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I disagreed with Koolhaas. Of course, it wasn't me who had the discussion with Rem Koolhaas in Philadelphia in front of a few thousand architects. That honor belonged to the Dean of the Harvard School of Design, Mohsen Mastafavi. Koolhaas at the AIA Convention I only watched.  First, when I stood right at the front door of the convention center pondering the falling rain and the fact that I had left my umbrella in my room. Koolhaas walked up with the Harvard Dean in tow, the one tall, slender and bold, the other short, chubby and with a waving mane. It was two hours before the keynote and the two were headed towards the convention hall to scout out the location. They opened the door, unencumbered, without much notice and I didn't say a thing. Later, when the "keynote" turned into this armchair conversation between two old white men that conference organizers wrongly consider a preferable variant to the traditional speech, presumably because it is casual.   Old   is re

For all the talk about   smart cities   a lot of dumb stuff happens in cities. Chicago can't get a grip on police violence, Flint poisons its citizens with municipal water, Washington DC's Metro subway is befallen by a series of mishaps and Baltimore can't count its primary votes so that the State has to de-certify the election results. The voting debacle is interesting because even though Maryland went from a smarter technology (touch screens) back to paper, the problems all seem to arise at the one point where technology is still deployed, the scanners that paper ballots are fed into once filled out,and which either misfired, or were mis-fed with provisional ballots that shouldn't have been scanned. In some instances the little data sticks were lost or misplaced. Technology problems are not a first for Baltimore.  Baltimore's data collections about red light running and inner urban speeds were so poor that parked cars were shown speeding or running red lights and

Last week I reviewed student projects at the local architecture department. One half of the projects dealt with a dis-invested African American community in Baltimore with most of the design task involving housing. The other half of the projects were part of a design competition in an African American community in Los Angeles. The second program was a museum and a community center. The students with the civic project designed interesting structures and created existing places in the community. The ones with the residences, not so much. Essentially, they recycled rowhouses and apartment buildings of a kind that would have looked outdated and unimaginative in the seventies and eighties of the last century. Brick walls with small punched out windows, double loaded corridors, surface parking, more attention to traffic than to floor plans and elevations.   Gehry New York What happened here? A colleague who was with me on the jury observed afterwards, "designing residential architecture

The invention of the arch, the use of steel, reinforced concrete, glass, and the elevator are well understood as innovations that changed architecture in often dramatic ways. Only few people, though, would count caulk among the disruptive inventions and game changers in architecture. But that may be an oversight. For understanding what really enables the type of  urban architecture we take for granted today, the role of joint fillers (commonly known as caulk) can't be underestimated. In fact, the story of caulk isn't interesting for the nerdy details of such mundane materials as caulk themselves but for the implications they have on style, architecture and even structural design.  Here is the story: The view of the 9/11 site in lower Manhattan in 2006 seen through a full glass wall (Photo: K. Philipsen) In the  small bit  of literature there is about caulk it is usually noted that joint fillers have been around forever , for example,  as mud and pitch. Examples  of early uses i