Stewart Brand isn’t the first public intellectual one associates with cities. In fact, he’s probably closer on the grand map of cultural phenomena to the rejection of cities, specifically the post-hippie ethos-impulse to go back to the land, albeit equipped with the highest possible technology. This owes, as anyone who’s heard Brand’s name understands, to […]
The sole skyscraper in central Paris celebrated its fiftieth anniversary recently, though “celebrate” may not be le mot juste. When the city’s official Twitter account wished the Tour Montparnasse (“Montparnasse Tower”) a happy birthday, the responses were hostile even by the standards of that platform, ranging from “Quelle horreur” to “La pire chose qui soit […]
“The science-fiction world of Buck Rogers and the twenty-first century have not left us,” write David Gebhard and Robert Winter in their Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles. “Five bronze-clad glass towers rise from their podium base, just like one of the 1940s drawings by Frank R. Paul for Amazing Stories.” The work in question is the Westin […]
나는 나 자신을 주로 도시에 대한 관심이 많은 사람으로 묘사한다. 그 것은 백 퍼센트 사실이긴 하지만 내가 관심 있는 것은 도시 뿐만 아니라 건축물과 길거리를 포함한 동네를 비롯하여 지하철과 같은 도시를 형성하는 여러 가지 시설물이다. 엄밀히 말하자면 나는 도시보다 도시를 구성하는 공간에 관심이 더 간다. 전상인 교수님의 <공간으로 세상 읽기>를 읽고 나서 나의 그러한 관심을 […]
외국에 살든 아니든 간에 외국어를 공부하는 사람들은 똑같은 도전에 직면하게 된다. 그 도전은 외국어를 구사하고 싶으면 무엇보다도 방대한 양의 그 언어에 노출되고 또한 소화해야 한다. 옛날에는 언어 습득을 위해 충분한 양의 언어를 듣는 것은 힘들 수 있었지만 소위 뉴미디어가 풍부한 오늘날에는 많이 쉬운 일이 되었다. 한국어를 배우는 나만의 독특한 방식은 매일 한국어로 된 뉴미디어의 일종인 […]
It isn’t always obvious who owns Los Angeles’ notable old buildings, but 4833 Fountain Avenue requires no research more intensive than an upward glance. There, in sixteen-foot letters, its current stewards have mounted — lest the symbolism of the eight-pointed cross at the tip of the rooftop pyramid prove too obscure — the word “SCIENTOLOGY.” […]
The world has come to know South Korea, one of the most rapidly developed countries in human history, through its exporting industries, but none of the Korean-made products that first won wide international use — ships, automobiles, electronics — presented the world with much of an image of Korea itself. In fact, Samsung, Hyundai, LG, […]
The thin spread of development over great distances; the strict separation of residential buildings from those of commerce and industry; the caps on height and density: these conditions may now look like Los Angeles’ most crippling and intractable disorders, but they once promised a cure for all that ailed the American city. The bigger Los […]
Each month I join Kurt Achin, host of Koreascape on Seoul’s English-language radio station TBS eFM, for an exploration of one of Seoul’s urban spaces. This time we visit the very first Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, a months-spanning celebration and an exploration of how cities across the world have found innovative ways to use, preserve, and improve […]
This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. I started Notebook on Cities and Culture in large part as a way of understanding one city in particular: Los Angeles, to which I’d just moved a […]