Archinect - News

Urban planners take action to defund the police by calling for the American Planning Association to respond

2020-09-23T14:16:00-04:00

2020 has brought an increase in activism as the public reached its final tipping point from the racial and social injustices happening across the nation. With the inexcusable deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and others caused by police brutality, individuals across industries have taken note and voiced their concerns. With forms of allyship sweeping the nation, architects, academics, and urban planners have expressed their opinions and action plans. Although dismantling racial inequalities and systemic racism within the profession will not happen overnight, groups put their experience and training into action to respond to these injustices.

In early August, Brentin Mock of CityLab in Pittsburgh reported on the responses of "several hundred" urban planners as they call for the American Planning Association to support defunding the police. Housing/food planner Sara Draper-Zievet, who is one of the eight co-authors of the letter, spoke with Mock on their steps ...

Olafur Eliasson links his breakdancing years to spatial thinking in art and architecture

2018-09-17T15:34:00-04:00

“As a teenager I became very interested in street-dance culture and was active on the Scandinavian breakdance scene,” the artist Olafur Eliasson tells his friend and collaborator Anna Engberg-Pedersen in our new book, Olafur Eliasson Experience. This admission is a slight understatement. In 1984, the nascent artist’s three-man troupe, Harlem Gun Crew, actually won the Scandinavian breakdancing championships.

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson discusses his teenage breakdancing years in relation to how he thinks of architecture and space. Eliasson links the body awareness of moving through an urban landscape in dance to his development in spatial thinking as an artistic practice in design and architecture.

It sees you when you're sleeping, it knows when you're awake: WiFi can "see" you through walls

2015-12-10T13:18:00-05:00

Wi-Fi goes through walls, but it isn’t so great at getting through human bodies. Based in this piece of knowledge, a team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has built a detector that can see people through walls using Wi-Fi signals. It can recognize individuals and can even track the movement of their limbs with spooky accuracy.

If you've been trying to duck the information age by keeping a low online profile, not getting a smartphone, or even living off the grid, you are now officially out of luck: your body itself is a source of information thanks to its relative impenetrability by WiFi signals. Although it's a blow for any privacy advocates out there, the technology may have upsides, especially in the energy-savings arena: homes could automatically shut-off unneeded systems if no one was detected. Also, it could open up an entirely new (slightly creepy) area for architects: understanding how people interact with a space when they think no one is there.