Page 18 - Common Edge News Today

This article was originally published on Common Edge. My mother is a psychologist, so our family talks a lot about emotion. More specifically, we discuss the experience of emotion, because, as she  likes to remind me and my sisters, “We don’t  think our feelings—we  feel them, in our bodies.” According to my mother, it’s this experience of emotion that gives our lives a sense of meaning and vitality; as a result, her work isn’t about intellectual insight or abstract theories, ...

This term, artificial complexity, has not been widely used in the context of architecture. However, the architect and urbanist Leon Krier has frequently illustrated the phenomenon permeating the design of buildings, landscapes, and cities. His diagrams expose the absurdity of so much contrived complexity vs. the rational form of Krier’s classically inspired architecture and urbanism. Mathematician Nikos Salingaros has written extensively about complexity in architecture, using the terms dis...

This article was originally published on Common Edge. From the hills behind the City Hall in my adopted hometown of Ventura, California, it’s less than 1,000 yards southward to the Pacific Ocean. This constrained piece of topography creates a small urban gem of a downtown: streetscapes, restaurants, stores, offices, residences, parking garages, and a beachfront promenade, all within eight or so square blocks, creating a lively streetlife that connects a historic downtown to the beach. But th...

Reimagining the Urban Freeway With the new administration placing racial justice and equity at the forefront of transportation policy, will America finally reckon with the legacy of its freeways? February 11, 2021, 7am PST | Diana Ionescu | In a piece for Common Edge, William Fulton describes a scene thats all too common in many American cities: a dense, walkable downtown, brimming with diverse uses and businesses, sliced through by a massive freeway overpass. "In almost every urban locati...

This article was originally published on Common Edge In a Common Edge article, I briefly discussed a concept that I call the “Triple Bottom Lie,” which posits that more people, plus more consumption by each person, plus an economic system completely dependent on the aforementioned items, can just keep working forever, without consequences. Historically, the United States has accepted the economic shibboleth of endless growth because it reduced class conflict; a rising tide (supposedly) lif...

This article was originally published on Common Edge. In 2012, the Yale School of Architecture held a conference on the topic of drawing. It posed a couple of provocative questions: Was the study and practice of architecture already beyond it? Was it is even necessary to draw in order to be an architect? Mark Alan Hewitt’s new book, Draw in Order to See (ORO Editions), is a resounding affirmation that not only must architects draw, they cannot help but do so—it’s like breathing. The conn...

Stronger Hurricanes Challenge Housing Recovery Plans After a record-breaking hurricane season, city planners in Florida focus on best practices to rescue affordable housing, while architects adopt new housing designs for the long-term needs of a changing coastline. Carl Smith, Senior Staff Writer   |   January 6, 2021   |  Features The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season broke the record for the number of storms big enough to be given a name, e...

Copy This article was originally published on Common Edge as "Presenting Architecture as Progressive, but Practicing Through Exclusion." For a profession that likes to congratulate itself about how well-meaning it is, and sees itself as liberal, diverse, open, and progressive, British architecture has a serious problem with diversity of pretty much every kind. It is dominated by people from well-off backgrounds. It trains a lot of brilliant female architects but doesn’t pay them as much as me...