The year’s end brings the chance to survey architecture’s progression and social impact through salient entryways that include labor, activism, and the development of topical building trends. Another way of recapping things is by looking at the varied rows, discord, stories of ill-treatment... View full entry
The American Institute of Architects has released their latest quarterly report into residential design. The AIA Home Design Trends Survey (Q4) revealed a contraction in the demand for residential design inquiries and design contracts, despite billings for residential projects continuing to... View full entry
There is another cause of overcrowding and homelessness. It is mansionization, the demolition of older, smaller, less expensive houses by real estate speculators who quickly replace them with spec McMansions: boxy, shoddily built houses that max out the permitted building envelope. — City Watch LA
The disincentive to build multifamily and affordable housing is made worse by the popularity of these easily repeatable home designs, which also cost more to construct while taking up more space and using more water and electricity. Certain communities around L.A. County have developed effective... View full entry
The historic hotel, with its haunted reputation and 600 rooms, reopened in December 2021 as a privately funded permanent supportive housing project. With most of the rooms reserved specifically for those in the bottom 30% of the area’s median income, it’s open to any [...] with a government-funded voucher. Many viewed the project as a promising new model in L.A. because of its size and flexibility.
And yet, a year later, two-thirds of the Cecil remains unoccupied.
— Los Angeles Times
The rare privately-funded $80 million conversion project for the influential Skid Row Housing Trust is one of many case studies on the issue of vacant single-room occupancy (SROs) in Los Angeles. The city housing authority’s Section 8 director thinks an absence of in-unit bathrooms and... View full entry
The NEOM megadevelopment in Saudi Arabia is moving forward with an attention-grabbing feature after the American engineering firm Bechtel announced its retention as project managers for a new manmade ski resort project called Trojena. According to NEOM’s website, the resort will be spread... View full entry
Several chapters of the AIA in California, including AIA California and AIA Los Angeles, have published an open letter to the California Architects Board (CAB) in opposition to proposed changes in how licensed architects in the state must advertise their license number. California Code of... View full entry
Saad Rajan penned an editorial about The Revival of Human-Centered Architecture. In it he praises the works of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) "hidden gems…from unexpected places" which have "had a transformational impact on how we reward, understand, analyze, appreciate, and... View full entry
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has released a new study examining the impact of student debt across different demographic groups in the architecture industry. The organization used the research company Ipsos to conduct an interview survey of over 700 members who provided insights on... View full entry
The Qatari official responsible for delivery of the 2022 World Cup has said the number of migrant workers who have died on World Cup-related projects is “between 400 and 500”.
Hassan al-Thawadi, the secretary general of the Supreme Committee for delivery and legacy, made the admission in an interview but said a precise figure for the number of fatalities was still “being discussed”.
— The Guardian
Following al-Thawadi’s vague estimate of worker deaths in a live TV interview, the Qatari Supreme Committee tried to minimize the numbers by issuing a statement that the figures referred to "national statistics covering the period of 2014–2020 for all work-related fatalities (414) nationwide... View full entry
A few months after ground was broken on the $9.5 billion New Terminal One project, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has announced the financing and approval of a new $4.2 billion Terminal 6 at JFK Airport that will serve as the final piece of the airport’s multi-year transformation upon... View full entry
Niall Patrick Walsh had A Conversation With Ma Yansong. Critics raised questions over current/past pay practices. However, folks jumped in to defend MAD Architects "Can confirm he's been paying interns since at least 2009" and "I had multiple classmates work at this office for co-op semesters... View full entry
A new desktop city-building game has been launched which takes aim at the slow pace of housing construction in U.S. cities. Sim Nimby was developed by Brooklyn-based copywriters Steve Nass and Owen Weeks as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on what they view as 'NIMBYs' (Not In My Backyard neighbors)... View full entry
There is no housing shortage. There are over 400,000 empty homes in the UK, and about 200,000 homeless people. The vast majority of empty homes are in parts of the country which have become depopulated because of economic decline – in the Midlands, the north, and coastal cities. So the solution to the housing crisis isn’t building tons of homes. It’s about reviving the economy in those places, launching a massive retrofit campaign, and bringing people back.” — The Guardian
“We could end the housing crisis overnight, if we wanted to,” Barber told Oliver Wainwright in a recent interview, referring to the private grab on council housing that has developed unabated since the Thatcher administration's Right-to-Buy laws came into effect in 1980. “We should... View full entry
The UK’s Architects Registration Board (ARB) has found a British architect guilty of unacceptable professional conduct after the architect made “a series of offensive and antisemitic comments and gestures.” The architect, Justin Rooney, was also found guilty of making “a series of... View full entry
A new $1 million grant from the J. Paul Getty Trust is being advanced to the International alliance for the protection of heritage in conflict areas (ALIPH) to ensure the protection of vulnerable cultural sites across Ukraine that have come under fire since the Russian Federation’s illegal... View full entry
