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Jan 10, 2025 | 
architectmagazine.com | Aaron Betsky
You call them the Goff Balls or members of the American School. Whatever they were, the half dozen or so architects who were educated by Bruce Goff at the University of Oklahoma and then made their way to California to bring their masters swerves and verve to meet the Pacific crashing into the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s did some weird buildings.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
architectmagazine.com | Aaron Betsky
Walking into Nantou, a neighborhood of “handshake buildings” (where the structures are close enough that you can reach out and greet your neighbor in that manner) in the middle of Shenzhen, China, and you find insertions that you might not notice at first.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Aaron Betsky
In October 2018 I went to visit Manhattan’s High Line, a mile-long elevated park that was developed over the last decade out of a closed-down freight line stretching from West Fourteenth Street to West Thirty-Fourth Street. It was one of those New York fall evenings when you realize that winter is coming. By 6:30 it was already becoming dark, and there was the proverbial nip in the air.
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Oct 31, 2024 | 
architectmagazine.com | Aaron Betsky
It is the ultimate art trip. Go about as far away from United States as you can: to Tasmania, the island dangling off Australia’s southern coast. Find your way to the dock at Hobart, the capitol, and get on a boat sporting fake pink missiles waiting to blast any anti-aesthetic interference out of the way. Make your way up the Derwent River for twenty-five minutes and alight at the bottom of a sheer rock.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
architectmagazine.com | Aaron Betsky
The future is a curved, white, and shiny cocoon of plastic. It envelops our bodies as suits, shapes chairs that hold us in place, and surrounds us in an eggshell. That was the message I received from viewing the spacesuits, furnishings, interiors and even exterior of the Space X Falcon 9, Elon Musk’s most advanced manned (and wo-manned) capsule.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
metropolismag.com | Aaron Betsky
Discover how Jones Studio transformed the ruins of a former Baptist church in Phoenix into a community-centered garden and event venue. They peered through the boarding of what was left of the church. What they saw, back in 2010, was an open space where there had once been pews in which the hundreds of congregants of Phoenix’s First Baptist Church gathered. The structure was now open to the sky and partially covered with weeds.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
metalocus.es | Aaron Betsky
What is a Monster Leviathan? by Aaron BetskyThe Monster Leviathan: Anarchitecture collects visions of other worlds that have arisen over the last century. These might be places we imagine as proper to an unknown future, memories of the past, or territories that surrounds us every day without us knowing. Such mythic realms offer alternative ways of understanding the humanmade world we have built as a monstrous, but also more sustainable, just, and beautiful place.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
architectmagazine.com | Aaron Betsky
The weight of history lies heavily on all, but especially Italian architecture. The presence of layer after layer of civilization embedded in built form is to architects and clients alike a physical impediment to making new buildings. An added issue both must weight in considering new designs is the decline in quality of building standards and the rise of restrictions on what you can build. It is no wonder that architects struggle to make new buildings that are popular, beautiful, and innovative.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Sune Engel Rasmussen |Craig Brown |Tim Robey |Aaron Betsky
Jeff Schuhrke. Verso, $29.95 trade paper (354p) ISBN 978-1-83976-905-4The international labor movement has been undermined by the long-running obsession the leadership of America’s largest federation of unions, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), has had with combatting communism abroad, according to this ambitious debut.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Sune Engel Rasmussen |Craig Brown |Tim Robey |Aaron Betsky
Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo. Atria, $32.50 (592p) ISBN 978-1-9821-6483-6Five decades worth of raucous behind-the-scenes anecdotes, from the creation of the notorious headline “Headless Body in Topless Bar” to the genesis of the popular gossip column Page Six, fill this scintillating oral history of the New York Post.
