ARCHITECTURE

SPHERE, LAS VEGAS 

It will be all too easy for architects to dismiss the most expensive entertainment venue in Las Vegas history as the apotheosis of spectacle culture. But it seems unlikely that a critical vocabulary developed for quaint twentieth-century technologies like the cinema and broadcast television will prove adequate to understanding a $2.3 billion augmented-reality machine that has absorbed more resources than most major urban development projects, and anything that can gather tens of thousands of people into the same physical location at the same time to engage in the same collective activity is surely worthy of consideration by both cultural institutions and the architects who build them.

24 PERCENT GROWTH IN NORTH AMERICAN DATA CENTER INVENTORY 

Like practitioners in most creative fields, architects are still trying to grasp AI’s implications for their profession. But the stunning growth in US data centers over the past year—driven primarily by the insatiable computational demands of AI companies, and concentrated in the region of Northern Virginia known as “Data Center Alley”—is a reminder that this latest digital revolution will inevitably remain grounded in physical infrastructure, presenting architects with an opportunity to engage in a wholesale transformation of the rural landscape on a scale not seen since the monumental modernization projects of the New Deal era.

FIRE SALE OF THE OLD SPORTS ILLUSTRATED BUILDING, NEW YORK

In the 1960s and ’70s, a legendarily fecund loft scene was catalyzed by New York’s transformation into a postindustrial city, as blue-collar manufacturing jobs moved to places with cheaper labor and looser regulation. The sale of this Midtown building for $8.5 million—a 97.5 percent discount from its last purchase price—suggests that the city may now be moving into its post-financial phase, as white-collar office jobs have migrated into the cloud. The trick will be to make this shift similarly unruly and productive, rather than following the smooth pipeline from high-end offices to luxury residences already in progress.

MOWAA INSTITUTE AT THE MUSEUM OF WEST AFRICAN ART, BENIN CITY, NIGERIA

Calls to decolonize the museum have become ubiquitous over the past decade, even if many institutions in Europe and America still seem uncertain as to what they really mean. Meanwhile, this ambitious institution has been slowly growing in Nigeria’s historic Benin City. Its wide-ranging program includes everything from housing repatriated artifacts—among them those looted by the British in the infamous punitive expedition of 1897—to training archaeologists who will excavate and preserve traces of the ancient capital and exhibiting contemporary work from the region’s vibrant artistic community. Its first building, a collaboration between the embattled Adjaye Associates and the Lagos-based firm MOE+, opened this past fall, and a major exhibition space designed by the Dakar-based studio Worofila is in the works, with the institution eventually planning to expand into a fifteen-acre multi-use campus. MOWAA faces many challenges, but it’s worth watching this radical effort not to decolonize the museum but to actually reimagine it as a vital piece of cultural infrastructure in a postcolonial society. 

PAUL RUDOLPH (METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK; CURATED BY ABRAHAM THOMAS)

Brutalism has now become as cool as the smoother-sipping midcentury modernism it once pushed against. Yet here is a poignant reminder that it was not just another style but modern architecture’s best attempt to find its purpose in a rapidly changing world. Rudolph’s ideas ranged from the good (mass-produced housing using new materials like plastic and plywood) to the very bad (his mercifully unrealized Piranesian nightmare of a monumental expressway wiping out a swath of Lower Manhattan). But his gorgeous drawings make him an ideal subject for a retrospective, and the force of his vision is consistently thrilling.

On view through March 16, 2025.

H.EARTH IN MOTT HAVEN, SOUTH BRONX

Designed by the nonprofit collective Territorial Empathy, this innovative project combines a mutual aid kitchen (housing the beautifully crafted brick oven that gives the project its name) run in partnership with local restaurant La Morada, a community garden, and a gathering space focused on serving both local residents and migrants housed in the area who otherwise have difficulty accessing basic social services. The fact that all this was accomplished on a budget of around $200,000 (in the form of a grant from re:arc institute’s Practice Lab) makes the project a prototype for a new kind of socially engaged architecture; more importantly, it is already poised to have a concrete impact in the surrounding community. 

“CULTURE OF CREATIVITY: AN EXHIBITION FROM THE PETER MARINO ART FOUNDATION” (TIFFANY & CO.’S FLAGSHIP, NEW YORK)

Luminaries from Walter Benjamin to Andy Warhol have meditated on the similarity of art museums to department stores, but this intertwining of culture and commerce has remained taboo for cultural institutions terrified of the reduction of artworks to commodity objects. This exhibition, which doubled down on the initial installation of blue-chip art throughout the renovated store when it reopened in 2023, underscores the lesson that the museum’s actual achievement was to monetize the experience of viewing art; in the current “retail apocalypse,” when most shopping transactions occur in virtual space, luxury businesses that remain invested in the survival of physical stores have adopted an art museum model.

BRITISH COLUMBIA UPDATES ITS BUILDING CODE TO ALLOW THE CONSTRUCTION OF APARTMENT BUILDINGS WITH A SINGLE EGRESS STAIR 

Few architects admit it, but their ability to solve both spatial and social problems is far more dependent on structural constraints like building codes and market pressures than their own ingenuity. The United States and Canada are among the few developed countries that still require two egress stairs in low-rise structures, and British Columbia’s decision to allow buildings under six stories to be constructed with only one (in combination with the adoption of other new fire safety measures) will make it significantly easier and cheaper to construct high-density housing, an encouraging step toward bringing North American building codes in line with those across Europe and Asia.

THE WORLD AROUND SUMMIT (SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, MAY 11)

The fifth iteration of this ambitious initiative focused on the intersection of architecture with ecological and social justice, gathering an international and interdisciplinary cohort to exchange ideas on everything from the design of affordable housing to the development of more sustainable building materials. Collectively, the conversations amounted to an emphatic—and convincing—argument that architects have significant contributions to make in addressing the most urgent issues of our time.  

JOHN SAINSBURY’S LETTER, DISCOVERED IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON 

“If you have found this note you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been placed in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing. . . . Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary columns.” So reads, in part, a letter that John Sainsbury hid inside one of the columns in the wing of the National Gallery that bears his family name, designed in a high postmodern style replete with Tuscan columns, Corinthian pilasters, and any number of other historical quotations by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and completed in 1991. The letter’s discovery this year was a delicious corrective to the rush of misguided nostalgia that had briefly marshaled opposition to the urgently necessary renovation currently in progress by Selldorf Architects. Maybe, just maybe, the history of architecture is a story of progress after all.