The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: a collection of carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
At the end of a year unlike any other, we are taking the opportunity to look back at the stories that our loyal AR readers most enjoyed in 2020. When we took the difficult decision to prioritise public safety and pause building studies, we recalibrated our editorial calendar to consider issues that suddenly became urgent – the interior world of our homes, the rethinking of the profession with the collection of ‘letters to a young architect’, and the threats facing architectural criticism.
As the world stood still, planes were grounded and life as we knew it stopped, we hope that the people, places and stories in our pages were able to transport you to places outside the current daunting reality, while bringing the fore vital stories in an age of great change. This week’s Reading List brings together 2020’s top 10 stories most read on our website this year.
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1. Kate Wagner: letter to a young architect, AR September 2020, Kate Wagner
‘Architects have forever thought themselves above the construction labourers that build their works, but this is no longer the case in the age of the global, multi-national firm’
2. Reputations: Hassan Fathy (1900-1989), AR February 2020, Viola Bertini
‘For many years Fathy’s projects have been described as Postmodern vernacular, and only recently has he been rediscovered as a master who proposed a different idea of modernity’
3. Public house: the city folds into the space of the home, AR June 2020, Atxu Amann and Alcocer and Flavio Martella
‘While we shouldn’t be designing homes and cities solely for periods of quarantine, this crisis has shed a light on issues that might have been ignored previously, giving them new urgency’
4. Inhabiting the earth: a new history of raw earth architecture, AR February 2020, Jean Dethier
‘While an essential civic and ethical duty to fight against the climate crisis is belatedly being adopted in new architecture, raw earth offers architects the potential for action’
5. Outrage: greenwashing risks giving dirt a filthy name, AR February 2020, Phineas Harper
‘The complexity of climate change is enabling greenwashers to sneak through destructive practices dressed as climate activism’
6. Herman Hertzberger: letter to a young architect, AR September 2020, Herman Hertzberger
‘We should consider buildings more as instruments, open to different tasks at different times’
7. Outrage: the problem with tiny homes, AR June 2020, Jack Self
‘Tiny homes are potent signs of our inability to maintain a middle-class standard of living in the face of austerity’
8. Reputations: Tadao Ando (1941-), AR April 2020, Ken Tadashi Oshima
‘Ando will open his Nakanoshima Children’s Book Forest library this year, to inspire children to appreciate the importance of books and lead them along their own path from darkness to light’
9. Typology: Nightclub, AR April 2020, Tom Wilkinson
‘There is a sort of typological melancholy to the club, since the architectural qualities of the space are usually ephemeral, and should in any case recede into the background’
10. ‘Everything you do is a political act’: Owen Hatherley’s AR Bookshelf, AR July 2020, AR Editors
‘A lot of what architects are involved in – and it has always been thus – is pretty morally dubious’
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