Failed Architecture

Mecca is the holiest city in the Islamic religion and the birthplace of the prophet Mohamed. Located just off Saudi Arabia’s western coast, all Muslims are required to visit at least once in their life if they are physically able to. With air travel becoming easier, the number of pilgrims has been rising rapidly over the last few decades, with a record number of 3 million people visiting Mecca sim...

Contemporary urban discourse relies overwhelmingly on visual representation. While it may be more effective both in conveying the actual appearance of a particular urban space and in communicating the intentions of the architect and the planner, this kind of representation leaves little room for individual interpretation and cannot possibly capture the full range of feelings and emotions that peop...

Albert Speer is one of the most infamous architects in history. During his time working for the Nazi Party he was responsible for designing the Reich Chancellery and the Zeppelinfeld Stadium in which the Nuremberg rallies took place, as well as being in charge of Germany’s war production during the Second World War and having responsibility for the plan to reconstruct Berlin as Germania. Yet by em...

Italy’s landscape is dotted with unfinished structures. For a myriad of reasons, the construction of these buildings and pieces of infrastructure stopped half-way, leaving the often concrete and often striking remains of hitherto incomplete plans. The ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ (Unfinished Sicilian) project has been mapping and researching these many structures, on Sicily as well as in the rest of the...

The area around Calais, a town in northern France, has for many years been a major transit point for refugees on their way to the United Kingdom. During the recent peak in the number of refugees, the French and British authorities increasingly fortified this border landscape, forcing those on the move to build increasingly permanent shelters for themselves. As this self-built city, also sometimes...

In this episode, we use the work of London-based rapper Gaika to explore the subject of London, talking to both Gaika and Ash Sarkar, a senior editor at Novara Media who has previously collaborated with Gaika, about the city’s near future and its recent past. Gaika’s work covers a lot of themes, but his ‘Security’ and ‘Spectacular Empire’ projects are among the most incisive articulations of the m...

Alexandra Lange has been writing about architecture and design for over two decades. Her articles span a wide range of subjects, from building reviews and calls for preservation to furniture, fashion, and women in architecture. After writing for such media outlets as Metropolis, Dezeen, The New York Times, Places Journal, Architect Magazine and The New Yorker, she published the book Writing About...

Stereotypes regarding Modernist architecture, and in particular the negative discourse on Amsterdam’s Bijlmer estate, have been quite crucial in shaping Failed Architecture’s way of thinking in its early years. Can we really blame the architecture for what went wrong? How can an entire neighbourhood, where thousands of people continue to live their lives on a daily basis, be simply dismissed as a...

Video games have changed the way we interact with space. From their very inception, these increasingly complex virtual worlds have been forcing new perspectives and new ways of interacting with the world beyond. Once they were able to represent cities, their role in shaping our everyday urban experience became even more acute, thrusting players into environments that they would otherwise have neve...

Instagram photos, public transport information, streamed music and Netflix movies seem to appear out of thin air on your phone, don’t they? Well, getting them onto that screen isn’t as light and easy as it feels. There is, in fact, an immense and decidedly heavy infrastructure powering the cloud. More and more architecture is being designed and built to house server space and internet connection h...