People tell me that I dress rather sloppily. I’m not that guy with the crisply ironed trousers and perfectly knotted tie, and it was only when I started to study architecture that I realized why. Nothing sets me quite on edge as much as things that aspire to be perfect but fall short. Crisp trousers?…

In 1938, there was a world’s fair in Glasgow—called the Empire Exhibition—that attracted over 13 million attendants. Modernists from Basel Spence to Jack Coia built dozens of pavilions, most of which have since been demolished. Last month, the Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studio (DDS) launched a digital recreation of the festival, bringing to…

Herbert Muschamp’s recent death has inconveniently coincided with the opening of Beatriz Colomina’s ‘Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X’ at the Architectural Association here in London. Inconvenient, perhaps a glib adjective given a death is involved, because both serve as reminders of the disappointing state of architectural criticism at present. I should apologize.…

I love the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles but, generally speaking, I think it’s pretty underappreciated. Sure, people know it. They recognize it, it’s generated it’s share  of buzz (let’s be honest, mostly not very positive). It has won the hearts of post-modernists and ironic architecture-appreciating hipsters during its various oscillations on the so-wacky-it’s-cool…

In the mid 1990s, urban economist and sociologist Richard Florida devised the “gay index,” a tool used to monitor and predict cities that could host profit-generating high-tech industries. The index essentially correlates the number of gay people living in an area and how many high-tech firms are located there. This, of course, is a good…

If the legacy of Patricia Highsmith could be said to live on through the work of any contemporary artist, it would surely be the British filmmaker Danny Boyle. Boyle, who has worked in a range of genres—from 2002’s zombie flick 28 Days Later to Millions, a wondrous children’s fable directed two years later—is a director…

About a year ago I started working on an article about the use of vertical space in cities, confused over why, beyond the ground floor, most buildings are totally inaccessible except to their occupants. Without much confidence and convinced that I should engage in further exploration, I abandoned the piece and bottled up my frustration…

In “Summer Fading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle,” published in the New York Times on August 24, Sharon Waxman discussed the decline of ticket sales in the context not of a shifting economy or social landscape but instead of the increasingly lacking quality of mainstream movies. The piece was a helpful reminder to discontented viewers that they…