Archinect - News

Twist! Proposal to turn Catskills into "China City"

2013-12-13T15:09:00-05:00

[The Catskills] could become a lot flashier, thanks to [Sherry Li's] proposal for the area: a multibillion-dollar "China City of America," complete with an amusement park, mansions, a casino, retail centers, a college, and more. [...] The Center for Immigration Studies wrote a comprehensive take-down of "China City," criticizing the project's potential for environmental disruption, dubious promise of job creation, and possible role as a stalking horse for the Chinese government.

Back to Never Land: Chicago exhibition honors remarkable never-builts

2013-08-22T16:48:00-04:00

The exhibition re-envisions a series of urban environments that are typical for Chicago in order to examine alternatives to the way architecture engages the city. It is a collaborative effort by five teams – David Brown, Alexander Eisenschmidt, Studio Gang, Stanley Tigerman, and UrbanLab – determined to find potentials for spatial, material, programmatic, and organizational invention within the city.

Same as it never was? What inspires a city to look back on abandoned plans? Along with the success of A+D Museum's "Never Built: Los Angeles", and anticipating the Bay Area's "Unbuilt San Francisco", The Atlantic Cities took a look at "City Works: Provocations for Chicago's Urban Future" at Expo 72 in Chicago. Originally presented at the 2012 Venice Biennale by University of Illinois at Chicago professor Alexander Eisenschmidt, the collection of alternate striking visions for the city will be on display through September 29.

The exhibition includes a panorama of the Chicago skyline, where viewers can use the Phantom City app to pinpoint 100+ of these remarkable, unrealized structures, including works by Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright and Stanley Tigerman.

UCLA's Patricia Greenfield Tracks Urban Psychology With Words

2013-08-13T18:21:00-04:00

As a society slowly urbanizes over time, its psychology and culture change, too... If American culture and psychology grew more individualistic as the country urbanized, wouldn't that transformation be clear in the words from American books (and the concepts that lie behind them)?

Urban and rural environments impact personal psychology differently, according to research published by UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield in Psychological Science. While observational evidence may draw a clear line between current city- and country-mindsets, Greenfield's source material draws on data from over 200 years of publishing in the United States. Using Google Books Ngram Viewer, Greenfield tracked English words that refer to certain trends or larger ideas, such as "obliged" vs. "choose", to see if urbanization accompanies a more individualistic mentality. It's given that a word's frequency of use will change over time, but seeing how that frequency correlates with urbanization is an exciting metric for the collective urban unconscious.