When I worked at Microsoft, it was always a thrill to see a product we’d been working on for years finally get released to the public. I’m feeling the same sense of anticipation today. My new book on climate change is available now online and in book
The astonishing ease with which an imported microscopic virus is bringing our current wellbeing and the global economy down on their knees is making us rethink our way of living and reconsider our priorities. It is starting to look less like just a s
The year 2021 begins with three black swans, sounding like drum beats after the Christmas truce: the assault on the United States Capitol by a mob devoted to still-President Trump, the historic snowstorm that has paralyzed Spain, and the sudden spike
An image opens on my screen: a 2,000-seat theatre on the edge lands of Guangzhou, a territory of raw new towers and just-departed rural ghosts, designed to look like a swirl of red silk, imprinted with “tattoos” of phoenixes, cranes and other ornitho
From virus to vaccine, 2020 has been a year on pause. From the detection of the first cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan to the announcement of the efficacy of vaccines, we have lived a period of virtual life, locked up in domesticity and our contact with ot
Ensamble’s track seems inseparable from trial. Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa have assembled their life and work as a sequence of material and mental essays that are interwoven to join experiment and experience, production and perspective, explor
In this open letter addressed to David Chipperfield, Jacques Herzog reflects on the active role that architects ought to play in post-Covid society.
Patience is the sister of hope. The philosopher Ernst Bloch, who wrote the three volumes of The Principle of Hope while exiled in the United States from 1938 to 1947, often spoke of the importance of optimism. Now, while everyone from The Economist t
Monuments molt: they change skin, change image, and change meaning. As living heritage, they renew their renders and their walls, transform their outer appearance, and modify their symbolic content; and as vulnerable heritage, they experience decaden
Philip Johnson was one of the most influential architects of the past century, chameleonic in each of his roles as a New York power broker, art collector and creator of his “Glass House,” a celebrated landmark of modernist design in Connecticut. He a
Following a letter released November 27, 2020 by The ---- Johnson Study Group calling for all institutions to remove the name of Philip Johnson from "every leadership title, public space, and honorific of any form," Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluí
