Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has announced a proposal to raise rents for low-income Americans relying on federal housing subsidies. Currently, families and individuals living in subsidized housing are traditionally asked to spend 30% of their adjusted income on rent, with a... View full entry
The Israeli Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale will explore the established mechanisms by which the country facilitates the co-existence of Holy places. As a location with special sacred status as the cradle of three Abrahamic religions, the region encompasses a variety of holy... View full entry
The latest Cross-Talk focused on Criticism. Anthony Morey kicked things off "Does criticism today have a role in architecture at all? At least, does the version of criticism that exists today have a role? ...There is no real criticism in architecture today; it has vacated its own integrity for the... View full entry
Architectural representations often embody the tension between familiar and unfamiliar. In an effective rendering, the new buildings or landscapes share the same illusionistic space with images of existing buildings or landscapes, producing an almost exquisite confusion between real and unreal. — Places Journal
Architectural renderings are not photographs; or are they? Susan Piedmont-Palladino examines the hyper-real imagined worlds of contemporary architectural drawings through theories of the uncanny, and considers the disconcerting effect that occurs when "we can't quite sort out the relationship of... View full entry
Marcel Breuer's iconic Pirelli Building, once a symbol of New Haven's mid-century embrace of urban renewal and modern architecture, has spent the past two decades completely vacant, save for a recent art show. Known for its Brutalist design featuring a 2-story gap, the mid-century masterpiece... View full entry
A Romanian man who used threats of violence and indebtedness to keep a group of his countrymen as slaves while he pocketed their wages from a London construction site has been sentenced to seven years in jail. — Global Construction Review
David Lupu, a 29-year-old Romanian, was found guilty of holding 15 of his countrymen in slavery or servitude in two small one-bedroom apartments in East London and sentenced to seven years in jail. Lupu had lured the men to work as demolition workers in the UK, falsely promising a wage of £... View full entry
San Francisco lives with the certainty that the Big One will come. But the city is also putting up taller and taller buildings clustered closer and closer together because of the state’s severe housing shortage. Now those competing pressures have prompted an anxious rethinking of building regulations. Experts are sending this message: The building code does not protect cities from earthquakes nearly as much as you might think. — New York Times
Taking a hard look at San Francisco's building codes, this NY Times piece goes in depth on what it means for city high rises if the next big earthquake hit. From the 1906 earthquake and fire to current seismic safety, concerns revolve around the number of skyscrapers built on liquefaction zones... View full entry
The tinted world of tomorrow is coming, and airports—mini-cities of steel, concrete and lots and lots of glass—are interested. In a test last fall, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport outfitted one of its gates with a new type of “smart glass” that can adjust for sunlight exposure. The obvious point is to keep travelers from getting overheated—but the exercise also brought a more lucrative benefit. — Bloomberg
A Cornell-led study at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport found that implementing a new type of electrochromatic 'smart glass' at one of its gates not only led to cooler, more pleasant surface temperatures in the waiting area, but the tinted glass, and the resulting dimmer light in the neighboring bars and... View full entry
"Work rules our lives today more than ever," says the design team behind Homework, an installation at Milan Design Week's furniture focused event, the 2018 Salone del Mobile, that explores the historically shifting boundaries between private and public spaces. © USM© USMIn 2012, a study by a bed... View full entry
[...] iPhoto confused a human friend of mine – I’ll call him Mike – with a building called the Great Mosque of Cordoba. [...]
Rather than viewing this as a failure, I realized I had found a new insight: Just as people’s faces have features that can be recognized by algorithms, so do buildings. That began my effort to perform facial recognition on buildings – or, more formally, “architectural biometrics.” Buildings, like people, may just have biometric identities too.
— The Conversation
Peter Christensen, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, elaborates on his research with 'facial recognition' on buildings to unlock architectural secrets. View full entry
Architecture isn’t just looking at a building. It’s looking at how the city is shaped, and then thinking about, what can we do as citizens to make it a better place to live through architecture and design? — PBS | News Hour
via PBS | News HourJefffrey Brown reports from Green River, Utah. Small, with a population that "hovers at" 950, a nonprofit called Epicenter aims to use use art and architecture to bring new energy, life and economic development. There is even a "stationary" taco truck. View full entry
The American Institute of Architects [...] reported that architecture firm billings rose for the sixth consecutive month in March, although the pace of growth slowed modestly from February.
Overall, the AIA’s Architecture Billings Index (ABI) score for March was 51.0 (any score over 50 indicates billings growth), which still reflects a healthy business environment.
— AIA
“New project activity coming into architecture firms continues to grow at a solid pace. As a result, project backlogs—in excess of six months at present— are at their highest post-recession level,” said AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker, Hon. AIA, PhD. “Business remains strong in the... View full entry
The Smart Scale Ruler was created by Joanne Swisterski, an Interior Designer looking to solve scale and unit issues once and for all. This digital ruler can be customized for Architects, Designers, and Builders. Solving the common problems of out of scale drawings and differing units, this... View full entry
The A+D Museum has announced the unveiling of their inaugural fellowship program, developed in collaboration with the LA-based multi-disciplinary design firm, Rios Clementi Hale Studios. The aim of the The Alley Fellowship is to produce a two-month rotating exhibition and lecture series and is... View full entry
If you've been around the 'architecture-can-be-fun-too'-focused internet for a while, you may remember Sergej Hein's semi-viral gem of a video, Berlin Block Tetris, which was exactly that: an animated version of the video game classic using building blocks that resembled socialist-era residential... View full entry
