Notes from attending 'Attention Lab 1' at the School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn. The event included two guided exercise and a few guided discussions between groups of two, four, half or all of the 40 odd participants. Introductory conversations while waiting for the lab to begin covered themes around the question of why each... Continue Reading →
Notes from the AIA Brooklyn General Meeting 11/20/2024 and panel discussion. Convening two weeks after the 2024 election, the subject of labor, collectivism and the architectural profession felt timely, poignant, and very distant. The three panelists were: Dr. Benjamin Shepard City Tech Professor of Human Services. He is the author/editor of over ten books including White... Continue Reading →
this post is part 2 of a series covering my trip to Algeria this past February The previous post reviewed photographs taken from a flight from Algiers to El Bayadh in February, comparing the bird's eye view from the plane to the God's eye view of satellite imagery. As the flight approached El Bayadh we... Continue Reading →
part 1 of a series covering my trip to Algeria this past February The documentary L'Algerie Vue du Ciel is a beautiful portrait of Algeria with slow motion sweeping panoramas of many cities and regions. The ever present voice-over commentary keep the feeling closer to a travelogue or nature documentary than an experimental documentary like... Continue Reading →
I came across a recent prompt asking "what is your favorite book about NYC?" Mine is the The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill (1964), a children's book I first red in 4th grade and probably my first exposure to New York City. The book has plenty of fans, its own New Yorker profile from 2014,... Continue Reading →
Part of no longer being in school means I have time to read all sorts of things that I skipped while in school. I recently read most of Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture (Towards an Architecture, or Towards a New Architecture), and am trying to finish Atlas of Novel Tectonics and Complexity and Contradiction in... Continue Reading →
Why are medinas worth exploring? They are some of the most densely populated areas on earth and represent some of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements. Their organization and structure are informed by climate, religion, social structure and transportation modeled after pedestrians and goods-laden animals. Public and private realm are extremely well defined and delineated. In some places these... Continue Reading →
editor's note: this post is third of four written in December 2011 about In Sidi Bouzid the location of protests was determined by two factors. One, where Bouazizi decided to set himself on fire (the local seat of government) and two, where the local seat of government decided to situate itself within the urban fabric.... Continue Reading →
The five cities in four countries mentioned in yesterday's post find themselves with the Dar-al-Islam, within the historic boundaries of the Islamic Empire of the middle ages and later the Ottoman Empire. As a result of this shared history, certain urban structures and organization patterns can be seen as shared amongst the five cities. Stephano Bianca outlines... Continue Reading →
The Tunisian Revolution started in the town of Sidi Bouzid, the seat of governance for a rural province of the same name in central Tunisia. By January 21, Time magazine summarized the catalyst of the unrest with the following record of one Mohamed Bouazizi: ...on Dec. 17 his livelihood was threatened when a policewoman confiscated his... Continue Reading →
Adam Achrati 