Jack Murphy

3 days ago | archpaper.com | Jack Murphy

Ahead of the annual AIA convention, which begins today in Boston, an anonymous group is calling for AIA members to request an audit of the organization’s finances and to ask questions about its leadership.

1 week ago | archpaper.com | Jack Murphy

Depending on how you’re keeping score, Pennzoil Place in Houston is either Philip Johnson’s last modern building or his first postmodern one. Regardless, when it was completed, in 1975, Ada Louise Huxtable called it a “towering achievement” and awarded it the superlative of Building of the Year. The building was commissioned by Hines to lease to two oil companies—hence its two towers—and is currently owned by Metropolis Investment Holdings.

3 weeks ago | archpaper.com | Jack Murphy

“Today we experience chaos. The waste of human and material resources and the canalization of almost all creative effort into blind alleys bear witness to the fact that our common life has lost its coherency.” This feels accurate, but surprise: These are the opening lines to György Kepes’s The Language of Vision, published in 1944.

3 weeks ago | archpaper.com | Jack Murphy |Matt Shaw

Another biennale tour through the national pavilions is cause for some reflection about the U.S. pavilion building itself. Should we replace it? It might be the most frustrating building of all the pavilions, and possibly the worst exhibition venue in the Giardini. Designed in 1930 by architects William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich, its symmetric layout is vaguely Palladian, with a front door leading to a foyer where visitors choose between going left or right.

4 weeks ago | archpaper.com | Jack Murphy |Matt Shaw

Another day, another romp through what’s on at the Biennale Architettura 2025. In case you missed them, check out our dispatches from earlier this week for more takes on the national pavilions and low-downs on the talks and exhibitions happening in Venice. Beyond the rammed earth utilized in the U.S. Pavilion, soil had a good showing this year. Australia’s pavilion, themed Home, centered objects and discourse from its First Nations team, and includes a circular earth-clad wall and bench.