According to English Dept doctoral student Irene Yoon: "Architecture school floats tents in the air at occupy cal. :)" And @DarthNader: "In response to police demolition of the encampment, #Occupycal floats tents with balloons!"   And more here from @zunguzungu: “thy life is a flitting... View full entry

Forest City Ratner has released renderings of their SHoP-designed high-rise condos for Atlantic Yards. And let's face it, assuming Ratner doesn't backtrack on the design yet again, the project resembles the same ho-hum, cookie-cutter vertical sprawl of a thousand-and-one other transit-oriented... View full entry

[Updates below. Link fixed to "some" word below.] The New York Times features architect Rafael Viñoly on the 'Sunday Routine'.  Says the Times: "He divides his Sundays between the drawing board and the keyboard: he owns nine pianos, and as a child in Uruguay he trained to be a... View full entry

Facing not only the privatization of public education and the concomitant worsening of the quality of schools, it has become more than apparent that students at UC Berkeley (and many other places) in addition now must make visible the degree of violence unleashed by the administration on its... View full entry

Dear Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor (UC Berkeley), I wanted to express my concern for your troubles, sir. Your message is not getting across and your power is in jeopardy. First of all, the Associated Press characterized the brave actions taken by the police in front of the storied Sproul Hall... View full entry

[with 11/10 updates] Police mobilized in force to remove #OccupyCal tents today. A couple of small groups had managed to set up just two tents after UC Berkeley police confiscated most other ones, following a large rally. There were maybe two hundred people congregated to block off the shock... View full entry

[edited w/ updates!] Two weeks ago I posted a note about "Architecture noticing Occupy" that mentioned Reinhold Martin's participation in a panel at Columbia about Occupy Wall Street, etc. Today, Design Observer features Martin's post "Occupy: What Architecture Can Do". David Gissen also... View full entry

There is a must-read article by Fred Bernstein in the Huffington Post, mostly for some of the facts that, if proven to be verifiable, are alarming (while not all that surprising), such as: There are at least 14 million vacation homes in the United States. That means that for every... View full entry

Highly recommend reading, in its entirety, "Not Your Friend: Dissensus and the Police," by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi aka @southsouth, a response to certain olive-branch pleas to the police. But most especially, on political space, she writes: One of the most useful and succinct definitions... View full entry

Following up on Mapping POPOS in NYC yesterday, I woke up to find this next item in my inbox this morning, from the friends at DSGNAGNC, in collaboration with Do-Tank Brooklyn and not an alternative: #whOWNSpace... ...goals are: 1- TO REVEAL conflicting rules and ownerships in the increasingly... View full entry

Privately-Owned Public Open Space (POPOS), or their cousins, POPS (apparently not exactly open, yet accessible)... Spurred by Zuccotti Park, WNYC and NY World ask you "to map and report on New York City's Privately-Owned Public Spaces, aka POPS. We want to figure out how public these public... View full entry

[post was edited Tues. AM.] This just caught my eye: Some great folks are going to be discussing Occupy and public space at Avery Hall, Columbia University. Again, the link... Would love to hear more of what they discuss, if anyone can live blog or something. I am curious. But, I'm having a... View full entry

Note: I'm saving clippings and thoughts in preparation for the event (poster) on Nov. 19th at the VDL Neutra House. (More: see this post; all posts tagged--ahem--"glam"). Saturday servings: This blog post by Joel Olson, on "Whiteness and the 99%" begins to raise some of the issues that pertain... View full entry

Note: I'm saving clippings and notes in preparation for the event on Nov. 19th at the VDL Neutra House (see this post; all tagged "glam"). I'm curious to know more about what goes on at the Congress for New Urbanism Council  meetings, glimpsed at here. They recently met in Montgomery... View full entry

As people think a bit more critically about what it means to “occupy” contested spaces that blur the public and the private and the boundaries between the 99% and the 1%, and as they also think through what Occupy Wall Street might do next, I would humbly suggest they check out the... View full entry

Some of you might have noticed that Orhan is hosting a series of talks at the VDL Neutra House in Silverlake, Los Angeles. Aside from doing my part to continue gentrifying the neighborhood, at least with my overaccumulated low-culture, I'll be in conversation with Stefano De Martino on... View full entry