A very large 3D printer measuring 20 x 120 x 40 ft (6 x 36 x 12 m) did most of the work, printing the building by extruding a cement mixture layer by layer, in a similar method by which WinSun's 3D-printed homes were made (WinSun is involved in this project too). There were also some additional smaller mobile 3D-printers used too, however.

It took 17 days to print the basic building, but it then required finishing both internally and externally. — Gizmag

Rome has issued a €500m (£380m) SOS to companies, wealthy philanthropists and its own citizens to help restore many of the Italian capital’s historic sites and prevent others from falling into ruin.

The Roman Forum, the Circus Maximus and the walls, aqueducts and sewerage system of what was once the most powerful city on Earth have all been earmarked as needing help ranging from a relatively minor clean up to full-blown structural works. — the Guardian

A City Council committee could take the first steps Tuesday toward mandating that developers include affordable units in new housing complexes to be built in several East Austin neighborhoods.

The proposal by Council Member Greg Casar, who chairs the council’s Planning and Neighborhoods Committee, comes as soaring rents have pushed poorer and minority residents out of the city. — My Statesman

“What we’re seeing right now is what I saw in 1996,” said Mr. Lloyd, a former president of sales and development at Cisco. “We all had I.P. routers and everything was done a certain way. At Cisco, we said, ‘You can carry that over the Internet,’ and everyone said, ‘No.’ But those high-speed networks made the Internet possible.” Hyperloop, he said, “will do to the physical world what the Internet did to the digital one.” — Allison Arieff – nytimes.com

These public pools, or sundlaugs, serve as the communal heart of Iceland, sacred places whose affordability and ubiquity are viewed as a kind of civil right....The pool is Iceland’s social space: where families meet neighbors, where newcomers first receive welcome, where rivals can’t avoid one another. — NYT

...Given all the harm we know air pollution can cause, does cycling actually help, or could it hurt? After all, I’m not breathing in the foul fumes of a truck when I’m sitting inside an air-conditioned train. I’m certainly not breathing them in deeply, as I would while huffing and puffing on my cycle.

Air pollution kills more than 5 million people every year, yet there has been no analysis of the costs versus benefits of city cycling. Until now. — Quartz

the artist says we should not “sentimentalise or romanticise” the crisis, which has seen more than 2,000 children die on their way to Europe. [...]

Ai first visited Lesbos on Christmas Day last year, and has since dedicated most of his life to helping refugees there, even moving his studio to the island. [...]

“The goal is to make everyone conscious of the struggle of refugees. We need to protect humanity. The fight is endless. If we don’t fight, our children have to fight,” he says. — theartnewspaper.com

Twice a week or so, loaded with bodies boxed in pine, a New York City morgue truck passes through a tall chain-link gate and onto a ferry that has no paying passengers. Its destination is Hart Island, an uninhabited strip of land off the coast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound, where overgrown 19th-century ruins give way to mass graves gouged out by bulldozers and the only pallbearers are jail inmates paid 50 cents an hour.

There, divergent life stories come to the same anonymous end. — the New York Times

Set to open on 17 June, the Tate Modern Switch House – named after the part of the power station that the new galleries occupy – expands the museum by 60% to accommodate the surging numbers of visitors, which reached 5.7 million last year, well over double the number the building was designed to cope with when it opened in 2000. But the arresting brick ziggurat is also a physical symbol of the effect the Tate has had on its surroundings. — theguardian.com

The $1.5-billion second leg of the Expo Line, which opened Friday from Culver City to Santa Monica, adds seven light-rail stations and more than six miles of track to the growing Los Angeles County transit network. [...]

In the immediate context of L.A.'s attempts to turn its public-transit network from national punch line to something that increasingly resembles a mature system, 13 new Metro stations in less than three months qualifies as a pretty dramatic upgrade. — latimes.com

Many buildings in distinctive Manhattan neighborhoods like Chinatown, the Upper East Side and Washington Heights could not be erected now: Properties in those areas tend to cover too much of their lots (Washington Heights), have too much commercial space (Chinatown) or rise too high (the Upper East Side). [...]

“It’s ridiculous that we have these hundred-year-old buildings that everyone loves, and none of them ‘should’ be the way they are.” — nytimes.com

If we imagine one's escape to a refugee camp as fragmentary, provisional and incomplete, the camp must be transformed not only in design but also in its role as a catalyst for promoting the humanity of those living within its barbed-wired walls. [...]

Architecture has become the litmus test of society's capacity for holistic and compassionate security. — cnn.com