Urban Swales: Subterranean Reservoir Network for Los Angeles, by Geofutures @ Rensselaer School of Architecture / Muhammad Ahmad Khan (student); Chris Perry (program director), Ted Ngai, Fleet Hower, Kelly Winn, Lydia Xynogala (program faculty). Acknowledgements: Evan Douglis, Dean of the... View full entry
Grassroots Cactivism, by Ali Chen California is entering the fourth year of an epic drought. Urban households have reduced water usage by 25%. However, legislation does not apply to farmers, while 80% of the state's water usage goes towards agricultural production. A large percentage of that... View full entry
Recharge City, by Barry LehrmanRecharge City evaluates pragmatic options for recharging the groundwater in Los Angeles County by recycling the 502 million gallons of water that is dumped by Hyperion Treatment Plant and the Joint Water Pollution Control Plant into the Pacific each day. This is... View full entry
What if the Valley could have multiple wells placed around the city in contingent locations for maximum water replenishment back into the Aquifer?Liquifying Aquifers, by Lujac DesautelThe story of water in the San Fernando Valley is the by-product of the American frontier to the West and the... View full entry
Every drop countsLiquid Bank, by Juan SaezLiquid Bank confronts California’s drought from both a local and global perspective. The project addresses the relationship between domestic water consumption and the global water crisis with the development of water related infrastructure in emerging... View full entry
What is the role of creative exploration in architecture? From the L.A. Times to The New Republic, this question is very much on critical minds. In a piece entitled "How to Make Architecture Human," Anna Wiener reviews Witold Rybczynski's latest collection of essays, Mysteries of the Mall, which... View full entry
We surely have loads to say about the architecture profession, but how would you compose all those thoughts into the good ol' classical form of a letter? The "Dear Architecture" ideas competition asked its participants just that.Created by Blank Space, the same people who organized the Fairy Tales... View full entry
Midcentury modernist architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler may have been good friends when they studied together in Vienna, but by the time they ran into one another one last time in a Los Angeles hospital in 1953, they were bitter enemies.
Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.'s production of The Princes of Kings Road, now playing at the Neutra Institute in Silver Lake, imagines what it might have been like in the hospital room they shared
— laweekly.com
even given that the Hyperloop whitepaper was a rough sketch, the most important elements of the plan—its speed and price—have been vastly oversold. [...]
But there’s a final reason to be skeptical, not just of the technical details of the Hyperloop, but of the supposedly utopian motives behind it: It may not even be Musk’s idea.
— fortune.com
More on the much hyped (and griped) world of Hyperloop:Elon Musk launches Hyperloop Pod Competition to university students and engineersLA's Arts District now home to Hyperloop World HeadquartersThe town that Hyperloop builtDon't write off Elon Musk's Hyperloop yet...Designing the Hyperspace: UCLA... View full entry
A shortage of US curtain walling makers caused by the 2008 crash is so severe that it is halting projects and has even forced one developer to open its own factory. [...]
As a result the price for curtain walling systems has risen between 35% and 45% in the past 18 months, and lead times have increased dramatically [...]
In New York, the availability of cladding systems has become the single main determinant of programme and schedule.
— globalconstructionreview.com
The latest explosion of Manhattan development has fully and passionately embraced the phenomenon of the global starchitect. [...]
As it turned out, the future would be pure real estate ... The future was the privatisation of the sky and a transfer from corporate power to individual wealth, the visual manifestation of the 0.1 per cent. It was a catwalk of anorexic skinnyscrapers by the equivalents of haute-couture designers ... global names with which to sell real estate.
— ft.com
“Let us usher in a great golden age of construction,” exhorts one of the 310 official patriotic slogans published this year. The ambition is already evident in the number of cranes that dot the skyline [...]. The most prominent structures are the 47-storey shafts of the Changjon Street apartments, an 18-tower complex completed last year in less than 12 months and nicknamed “Pyonghattan” by foreign diplomats. But other emerging skyscrapers go undiscussed and unphotographed [...]. — theguardian.com
Related stories on Archinect and our sister site Bustler:“Crow’s Eye View”, from the 2014 Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion, returns as a NY exhibition (Bustler)North Korean architect of new Pyongyang airport reportedly executed by Kim Jong UnNorth Koreans hesitate to move into Kim Jong Un's... View full entry
San Diego may be known as "America's Finest City," but — at least this week — it's also the epicenter of the desalination and water reuse movement. [...]
The area had one of the first desalination plants — opened in Point Loma in 1961 — and will soon see a $1-billion facility open in Carlsbad. [...]
a sustainable water future depends on two things: "political leadership and public engagement, whether it's desalination or reuse."
— latimes.com
Desalination is just one large-scale technology for treating potable water, but it's attracted recent attention in places like Santa Barbara and San Diego as the California cities ramp up their water-conservation efforts and learn how to market the large upfront costs of desalination as long-term... View full entry
Ask a cyclist what it’s like to ride in Indonesia’s capital – a sprawling megalopolis of 10.2 million people...More than likely, they’ll tell you it’s outright dangerous...Car-free days may be popular, but there is almost no [cyclist] infrastructure... [However, there] is hope among cyclists that bike lanes will become a priority after the city’s [mass rapid transport] system is finished in 2019. In the meantime, several young innovators are taking matters into their own hands. — The Guardian
More on Archinect:Australia's "biggest bike-lane skeptic" plans to remove a popular Sydney cyclewayAs bicycle ownership in North Korea rises, Pyongyang introduces bike lanesCopenhagen could ax its pioneering city bike program by month's endWhy a bike city? Why not a mix of biking and transit? View full entry
At least 52 people were killed when a crane crashed in Mecca’s Grand Mosque on Friday, Saudi Arabia’s civil defence authority said on its Twitter account.It said 30 people were injured.
The Muslim annual Haj pilgrimage is due later this month and Saudi authorities go to great lengths to be prepared for the millions of Muslims who converge on Mecca.
— theguardian.com
