Archinect - News

The New York Times uses neural network to map every building in the U.S.

2018-10-12T13:25:00-04:00

The New York Times has made a map of every building in the United States. Using a neural network to analyze satellite imagery, the team's program then traced the shape of buildings across the country. Users can enter a city, zip code, or address, and explore these areas in detail.

It's pretty fun to play with, but the tool also helps illuminate the underlying patterns of cities and places that make them feel the way they do. Looking at these different patterns, we can detect the imprints of geology, the effects of suburbanization, the intentional designs of cities, and the traces of culture embedded within. By looking at the physical infrastructure, the maps tell us so much more about people’s connections, stories, and experiences relating to a specific environment.

Take a look here.

Beyond the Map: Spikescapes and Wild Strawberries

2018-04-10T15:30:00-04:00

Geography is getting stranger: the map is breaking up. Now we need to attend to the unnatural places, the escape zones and gap spaces, the places that are sites of surprise but also of bewilderment and unease.

Negotiating the hostile architectures of the modern city — from the anti-pedestrian cobbles of a median strip to the unloved landscape of a traffic island — geographer Alistair Bonnett reflects on the increasingly disciplinarian nature of public space, and by crossing roads and planting strawberries, experiments with modes of resistance.

As Singapore grows from the sea, its heritage continues to shrink

2018-03-12T14:38:00-04:00

Short on space, the city-state has since its independence been reclaiming land to build the nation and to rewrite 'unhygienic' episodes of its history.

In his essay for Failed Architecture, William Jamieson, a PhD candidate in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, takes a look at Singapore's monumental land reclamation efforts since 1965, the ecological, urban, and cultural implications, and the inevitable erasing of heritage.

"Singapore sees itself as chronically undersized," Jamieson writes. "It imagines itself as a larger country, and works backwards: materialising the necessary geographical puzzle pieces to suit the demands of the global economy as much as to satiate its own needs. Space is not merely flexible, but hypothetical."

Trevor Paglen is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow — #TBT to our encounter with the experimental geographer 12 years ago

2017-10-12T19:19:00-04:00

The mysterious images of the physical manifestations of military power hover between abstraction and information, between the inscrutable and the mundane. They are at once compelling as visual compositions and chilling as photographic documentation of activities that are otherwise based on speculation.

The 2017 MacArthur fellows have been revealed. Artist and geographer, Trevor Paglen, won the award for his work on surveillance infrastructures. Twelve years ago, we followed Paglen on his field work and spoke with him about experimental geography. The full feature by Bryan Finoki is available here.

Image via MacArthur Foundation

Ed Soja 1940 - 2015

2015-11-03T11:40:00-05:00

Murray Low has passed on the sad news of the death of Edward Soja. I first heard him talk on Postmodern Geographies in 1995 – this would have been work that ended up in Thirdspace – and the talk really motivated me to examine the spatial aspects of Foucault and Lefebvre.

"Los Angeles seems to break every rule of urban readability and regularity. it is no surprise, then, that Southern California has become a center for innovative and nontraditional urban theory and analysis." - Ed Soja

The Postmodern City / Bonaventure Hotel

New study suggests Aboriginal collective memory reaches back more than 7,000 years

2015-09-22T19:53:00-04:00

Aboriginal society has preserved memories of Australia’s coastline dating back more than 7,000 years [according to] Professor of Geography Patrick Nunn... [His] study looks at Aboriginal stories from 21 places around Australia’s coastline, each describing a time when sea levels were significantly lower than today... present sea levels in Australia were reached 7,000 years ago and as such any stories about the coastline stretching much further out to sea had to pre-date that time.

China is busy building islands in the South China Sea

2014-09-08T21:18:00-04:00

But I’ve seen aerial photographs of this place taken by the Philippine navy. They show the massive land reclamation work China has been doing here since January. Millions of tonnes of rock and sand have been dredged up from the sea floor and pumped into the reef to form new land.

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes travels to the South China Sea, where the Chinese state is building islands.

Buckminster Fuller Institute Announces DYMAX REDUX Finalists

2013-07-22T14:21:00-04:00

The Buckminster Fuller Institute has unveiled the eleven finalists of DYMAX REDUX, an open call to create a new and inspiring interpretation of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map from 1943.

UPDATE: Buckminster Fuller Institute Selects DYMAX REDUX Winner

There is water that far down

2012-12-02T18:23:00-05:00

"You need to get concrete out of your head and replace it with greenery," Bödeker had thundered at the head of planning at the urban planning authority. The gruff German made such an impression that to this day, Saudi authorities continue to hire and recommend him. Image by Susanne Kölbl / DER SPIEGEL

Susanne Koelbl introduces the work of Richard Bödeker, a German landscape architect who has been working in Saudi Arabia for nearly 40 years. Bödeker Partners has played a key role in introducing green spaces to Riyadh and has pushed the limits in terms of making the desert bloom. However, one does wonder how green all that green really is, in a desert?

The Carolinas Work to Clarify Their Borders

2012-04-09T17:19:00-04:00

In an ambitious project, the states of North Carolina and South Carolina are trying to set the record straight. After years of historical research and old-fashioned survey work mixed with global positioning technology, they are moving the boundary back to where it belongs.