Almost a year ago, we read an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled: "How Economists Became So Timid." It was an enlightening read to hear from an economist who avoided the binary capitalist-communist, either/or pairing (or substitute 'socialist' in 2019 Am...

It’s a long journey.

Voyage well!

Like many adventures, Animate began by setting out in a general direction –– innovation for good in architecture –– and our path has wound through amazing terrain. We studied evolving cities as complex adaptive systems; we found a...

 Opinions about art by Crate&Barrel...

Opinions, like the air we breathe, are everywhere. Lema Khorshig and I found ourselves discussing how to serve clients better. 

Given the myriad of details of a legal case for Lema, or an architectural project for Animate..., it a...

Patterns otherwise invisible are made possible by ultra wide angle cameras. It's even more impressive when one watches the video (this clip from about 5:10). "TheRidge" is a new film about mountain-biker Danny Macaskill from RedBull and other supporters, showing a mou...

Very strange... seeing a new book by Alessandro Baricco, The Barbarians: An Essay on the Mutation of Culture at the checkout counter at Eataly, Chicago. Yes one could read a tabloid, but... Two previous reads by Baricco were excellent: Silk, and The Ocean Se...

A client asked us why we would propose to keep a mediocre old building on a new project. After all, we are proposing a much larger building, with significantly newer technology. A quick thought occurs: it is not worth saving. Mediocrity should be removed, such that cr...

It was a surprise to see Frank so honest. The pictured gesture is the logical representation of Frank and his clients towards 98% of people in this world. He appears happily “smug” in a video of the incident: El arquitecto Frank Gehry dedica una peineta a las críticas...

Broad and general words, in this case ‘architecture,’ can provoke many opinions and incite emotional retorts by practitioners and observers alike. A recent and well referenced article editorially summarizes one viewpoint on the current American architectural discours...

Beauty has had a "checkered past." For the French Impressionists, Romanticists, and turn of the century 19th-20th century culture, beauty was pleasure. It was a way to unwind from the grind of urban life. Beauty was thought as a measure of truth. By the end of...

There are many ways to detail buildings. We don’t recommend wrapping unless an exceptional circumstance presents itself, and then very carefully. The image below shows a luxuriously made, brass covered entrance sign, wrapping a regular steel mounting plate. Of course c...