The Yin-Yang of Urbanism: Léon Krier and Architectural Complementarity

Following up on a previous essay on the success of Guatemala’s new Cayalá township as a springboard for discussing traditional urban planning and architectural principles, we will explore some of the ideas of Cayalá’s designer, the Luxembourgish...

The 2023 Traditional Architecture Gathering, Event organised by The Classic Planning Institute.

While most of today’s architecture and urbanism speak to “sustainability” and “equity,” the buildings and urban fabric built since 1950 use about 65% of today’s energy in the production of their materials, fabrication of their components, in their...

2nd International Conference on Urban Experience and Design: Ux+Design/2023, Organised by Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Tufts University and Human Architecture + Planning Institute.

On April 28, 2023, Tufts University, and the Human Architecture + Planning Institute, Inc.(theHapi.org)will host the 2nd International Conference on Urban Experience + Design: Ux+Design/2023. Researchers, scholars, architects, planners, designers, and...

Location: Tufts University; Medford and Somerville, United States

Lucien Kroll, paragon of progressive architecture, passes away aged 95

An influential figure in the realm of ecological design is being mourned after Le Monde reported the death of Belgian architect Lucien Kroll in Brussels on August 2nd at the age of 95. The Atelier Kroll co-founder will be remembered for...

Christopher Alexander has shown us the way of building beauty

As designers we often find ourselves floundering amidst intellectual concepts of beauty. Architecture and design become a result of cerebral responses to these concepts, functions, or materials, where on one hand the mantras of modernism weigh heavy upon...

Christopher Alexander, R.I.P.

The great architectural and computer design theorist Christopher Alexander, born in Vienna and of British and American citizenship, died at his home in Binsted, Sussex, U.K. this past week after a long illness. He was 85. His more than 200 works of...

Rob Krier named 2022 Driehaus Prize winner

A pair of noteworthy names in the world of architecture and ideas have received two of academia’s most sought-after awards as urbanist Rob Krier and environmentalist author Wendell Berry have been named as this year’s recipients of the prestigious ...

Architects are trapped in a COVID-19 world

Lawyer and analyst Barry LePlater noted on the website CURT: “The construction industry will exit from the pandemic at the early stages of a $35 trillion construction boom resulting from pent-up demand, governmental intervention, and...

Rethinking Cities #64: Architecture in Transition: New Findings from the Sciences. Organised by Habitat Forum INHAF

In the last few years, surprising new developments in neuroscience, environmental psychology, biology, mathematics, and other fields have begun to challenge designers to think differently about their role, particularly as we seek to transition to a world...

COASocial Reads #8: 'Evidence-based architecture,' an online conversation between Nikos Salingaros, Michael Mehaffy and Habeeb Khan

The eighth edition of COAsocial Reads, an online discussion event organized by the Council of Architecture will introduce key themes from the book Unified Architectural Theory: Form, Language, Complexity—a Companion to Christopher Alexander's "The...

How a Trump Executive Order Aims to Set White Supremacy in Stone

[T]he heritage industry fails to address or acknowledge how their work supports that of white supremacists. When white nationalists flocked to the streets of Charlottesville in August 2017 to protest the city’s decision to remove their statue of Robert E...

Reassessing New Urbanism, A thematic issue of the peer reviewed journal Urban Planning provides a framework for reassessing New Urbanism..

According to the introduction to the issue's theme by Susan Moore and Dan Trudeau, the collection "proposes an examination of New Urbanism as heterogeneous in practice, shaped through multiple contingent factors that spell variegated translations of core...

Trump signs executive order promoting 'traditional and classical architecture' for America's federal buildings

With only 29 days of his White House mandate remaining, President Trump revisited a topic that had previously stoked sharp criticism from the architecture community and signed an executive order today that makes classical architecture...

Amend GSA’s guidelines?

After February’s leak of the draft executive order to prefer traditional design for federal architecture, many architects, including some classicists, worried that classicism would be hurt by any proposal linked to President Trump. Now, on the heels of a...

Reading List | #2 - 'A Pattern Language'

Bruce Buckland's second architectural book recommendation is 'A Pattern Language' by Christopher Alexander. Here he talks about how this book is useful to architects and why you should read it.

Reading List | #1 - 'A Theory of Architecture'

In the first of a series of short episodes Bruce Buckland talks about the first book that should be on your architecture reading list, 'A Theory of Architecture' by Nikos Salingaros, and why it is so important and useful for architects and architecture...

Why Classicists Are Against Trump’s Draft Executive Order, A proposed executive measure could require that all federal buildings be built akin to those of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicists believe it .

When news broke of an executive order calling for new or renovated United States federal buildings to bear a classical style, you might have thought traditional architects would be over the moon. Well, they weren’t. The preliminary...

Beauty Is Making a Come Back in Architecture – but Not in Jerusalem, The aesthetic dividends need to be shared equally, and yet, even the historical city is managed like a remote provincial town.

The concept of beauty, which had ostensibly been disdainfully erased from 20th century architectural theory, reverberates again in international discourse, and the results are already visible on the ground.  We can assume that some Israeli...

Conclave weighs architectural education, practice

PUNE: A two-day national conclave, titled “Architects, Architecture Education and Practice: Imperatives in the context of Environmental, Ecological and Social Challenges in Urbanising India”, was held at MIT-WPU’s Kothrud campus on Saturday. Organised...

The Future of Architecture Education Is the Future of Civilization, The constitutional documents of architecture school accreditation are up for grabs, but only until Nov. 22. Please, read the drafts, and comment.

The National Architectural Accrediting Board is currently undergoing review and revision of its Conditions for Accreditation and Procedures for Accreditation, two documents that establish the criteria for architecture education and the...

eVolo Announces 2019 Skyscraper Competition Winners

eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of its 2019 Skyscraper Competition. Now in its 14th year, the annual award was established to recognize “visionary ideas for building [high-rise] projects that through [the] novel use of technology,...

Pobreza monetaria y pobreza extrema en el Perú disminuyó en el 2018

Según el INEI, la pobreza monetaria en el Perú bajó el año pasado hasta 20,5%. En el 2017 registró un incremento por primera vez en el milenio, hasta 21,7%

Nature of Order Seminar Series: Nikos Salingaros

Nikos Salingaros discusses the beginning of book IV of the Nature of Order: The Luminious Ground. His presentation covers pages 1-48 including the Preface, Chapter 1: Our present picture of the world, and Chapter 2: Clues from the history of art. The...

The Legacy of Christopher Alexander: Beauty and the nature of matter

Nikos Salingaros discusses the beginning of book IV of the Nature of Order: The Luminious Ground. His presentation covers pages 1-48 including the Preface, Chapter 1: Our present picture of the world, and Chapter 2: Clues from the history of art. The...