Articles by Romullo Baratto

Is there an aspect, a recurring mark, that reveals a difference in the way that male and female architecture photographers see the world? This is, perhaps, one of those rhetorical questions often used as an argument to shed light on works produced by women and for which there is no precise answer.

Stanford University experts digitally assembled what is considered the largest world map produced in the 16th-century. The representation of the world of 1587 by the Milanese cartographer Urbano Monte was divided into 60 pages and published in atlas form, but with clear instructions on how to reassemble it. 

There are different methods for estimating how green a city is. We can count the parks, add up all green areas, quantify only the forested areas, specify the number of trees planted, and more recently, according to this new, we can now analyze inhabitants perspective. A team of researchers led by Newsha Ghaeli, at MIT‘s Senseable City Lab has developed a method to find out how green an urban space is from the perspective of pedestrians.

The SDG Academy online education platform recently launched a series of free online courses on topics ranging from sustainable development and urbanization to climate change and the use of natural resources. According to the description on its website, SDG Academy “creates and curates free, top-level courses on sustainable development for students around the world.”

In many parts of the world, such as Brazil, more women have architectural degrees than men. However, this fact hasn’t translated past college into the working world as women continue to be underrepresented.

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho, or simply Oscar Niemeyer, (December 15, 1907 – December 5, 2012) was one of the greatest architects in Brazil‘s history, and one of the greats of the global modernist movement. After his death in 2012, Niemeyer left the world more than five hundred works scattered throughout the Americas, Africa and Europe.

Lina Bo Bardi (December 4, 1914 – March 20, 1992) was one of the most important and expressive architects of 20th century Brazilian architecture. Born in Italy as Lina Achillina Bo, she studied architecture at the University of Rome, moving to Milan after graduation. In Milan, Bo Bardi collaborated with Gio Ponti, and later become editor of the magazine Quiaderni di Domus. With her office destroyed in World War II Bo Bardi, along with Bruno Zevi, founded the publication A Cultura della Vita. As a member of the Italian Communist Party, she met the critic and art historian Pietro Maria Bardi, with whom she would move permanently to Brazil.

This week, the Portuguese center for architecture Casa da Arquitectura (House of Architecture) celebrates the opening of its new premises in Matosinhos, Porto. In order to mark the occasion, the architecture museum has planned three days full of activities from the 17th to the 19th of November, with guided tours, performance, talks, music and films.

The Cooper Hewitt Museum, also known as the Smithsonian Design Museum, has completed a digitization of its expansive collection dedicated to the field of design that spans thirty centuries and more than 220,000 objects. Now, the collection has been made available on its online page.

Mid-century modern visionaries, Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi are exhibited together at the Palm Springs Art Museum for an unprecedented show of models, drawings, design objects, and photographs, opened this fall and will remain on exhibit through January 7, 2018.