Thomas Wensing | Kean University (original) (raw)
Book Reviews by Thomas Wensing
Architecture Image Studies, 2020
Le Corbusier (1887-1963) was not afraid to advertise his achievements in a wide range of media: p... more Le Corbusier (1887-1963) was not afraid to advertise his achievements in a wide range of media: painting, drawing, lithography, collage, sculpture, and tapestry, not to mention architecture and urbanism. But about one branch of his activity he always remained strangely silent. Between 1906 and 1916, and again from 1936 to 1938, Le Corbusier took hundreds of photographs. He published very few of these, and maintained that photography was a stultifying activity, good only for lazy people. The book 'Le Corbusier Secret Photographer' by Tim Benton complements earlier research on the photographic output of Le Corbusier. The work attributes prints and negatives held in different photo collections, it analyses the photographic equipment owned and used by Le Corbusier, and it assesses Le Corbusier's artistic development in the field of photography and movies over time.
Architecture Today, 2015
The Whitney Museum’s move to its new building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, designed by th... more The Whitney Museum’s move to its new building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, returns the Whitney to its roots; in 1918 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force opened the Whitney Studio Club on West 4th street, and in 1931 the first Whitney Museum opened in three rowhouses a few blocks to the south on West 8th Street. The new 20,000-square-metre building at 99 Gansevoort Street fulfils the need for more exhibition space, and adds a much needed collection of public, educational and curatorial spaces that have become so important to the operation of contemporary museums.
Renzo Piano’s buildings usually stand up to the closest scrutiny, but like many architects, he has suffered the indignity of poor execution that characterises the US construction industry.
Architecture Today, 2014
In ‘Urban Literacy’, Delft University associate professor Klaske Havik interrogates the relations... more In ‘Urban Literacy’, Delft University associate professor Klaske Havik interrogates the relationship between literature and architecture, arguing
for a literary approach to architectural education, research and design
practice. The book sits firmly in the phenomenological discourse, framing itself in the context of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Bachelard, yet it is mostly based on a particular reading of Henri Lefebvre. Havik takes Lefebvre’s triad of social space: the conceived’, the ‘perceived’ and the ‘lived’ to argue that architecture should appeal not just to our visual senses but to the full complexity of our multi-sensory experience of space. Architects don’t usually design with the ‘lived’ experience in mind, Havik contends, whereas literature abounds with rich descriptions of architectural space, sensory experiences, time and memory. This poetic potential, she argues, should be applied to architectural design to fill this lacuna.
Architecture Today, 2013
Reviews of monographs by the architects Kengo Kuma, Luc Deleu, Bernard Tschumi, and HHF Architect... more Reviews of monographs by the architects Kengo Kuma, Luc Deleu, Bernard Tschumi, and HHF Architects. In order to compete with the web, the genre of the architectural monograph needs to offer more substance over image.
Bernard Tschumi – Red is Not a Color
Rizzoli, 776pp
Kengo Kuma Complete Works
Thames & Hudson, 320pp
HHF Architects Archilife, 336pp
Luc Deleu – TOP Office: Orban Space
Valiz, 420pp
Architecture Today, 2012
Book review of two books that examine the life and legacy of the master architect Palladio.
Architecture Today, 2012
In late 2010, Kenneth Frampton celebrated his eightieth birthday with a one-day conference at the... more In late 2010, Kenneth Frampton celebrated his eightieth birthday with a one-day conference at the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation at
Columbia University. The conference was, typically, an act of resistance against the prevalent culture of commodification and globalisation and focused on architecture as practice. To this end, five offices were endorsed by Frampton and invited to speak about their work and motivations: Stanley Saitowitz, Brigitte Shim & Howard Sutcliffe,
Rick Joy, John & Patricia Patkau and Steven Holl. In addition to eschewing the prevalent tendency to perceive architecture as a fashionable and expendable consumer product, Frampton thus also decided to put the cult of personality into perspective
and to present Canadian practice on an equal footing with that in the US. The review argues that the work of the offices presented lacks the necessary political bite to address the forces of globalisation and commodification.
Architecture Today, 2011
The celebrated Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa was born in 1936 and came to notice as a theor... more The celebrated Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa was born in 1936
and came to notice as a theorist with the publication of ‘The Eyes of the Skin (1996): Architecture and the Senses’. The book is a phenomenological account that offers architecture as a multi-sensory experience as an alternative to the current emphasis on visual spectacle. In doing so Pallasmaa reminds us that one of the tasks of architecture is to address the deeper existential questions within us.
Pallasmaa’s book under review, ‘The Embodied Image – Imagination
and Imagery in Architecture’ develops this discourse. It argues that, in
our world of mass communication and consumption, the human imagination is diminished by the continuous bombardment of images. Thrown at us for commercial and ideological purposes, it dulls our senses, conditions us, and fragments our understanding of the world. The resulting alienation can be countered, according to Pallasmaa, by recuperating the image as a bearer of poetic content and meaning so it can inspire our mental imagery and imagination.
The review ends by posing the question if the embodied experience of two projects by Rem Koolhaas (OMA) and Steven Holl are, by this reading, really so qualitatively different.
Architecture Today, 2011
The 'Art-Architecture Complex' by the art historian Hal Foster argues that the global styles of c... more The 'Art-Architecture Complex' by the art historian Hal Foster argues that the global styles of contemporary high architecture offer inauthentic
spectacle in place of visceral experience. Thomas Wensing meets him to ask what went wrong, and what architecture can learn from art.
Architecture Today, 2011
The Beach Beneath the Street wavers between historiography and a call to action. McKenzie Wark se... more The Beach Beneath the Street wavers between historiography and a call to action. McKenzie Wark sets the tone immediately, poignantly describing our epoch as a time which offers only ‘spectacles of disintegration’, a time in which we are asked to choose between one of two possible doom scenarios: ‘capitalism or barbarism’. Within this rather bleak world view Wark proposes to go back in time, specifically to the period of the Situationists, in an attempt to reassess this historical
moment and ignite new possibilities in the here and now.
Architectural Record, 2014
The revolutionary Spangen social-housing complex (1919-1921) in Rotterdam, by Michiel Brinkman, h... more The revolutionary Spangen social-housing complex (1919-1921) in Rotterdam, by Michiel Brinkman, has recently been immaculately restored (2012). The project pioneered “street in the sky” deck access, an idea that famously inspired Alison and Peter Smithson’s design of the 1950s Golden Lane housing project in London. The Spangen estate, or Justus van Effen complex, is a rectangular four-story brick urban block, centered around two large courts. Concrete balconies give access to the duplex apartments on the top floors. In its heyday, the project offered many shared amenities, like a public bathhouse located between the two courtyards. A communal spirit was further promoted by making the decks publicly accessible; large cargo lifts allowed tradesmen to reach tenants’ front doors.
Blueprint, 2012
This is a review of facsimile editions of two architects' sketchbooks, Eduardo Souto de Moura and... more This is a review of facsimile editions of two architects' sketchbooks, Eduardo Souto de Moura and Wang Shu. One factor in the staying power
of the sketch is its immediacy, another is its physicality. In a world in which we increasingly interact through various technological interfaces, in which architecture is mostly created virtually – before it has to interact with the messy reality of the site – the sketch can be seen as an intimate and individual protest against the prevailing norm. The two sketchbooks, Eduardo Souto de Moura – Sketchbook No. 76, and Wang Shu– Imagining the House, are examples of an architectural process in which hand-drafting still has a place.
Blueprint, 2015
This is the closing show (2015) of a 14-month initiative in which interdisciplinary teams of loca... more This is the closing show (2015) of a 14-month initiative in which interdisciplinary teams of local practitioners and international architecture and urbanism experts have been invited to produce tactical interventions for six rapidly and unevenly growing global metropolises — Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, New York, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro.
The six different proposals are responses to the specific nature of the different locations but all favour ‘tactical urbanism’ over more traditional top-down planning activity. Tactical urbanism is about small-scale, often temporary, urban interventions that challenge existing power structures. Pedro Gadanho, the curator of Uneven Growth, posits tactical urbanism as a critical tool against failing official policies and institutions. The interventions are intended to foster public debate and enable activist architects and communities to engage with urban problems in a more immediate way.
Blueprint, 2013
With Le Corbusier Secret Photographer, Tim Benton has produced an immaculately researched and wel... more With Le Corbusier Secret Photographer, Tim Benton has produced an immaculately researched and well-written book that highlights the development of Le Corbusier’s photographic output.
Benton can be rightfully called a Corb expert, and his output is prolific: in 2013 he published Le Corbusier’s Pavilion for Zurich and co-authored the massive Le Corbusier Le Grand, and, in 2007, published The Villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret 1920-1930.
It is well known that the Swiss architect had an ambivalent attitude towards photography: on the one hand, he relied heavily on professional photography to promote his built work and support his discourse but, on the other, he said that he abandoned photography quickly in his career. Like the cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, he clearly saw photography as a means to an end. Neither shied away from doctoring images of grain silos to make them more purist, so it comes as little surprise that Le Corbusier was not entirely truthful about his relationship to the medium:
he owned many, often professional, cameras over the years and he photographed regularly.
Blueprint, 2015
The Future of the Skyscraper is a collection of essays, edited by SOM architects, of people outsi... more The Future of the Skyscraper is a collection of essays, edited by SOM architects, of people outside or obliquely related to the profession of architecture to think and reflect on skyscraper design.
This approach is appealing, since the consequences of building skyscrapers with respect to their ecological, material and energy footprints are so large that the decision of their construction ought to be a larger societal question and a shared, public responsibility. In the most positive scenario this building type can help to solve problems of an increasingly urbanised and overcrowded planet: they can make cities denser, function as carbon sinks, generate energy and be used for rainwater retention and urban agriculture. If their explosive, and largely unregulated, growth is left unchecked, however, they will continue to be used to reinforce inequality and class divisions by creating privatised, heavily secured havens for the few, will continue to deplete resources, will create micro climates and heat islands, and last, but not least, will remain a massive contributor to CO2 emissions and thus speed up the process of climate change.
Blueprint, 2018
President George W Bush officially acknowledged the existence of the CIA Detention and Interrogat... more President George W Bush officially acknowledged the existence of the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program in 2006. Established immediately after the attacks of September 11, it consisted of a worldwide network of secret prison facilities, the so-called black sites.
Spaces of Disappearance is an attempt at a reconstruction or representation of this classified incarceration network of the early years of the so-called War on Terror by way of maps, diagrams, photographs, witness statements and redacted government and legal memos. It aims to not only reveal the physical nature and experience of these spaces of disappearance, but also to lay bare the political spectacle, the bureaucratic edifice of obfuscation and secrecy, and to show the architectural logistics of the network. Ultimately the book is an attempt to challenge the claims to US sovereign power which supported or attempted to justify these abuses.
In 2014 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program (also known as the ‘Torture Report’). No one has been held accountable or brought to justice. Secrecy and obfuscation continue to surround the programme.
Blueprint, 2014
The book Megastructure Schiphol — Design in Spectacular Simplicity charts the design development ... more The book Megastructure Schiphol — Design in Spectacular Simplicity charts the design development of the airport, and reveals how Schiphol is both international in its orientation and as a result of the landscape and public-infrastructure planning tradition
of the Netherlands. The various aspects of Schiphol’s design, such as its growth over time, spatial impact and day-to-day operations, are effectively communicated through
so-called visual essays, data visualisations, while the essays give more detailed historical, political and economic background information.
Blueprint, 2015
This is a review of the monograph on the work of the Austrian architects Riegler Riewe, situating... more This is a review of the monograph on the work of the Austrian architects Riegler Riewe, situating the work in the local history and architectural context. Eva Guttmann replaces the currently predominating and simplistic account, in which Riegler Riewe’s work is mainly understood in opposition to the Graz School, for a more complex view in which the work is explained as the result of differing circumstances and a variety of ideas. After the introduction by Guttmann, the book starts off with an interview by Otto Kapfinger with Riegler and Riewe. The focus is on the early influences and impressions in their work, such as the post-war modernists surrounding Ferdinand Schuster, relatively unknown local architects such as Josef Klose, and the highly tectonic work of Heinz Bienefeld.
Blueprint, 2018
In Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities, journa... more In Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities, journalist Juan González documents de Blasio’s rise to power and places it in the context of ‘the maturing of a new grassroots urban political revolt in America’. Juan González’ is one of
the anchors of Democracy Now, the main progressive news programme broadcast in the USA.
Blueprint, 2014
This is a riveting travelogue that narrates the stories and lives of activist architects, politic... more This is a riveting travelogue that narrates the stories and lives of activist
architects, politicians and radical communities in pursuit of a more
dignified existence for the inhabitants of barrios, barriadas, villas miserias and favelas across South America.
McGuirk visits radical communities, for instance Túpac Amaru in Argentina, he meets with the squatters occupying the Torre David, an empty and unfinished office building in the centre of Caracas. He explores the projects and picks the brains of several activist architects, including Alejandro Aravena of Elemental and Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner of Urban Think Tank.
Blueprint, 2012
In Project Japan, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist revisit what is arguably the last Utopian m... more In Project Japan, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist revisit what is
arguably the last Utopian movement in architecture, the Japanese
Metabolists. In 2005, in the realisation that the members of this diverse group of architects, designers, and artists were soon to pass away,
Koolhaas and Obrist embarked on a series of marathon interviews with
them to document the group’s contribution to architecture.
The strength of both the Metabolists and the book is that the existential questions of birth, growth, renewal, destruction and death are never far away, that it is especially important to use our powers of imagination to imagine more peaceful, just and harmonious futures.
Architecture Image Studies, 2020
Le Corbusier (1887-1963) was not afraid to advertise his achievements in a wide range of media: p... more Le Corbusier (1887-1963) was not afraid to advertise his achievements in a wide range of media: painting, drawing, lithography, collage, sculpture, and tapestry, not to mention architecture and urbanism. But about one branch of his activity he always remained strangely silent. Between 1906 and 1916, and again from 1936 to 1938, Le Corbusier took hundreds of photographs. He published very few of these, and maintained that photography was a stultifying activity, good only for lazy people. The book 'Le Corbusier Secret Photographer' by Tim Benton complements earlier research on the photographic output of Le Corbusier. The work attributes prints and negatives held in different photo collections, it analyses the photographic equipment owned and used by Le Corbusier, and it assesses Le Corbusier's artistic development in the field of photography and movies over time.
Architecture Today, 2015
The Whitney Museum’s move to its new building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, designed by th... more The Whitney Museum’s move to its new building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, returns the Whitney to its roots; in 1918 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force opened the Whitney Studio Club on West 4th street, and in 1931 the first Whitney Museum opened in three rowhouses a few blocks to the south on West 8th Street. The new 20,000-square-metre building at 99 Gansevoort Street fulfils the need for more exhibition space, and adds a much needed collection of public, educational and curatorial spaces that have become so important to the operation of contemporary museums.
Renzo Piano’s buildings usually stand up to the closest scrutiny, but like many architects, he has suffered the indignity of poor execution that characterises the US construction industry.
Architecture Today, 2014
In ‘Urban Literacy’, Delft University associate professor Klaske Havik interrogates the relations... more In ‘Urban Literacy’, Delft University associate professor Klaske Havik interrogates the relationship between literature and architecture, arguing
for a literary approach to architectural education, research and design
practice. The book sits firmly in the phenomenological discourse, framing itself in the context of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Bachelard, yet it is mostly based on a particular reading of Henri Lefebvre. Havik takes Lefebvre’s triad of social space: the conceived’, the ‘perceived’ and the ‘lived’ to argue that architecture should appeal not just to our visual senses but to the full complexity of our multi-sensory experience of space. Architects don’t usually design with the ‘lived’ experience in mind, Havik contends, whereas literature abounds with rich descriptions of architectural space, sensory experiences, time and memory. This poetic potential, she argues, should be applied to architectural design to fill this lacuna.
Architecture Today, 2013
Reviews of monographs by the architects Kengo Kuma, Luc Deleu, Bernard Tschumi, and HHF Architect... more Reviews of monographs by the architects Kengo Kuma, Luc Deleu, Bernard Tschumi, and HHF Architects. In order to compete with the web, the genre of the architectural monograph needs to offer more substance over image.
Bernard Tschumi – Red is Not a Color
Rizzoli, 776pp
Kengo Kuma Complete Works
Thames & Hudson, 320pp
HHF Architects Archilife, 336pp
Luc Deleu – TOP Office: Orban Space
Valiz, 420pp
Architecture Today, 2012
Book review of two books that examine the life and legacy of the master architect Palladio.
Architecture Today, 2012
In late 2010, Kenneth Frampton celebrated his eightieth birthday with a one-day conference at the... more In late 2010, Kenneth Frampton celebrated his eightieth birthday with a one-day conference at the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation at
Columbia University. The conference was, typically, an act of resistance against the prevalent culture of commodification and globalisation and focused on architecture as practice. To this end, five offices were endorsed by Frampton and invited to speak about their work and motivations: Stanley Saitowitz, Brigitte Shim & Howard Sutcliffe,
Rick Joy, John & Patricia Patkau and Steven Holl. In addition to eschewing the prevalent tendency to perceive architecture as a fashionable and expendable consumer product, Frampton thus also decided to put the cult of personality into perspective
and to present Canadian practice on an equal footing with that in the US. The review argues that the work of the offices presented lacks the necessary political bite to address the forces of globalisation and commodification.
Architecture Today, 2011
The celebrated Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa was born in 1936 and came to notice as a theor... more The celebrated Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa was born in 1936
and came to notice as a theorist with the publication of ‘The Eyes of the Skin (1996): Architecture and the Senses’. The book is a phenomenological account that offers architecture as a multi-sensory experience as an alternative to the current emphasis on visual spectacle. In doing so Pallasmaa reminds us that one of the tasks of architecture is to address the deeper existential questions within us.
Pallasmaa’s book under review, ‘The Embodied Image – Imagination
and Imagery in Architecture’ develops this discourse. It argues that, in
our world of mass communication and consumption, the human imagination is diminished by the continuous bombardment of images. Thrown at us for commercial and ideological purposes, it dulls our senses, conditions us, and fragments our understanding of the world. The resulting alienation can be countered, according to Pallasmaa, by recuperating the image as a bearer of poetic content and meaning so it can inspire our mental imagery and imagination.
The review ends by posing the question if the embodied experience of two projects by Rem Koolhaas (OMA) and Steven Holl are, by this reading, really so qualitatively different.
Architecture Today, 2011
The 'Art-Architecture Complex' by the art historian Hal Foster argues that the global styles of c... more The 'Art-Architecture Complex' by the art historian Hal Foster argues that the global styles of contemporary high architecture offer inauthentic
spectacle in place of visceral experience. Thomas Wensing meets him to ask what went wrong, and what architecture can learn from art.
Architecture Today, 2011
The Beach Beneath the Street wavers between historiography and a call to action. McKenzie Wark se... more The Beach Beneath the Street wavers between historiography and a call to action. McKenzie Wark sets the tone immediately, poignantly describing our epoch as a time which offers only ‘spectacles of disintegration’, a time in which we are asked to choose between one of two possible doom scenarios: ‘capitalism or barbarism’. Within this rather bleak world view Wark proposes to go back in time, specifically to the period of the Situationists, in an attempt to reassess this historical
moment and ignite new possibilities in the here and now.
Architectural Record, 2014
The revolutionary Spangen social-housing complex (1919-1921) in Rotterdam, by Michiel Brinkman, h... more The revolutionary Spangen social-housing complex (1919-1921) in Rotterdam, by Michiel Brinkman, has recently been immaculately restored (2012). The project pioneered “street in the sky” deck access, an idea that famously inspired Alison and Peter Smithson’s design of the 1950s Golden Lane housing project in London. The Spangen estate, or Justus van Effen complex, is a rectangular four-story brick urban block, centered around two large courts. Concrete balconies give access to the duplex apartments on the top floors. In its heyday, the project offered many shared amenities, like a public bathhouse located between the two courtyards. A communal spirit was further promoted by making the decks publicly accessible; large cargo lifts allowed tradesmen to reach tenants’ front doors.
Blueprint, 2012
This is a review of facsimile editions of two architects' sketchbooks, Eduardo Souto de Moura and... more This is a review of facsimile editions of two architects' sketchbooks, Eduardo Souto de Moura and Wang Shu. One factor in the staying power
of the sketch is its immediacy, another is its physicality. In a world in which we increasingly interact through various technological interfaces, in which architecture is mostly created virtually – before it has to interact with the messy reality of the site – the sketch can be seen as an intimate and individual protest against the prevailing norm. The two sketchbooks, Eduardo Souto de Moura – Sketchbook No. 76, and Wang Shu– Imagining the House, are examples of an architectural process in which hand-drafting still has a place.
Blueprint, 2015
This is the closing show (2015) of a 14-month initiative in which interdisciplinary teams of loca... more This is the closing show (2015) of a 14-month initiative in which interdisciplinary teams of local practitioners and international architecture and urbanism experts have been invited to produce tactical interventions for six rapidly and unevenly growing global metropolises — Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, New York, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro.
The six different proposals are responses to the specific nature of the different locations but all favour ‘tactical urbanism’ over more traditional top-down planning activity. Tactical urbanism is about small-scale, often temporary, urban interventions that challenge existing power structures. Pedro Gadanho, the curator of Uneven Growth, posits tactical urbanism as a critical tool against failing official policies and institutions. The interventions are intended to foster public debate and enable activist architects and communities to engage with urban problems in a more immediate way.
Blueprint, 2013
With Le Corbusier Secret Photographer, Tim Benton has produced an immaculately researched and wel... more With Le Corbusier Secret Photographer, Tim Benton has produced an immaculately researched and well-written book that highlights the development of Le Corbusier’s photographic output.
Benton can be rightfully called a Corb expert, and his output is prolific: in 2013 he published Le Corbusier’s Pavilion for Zurich and co-authored the massive Le Corbusier Le Grand, and, in 2007, published The Villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret 1920-1930.
It is well known that the Swiss architect had an ambivalent attitude towards photography: on the one hand, he relied heavily on professional photography to promote his built work and support his discourse but, on the other, he said that he abandoned photography quickly in his career. Like the cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, he clearly saw photography as a means to an end. Neither shied away from doctoring images of grain silos to make them more purist, so it comes as little surprise that Le Corbusier was not entirely truthful about his relationship to the medium:
he owned many, often professional, cameras over the years and he photographed regularly.
Blueprint, 2015
The Future of the Skyscraper is a collection of essays, edited by SOM architects, of people outsi... more The Future of the Skyscraper is a collection of essays, edited by SOM architects, of people outside or obliquely related to the profession of architecture to think and reflect on skyscraper design.
This approach is appealing, since the consequences of building skyscrapers with respect to their ecological, material and energy footprints are so large that the decision of their construction ought to be a larger societal question and a shared, public responsibility. In the most positive scenario this building type can help to solve problems of an increasingly urbanised and overcrowded planet: they can make cities denser, function as carbon sinks, generate energy and be used for rainwater retention and urban agriculture. If their explosive, and largely unregulated, growth is left unchecked, however, they will continue to be used to reinforce inequality and class divisions by creating privatised, heavily secured havens for the few, will continue to deplete resources, will create micro climates and heat islands, and last, but not least, will remain a massive contributor to CO2 emissions and thus speed up the process of climate change.
Blueprint, 2018
President George W Bush officially acknowledged the existence of the CIA Detention and Interrogat... more President George W Bush officially acknowledged the existence of the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program in 2006. Established immediately after the attacks of September 11, it consisted of a worldwide network of secret prison facilities, the so-called black sites.
Spaces of Disappearance is an attempt at a reconstruction or representation of this classified incarceration network of the early years of the so-called War on Terror by way of maps, diagrams, photographs, witness statements and redacted government and legal memos. It aims to not only reveal the physical nature and experience of these spaces of disappearance, but also to lay bare the political spectacle, the bureaucratic edifice of obfuscation and secrecy, and to show the architectural logistics of the network. Ultimately the book is an attempt to challenge the claims to US sovereign power which supported or attempted to justify these abuses.
In 2014 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program (also known as the ‘Torture Report’). No one has been held accountable or brought to justice. Secrecy and obfuscation continue to surround the programme.
Blueprint, 2014
The book Megastructure Schiphol — Design in Spectacular Simplicity charts the design development ... more The book Megastructure Schiphol — Design in Spectacular Simplicity charts the design development of the airport, and reveals how Schiphol is both international in its orientation and as a result of the landscape and public-infrastructure planning tradition
of the Netherlands. The various aspects of Schiphol’s design, such as its growth over time, spatial impact and day-to-day operations, are effectively communicated through
so-called visual essays, data visualisations, while the essays give more detailed historical, political and economic background information.
Blueprint, 2015
This is a review of the monograph on the work of the Austrian architects Riegler Riewe, situating... more This is a review of the monograph on the work of the Austrian architects Riegler Riewe, situating the work in the local history and architectural context. Eva Guttmann replaces the currently predominating and simplistic account, in which Riegler Riewe’s work is mainly understood in opposition to the Graz School, for a more complex view in which the work is explained as the result of differing circumstances and a variety of ideas. After the introduction by Guttmann, the book starts off with an interview by Otto Kapfinger with Riegler and Riewe. The focus is on the early influences and impressions in their work, such as the post-war modernists surrounding Ferdinand Schuster, relatively unknown local architects such as Josef Klose, and the highly tectonic work of Heinz Bienefeld.
Blueprint, 2018
In Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities, journa... more In Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities, journalist Juan González documents de Blasio’s rise to power and places it in the context of ‘the maturing of a new grassroots urban political revolt in America’. Juan González’ is one of
the anchors of Democracy Now, the main progressive news programme broadcast in the USA.
Blueprint, 2014
This is a riveting travelogue that narrates the stories and lives of activist architects, politic... more This is a riveting travelogue that narrates the stories and lives of activist
architects, politicians and radical communities in pursuit of a more
dignified existence for the inhabitants of barrios, barriadas, villas miserias and favelas across South America.
McGuirk visits radical communities, for instance Túpac Amaru in Argentina, he meets with the squatters occupying the Torre David, an empty and unfinished office building in the centre of Caracas. He explores the projects and picks the brains of several activist architects, including Alejandro Aravena of Elemental and Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner of Urban Think Tank.
Blueprint, 2012
In Project Japan, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist revisit what is arguably the last Utopian m... more In Project Japan, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist revisit what is
arguably the last Utopian movement in architecture, the Japanese
Metabolists. In 2005, in the realisation that the members of this diverse group of architects, designers, and artists were soon to pass away,
Koolhaas and Obrist embarked on a series of marathon interviews with
them to document the group’s contribution to architecture.
The strength of both the Metabolists and the book is that the existential questions of birth, growth, renewal, destruction and death are never far away, that it is especially important to use our powers of imagination to imagine more peaceful, just and harmonious futures.