All images: Foreign Language Publishing House/Dom Publishers

As a general rule, dictators love architecture, and Kim Jong-il was no different. The late North Korean leader even authored a treatise on the art of building, 1991′s On Architecture, in which Kim extols the virtues of “Juche” architecture, that is, those works that were symbolically compatible, ideologically resonant, and formally representative of DPRK state doctrine. According to Kim, architects are both “creative workers and operations officers” whose work must cannot be successful, architecturally or otherwise, without the approval of the masses, “the true critics of architecture.” But, have a look through Philipp Meuser’s fascinating “Pyongyang: Architectural and Cultural Guide“, and it’s safe to say that the masses do not approve.

The theoretical leanings underpinning much of the architecture featured in the two-part volume suggest an architectural and urban . Despite Kim’s appeal to the masses, much of the architecture of Pyongyang, the dictator’s seat of power, is overwhelmingly authoritarian in tone. Large monuments of questionable taste dot the cityscape embodying Kim’s cult of personality, linked by absurdly wide Haussmannian boulevards and colossal public squares devoid of an actual public. Featureless (but free) housing projects foreground the pedestal architecture, whose fragments are held visually together by a penchant for Stalinist grandeur and a schizophrenic eclecticism, with allusions to the building cultures of nearly every socialist regime of the last half century. Meuser’s book is split into two parts, the first of which consists of an actual North Korean architectural guide–the photos of which can be seen here–with the other functioning as exegesis, filled with critical texts that not only argue against the ugly power of Kim’s architecture, but also outlines potential lessons that Pyongyang, as a socio-urban model, has to offer.

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Thirty-five years ago yesterday, the world did not yet know about Star Wars or what it was. No one had yet heard of strange names like ‘Skywalker’ and ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’, nor had any idea as to what a lightsaber or Jedi was or had any way of foreseeing the convoluted politics behind Han shooting first. That would all change on May 25, 1977, when the first Star Wars films hit theaters, sending a riptide across the cultural landscape that has, even now, yet to complete recede. To commemorate the occasion, here’s our list of our favorite Star Wars posts we’ve covered. Happy long weekend!

1. The Architecture of Star Wars

The one that started it all. We explore the blueprints behind the architecture of the Rebel Alliance and the Empire.

2. The Man Who Helped Imagine Star Wars

We pay tribute to the late Ralph McQuarrie, the conceptual artist who worked with George Lucas in bringing the world of Star Wars to the screen.

3. On Earth As It Is in Star Wars

Photographer Cédric Delsaux inserts characters and ships from the Star Wars films into real world environments. Stormtroopers patrol empty carparks, the Millenium Falcon makes repairs in the a Dubai construction site, and the Emperor haunts the Parisian suburbs.

4. Travel to Tatooine

Make the trip of a lifetime to Tatooine, aka Tunis, Tunisia. We’ve got your guide to all iconic film sets that were left abandoned in the desert.

5. The Economics Behind the Death Star

University economic majors forgo studying for their midterm and devise a project of their own instead to find out how much it would cost and how much material would be needed to build an actual Death Star. Hint, it’s all very expensive.

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Batman, like most superheroes, is defined by the city which he’s sworn to protect. That city is, of course, Gotham, the depiction of which has changed considerably in the 70 years since the character’s invention, from the barebones sound stage-like constructions of the comic’s pulp origins and the camp of the mid-century city to Frank Miller’s canonical turn as a dark smoldering vat of paranoia and Anton Furst’s insanity-gripped, fragmented metropolis strewn with Piranesian ruins and corpses. Putting aside Christopher Nolan’s recent Batman films, which very literally crystallized the anxiety of the contemporary American city, Gotham endures to this day as a stone tapestry of skyscrapers and alleyways in the form of Batman: Death by Design.

Penned by acclaimed graphic novelist Chip Kidd, Death by Design sees Gotham under intense construction, its skyline awash with the cranes and machinery that erect tower projects designed by the world’s (or DC Comics’) most famous architects. Bruce Wayne oversees the boom that will be remembered as a “golden age of architectural ingenuity” in the history of the city, a legacy the billionaire-turned-chair of the Gotham’s landmarks commission is committed to uphold. Yet, amid the joyous clamor of construction, a series of horrifying accidents abruptly cut through the optimistic miasma, initiating a period of chaos that brings the widespread building to a halt. Gotham’s greatest sleuth must uncover who’s behind these seemingly random acts of terror before it’s too late!

As is evident from the brief synopsis and title–the villain is even named Exacto–Death by Design explores the link between Batman and architecture, weaving a narrative that is as much invested with architecture as with the human players it accommodates. At one point, Wayne Central Station is marked for demolition and must be rescued by preservationists, recalling the drama that surrounded the 1963 campaign to save McKim, Mead and White’s tragically doomed Penn Station from the developers’ wrecking ball. “Great Batman stories always incorporate architecture in some way” Kidds tells i09 of the graphic novel, which, along with Furst’s Destroyer series explicitly tackles the relationship between the Caped Crusader and the buildings, not too mention social structures that he purports to defend.

The book’s actual architectural content riffs off both Hugh Ferriss’ canonical “City of Tomorrow” etches and the infrastructural quagmire of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Colossal stone towers spear upwards, each one with a distinct aquiline profiles. Interestingly, the highest registers of the skyscrapers appear vacant or unfinished, with the actual skyline falling well short of the pinnacle heights the spires would suggest. The traditional scenario is thus flipped on its head, so to speak, where Gotham’s darkest and most cavernous spaces reside not in the alleyways and ambiguous terrain of the street and sewer, but above, among the flyspace and echoing attics, abandoned penthouses and clock towers.

Kidd’s Gotham quite literally draws on the comic’s pulp origins, filtered through a somewhat atavistic aesthetic that eulogizes the frictional moment when graphite rubs off of paper. Illustrator Dave Taylor’s broad, uneven shading and charcoal smears approximate the grit of the era, while the Dark Knight is rendered in radial lines, bleeding into the shadowed cityscape he nimbly navigates. As Kidd says himself, every frame is very much a “love letter to pencil on paper”. The technique serves the story well, presenting an all-new Gotham that is different, yet strangely familiar, and altogether sublime.

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Antilia; Photo: Hirsch Bedner Associates via

Money, it seems, really can’t buy a home. The world’s first and only $1 billion house, a towering 27-story structure in Mumbai filled to the brim with luxurious comforts, technological gizmos, and recreational facilities, has proved incapable of fulfilling the most basic of programs. Constructed by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, to house his family, problems with the building and interior design, by Chicago architects Perkins & Will and Atlanta-based Hirsch Bender Associates, have prevented the Ambani’s from moving into their private skyscraper.

The building, called Antilia after a fictional island in Atlantis, functions more as a pied-à-terre than the opulent residence that it is. Family members inhabit the “house” during the daylight hours, indulging in the resident spa, yoga studio, movie theatre, hanging gardens, swimming pool, and “ice room” until nightfall, when Ambani, his wife, mother, and three children return to their other home, a 14-floor complex in the southern part of the city.

So what’s behind the prolonged move-in date? Ambani has been hesitant to discuss the exact motivations keeping his family from permanently occupying the grounds (sky?), while regional and foreign media opined that the billionaire did not realize the ostentatious and, ultimately, oppressive display of wealth he had created until it was too late. Still, other news agencies claimed that the family has been weary of sleeping in the building for “superstitious” reasons. As Arch Record reports, the structure is apparently incompatible with the laws of dwelling as conditioned by Vastu Shastra, an ancient building code that dictates the form and design of both Indian temple and domestic architecture. Many homeowners, new and old, want their houses to adhere to the feng shui-like tenets specified by the system, which include the orientation of windows, air flow, and furniture configuration.

The eastern facade of the Antilia, it turns out, does not have a sufficient number of windows or openings that would bring in morning light to residents–just one of the design’s several failings which, according to the Vastu Shastra, invites misfortune. Ambani’s company spokesmen has dismissed the rumors, saying that the family lives in both of their properties.

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Photo: AP

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Kukje Art Center by SO-IL; All photos: Iwan Baan

Architectural plasticity once meant–and still does, in some quarters–a cubist-like composition of stark, white-washed walls that communicated little aside from volumetric depth and sensuousness. This means of formmaking has fallen in and out of favor periodically for the better part of the century since its introduction, finding its highest application in Japanese and Korean contemporary building cultures, which seemingly cease to churn out an inventive array of new plastic iterations usually in the form of compact single family homes. SO-IL‘s recently opened Kukje Gallery adheres to this model of architectural production,  a pure geometric box bulging at points with protruding platonic volumes seamlessly tethered to a taut, continuous surface.

Set in a low-rise neighborhood in Seoul where courtyard homes are prevalent, the gallery is the latest of several art outlets, boutique shops, and cafes which have begun to infiltrate the area. Designed as one module in a new master plan of a burgeoning ”art campus”, the single-story structure is comprised of a clear-span ground area devoted to installations and performances and two below-grade floors that accommodate several additional programs, including an auditorium, sales room, and storage.

According to the architects, the gallery’s context, framed by the dense configuration of homes and alleyways juxtaposed against the backdrop of traditional pagoda structures, demanded a more sensitive approach to surface treatment. Rather than present an austere white box, SO-IL cloaked the gallery in a custom chainmail veil that’s pliable and easily stretches to envelop both the projecting volumes and the angled staircase tucked just behind the facade. A series of in-between spaces created by this facade-wall condition mimics the narrow circulation paths threaded throughout the surrounding neighborhood. The architects describe the stainless steel skin as a “nebula” that softens the sharp-edged geometries while enmeshing the mass in an interplay of shadow and reflection.

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There’s 9 tons of chocolate in that there pyramid. The colossal cacao structure was commissioned to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Qzina Specialty Foods, which tapped chef Francois Mellet and M.O.F. Stephane Treand to create a six-feet tall edible replica of the Temple of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza, the most well-known and ingenious example of Mayan architecture. The finished model sits on a ten square foot base and weighs in at 18,239 pounds, a world record for the largest chocolate work, easily beating the previous 7,500 pound title holder.

The massive piece was made from using an assortment of Qzina’s line of chocolates that was poured in vast amounts and left to cool in bricks that form the core of the structure. Together with a small team, Mellet and Treand travailed for over 400 hours to build the edible sculpture, meticulously recreating the exact form and details of the temple in an effort to “honor the original chocolatiers.” Much research was conducted to familiarize the team with the precise proportions and ornamentation of Mayan temples to ensure verisimilitude to the real thing. Each of the pyramid’s four staircases is faithfully reproduced here, as are the temple effigy and the period dress of the diminutive guards. Not only that, the chocolate and stone temple will share the same fate and ruin as predicted by the Mayan calendar. Qzina will exhibit the piece through December 21, 2012, when it plans to destroy the model in accordance with prophecy–the end of all things, chocolate or otherwise.

[via Collacubed]

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Nothing says failure quite as much as a weathered, rusted space frame. Yet, in pristine conditions–see Konrad Wachmann’s colossal, even animistic proto-space frame projects–it possess an aesthetic that rivals all other modes of architectural expression. When taken as a (pictorial) whole, the space frame’s superimposed latticework inevitably becomes collaged, its inherent structural legibility blurred into a moiré of thick and thin lines–a drama teased out from the anonymity of standardized steel members.

A space frame, however, does not a home (usually) make. Domesticity can neither tolerate the intense material volatility of the space frame, nor the hostility it poses towards the calm, passive life. But wait! The plants will take it!

Introducing, the plant space frame from studio kg, a modular planting system comprised of interconnected tetrahedrons that guide and “tame” the course of plant growth from inside your home or office. Called ‘Parramyd‘, the system provides a framework on which to grow ivy and vine-like plants in a domestic environment. The kits come in two sizes, both sets of which can be expanded or made smaller by the addition or removal of the pyramidal modules. Utopia and your garden, back together again.

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The Bubble Building; All photos via DUS Architects Facebook

Commenting on the brevity and precariousness of life, Erasmus likened man to a soap bubble (homo bulla), a vain, delusional creature who exerts much effort and time to erect “walls of bubbles” to insulate its base vulnerabilities with intricate systems of culture and knowledge. The barefaced fact of one’s finitude is, as Sartre facetiously and accurately noted, “a fart in a soap bubble”–to shamelessly exploit the metaphor–the noxious truth of extinction thinly veiled by the seeming vibrancy of the life about to pop.

That’s part of what the “Bubble Building” tries express. Designed by DUS Architects for the ZigZagCity festival in Rotterdam, the pavilion is the world’s most temporary and fragile structure, comprised of 16 shallow hexagonal pools, each of which is filled with a reflective solution, that collectively form 35 square meteres of “soap surface”. Visitors grip handlebar frames at the base of the ponds and pull up to create iridescent globular volumes that appear different from one to the next but which last for all but a moment. The speed with which the form materializes and fades occludes any close reading of the emergent forms, and so the communal, participatory act itself assumes priority of place. At least two people are needed to construct each of the bubble cells, whose size and coverage corresponds to the number of participants cooperating uniformly across space. Continue.

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America’s “greatest” building–Virginia State Capitol by Thomas Jefferson

PBS/WTTW Chicago have released their top ten list for the buildings that have changed the face of America. The list is part of the build up for a new media production planned for next year that will devote time and exegesis to the history, construction, and influence attributed to each of the canonical structures. PBS has done their homework, but it also isn’t the first time the network has made such a compilation. The list doesn’t offer any surprises–it’s relatively conservative and unimaginative, which is fine as every one of the buildings noted here deserving of the recognition.

The list is confined to domestic projects, institutions, places of commerce, and corporate headquarters; there are no museums or educational structures to be found, and just one edifice of industry.

#2: Trinity Church by H.H. Richardson

Yet there are some structures that are conspicuously missing. Where’s Pruitt-Igoe? Or the Dodger Stadium or the totality of Disneyland, both of which first posited and subsequently popularized the parking lot as a legitimate architectural typology. Surely the identikit structures of the McDonald’s franchise, in both their earlier Googie and later “single family home” iterations, should have been given consideration. Also left out, the U.N. Building, which preceded the Seagram Building and set the tone for the monolithic, glazed Manhattan towers to come. (Note: as has been theorized before, had Le Corbusier won and the tower been garbed with brise-soleil, the city skyline may have turned out quite differently.) No love for Louis Kahn, while the Vanna Venuri house gets thrown into the lot as the token pomo project.

And where are the data centers?

#8: Dulles International Airport by Eero Saarinen; Photo via jfk50

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