Failed Architecture

Alexandra Lange has been writing about architecture and design for over two decades. Her articles span a wide range of subjects, from building reviews and calls for preservation to furniture, fashion, and women in architecture. After writing for such media outlets as Metropolis, Dezeen, The New York Times, Places Journal, Architect Magazine and The New Yorker, she published the book Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities in 2012. Currently working as the architecture critic at Curbed, her latest book The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids comes out this month.

In this episode, Alexandra Lange talks to Mark Minkjan about architecture criticism and The Design of Childhood. In the first half of the conversation, they discuss her work as a critic, the problem with architect profiles, writing for the New Yorker and feminist criticism. After that, the second half is about how to design the objects, spaces and cities that help children become independent, sociable and creative.

This episode was directed by Mark Minkjan/the Failed Architecture team.

Alexandra Lange has been writing about architecture and design for over two decades. Her articles span a wide range of subjects, from building reviews and calls for preservation to furniture, fashion, and women in architecture. After writing for such media outlets as Metropolis, Dezeen, The New York Times, Places Journal, Architect Magazine and The New Yorker, she published the book Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities in 2012. Currently working as the architecture critic at Curbed, her latest book The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids comes out this month.

In this episode, Alexandra Lange talks to Mark Minkjan about architecture criticism and The Design of Childhood. In the first half of the conversation, they discuss her work as a critic, the problem with architect profiles, writing for the New Yorker and feminist criticism. After that, the second half is about how to design the objects, spaces and cities that help children become independent, sociable and creative.

Links to books, articles and topics addressed in the conversation:

Alexandra Lange’s articles at The New Yorker

1:08 Alexandra Lange – Writing About Architecture

Stereotypes regarding Modernist architecture, and in particular the negative discourse on Amsterdam’s Bijlmer estate, have been quite crucial in shaping Failed Architecture’s way of thinking in its early years. Can we really blame the architecture for what went wrong? How can an entire neighbourhood, where thousands of people continue to live their lives on a daily basis, be simply dismissed as a grand failure? In recent years, however, there has been a slow but steady reappreciation of Modernist architecture taking place, but rather for its aesthetics than its social ideals.

While architecture from that era is still being demolished at a large scale, this renewed interest is Modernist architecture has also allowed investors to renovate entire blocks of it, and sell the individual apartments for lucrative prices. One of the last remaining Bijlmer flats, Kleiburg, went through a similar process, which was later even given the Mies van der Rohe Award and other major architecture prizes. For this episode, we revisit Kleiburg with Fenna Haakma Wagenaar, an architect who grew up in the flat, and discuss the simultaneous disregard and reappreciation of Modernist housing estates with critical expert Owen Hatherley.

– Fenna Haakma Wagenaar is an architect and currently design lead at the Municipality of Amsterdam. She grew up in Kleiburg.

This episode is directed by René Boer/the Failed Architecture team.

Video games have changed the way we interact with space. From their very inception, these increasingly complex virtual worlds have been forcing new perspectives and new ways of interacting with the world beyond. Once they were able to represent cities, their role in shaping our everyday urban experience became even more acute, thrusting players into environments that they would otherwise have never come close to and exposing them to representations of urban life which will have had countless effects on the way players experienced cities in real life.

But while it’s long been accepted that film, music and other established forms of culture have been instrumental in crafting people’s perception of city life, the role of video games has hitherto been rather neglected. This, despite the fact that the industry is in many countries bigger than film and music combined. If we do not accept the wide-ranging and increasingly significant role that video games have in shaping the way people interact with city space, then we leave it open to conservative or reactionary portrayals of city life and space more generally.

– Oli Mould is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, he blogs at Tacity

This episode is directed by Charlie Clemoes/the Failed Architecture team.

Video games have changed the way we interact with space. From their very inception, these increasingly complex virtual worlds have been forcing new perspectives and new ways of interacting with the world beyond. Once they were able to represent cities, their role in shaping our everyday urban experience became even more acute, thrusting players into environments that they would otherwise have never come close to and exposing them to representations of urban life which will have had countless effects on the way players experienced cities in real life.

But while it’s long been accepted that film, music and other established forms of culture have been instrumental in crafting people’s perception of city life, the role of video games has hitherto been rather neglected. This, despite the fact that the industry is in many countries bigger than film and music combined. If we do not accept the wide-ranging and increasingly significant role that video games have in shaping the way people interact with city space, then we leave it open to conservative or reactionary portrayals of city life and space more generally.

The initial inspiration for this episode came from one such reactionary portrayal: the crime-ridden inner city of Streets of Rage. Considering the way this game helped shape a specific neoliberal policy narrative emerging in the late 1980s, the episode questions how and in what ways games can do the opposite: expanding, rather than narrowing our perceptions of city life.

– Oli Mould is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, he blogs at Tacity

This episode is directed by Charlie Clemoes / The Failed Architecture Team

Instagram photos, public transport information, streamed music and Netflix movies seem to appear out of thin air on your phone, don’t they? Well, getting them onto that screen isn’t as light and easy as it feels. There is, in fact, an immense and decidedly heavy infrastructure powering the cloud. More and more architecture is being designed and built to house server space and internet connection hubs. Since these buildings typically use as much energy as a medium-sized city, our digital lives have a direct environmental toll. Minimising this footprint is one of the data centre industry’s main issues.

This episode was triggered by our encounter with the first data centre to be fully embraced as Architecture. Designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects, the AM4 data tower in Amsterdam only recently appeared on the city’s skyline. Being taller than most buildings in the city, and cutting an impressively slick, windowless appearance, the data skyscraper is hard to miss. Does this design treatment for data architecture signal a tipping point of data centres becoming more visible and acceptable elements of cities? For the podcast, we got inside the heavily secured AM4 data tower to see, hear and feel the internet, and talked to several people about data space.

– Michiel Eielts is managing director at Equinix, the data centre company that commissioned the building.

This episode is directed by Mark Minkjan / the Failed Architecture team.

Instagram photos, public transport information, streamed music and Netflix movies seem to appear out of thin air on your phone, don’t they? Well, getting them onto that screen isn’t as light and easy as it feels. There is, in fact, an immense and decidedly heavy infrastructure powering the cloud. More and more architecture is being designed and built to house server space and internet connection hubs. Since these buildings typically use as much energy as a medium-sized city, our digital lives have a direct environmental toll. Minimising this footprint is one of the data centre industry’s main issues.

This episode was triggered by our encounter with the first data centre to be fully embraced as Architecture. Designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects, the AM4 data tower in Amsterdam only recently appeared on the city’s skyline. Being taller than most buildings in the city, and cutting an impressively slick, windowless appearance, the data skyscraper is hard to miss. Does this design treatment for data architecture signal a tipping point of data centres becoming more visible and acceptable elements of cities? For the podcast, we got inside the heavily secured AM4 data tower to see, hear and feel the internet, and talked to several people about data space.

– Michiel Eielts is managing director at Equinix, the data centre company that commissioned the building.

This episode is directed by Mark Minkjan / the Failed Architecture team.

In this podcast episode, we go inside Amsterdam’s designer data tower and talk to several people about the architecture, environmental impact and cultural significance of data centres.

Instagram photos, public transport information, streamed music and Netflix movies seem to appear out of thin air on your phone, don’t they? Well, getting them onto that screen isn’t as light and easy as it feels. There is, in fact, an immense and decidedly heavy infrastructure powering the cloud. More and more architecture is being designed and built to house server space and internet connection hubs. Since these buildings typically use as much energy as a medium-sized city, our digital lives have a direct environmental toll. Minimising this footprint is one of the data centre industry’s main issues.

This episode was triggered by our encounter with the first data centre to be fully embraced as Architecture. Designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects, the AM4 data tower in Amsterdam only recently appeared on the city’s skyline. Being taller than most buildings in the city, and cutting an impressively slick, windowless appearance, the data skyscraper is hard to miss. Does this design treatment for data architecture signal a tipping point of data centres becoming more visible and acceptable elements of cities? For the podcast, we got inside the heavily secured AM4 data tower to see, hear and feel the internet, and talked to several people about data space.

– Michiel Eielts is managing director at Equinix, the data centre company that commissioned the building.

This episode is directed by Mark Minkjan / the Failed Architecture team.