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Studio Gang to design new sustainability commons at Stanford

2023-06-06T16:50:00-04:00

A new project led by Studio Gang will deliver Stanford University a home for the recently-established Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, called Stanford Sustainability Commons, at a site located on the western half of the school’s Palo Alto, California campus.

New York-based practices SCAPE and atelier ten will join the firm for the design of the Commons, which aims to help consolidate a group of interrelated academic disciplines in the hopes of enabling a “thriving habitat supporting the region’s larger network of living things.”

Jeanne Gang says: “The climate crisis is the most urgent challenge facing our world today. We are going to be working with Stanford to design a home for the Doerr School of Sustainability that can support the cross-disciplinary collaboration needed for generating climate solutions in all industries. At the same time, we are excited to model ways for the built environment to address this challenge head-on.”

An aerial view of campus courtesy of Flickr ...

$800-a-month sleeping pods? One company thinks they are the solution to California’s housing crisis

2022-05-20T18:41:00-04:00

A new Silicon Valley startup is taking the charge put forth by the recent expansion of ADUs and other non-traditional forms of accommodation in the uphill battle to provide affordable housing to the millions of Californians struggling to find a way forward.

Business Insider recently took a closeup look at the San Francisco-based Brownstone Shared Housing, an eight-month-old company co-founded by former state auditors James Stallworth and Christina Lennox, that has designed a new stackable sleeping pod currently being modeled within single-family homes in Bakersfield and Palo Alto.

Similar to the sleeping capsules common to urban Japanese hotels and resorts, the four-foot-tall spaces can be scaled to hold up to 14 people and are being marketed by the company as an alternative to the high-rent, low-availability housing situation typical in the areas adjacent to Stanford University.

FreelandBuck designs geometrically reflective art installation for Palo Alto

2019-12-11T17:47:00-05:00

Bicoastal architecture firm FreelandBuck has designed Cache Me if You Can, a new installation currently on view in King Plaza, Palo Alto right in front of city hall. The installation utilizes imagery that captures the activity that took place within the plaza over the course of one day, documenting everything from fluctuating light levels to shifting shadows.

Each of the 10 triangular panels that make up the art piece contain perforated patterns mimicking the captured imagery. Concerning the design approach, FreelandBuck co-founder and principal Brennan Buck said, "This project follows several of our previous large-scale installations designed as constructed drawings. In this case, we worked with images of the site, articulating them graphically as a pattern of overlapping circles. Each pixel of the photograph produced 5 circles in a range of hues that, when averaged together, match the hue of the original pixel. From a distance, the photograph is clear, but up close, the surface o...

An influx of new tech millionaires further balloons Silicon Valley's housing crisis

2019-03-29T15:50:00-04:00

As the tech companies Uber, Airbnb, Lyft and Pinterest prepare to go public, thousands more instant millionaires are expected to flood the market in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. All the while, the middle class and working poor are scrambling for shelter.