With the growing trend towards hostile architecture now openly admitting its political incentives, are we in an age of transparent hostility? [...]
Whereas other instances of hostile architecture are marked by their deliberate obscurity, the Camden Bench was developed, constructed and deployed in plain sight, making it an all too visible reminder of persistent negligence, raising the question: will hostile architecture become an accepted feature of the built environment?
— failedarchitecture.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Amid London's austerity measures, "defensive design" becomes even more hostileLAPD directs officers to treat homeless people “with compassion” in new vague policyArchitecture of paranoia View full entry
Frustrated by a succession of boring glass boxes, Mayor Marty Walsh has called for one more: adventurous architecture.
[...] the city tries to sell off a decrepit garage in Winthrop Square. Earlier this month, each of six development teams presented its ideas in an open house at Faneuil Hall. On Monday, the Boston Redevelopment Authority revealed each team’s bid for the garage.
— bostonglobe.com
Detailed presentations of the six final RFP responses can be found here.Related stories in the Archinect news:Boston Mayor Marty Walsh goes up against boring architectureRachel Slade dares to ask: "Why is Boston so ugly?"Art college professor suggests makeover for brutalist Boston City Hall View full entry
In the late 1950s, some of the world's most prominent architects gathered in Berkeley, California, to take part in a landmark psychological experiment on creativity and personality. Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, William Pereira and dozens of other architects were put through a... View full entry
Ozymandian in their hubris and decay. There are over 2,000 buildings, most of them havelis, covered inside and out with frescoes that depict scenes from battle, myth, the ancestries of their owners and the coming of the Europeans. The havelis are mostly empty now, and their desolation, combined with their scale and opulence, produces a feeling of wonder. — NYT - T Magazine
Aatish Taseer extols, the faded opulence of, the painted houses found in the desert of Marwar, Rajasthan. View full entry
No one benefits from continuing their seemingly unending litigation to protect a parking lot — Chicago Tribune
It's like these cities think that he's building a Death Star..... View full entry
All the progress we have made will now be put on hold and the government’s attention will be diverted while we try and work out how to deal with Brexit. - Rob Naybour, Weston Williamson + Partners
Today marks a historic turning point for the UK and European Union - the UK has voted to quit the EU. What lays ahead no one is really sure; Cameron has already resigned this morning and discussions for a second Scottish referendum have begun. The majority within the architecture industry... View full entry
In light of the recent killing of 49 people at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando known to many as a center for Queer and Latinx culture, our focus for this week’s podcast is the role and significance of queer spaces in creating community and culture.We wanted to use this time to encourage... View full entry
Today, the New York City Council unanimously passed a set of bills requiring free menstrual-hygiene products in public schools, prisons, and shelters, making it the first city in the nation to pass so-called "menstrual equity" legislation. The city will budget for tampons and pads just like it does for toilet paper and hand soap. — New York Magazine
"Tampons and pads are not currently covered by public-assistance programs and some school-aged girls stay home or use products longer than they should when they get their periods. Women in prisons face rationing and degrading treatment from corrections officers."For more public health-related... View full entry
Columbus, Ohio, has won a $50m prize for its plans to smarten up its transport system. The money is made up of a $40m Smart Cities grant from the Department of Transportation (DOT), a $90m fund put up by private sector partners and a further $10m from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s charity Vulcan, which will be used to finance electric vehicle infrastructure. — globalconstructionreview.com
Columbus managed to beat six rival cities that were shortlisted by the DOT earlier this year:Austin, TexasDenver, ColoradoKansas City, MissouriPittsburgh, PennsylvaniaPortland, OregonSan Francisco, CaliforniaRelated stories in the Archinect news:Imagining the future cyberattack that could bring... View full entry
Could Los Angeles grow to become a “real city” like New York or London? Last year, LA gained at least 50,000 people, according to a recent report from the California Department of Finance, pushing the population to more than 4 million people for the first time in the city’s history. — Vice
Part of the appeal of Los Angeles has been its refusal to be like other cities. For years, its objective "center" was a forbidding cluster of office towers with near zero street life, while in outlying, low-density neighborhoods, people partied in back yards that ran up against wildlife preserves... View full entry
What should a National Veterans Resource Complex look like, exactly? SHOP Architects has been given the official opportunity to find out, courtesy of Syracuse University. The early renderings for this project, which the school in a release is careful to note "are conceptual in nature and may not... View full entry
The Open Architecture Collaborative, the offshoot from the now-defunct Architecture for Humanity, launched its #iOpenArchitecture social media campaign on Tuesday, aiming to expand the dialogue around design and architecture. Participants (the campaign is directed towards "all members of the... View full entry
It was revealed earlier this month that declassified U.S. spy satellite photographs taken above the Antarctic have inadvertently also documented how that continent has been affected by climate change. In this case, deep in the archives of national intelligence agencies are satellite photos half a century old in which scientifically useful data has been hiding in plain sight. These now-outdated spy photographs have thus found an unexpected second life as important tools of planetary science... — the Atlantic
For more on the often unexpected sources of climate data, check out these links:The 700-year old climate data recorded by Japanese monksGlobal warming may be much more catastrophic (and happen much quicker) than we imaginedLast year was the warmest since (at least) 1880Architecture of the... View full entry
..We must expose rather than mask the institutional mechanisms driving uneven urban development. Such a revelation requires a corresponding expansion of our understanding of the scope of architecture itself—can we design human rights, for example? Can social justice become an architectural protocol? In other words, the most important materials with which architects must learn to work are not steel and concrete but critical knowledge of the underlying conditions that produce today’s urban crises. — Art Forum
The article makes reference to the controversy generated a few months ago over a competition to design Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposed border wall between the US and Mexico. The editors of Bustler, Archinect's sister site, decided not to host the competition due... View full entry
SolarCity's solar panels with Tesla's electric vehicles and stationary storage batteries was "what the world needs, the ultimate solution" to a sustainable-energy future.
"As a combined automotive and power storage and power generation company, the potential is there for Tesla to be a trillion-dollar market cap company," [Musk] added. [...]
Musk said costs for both companies would go down significantly after the merger, but he did not give specifics.
— reuters.com
Elon Musk already sits on the board and owns 22% of the Buffalo-based SolarCity, "the leading installer of residential solar panels" in the US. Musk is convinced that the merger is a no-brainer, but according to Reuters, analysts aren't so smitten with the prospect."While we don't doubt that some... View full entry
