Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados [...]
The interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports, qualities that led the French anthropologist Marc Augé to define them in 1992 as "non-places," has leaked into the rest of life. [...]
This confluence of style is being accelerated by companies that foster a sense of placelessness … Airbnb is a prominent example.
— theverge.com
Nicholas Korody previously explored this phenomenon, of supposedly idiosyncratic Airbnb styling converging on the generic.Related on Archinect:Airbnb turns to urban planning as it looks towards the future of home-sharingAfter allegations of racial discrimination and #AirbnbWhileBlack fallout... View full entry
Dora Epstein Jones is the newly minted executive director of the A+D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles. With a doctorate in Architectural History, Theory and Criticism from UCLA, Epstein Jones came to A+D after nearly 15 years at SCI-Arc, where she led the coordination of humanities... View full entry
“The best way to describe what we’re trying to create is a ‘biomechanical cow’s stomach’,” said Rachel Armstrong, coordinator of the Living Architecture (LIAR) research project. LIAR's aim is to develop a building block material that uses living microorganisms to clean wastewater... View full entry
Casinos like the Taj Mahal have destroyed Atlantic City’s public space. Gambling’s arrival replaced the outward-looking hotels, shops, and promenades of the mid-century boardwalk with clusters of dark, labyrinthine resorts, set back from the street and enclosed behind monitored security gates. [...]
Atlantic City’s model of a plush, self-contained casino abutting a ruined neighborhood has become a synecdoche for the last forty years of American urban development.
— jacobinmag.com
To dissect the urban effects of Trump's Atlantic City casino, Sam Wetherall traces the city's history as a booming resort town through the early 20th century, and into its current economic crisis:In 2014 alone, casino closures cost Atlantic City more than ten thousand jobs, a staggering figure for... View full entry
Today the highway serves as the main artery connecting the “Last Frontier” with Canada and the northwestern U.S., bringing tourists to Alaska cruise ships; food, supplies and medicine to remote towns; and equipment to oil fields and mines that are the region’s lifeblood...
“Communities are unable to reach each other, it’s harder to get goods there,” [...] Thawing permafrost isn’t “just an inconvenience, folks; it’s a change in the way of life.”
— Bloomberg
More on Archinect:Global warming is redrawing national bordersRussia considering plans for a 12,400-mile superhighway linking London and AlaskaObama changes the name of tallest mountain from Mt McKinley to DenaliWhy American infrastructure funding keeps facing such an uphill battle View full entry
Each of the 16 bus stops that competed this year — and the agencies who oversee them — deserved a thorough shaming. No transit rider should ever have to wait in the rain for a bus with no posted schedule, or walk in a ditch along an eight-lane highway after disembarking. These conditions are deplorable but all too common in American cities.
The two bus stops facing off today — in Kansas City and Silver Spring [...]— had some extra dreadful quality that sets them apart in the eyes of our voters.
— usa.streetsblog.org
Related stories in the Archinect news:Google Street View captures beautiful public space transformationsColumbus, Ohio wins DOT's $50M Smart City ChallengeHomey pop-up bus shelter hopes to increase safety for Minneapolis commuters View full entry
It's finally arrived: the opening ceremony for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro is tonight. Technically, the Games are already underway (soccer competitions began on August 3), but the bulk of events will take place after the ceremony. And chances are for those in the U.S., you're... View full entry
The last few weeks have been a bit of a downer—we had a big ol' roundtable on how Brexit is changing architecture practice and education, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions raged, and Rio is coping (somewhat) with its Olympic stress. Now, we're in need of some lighter fare. We... View full entry
"Spark a blackout, fix a pipe, or clog the toilets. Test your building’s engineering when dinosaurs invade, lightning strikes, or the earth quakes. Find out what keeps skyscrapers standing tall and people happy in them all." So says the description of the newly launched Skyscrapers by Tinybop, a... View full entry
“They spend $25,000 per employee per year on perks like free beer and pool tables and massages ... That’s great, but can they spend $1,000 to help the rest of San Francisco survive?”
As it turned out, they could not. Representatives of tech organizations reacted fiercely against the tax, saying that it would suppress growth in the industry that has made the city – parts of it, at least – wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.
— The Guardian
Widening the gap between San Francisco's wealthy and poor, the budget committee of the city's board of supervisors rejected on Monday the tech tax, which “would have imposed a 1.5% payroll levy on technology companies that generate more than $1m in revenues a year, including Uber, Google... View full entry
The French artist who goes by JR, known for flyposting large-scale photographs in cities around the world, has set up shop in Rio, just in time for the Olympic opening ceremony this Friday. As part of his ongoing worldwide Inside Out project, and under the invitation of the IOC, he's installed... View full entry
Our culture of fear has changed the role of architecture in the United States. In just 2016 alone, the country has seen 221 mass shootings, and we struggle to keep up with the stream of international terrorism attacks by groups like ISIS and Boko Haram. If you listen to the news for too long, every building we enter seems compromised, from malls and movie theaters to schools. — Vice
So while legislators falter over gun control laws, architects and building designers are working to rethink the concept of a safe space.For more architectural responses to public health issues, check out these links:Do cities make you go crazy? On the link between urban living and psychosisWhat... View full entry
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has announced criminal charges against six more people—including the state's former water quality chief—in connection with lead-contaminated water in the city of Flint. [...]
All six people are current or former state employees in the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services or the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. [...]
"these individuals concealed the truth. They were criminally wrong to do so, and the victims are real people."
— npr.org
Get situated with Flint's water crisis here:Dispatch from Flint: How architects can help, on Archinect Sessions #54Should the children of Flint be resettled?The crisis in Flint and why architects should care about decentralizing our water systems View full entry
Prime Minister Theresa May recently announced that the newly-formed government will delay making any decisions about building a major nuclear power plant—the first in a generation—until the fall.Economists reacted with alarm to the announcement, according to Bloomberg, since the deferral... View full entry
Just in time for Friday's Rio Olympics, it's time to take a look back at former Olympic villages: specifically, what good are they post-games? In London, the 560 acres of the East End that was transformed into the grounds for the 2012 Olympics have undergone the Olly Wainwright examination in his... View full entry
