Denari, Illuminated

The Flickering Field of Fluoroscape: Illuminated perspectives on Neil Denari. On a culture-filled Sunday this past September 17th I tromped down to Downtown Los Angeles to take in several fantastic “Spectacles of Culture”. First, I visited the Banksy show, which...

Scion Competition: Beware

Somewhere along the way, we mentioned this: Tropolism means calling bullshit. For a grand prize of $5,000, and the opportunity to have your design built, the Scion car company will gladly accept your pro-bono design ideas for their next generation...

New New Museum Going Up

The New Museum's new building, designed by SANAA, is going up. See for yourself: The New Museum has a pretty-much-live webcam on the construction. Via Curbed....

Rem Koolhaas: Back In The USA

For those of you, like us, who thought that the spinoff series T-REX was to replace The OMA's time slot, then you were wrong! Oops, wait, this is architecture, not television. For those of you who thought that REX was...

Panoramic Map of Manhattan

You may have noticed that we at Tropolism love maps. And lists. And maps. Curbedhart points us to a unique addition to our maps of Manhattan, a circa 1940 panoramic, posted by eightface....

Architecture Returns To The Hamptons

It's been a while since original architectural ideas settled in the Hamptons. The days of Peter Blake and his gorgeous (and simple, and small, and brilliant, and uncompromisingly modern) Pin Wheel House (1954) seemed long gone, until we stumbled upon...

High Waters In New York (And Elsewhere)

There are recent articles in several places about global warming (like last week's survey in The Economist) and all of them vaguely refer to the fact that a rise is ocean levels would be devastating to urban areas near water,...

Governor's Island: Back To Planning

Polis has the news on the development of Governor's Island: all the development plans have been trashed. They were awful anyway, but since no one ever goes to Governor's Island anyway, it didn't seem important to mention it (except tangentially)....

Science Fiction and the City

Geoff Manaugh over at BLDGBLOG interviews Jeff VanderMeer in a transcription that follows Geoff's architectural imagination, swinging between hard urbanism stats to sci-fi geek. We are fascinated as much by his questions as by Mr. VenderMeer's replies. Also of note:...

WTC Tower Review

Nicolai Ouroussoff writes a balanced critique of the three building designs announced for the World Trade Center site in today's New York Times. He makes an important point about the Maki/Rogers corridor on Cortlandt Street as being an important...

Daily Dose Double, Part 2: Holy Rosary Church Complex

Daily Dose points out the Holy Rosary Church Complex by Trahan Architects. More astounding that such a gorgeous example of religious modern architecture is found outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is that the complex is almost entirely out of...

Daily Dose Double, Part 1: 40 Bond Street Mockup

Daily Dose has posted a couple of wonderful posts lately. First of all, the completely-unreported-by-New-York-blogs news that the Herzog and DeMeuron designed 40 Bond Street, here in Manhattan, had put up some kind of construction mockup of the glass trim....

WTC Small Towers Unveiled

Today, Larry Silverstein, the developer of the World Trade Center, announced the designs for the smaller towers at Ground Zero. The designs are by Lord Foster, Richard Rogers, and Fumihiko Maki. We'll tell you a secret: even though we always...

Uchronia, So Totally Not At PS1

Greg Allen calls it out: Uchronia, a Burning Man structure designed by Jan Kriekels and Arne Quinze, of Belgium, and built by a bunch of volunteers in the desert, is so totally not like anything at PS1 in the last...

Alessi Disaster

From our Los Angeles correspondant, John Southern: Last week when I was in NYC I stopped by to see the new Alessi Shop in SoHo only to find it was still under construction. I stepped inside, pretending to be "the...

Spanish Architecture Blog

As if El Tropolismo wasn't enough, we have come across Urbanity.es, a blog about urbanism and architecture in Spain. Spain, land of El Croquis and Quaderns and a large and thriving architectural press (the center of said press in the...