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 ...

Adolf Loos suffered from progressive hearing loss. As a child, his hearing was poor, and by the time he reached his mid-50s, his condition had deteriorated to the point that he became dependent on a ...

I grew up in a domestic world that seemed to hospitably reconfigure itself around our family’s evolving interests and enterprises. As my younger brother’s model horse and airplane collections expanded ...

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 ...

If labor power—that is, a population’s potential to produce—was and is the most important form of “production,” the most central productive space is the house itself. Dogma, proposal for the ...

I was born a Sloterdijkian. When, thirty years ago, I was preparing the proofs of Laboratory Life, I had included in the pictures, to the disgust of my scientist informants, a black-and-white ...

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 ...

Like all animals, humans are programmed for survival. Fight or flight? Duck! Run for cover! Our reflex, when we register fear, is to protect ourselves. Architecture’s answer, “shelter,” is said to ...

It is increasingly clear that one of the major female architects of the 20th century was the Italian Lina Bo Bardi, who emigrated to Brazil in 1945 and made a name for herself there. But this claim is ...

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 ...

The purpose of Harvard Design Magazine, no. 37 is to foreground these urgent issues of epistemology and praxis; to explore new directions for research and theoretical formation emerging from these ...

The architectural profession is in the midst of a long-overdue ethical reckoning. For years, it could ride the tidal wave of globalization to bigger and better commissions while still claiming that it ...