The massive brushfires in Australia have damaged a large portion of the country's landscape. As of today, according to BBC News, "more than 100 fires are still burning in the states of New South Wales and Victoria." Many have lost their homes and family members in addition to the amount of... View full entry
Are you a motivated architect or designer who is currently on the hunt for a new job? Are you striving to work at a practice who shares a passion for creating innovative, high-quality projects? Whether you're entry-level or a well-seasoned practitioner, how about kicking off your search with the... View full entry
Suzanne Morse Moomaw, associate professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia's School of Architecture, is the new director of the University of Virginia Press. UVA Today reports that Moomaw has served on the press's board of directors since 2015 and will be on... View full entry
A new lawsuit aims to halt the construction of a homeless shelter in Griffith Park, arguing that Los Angeles officials skirted city and state rules when they approved the project on a Riverside Drive parking lot...
In the lawsuit, the group [Friends of Waverly Inc.] asserts that Los Angeles officials abused their discretion when they granted the planned shelter an emergency exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act.
— Los Angeles Times
According to the Los Angeles Times the lawsuit "argues that the city skipped necessary hearings for the project, flouting the city charter and ignoring the rights of nearby property owners." The $6.6-million project is due to include a 10,800-square-foot building with around... View full entry
City-focused reporting has suffered another setback this week as news that the Guardian Cities initiative at The Guardian will be shuttering has been made public. In a farewell letter published in The Guardian, Guardian Cities editor Chris Michaels writes, "Since its... View full entry
New York City-based firm ODA-Architecture just revealed its competition-winning design for the MAZD master plan in Russia. Covering an area of 9.3 ha, the mixed-use scheme seeks to redevelop industrial zones on the outskirts of Moscow City, part of a grander conversion of... View full entry
This post is brought to you by Southern California Institute of Architecture Deeply embedded in the entertainment industry of Los Angeles, SCI-Arc’s postgraduate Master of Science program in Fiction and Entertainment has emerged as the place to tell new kinds of stories about the alternative... View full entry
To kick off the inaugural Master Lecture Series put on by the Florida State University College of Fine Arts in collaboration with Florida A&M University School of Architecture and Engineering and the Tallahassee chapter of the AIA, Chris Downey will be speaking. Downey is a San... View full entry
The history of housing discrimination in this country is in significant part a history of deliberate government policy, not market forces or individual choice. Ghettos such as those in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore, in fact, reflect federal policies of the mid-20th century that made segregation a condition for federal support of various kinds. That was social engineering of the most shameful sort. — Washington Post
The Washington Post editorial board sounds off on a recent plan advanced by United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson that seeks to further weaken Obama-era "affirmatively furthering fair housing" regulations. According to the editorial, the wording... View full entry
Snøhetta's design for the public garden and revitalization of the Phillip Johnson and John Burgee-designed 550 Madison Avenue building received unanimous approval from the New York City Planning Commission last month. The design transforms the building's public space into an expansive vegetated... View full entry
Manhattan is glutted with even more luxury condos than most apartment-shoppers realize. [...]
The secret supply is a heavy weight on a market in which sales, especially of higher-end properties, have slowed to a crawl. It would take take 74 months -- more than 6 years -- to clear all of Manhattan’s unsold units at the pace of contracts in 2019, the report shows.
— Bloomberg
Bloomberg on how a vast "shadow inventory" of nearly 6,000 recently completed units puts added stress on Manhattan's slowing real estate market, especially in the higher-end segment. Related: Condo-boom hangover: More than a quarter of NYC's new units remain unsold View full entry
With the new year (and new semester) just getting under way, now is as good a time as any to take in a good architecture exhibition.We have collected a few of the most interesting exhibitions currently (or soon-to-be) on view at four university campuses across the country, highlighting curatorial... View full entry
Writing in The New York Times, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman sounds off against recently revealed intentions by Related Companies, the developer of Hudson Yards, that could wall off a semi-public park slated for the western end of the mega-project's second phase site. The... View full entry
The Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery, which sits in northeast Houston behind roads peppered with concrete plants and trucking depots, is just one of thousands of eroding African-American cemeteries across the state, in danger of being erased as descendants of those buried have died out, moved out or been pushed out. Many of the cemeteries are long gone. For years, mainstream historians didn’t pay attention to them; now genealogists, historians and families are rushing to save them. — Houston Chronicle
The Houston Chronicle takes a look at the growing movement to rediscover and preserve the forgotten African American burial grounds of Texas by highlighting the story of the Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery. The push to save and memorialize African American cemeteries is part of a larger... View full entry
Throughout the 20th century, architecture in Antarctica was a pragmatic and largely makeshift affair, focused on keeping the elements out and the occupants alive. [...]
Construction in Antarctica, long the purview of engineers, is now attracting designer architects looking to bring aesthetics — as well as operational efficiency, durability and energy improvements — to the coldest neighborhood on Earth.
— The New York Times
The NYT looks at the increasingly maturing architectural designs of Antarctic research stations, from early, highly pragmatic shelters to Britain’s now iconic Halley VI, designed by Hugh Broughton Architects, all the way to the brand new (and very nice looking) Brazilian Comandante Ferraz... View full entry
