Articles by Matt Shaw

The intense heat, different levels of local construction knowledge and the availability of materials all factor into designs.

Some day soon, every day will be “Dollar Oyster Day,” thanks in part to architects. You never would think that oysters would become a demographic that designers came to rescue, but it is happening through a number of upcycling these days, both designed as temporary pavilions and through other initiatives. Oyster reefs once dominated the…

Two projects, unveiled on the same day last week, shed light on some of the issues that contemporary architects face, from the beginning of a project to the end. They couldn’t be more high-profile yet they also couldn’t be more different in their origins and public reception. But something tells us that both projects are…

In what has become a grand tradition for, the internet turns into a minefield of fake news à la The Onion on April 1st, a.k.a. April Fools’ Day. Here are some of our favorite design-related stories from online publications doing their best one-day Onion impression, complete with hilariously questionable Photoshopping. Image via Hyperallergic (courtesy the…

Today is April Fool’s Day, which is a good opportunity to reflect on the topic of rendering as design fiction. Architectural rendering relies heavily on Photoshop to drive its narratives, as post-production allows designers to visualize worlds with insanely good-looking people riding bikes across plazas and brunching al fresco under a hazy lens flare. These…

Google is known for their playful April Fool’s Day pranks and hoaxes. Their first, MentalPlex, was an actual hoax. In 2000, when search engines were still in their formative stages, they tricked people into thinking about what they wanted to search for, and then delivered humorous error messages, like “Error 001: Weak or no signal…

Achillina Bo was born in Rome in 1914, the same year that Le Corbusier published his Maison Dom-Ino. She worked for designers in Italy, including Carlo Pagani, before founding her own practice in 1932. After World War II destroyed Europe, it was Domus magazine that sent her out to survey the destruction of the built…

By the 1920s, airplane travel had made art and architecture a global profession, at least in the dis semination and cross-contamination of ideas. All over the globe, colonialism and otherwise globalized commissions were spreading modernism and other sociopolitical systems around the world. These intellectual histories make for fascinating tales that reveal a secondary history behind some…

It is not often that architecture itself is the subject of cinema.