Author Archives: Nicholas Olsberg

The unattainable shore of utopia spurs great feats of discovery

Frank Lloyd Wright’s most ambitious project was to design his more modest buildings – cheap family dwellings – so that they could be mass-produced on a vast scale, transforming the USA. It offers a vital lesson to us today

A doomed installation by Diller Scofidio + Renfro revealed the secret life behind the facades of San Francisco

Nicholas Olsberg reflects on the history of the now rehabilitated Ground Zero site through the story of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center

Drawing on the history and typology of its Hollywood milieu, Morphosis’s new media college abstracts and synthesises ideas about surface, space and social connectivity in an ambitiously scaled urban stage set

Sculptural architecture can be moving, monstrous, or just plain arbitrary: a group of exhibitions in LA explores the borderline between the two spatial disciplines

Exploring photography’s obsession with architecture as motif and metaphor, a cluster of exhibitions in Los Angeles ended by questioning the neutrality of the camera in the architectural assignment

Looking back at key buildings and moments in Siza’s career

As LA’s architecture season comes to close, Nicholas Olsberg reflects on experimental housing, lacklustre public buildings and an exciting ‘reconsideration’ of civic failures

Fantastic mirrored pachyderms coexist with an all too real landscape of strip malls and freeways in a new exhibition on Los Angeles that examines the city’s capacity to stimulate radical responses to space, structure and patterns of use