Coolhunting has a great interview with Michael McHale, whose chandelier is pictured here. As any interior designer knows, finding the right chandelier is often a project in and of itself. McHale offers a direction just recently being explored by designers:...

Again with the Newsletter: last week I referenced some Miesian Delusions I came across the last few weeks. Another one opens tomorrow in Barcelona: SAANA is taking their bendy-glass-reflection-space to Mies's Barcelona Pavilion with a temporary installation. They have installed...

As those of you who signed up for the Newsletter already know, I wrote a little about Nicolai Ouroussoff's review of Frank Gehry's new building in Toronto. A quick recap. A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times included...

The new graduate student housing dorm has opened at Harvard. As a friend of ours put it: "I'd be stoked to live in that dorm". We would too! The dorm is by Kyu Sung Woo Architects. Woo studied and worked...

Oh, us and our diagrams. This time it's the awesome water/development diagram over at Urbanarbolismo. Click through that link to their post, you'll find many more where the one pictured came from....

No this is not a movie set. It probably will be, though. Or perhaps it was designed after seeing You Only Live Twice? At any rate this data center 30m under Stockholm, designed by Albert France-Lanord Architects, is futuristic as...

Tropolism means taking action. Fittingly the CCA is opening a show November 26th titled Actions: What Can You Do With the City. The exhibition explores 97 actions that "instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world". Our favorite part,...

Add this to our list of productive takes on Mies's legacy: Mies Van Der Rohe gets detailed by a motorcycle gang. Rosa Muerta is the architect Robert Stone's design-build building in Joshua Tree, California. The house appears to have...

Joe Velluto Studio, based in Vicenza, has a new exhibition called "Useless Is More". Now that our shopping frenzy of the last 7 years is finally over, we can get back to making art again. Joe Velluto does this by...

Anyone who's walked The High Line knows about The Spur. It's that totally awesome elevated rail thingy that is more like a rail pier than a piece of a rail line. Like an appendix to the main High Line it...

Yoga Deva is a yoga studio in a strip mall in Gilbert, Arizona. Yet is has the distinction of being the most awesome yoga studio ever. The project derives its power by being hyperminimal while at the same time sensual....

1. Performer's House in Denmark by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, 2005; via Arch Daily. 2. Plaza Villa de Madrid in Barcelona by Arquitectos Baena-Casamor-Quera, 2003. Via Daily Dose of Architecture. 3. CaixaForum Madrid, Herzog & de Meuron, 2007....

Portuguese firm Plano B's Casa em Arruda dos Vinhos is a small, one-room cabin that has all its green check boxes marked off. It's DIY. It's rammed earth. It's small. It has its own freaking blog. But what's best about...

Architecture enthusiasts who saw Quantum of Solace this weekend, or those (like us!) who watched the HD trailer to the next Star Trek movie frame-by-frame, saw the unmistakable criss-cross trusses of Fay Jones's iconic 1980 Thorncrown Chapel in one second...

I told you before, Tropolism loves sports. Today is baseball's cartographer, Lee Walton, whose next solo show of drawings are notations of specific baseball games. The end result captures vectors of unknown origin in beautifully detailed and layered maps. He...

Parent (sister? godfather?) website Coolhunting profiled Tropolism book reviewee Tom Kundig last week, talking to him and finding a great youtube video of his projects in motion....

From our roving correspondant, Saharat Surattanont, we get this report on Imagine Coney: Last night, the Municipal Art Society (MASNYC) showcased their proposal for the redevelopment of Coney Island. Underscored by the financial realities of such an endeavor, their master...

In keeping with our museums for antiquities theme, we were interested to see the Berlin museum for the Temple of Pergamon show up in the press images for Toplight, a review of architectural skylights at the CCA in Montreal. In...

Today The New York Times posts a little memo from Cairo touching on the relationship of modern Egypt to its ancient past. These are issues touched on in the book we finished recently, and the article stars Zahi Hawass, the...

Our favorite Death Star artist John Powers has posted a fascinating essay about Star Wars, Minimalism, and Modernism called Star Wars: A New Heap over at triplecanopy. This goes beyond his wonderful visual associations (like the original Star Wars text...

Free Darko, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, posted an essay last week about how urban planning could affect basketball coaches. It starts from silly relationships (basketball and skyscrapers, tall men and tall buildings), but quickly takes a more sophisticated tack....

Sori Yanagi, long considered the Charles and Ray Eames of Japan, has designed so much flatware, mixing bowls, dishes, cutlery, kitchen tools, pots, pans, plates, that you are able to stock several kitchens. If you can get the stuff. MoMa,...

Tropolism Newsletter 1.2 included the book review Loot and some of our favorite ideas of the week. Newsletter 1.3 goes out this weekend. To get your copy, sign up now in the top far right email field on this page....

As seen everywhere on the internets (I don't care, I love them anyway) are the Microcoasts by Vicente Guallart. Like a semi-permanent beach chair they make what would normally be an uncomfortable shore into a great place to spend the...

Today is a screening of the new film Bodega Down Bronx. From the Center for Urban Pedagogy's announcement: "This past year, students from New Settlement's Bronx Helpers and CUP teaching artist Jonathan Bogarin investigated bodegas in the Bronx. The group...

1. Sculptured House by Charles Deaton, as seen in the Woody Allen Film, Sleeper. 2. Aatrial House by KWK PROMES. 3. House on the beach by Javier Artadi Arquitecto....

Design renderings for the Thermal Baths of San Pelligrino by Dominique Perrault Architecture have been released, and they are trippy. The 'perforated like a tree canopy by a French Architect' meme is continued with the all-over skin of this building....

One of the pleasures of my job is getting updates like these: El Croquis is offering digital versions of its magazines. In one swoop the twin problems of acquiring and storing their oversize formats is disappeared. Of course you don't...

Reading Loot got me wondering how far along the new museums underway in Cairo and Athens were. The New Acropolis Museum, designed by Bernard Tschumi, is complete and they are moving the artifacts in. There was a great walkthrough of...

The Builder's Association, the artists collective responsible for several on-stage media theater works over the last decade, is coming back to BAM. You may remember their last show, Super Vision, which was as thrilling technically as it was a tad...

From yesterday's news of Madrid architects (and Tropolism friends) Inaki Abalos and Juan Herreros splitting into two different offices I was put in touch with a great project on Juan's website, a country house in Mallorca (pictured). The house reminds...

BLDGBLOG is back in fine form with a survey of the work of artist Filip Dujardin, who manipulates images to create his architectural fantasies. Yet these images are sublime because they amplify the weight and grunge of the existing...

The crazy rendering we published back in 2006 turned out to be a real, live building. Coop Himmelblau's High School #9 is completed; our favorite write up is the amusing visual essay by Hello Beautiful!...

OMA's Wylie Theater in Dallas in under construction. Click here for an awesome slideshow by Archinect contributor Orhan Ayyüce. Via Archinect....

We just finished the new book by Sarah Waxman, Loot: The Battle Over Stolen Treasures Of The Ancient World. The book is a fascinating account of the culture war that is the resitution of ancient artifacts in Western museums. Institutions...

Continuing our theme of Gio Ponti inspired awesomeness comes this pair of chairs done up like Ponti's famous Superleggera chairs. Except these are from the 1970s and are shiny polished chrome. Of course it's possible to find other examples of...

Speaking of swoopy bench-like sculptures, Frank Gehry has done one for the World Company building in Tokyo, just in time for Tokyo Design Festival. It's worth comparing his to Zaha Hadid's. Formally they are similar: complex curves that you can...

Richard Prince's latest show at Gallerie Patrick Seguin, in Paris, shows off an interest in furnishings, including his new "Nurse Hat Chair". The other pieces in the show are from his collection, and are arranged in a way to display...

For those of you who missed it, Tropolism Newsletter 1.1 went out last Sunday. It was how the Zaha Hadid Chanel Pavilion now-closing in Central Park would have been improved by curation ideas taken from my favorite Xbox 360 games....

The Experimental Pavilion explores the possibilities of using special high strength concrete. The concrete's strength allows for super-thin forms of its columns and walls. Of interest is that the pavilion was created monolithically in two pieces and craned in. Prefabricated...

1. Buckminster Fuller's patent drawings for geodesic domes, via BLDGBLOG. 2. Museum of Drafting Technology, via Materialicious. 3. Brian Dettmer, Gray's Anatomy 2002....

Favela Painting is a project by Dutchmen Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn that creates home-grown artworks out of the density of the Rio favelas. The project has raised the cash to fund several large paintings already, creating a pretty brilliant...

The National Geographic Channel is featuring One Bryant Park on its Man Made series. The episode airs Thursday, November 6, at 9PM ET/PT. It's a great mini-documentary on the building, and gives some great insights into how large-scale sustainable building...

Our favorite wood building in New York City is about to get a neighbor! 245 Tenth Avenue is clad in (very) shiny, stamped metal panels. And surprise it's by friends from my alma mater, Della Valle Bernheimer. More pictures...

Picking up where we left off in last week's newsletter, we bring you GPS Film, a new cinematic concept that attempts to integrate traveling through the city with a cinematic, authored experience. The films sense your location with your GPS-enabled...

Greg Allen does the homework and finds one of our favorite works of Land Art, Double Negative, using the GPS device in the car of his in-laws. The large yet simple cut in the earth, famously difficult to find in...

In what is probably the most brilliant tie in ever, Muji is selling new chairs designed (but not-designed, right?) by Muji but produced by famous Austrian manufacturer Thonet. The bent wood "design" is a riff on Thonet's famous No. 14...

Ha ha, joke's on us. Here we thought MAS was just going to accept ideas for its Imagine Coney project through public forums and such. No, they were just hanging onto a wonderful website where you can click "Submit Idea"...

Hunter College's ambitious exhibition to: Night includes a large scale neon installation at the college's aerial walkway, Infinite Light by Laurent Grasso. We have been milling around that part of town a lot lately, and noticed it right away. However...

In keeping with two of our favorite themes here at Tropolism (arctic residences and drawing) we direct your attention to Concrete Ammonite, the work of Lewis Wadsworth. Like a cross between John Hejduk and Lebbeus Woods, Lewis's work combines a...