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Architecture

The man who designed Gotham City

Gotham City is the perpetually dark comic book metropolis of alleys, asylums, caves, mansions, and of course, Batman. The Dark Knight of DC Comics celebrates his 75th anniversary this year but Gotham didn’t become the hometown of the Caped Crusader until 1940, when Batman co-creator Bill Finger named the city for the first time inBatman […]

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Architecture

Dr. No, Die Hard, and Deleuze: Mechanical Spaces and Movies

The following essay  on Die Hard, Kafka, Deleuze, The Towering Inferno, Inception, James Bond, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning originally appeared in Volume 37: Is This Not a Pipe?

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Architecture

Design Decoded: The Architectural History of Pepsi, Part 2: Edward Durell Stone and the Corporate Campus

A view from the approach to Pepsi’s Purchase, New York Headquarters (image: “WhisperToMe” via wikimedia commons) Sometime in the early 1970s, huge American companies like IBM, General Foods and Union Carbide fled the confines of the city for the greener pastures of the suburbs. The new corporate campuses built during this time were sprawling modernist […]

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Architecture

Design Decoded: The Architectural History of Pepsi, Part 1: The ‘Mad Men’ Years

  The Park Avenue facade of the Pepsi-Cola Corporation World Headquarters, designed by SOM (image: Ezra Stoller, via SOM] In 1963, Pepsi-Cola launched a new advertising campaign: The Pepsi Generation. Those three simple words represented a drastic rebranding for the company, which had previously marketed itself as a cheaper version of rival Coca-Cola. With the […]

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Architecture

Design Decoded: BIG Plans for a Lego Museum in Denmark

Still from an animation illustrating the concept behind BIG’s design for Lego House (image: BIG) Some architects played with Legos as a child. And some never stopped playing with them. Take, for instance, the Copenhagen and New York-based architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) –the architects currently developing a master plan for the Smithsonian Institution in […]