Michael Höpfner, Outpost of Progress, 2008; plastic sheeting, sisal line, wooden posts; 120 x 80 x 65 inches; courtesy the artist and Hubert Winter Gallery, Vienna
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Biennials and Texanicity in Contemporary Art: A Survey of Surveys


2011 Texas Biennial Special #1

Benjamin Lima

Structure, Metaphor, Contemporary Art


Domenick Ammirati with Mevis & Van Deursen

Recently I read Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, from 1991. I’d gotten the sense from talking to my more intellectually conscientious friends that Latour had a lot to say about the current moment...

To Locate One’s Self


Mary Ellen Carroll and Peter Noever

On March 6, 2011, in the overhead compartment for seat 14K of an Austrian Airlines’ Boeing 767 en route from JFK to VIE (Flight 88) is a suitcase full of printed matter, most of which goes unread. The...

Shahyad (Azadi), A Monument of Many Faces


Morteza Baharloo

The Shahyad, currently called Azadi, is a 50,000-square-meter complex in Tehran that includes the 50-meter-tall eponymous tower and a subterranean section with a museum and audiovisual exhibition...

Miscegenous London


Simon Dance and Shezad Dawood

What if we were to see miscegenation as a neutral and factual term, not merely relating to racial admixture but to de facto as well as organic hybridizations of architectural period and culinary...

Berend Strik: Against Standardization and Sanitization


Renée Borgonjen and Berend Strik

Working with One Architecture seems to me to be a “thixotropic experience.” We both have different ways of developing a concept and working on an idea. But when these forces come together it...

Johnson and Oil!


Eva Hagberg

Pennzoil Place. Philip Johnson. 1975. A pair of towers, full of prismatic slippage, edged up against each other on a 250-square-foot downtown Houston block. Built by developer Gerald Hines with...

House Arrest


International House of Architecture
Marcos Sánchez and Mark Wasiuta with Adam Bandler

A familiar narrative of the San Fernando Valley holds that the formal repetitiveness of this vast suburbia delivers an image of bland homogeneity, while simultaneously providing cover for a...

Law and the Authoritarian Aesthetic of the American Lawn


Asmara M. Tekle

In his book Second Nature (Delta, 1992), Michael Pollan writes that at a certain moment in his childhood on Long Island, his dad decided to stop mowing the family’s suburban front lawn and let...

Neuroforms 


Paula Hayes and Florian Idenburg

The first form is a perfect transparent dome. Its widest point is just about one third above the ground, not at the ground. It first gets wider and then shapes back in. The dome is not just half...

Screen Space and the Conviction of “Dick Smart”


Cynthia Chris

On March 31 and again on April 7 of the year 2000, the Grand Rapids, Michigan, public access station known as GRTV (Grand Rapids Television) aired an episode of a show called Tim’s Area of Control in a...