Redefining “Iconic” Architecture

Nov 4, 2024 | untappedjournal.com | Diana Budds |Jesse Dorris |Julie Lasky |Redefining “Iconic” Architecture

Before influencers crowded its cobblestone streets and upscale boutiques leased its cast-iron storefronts, SoHo was the epicenter of New York City’s art scene. Most of those spaces—the squats, studios, and experimental galleries that populated the neighborhood after factories pulled out during the postwar era—are long gone, but a few holdouts remain. One of them is a83, a nonprofit gallery, printshop, and archive located at 83 Grand Street.

Oct 21, 2024 | untappedjournal.com | Jesse Dorris |Julie Lasky |Redefining “Iconic” Architecture |Sophie Lovell

One afternoon, when Mikyoung Kim was a teenager, she sat on the bench before her piano. Her architect father and ceramicist mother, both recent immigrants to America from South Korea, had taken out a loan to purchase the instrument when she was 5, and she’d practiced intensely every day since. Her body became a right angle enfolding the form of the piano, her fingers forming more angles across its keys.

Oct 7, 2024 | untappedjournal.com | Julie Lasky |Redefining “Iconic” Architecture |Sophie Lovell |Marianne Thode Krogh

“Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.” This incantation, at the beginning of the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses, describes babies being born at a Dublin maternity hospital on a June day in 1904. In epic terms, the sentence relates to an island in Homer’s Odyssey populated by cattle that are the special horned creatures of the sun god, Helios. In Biblical terms, it enacts the process of words made flesh.

Sep 23, 2024 | untappedjournal.com | Sophie Lovell |Marianne Thode Krogh |Zach Mortice |Redefining “Iconic” Architecture

It is time to stop the use of the word iconic as if it were a desirable attribute, because it isn’t. This infuriatingly ubiquitous adjective gained traction in the design and architecture world in the early aughts to describe a consumer object, building, or person as a symbol of a particular ideology or way of life—one that happened to be defined and perpetuated by the rise of a global postindustrial elite. This was particularly true in the case of architecture.