Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships Between Architecture and Site

Brent Solomon August 11, 2015

“A snippet from Ingraham’s Foreword:

“…O’Donnell’s book provides very sharp insights into what it might mean to draw, as an architect or urban designer, in order to draw out, in an ecological sense, the ‘missing perspectives’ of diverse and complex contexts in past, contemporary, and future architectural work.””

Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment.

Bracketed between texts on giraffe morphology, ecological perception, ugliness, and hopeful monsters, architectural case studies investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, from the anomalous city designs of Francesco de Marchi in the sixteenth century to Le Corbusier’s near eradication of context in his Plan Voisin in the twentieth century to the more recent contextualist movements. Extensively illustrated with 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics considers how attention to site might create a generative language for architecture today.

http://www.amazon.com/Niche-Tactics-Generative-Relationships-Architecture/dp/1138793124

Interview with Routledge : https://www.routledge.com/posts/494

This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good | MOMA

Brent Solomon February 27, 2015

FEBRUARY 14, 2015–JANUARY 01, 2016

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN GALLERIES, THIRD FLOOR

MOMA press release:

This exhibition takes its title from the Twitter message that British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) used to light up the stadium at the opening ceremonies for the 2012 Olympic games in London. His buoyant tweet highlighted the way that the Internet—perhaps the most radical design experiment of the last quarter century—has created limitless possibilities for the discovery, sharing, and expansion of knowledge and information.

As we revel in this abundant possibility, we sometimes forget that new technologies are not inherently democratic. Is design in the digital age—so often simply assumed to be for the greater good—truly for everyone? From initial exploratory experiments to complex, and often contested, hybrid digital-analog states to “universal” designs, This Is for Everyoneexplores this question with design works from MoMA’s collection that celebrate the promise—and occasional flipside—of contemporary design.

Organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, and Michelle Millar Fisher, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design.

Architecture and Design Collection Exhibitions are made possible by Hyundai Card and Hyundai Capital America.