Author: Annie Coggan

Reading the epic New York and Los Angeles: The Uncertain Future, however ominous the title, is actually an optimistic act. The 600-page tome will go down as a tremendous resource for a design community that is in desperate need of assessing evidence-based research of the highest quality. Orchestrated by sociologists David Halle and Andrew A. Beveridge, the collection of papers discusses the NYC/LA continuum in an impressive and lively manner. The Oculus Book Talk on 09.09.13, with its three-minute presentations and rock music impetus, broke new ground for the intersection of public policy and architectural thought.

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Vishaan Chakrabarti’s A Country of Cities is more cultural artifact than text. With 100-plus pages of argument, balanced with 100-plus pages of graphs, data, and illustrations, the book is a manifesto for the visual age. Chakrabarti proclaims smart urban growth as a way to overcome many of society’s ills. In most of the book he preaches to a happy urbanite choir – I found myself saying “yes, yes, yes” to much of the discourse. Chakrabarti guides us through the somewhat “hackneyed” (his word, not mine) arguments of the sustainable landscape: the car equals bad, density equals good, suburbs equal bad. He uses cues from other great texts from the sustainability movement: a good-looking book design and easy handling from Cradle to Cradle, fashionable and epic imagery from An Inconvenient Truth, and an attempt to make graphs sexy from Bruce Mau’s Massive Change. The book works – and pushes the argument farther into the American mindset than any other text to date, but its potential is in the things that I think Chakrabarti “slips in” rather than the obvious arguments.

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On the weekend of 06.08-09.13, the Center for Architecture and The Museum of Modern Art orchestrated “Le Corbusier/New York,” an ambitious and exhilarating symposium centered on the great work of Le Corbusier. The symposium itself was bookended by a visit to newly-opened exhibition “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscape” at MoMA, and a visit to recently-renovated rooms at the United Nations. The symposium was embroidered with a panel of admired thinkers who study the architect. Scholarship spanned from the forensic research by Patrick Leitner on the impact Le Corbusier’s hometown La Chaux-du-Fonds had on his creative development, to gossipy, humorous tidbits about his interaction with female Vassar College undergraduates, and his rock star status with the “Amazons” (possibly having no historic truth except in Le Corbusier’s mind.) Continue reading “Pondering Our Hero: A Weekend of Le Corbusier”