The Hill has penned an obituary for the National Endowment of the Arts, following its defunding at the hands of the Trump administration and the current Republican-controlled government. As the obit notes, the NEA has been threatened many times before, notably in the 80’s and 90’s following a... View full entry
With layered narration from writers and the input of a climate scientist, the 40-foot long table installation known as "Indoor City" designed by Founder Rome Prize Fellows Phu Hoang and Rachely Rotem (MODU) with Jonathan Berger, Hussein Fancy, Christoph Meinrenken, Jack Livings and Matthew... View full entry
Rooting himself less in a strictly academic tradition and more in an observed, on-the-street context, architecture author and researcher Christopher Gray catalogued what he considered to be beautiful and surprising for The New York Times from 1987 to 2014 in his "Streetscapes" column. He also... View full entry
Announcing the decisions, Khan said he had fully considered all the evidence available and was “confident” both high-density developments would deliver hundreds of genuinely affordable homes for Londoners.
“Building the homes Londoners urgently need will mean town centres and suburbs becoming denser, so we expect developers to continue to come up with high-quality designs which don’t have a negative impact on their surroundings.”
— Building Design
Overruling councillors in two north London Boroughs, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has approved an Allies and Morrisson scheme in Tottenham Hale and another in Harrow by Moss Architecture; both will be high-density housing developments which together will deliver 691 new homes for Londoners within... View full entry
Raised as a monument to Dubai’s aspirations as a center of international commerce, the Frame is now a physical manifestation of the crude system that erected it. — The New York Times
Considering the already controversial nature of the Dubai Frame, The New York Times recently published a piece on the project in relation to the city's “entrenched system [that notoriously] leaves outsiders vulnerable to mistreatment — from professionals sketching blueprints to construction... View full entry
Trump’s design aesthetic is fascinatingly out of line with America’s past and present. If you doubt it, note that the interiors of the apartments his company actually sells bear no resemblance to the one he lives in. But that doesn’t mean his taste comes from nowhere. At one level, it’s aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of. But it also has important parallels... — Politico
The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style. View full entry
Nicholas Korody profiled an on-going project 'Coded Plumbing', by QSPACE, a "queer architecture research organization" which "juxtaposes the language of these bills with the language of building codes, plumbing codes and best-practice standards, finding that design regulations parallel the... View full entry
The American Society of Civil Engineers releases a report every four years that details the conditions and performance of American infrastructure. The group gives a letter grade—like with a school report card—and this year, America got a failing D+.Some of the dismal findings include:Only 51%... View full entry
What's the value of history? It's a question that keeps coming up around the world as new projects displace older architecture. In Vietnam, many of Ho Chi Minh City's distinctive (and, in many cases, French-colonial-era) structures are being dispatched to memory in favor of newer developments... View full entry
What if the border wall proposed by Trump didn’t have to be built in concrete, but rather out of that ubiquitous staple of BArch theses and “pop-up” urbanism, shipping containers? That’s the twee take of DOMO Design Studio, who propose a “softer, gentler” version of the wall, wherein... View full entry
Starting Wednesday, March 8, the Pinkcomma Gallery in Boston will be showing a collection of drawings, models, and videos documenting a collection of algorithmically-generated suburban homes by John Szot.conceptual statement:Industrialization has had a profound effect on the American suburb. Only... View full entry
Birds fly in and out of the eight-storey "Green Office Building" in Shenzhen, China, because a third of its walls are completely open to the air. It's a clever natural design that enables the building to stay cool without air conditioners.
Across town, in a vast campus known as the "Low Carbon Park", mist is sprayed into the air to cool the streets down and remove dust.
— The BBC
Experiments like these are appearing across China's cities, as part of a devolution of power designed to clean up smoggy air and meet energy targets to tackle climate change. View full entry
Although it's unclear when the furnishing/window and door fitting process takes place, one thing is certain: you can now have the basic components of an entire 400 square foot house printed in about a day from the company Apis Cor. Aside from being speedy, the $10,000 printing process is... View full entry
A new report by the online property marketplace LendInvest reveals that four out of five of Britain’s housebuilders have gone out of business in the last 30 months. This is largely due to the dominance of the eight largest builders—responsible for constructing more than 50% of the country’s... View full entry
Syrian government troops have retaken Palmyra from Islamic State forces, with help from Russian air support, the Syrian army said in a statement on Thursday. Politicians in Russian welcomed the news as a triumph, as widely reported by the state’s media, but few details have emerged about the condition of the ancient site, where Isil has previously wreaked large-scale destruction. [...]
Isil first took Palmyra in May 2015 and the extremist group destroyed a number of important monuments [...].
— theartnewspaper.com
The Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities & Museums published an initial set of photos of the extent of destruction after ISIS troops had been driven out of Palmyra's archaeological sites on March 2, 2017.↑ Roman Theater↑ Tetrapylon↑ Triumphal Arch (previously on... View full entry
