Archinect - News

Alissa Walker imagines a "utopian" Los Angeles in 2056

2016-07-06T15:12:00-04:00

Sorry, I’m not able to send this directly through SnapFace since your iPhone 6 doesn’t support neural chat. Old-fashioned text pixels will have to do. Remember the movie “Her”? That’s what Los Angeles is like in 2056. L.A. is the densest city in the U.S., with a population that’s about a third larger than it was in 2016. Taller buildings are everywhere, including New DTLA — a corridor of super-talls that runs the length of Wilshire all the way to Santa Monica.

The speculative fiction details a "utopian" city primarily characterized by efficient, far-reaching public transport and fewer cars. There's no longer a drought, and buildings are wrapped in "solar skins" designed by Elon Musk.

For more speculative visions of a future California, check out these links from last summer's Dry Futures competition:

Book Review: Katrina Palmer's "End Matter"

2015-06-09T20:02:00-04:00

On September 2, 1666, a fire began in a bakery on Pudding Lane in London. By the next day, the flames had fanned out north and west, engulfing much of the city’s medieval center. The fire, later knowns as the Great Fire of London, destroyed much of the old cathedral of St. Paul as well as the overcrowded, narrow streets that surrounded it. In the aftermath of the fire, a period of social unrest was followed by a large-scale reconstruction, helmed by the noted architect Sir Christopher Wren. He built a new cathedral in the English Baroque style and supervised, to some extent, the city’s larger reconstruction. Today, St. Paul’s Cathedral and much of the city’s core owes its appearance in part to Wren’s preference for a particular variety of white, soft stone hewed on the Isle of Portland. The restitution of London spurred the industrial development of Portland’s quarries. For every monument that rose up, such as the looming Doric column that memorialized the fire itself, a hole was e...

Copyrighting Cartography with Fictional Places

2014-07-21T14:43:00-04:00

With all the time and energy cartographers spend preparing maps, it makes sense that they would want to protect their investment. One of the ways they do so — although they don’t always admit it — is by including “trap streets,” deliberate mistakes added to maps to catch unsuspecting copyright violators. These may include fake streets, as the name suggests, but the term is also applied to other erroneous cartographic data included to embarrass those who might steal it.

Everyone’s an architect: 11 jobs common only in romantic comedies

2014-02-10T21:05:00-05:00

Lonely male architects star in The Lake House (Keanu Reeves), The Last Kiss (Zach Braff), Three To Tango (Matthew Perry), Sleepless In Seattle (Tom Hanks), My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Luke Wilson), Love Actually (Liam Neeson), Just Like Heaven (Mark Ruffalo), and It’s Complicated (Steve Martin)—apparently, architecture is a good cipher for “sensitive, but not girly.” Few of those men ever worry about the job market...

CITY OF HUMAN, CITY OF MACHINE

2013-08-21T17:16:00-04:00

The most distinctive trait of the machine city is the lack of human beings. Other animals live within its limits. Not the rats and pigeons of human cities—the scavengers feeding on our remnants—but animals that can thrive in such particular conditions: algae on the water-cooling ponds, lichen and moss on the unadorned walls, flowering plants within the dirt that invariably builds up along the edges of the roadways and in the cracks of the buildings, and, of course, the insects that come to feed.

THE MACHINES BUILT THEIR OWN CITY, FULL OF SPACES FOR THEIR SECRET PASSIONS. AN ARCHITECTURAL FICTION.

By Adam Rothstein. Read the full story on OMNI REBOOT.