modernism

The patterns of place

Mathieu Helie — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:00:51 +0000

(This article originally appeared in Get Ahead Magazine, for the Get Ahead Festival of independent short films in Brooklyn.)

Leon Krier's lesson in architecture

Mathieu Helie — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:36:02 +0000

Review of The Architecture of Commun

The Journey to Emergence

Mathieu Helie — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:00:00 +0000

This is part I of a series of excerpts of an article to be published in the International Journal of Architectural Research entitled The Principles of Emergent Urbanism. Additional parts will be posted on this blog with the editor's permission until the complete article appears exclusively in the journal's upcoming issue.

The Urban Country: Holland

Mathieu Helie — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:17:19 +0000

Rem Koolhaas once described the urban as pervasive. It took a tour of Holland for me to grasp quite what he meant. While Paris is mocked as a museum-city due to its protected urban tissue, in Holland it is the farmland that is protected, the rural tissue that cannot be modernized. This makes the experience of moving in the country, which is about the same size as the Dallas-Fort-Worth metropolis and has more people, utterly surreal.

Complex geometry and structured chaos part II

Mathieu Helie — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:29:52 +0000

Complexity, to employ the definition proposed by Jane Jacobs in the final chapter of Death and Life of Great American Cities, is a juxtaposition of problems. This implies that a complex solution is a juxtaposition of solutions: fractal geometry.

How does the way we build arrive at complex solutions to complex problems without driving the builders to madness? How can we solve problems which exist at every scale in space, but also exist at every scale in time? Let's take a look at St. Paul's Cathedral in the City of London.

Emerging the city

Mathieu Helie — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 04:23:58 +0000

In the 20th century, the modern movement in architecture drew up grand plans to remake cities for the machine age. Le Corbusier, the leader of the movement, conceived his Radiant City plan. He designed every part of it himself so that it would work as he had willed it to. His machine provided the solution to four problems: inhabitation, work, recreation, circulation. Everything else was removed.

The idea of a machine city expressed three assumptions that led to the catastrophic results of modernism.