When the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris asked Ari Marcopoulos to curate an exhibition around their acquisition ‘Brown Bag’, a short film on skateboarders in New York that he made in 1993, he was given access to the museum’s collection of over 15,000 works. He looked for themes related to the body, injuries, and architecture, along with what he perceived as challenging and puzzling works. Some of the artists were already familiar, while others were new to him. The process was not so dif...

The Architecture Observer offers an overview of different forms of modern architecture in Central America since the outset of the 20th century. Although modern architectures constituted only a small percentage of the total building production in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, they hold in these countries an evident symbolic significance. Such buildings functioned as models for the desired societal, economic, and cultural changes, or as aspirational placeh...

In the 1960s the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs, and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara. This secret, still-classified programme occurred during and after the Algerian War (1954–1962). Meticulously culled together from numerous sources by architectural historian Samia Henni, this publication’s wealth of materials documenting the violent history of France’s activities in the Algerian desert offers...