Parsing distinctions between architecture and “mere” building has been a preoccupation of thinkers and practitioners since ancient times. The very difficulty of defining neat disciplinary boundaries ...

In 1921, Loos titled his first essay collection Spoken into the Void; the work was intended as a critique of his Austrian contemporaries’ ignorance of modern lifestyles. Indirectly, the “void” in the ...

Before books, there were scrolls. The ancient Romans, like the Sumerians, stored their extensive scroll collections in “cells,” or pigeonholes (nidus, forulus, or loculamentum), or on pegmata, ...

Harvard Design Magazine probes beyond the established design disciplines to enrich and diversify current discourse.

March 2006 is the fiftieth anniversary of the First Urban Design Conference at Harvard—an event that, under the leadership of José Luis Sert, marked a beginning of the self-conscious pursuit of urban ...

Harvard Design Magazine 51: Multihyphenate examines multihyphenation as a mode of creative practice, a political response, and economic imperative in our 21st century neoliberal world.

Redesign, for decades stigmatized by Modernist purists as an inferior architectural specialty reserved for the artistically timid and creatively challenged, has finally become a legitimate part of ...

Dogma, proposal for the transformation of an office block, Brussels, Belgium, 2014. Beyond simply offering refuge, the goal of the house has always been to create the possibility of frictionless ...

Shortly before his untimely death, the Spanish theorist and critic Ignasi de Solà-Morales commented to me that “If European architects or architectural scholars wished to study contemporary ...

Abele’s stylistic reserve contrasts with the turbulence about style going on within architecture concurrent with his career—challenges to classicism as the fount of inspiration for American civic ...

The ocean remains a glaring blind spot in the Western imagination. Catastrophic events remind us of its influence—a lost airplane, a shark attack, an oil spill, an underwater earthquake—but we tend to ...

Paul Rudolph’s Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center building—one component of Boston’s partially completed Government Service Center—has confounded observers since it opened in 1971. Historians have ...