Creating a work about the sinking high-rise was an easy choice, according to Martínez. “We started researching San Francisco, and current events in the city, and the Millennium Tower popped up,” Martínez said. “We knew almost instantly we wanted to do a project that was in some way going to connect with some of most expensive real estate on earth collapsing under the weight of itself as a metaphor for late capitalism.” — Hyperallergic
Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist of interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity were compelled to make an art piece based on the sinking, tilting Handel Architects-designed Millennium Tower in San Francisco, as a timely metaphor for late capitalism collapsing under the weight of... View full entry
Los Angeles area architect Ric Abramson has been selected to head a new Urban Design and Architecture Studio housed within the City of West Hollywood's Community Services Department. Abramson, whose practice, WorkPlays studio*architecture, is based in West Hollywood, has been active in the... View full entry
The Parks Department is looking to curb the cost of constructing new public bathrooms — by making them smaller...the agency is exploring stand-alone units tested in other cities, such as the Portland Loo and trailer-like bathrooms in Boston. — THE CITY
Following a $4.7 million comfort station at Ferry Point Park West and the prospect of a $6 million bathroom for another park on Staten Island, Mayor Bill de Blaisio vowed to address the rising costs to taxpayers, reports THE CITY. Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver has called the current... View full entry
Venice was reeling after experiencing its highest level of floodwater since 1966. High tides from the lagoon reached more than 6 feet higher than their usual level—the second-highest ever seen since records began in 1923. Two people were reported dead. Waters entered the nave of St. Mark’s Basilica and parts of the La Fenice opera house, left boats deposited on the canalside paving stones and in the middle of city streets, and surged across more than 80 percent of the city’s surface. — CityLab
Feargus O'Sullivan, writing in CityLab, reports on the devastating flooding that has impacted Venice, Italy, where five of the 20 worst floods in the city's history have occurred over the last ten years. Aside from being located on a spit of land in the northern Adriatic sea, Venice has... View full entry
Money just isn't coming in like it used to. At least, that's the case for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where efforts to raise $650 million to fund a new Atelier Peter Zumthor-designed expansion have hit a rough patch. Christopher Knight, American art critic for The Los Angeles... View full entry
New York City Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have unveiled a bold initiative aimed at rejuvenating and decarbonizing the nation’s public housing stock. The visionary Green New Deal for Public Housing Act aims to bring sorely needed maintenance... View full entry
The University College of London Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment is launching a new scholarship program aimed at helping the institution diversify its student body. The scholarship fund will bring £1.2 million in funding per year to help bring students from under-represented... View full entry
A Vinci-led consortium [...] completed civil engineering works on the high-spec building that will house the world’s largest fusion machine, called a “tokamak”, which scientists hope will start replicating the sun’s energy by the middle of the next decade. [...]
The 73-metre-high, 120-metre-wide structure required highly specific concretes. Teams developed about 10 formulations to shield staff and the environment from fusion-generated radiation.
— Global Construction Review
Building a tokamak machine to exploit fusion energy similar to our sun is no simple engineering feat: the building will house reactions that happen at extremely high temperatures, around 150 million degrees Celsius, fusing hydrogen nuclei when they reach the plasma state, thus releasing... View full entry
Los Angeles-based architecture firm Jerde has been tapped to reimagine the Rose Bowl Stadium property in Pasadena. [...]
Jerde, which provided design services for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, has been tasked with re-envisioning the Rose Bowl campus to address issues including accessibility, parking, and programming possibilities.
— Urbanize LA
The Rose Bowl stadium, nestled within Pasadena's lush Arroyo Seco Park, has been an iconic Los Angeles sports and entertainment landmark since its completion in October 1922. Despite its age, the venue still ranks among the largest stadiums in the world with a modern capacity of 92,542. View full entry
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs on, in and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its shallow lagoons and exiling hundreds of people from their homes.
[...] It then deposited the atoll’s most lethal debris and soil into the dome.
Now the concrete coffin, which locals call “the Tomb,” is at risk of collapsing from rising seas and other effects of climate change.
— The Los Angeles Times
A stunning report from The Los Angeles Times highlights America's deteriorating nuclear legacy on the Marshall Islands, where a vast concrete dome built to contain radioactive soil imported regionally and from Nevada is beginning to fail amid rising sea levels. According to the report... View full entry
Louise Blanchard Bethune is recognized as the first American woman who worked as an architect. Maybe there’s a Bethune among our young girls in the Crescent City, Baton Rouge, Lafayette or elsewhere in the state. — The Advocate
As the investigation into the deadly Hard Rock hotel collapse in New Orleans continues, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who has been meeting with the expert architects and engineers studying the collapse made a stunning realization: “The majority of them were absolutely men.” A staff... View full entry
By early next year [UnitedHealth Group] expects to house 350 homeless Medicaid patients whose annual health-care spending, while they’re on the streets, exceeds $17 million. The goal is for them to “graduate” within a year to paying their own rent. — Bloomberg Businessweek
Bloomberg Businessweek profiles UnitedHealth Group's efforts to reign in healthcare costs by providing high-cost patients with housing. The approach comes as the connections between a lack of housing and extreme healthcare costs come into sharper relief between these adjacent industries. The... View full entry
The Architecture and Design Museum (A+D), Archinect, and KCRW's DnA: Design and Architecture are coming together for SHORTLISTED!, a day-long symposium focused on highlighting the current state of earning, awarding, and judging architectural commissions in Los Angeles. The... View full entry
Living in a smart home neighborhood, the Fergusons experience both convenience and surveillance. And that's typical in Black Diamond, where Lennar Homes offers smart homes as part of a 4,800 unit development that includes other builders. This neighborhood isn't a one off. There are smart home developments in suburbs outside of cities such as Miami and San Francisco. Lennar is making Amazon tech standard on each of the 45,000 homes it builds this year. — NPR
Families in a Lennar Homes development in the Seattle suburb of Black Diamond are settling into their newly built and Amazon smart technology-equipped homes — some to their excitement, others fearing constant surveillance. "In this community, there are smart homes on one side of the street... View full entry
A new report from the International Code Council ranks the top commercial building code violations in a variety of construction trades. The 2019 Common Code Noncompliance Survey Report also details the reasons behind the violations. — Construction Dive
Construction Dive lists the top five causes for issues, according to inspectors as: Workers that don't follow the manufacturer’s instructions.A contractor’s lack of code knowledge. Cost-cutting, such as using substandard building materials that don’t meet local requirements.A lack of... View full entry
