The Frontier Dozen—September 5, 2024

Hi everyone,

When you receive this, I’ll be in New York. It’s my first visit in a few years. What new buildings and public spaces should I make a point of seeing? Hit reply and guide me through the streets; I’ll try to report back in a future issue.

Below is the second edition of the Frontier Dozen, annotated links to twelve stories, buildings, videos, or projects that deserve your attention—with a particular focus on insightful interviews. And because a few of you pointed out that I forgot to include “buildings that caught my eye” last week, you’ll find two batches of those below. Let the browser tabs proliferate!

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Stalking the perfect bagel,
Brian

• 🏢👀 Buildings that caught my eye, part 1. Büro Hacke’s design for what “might just be Germany’s smallest apartment building.” Noto’s design for a house in Hamburg with one corner cut out to accommodate an existing tree. Vallribera Arquitectes’s “dividing walls” house, with a central courtyard, on a tight urban site. B-Architecten’s block-long mixed-use complex in Brussels, which incorporates housing and a secondary school.
• 🇨🇦🏦 Government land is the hot new real estate. My pal Diana Lind reports on the Canadian government’s plan to turn federal properties into housing, suggesting it may be the first national-scale public land bank.
• 🎙️📐 Interview with Michael Maltzan. I’ve spent dozens of hours in spaces for art designed by Maltzan, and have admired from afar his firm’s housing projects, such as the New Carver Apartments and the new 26 Point 2 Apartments. In this short interview, the architect talks about architecture as a discipline and a profession; why he builds physical models; and why he forbids his teams to look at precedents less than twelve years old.
• 🕸️🛰️ Ecologies of entanglement. Willa Koërner and Meg Miller introduce their new interview series “exploring natural ecologies, networked technologies, and those of us caught in the web of both.” My favorite thus far is with Agnes Cameron, who “makes a case for the liberatory potential” of satellite imagery.

• 🔙🇬🇧 Two London followups. ➀ In January, I wrote about cyberattacks on libraries in Toronto and London; the British Library recently unveiled mind-boggling details about the attack and its attempts to recover. ➁ In July, I wrote about the Olympic legacy in host cities; in Bloomberg, Helen Chandler-Wells looks at the legacy of the 2012 London Games: “Once a forgotten brownfield site, the former Olympic Park is now home to 12,000 people and by next year will be the place of work of 40,000.”
• 🌆🇬🇧 OK, one more from across the Atlantic. Friend of FM Stefan Novakovic asks, “Is the future of Toronto designed in London?” A new class of British designers are leading projects here that “accomplish the more modest yet meaningful goal of introducing welcome departures from urban design norms. These are new recipes for tomorrow’s fabric buildings.”
• 🌊🛢️ Imani Jacqueline Brown’s Gulf. The New Orleans–born artist on her just-closed exhibition in New York City: “Watching disaster capitalism swoop in, in the aftermath of the storm, I realized that I needed to go back to New Orleans.” For more on Gulf landscapes, revisit my recent interview with photographer Virginia Hanusik.
• 🗺️🤳🏻 Interview with Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti about The Senseable City. The digital map is “actually a series of infrastructures, including satellites, computers, tablets, databases,” and “has become a support that enables a lot of things that we do.” (Via Sentiers)

• 🏢👀 Buildings that caught my eye, part 2. Office AIO’s moody Tanway restaurant, in Changsha, China. Canadian icon Arthur Erickson’s newly renovated Museum of Anthropology at UBC (originally 1971) in Vancouver. Park Associati’s brand and architecture work for Coop Lombardi, a “supermarket as a place of sale as well as a space for social gathering.” Keiji Design’s quietly luxurious Trunk Hotel Yoyogi Park, in Tokyo.
• 🏙️📈 Can we build better cities? Michael Webb reviews two-time Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s new book: “Equality of access to streets, greenery, and water is a recurring theme in Peñalosa’s thinking.”
• 🏥🚧 Is there a language of demolition? Nolan Boomer on an experimental text-and-image poetry collection that memorializes Chicago’s brutalist—and now demolished—Prentice Women’s Hospital. Its architect is “an object of affection and a projection for the incomplete utopias, unfinished projects, and failures we keep alive.”
• 🥐🧁 Design strategies for bakeries. In addition to countless museums and galleries, while in New York I’ll be visiting as many bakeries as my blood sugar levels allow. (I’m definitely trying Win Son, Postcard, and Bourke Street. Got any other recs?) Here’s a worldwide roundup of contemporary pastry shops.