More and more, amid the pastels and the gold-leaf embellishments, you see a striking juxtaposition: 125-year-old houses painted in the tones of a cold war-era nuclear warhead or a dormant cinder cone. In neighborhoods like the Mission and the Haight, this phenomenon reads to some residents as an erasure of the Latino community or of the lingering counterculture. — The Guardian
Gentrification has authored a wholesale change to the city brought on by what New York’s outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio once referred to as a “crisis of desirability.” Like the Big Apple, many highly-paid workers have begun returning to their former spendy enclaves, bucking a trend that... View full entry
The Ron Arad and David Adjaye-designed UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in London is facing another legal challenge this week after years of back-and-forth between a slate of opposition groups and the UK government. The Times of Israel is reporting that a High Court judge has granted... View full entry
In California’s Inland Empire, dozens of mega-warehouses for Amazon, UPS and other companies are choking the cities with traffic and air pollution. Some argue that the jobs warehouses provide aren’t worth the cost, while others say it’s online shopping that’s the real problem. — Los Angeles Times
Despite the boiler-plate promise of adding jobs to the community, warehouse-laden tracts have been dumping an increasing amount of pollutants into the atmosphere in the form of increased truck and air cargo traffic and propelled in part by a sharp rise in online shopping. Amazon opened its... View full entry
This idea was met with skepticism and didn’t move beyond the whiteboard. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation creating a right to housing, saying he worried it would be too expensive. During that time, Steinberg continued chewing on the idea, looking at places such as New York City and Scotland for ideas on how to enact legislation that would compel government to act and aid homeless people. — The Los Angeles Times
California is home to more than one quarter of the nation’s homeless population. If approved, the law would guarantee the right to housing with a dual “obligation” that requires the individual to accept whatever living situation is offered. The law would take effect beginning in 2023. ... View full entry
The debate surrounding Herzog & de Meuron's Tour Triangle is picking up this week amidst news that the €670 million ($757 million) project will begin construction within the next month in spite of a torrent of backlash that has beset the development since its announcement in 2008. As the plan... View full entry
One of America’s premier folk art institutions is getting a major expansion for the first time thanks to a newly-unveiled design from Rogers Partners. The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art opened in 1980 and is dedicated to outsider and folk art. Orange Show traces its origins to... View full entry
The ending of this year’s COP26 conference has left many architects to ponder how effective the mostly non-representative group of negotiators were in addressing the skepticism and high expectations coming into the meeting that is meant to address what is undoubtedly the greatest moral issue of... View full entry
An architect who creates just three typical buildings over their career will be responsible for carbon emissions equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 162 typical Americans, the COP26 summit in Glasgow has been told — The Architects' Journal
During a talk on “Adaptive Transformation” at the Danish Pavilion at COP26, Enlai Hooi, who works as the Head of Innovation at Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects in Copenhagen, said that professionals in the building industry carry a far greater responsibility for the world’s health than other... View full entry
According to an Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) analysis of the recently-released U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Producer Price Index data, construction input prices increased 1.5% in October. Nonresidential construction input prices have increased by 1.4% in the month. ... View full entry
Some prisons have been successfully transformed into whiskey distilleries, youth hostels, museums and boutique hotels. Others have been demolished, sometimes over the objections of local preservationists. But there’s a third option: Carceral sites can be reoriented as places that actively work to undo the damage wrought by mass incarceration. — Bloomberg
The movement to design spaces that are actively working to undo some of the social harms caused by mass incarceration is still fairly nascent, with salient projects in Atlanta and other places serving as models that can be applied in the age of bail reform, alternative sentencing, and other... View full entry
Modern-day equivalents of megaprojects like the Hoover Dam can benefit broad swaths of the United States, but infrastructure experts say they have often stagnated. President Biden campaigned to address the issue. Now his transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, is tasked with speeding up such projects, which can straddle state lines and take years to complete. — The Washington Post
Megaprojects like the finally-approved Gateway Program that would add a tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan’s west side have been thrown around without much tangible backing until now. Buttigieg has been vocal about the need for infrastructure spending, calling for a “generational... View full entry
The swirling controversy over the University of California, Santa Barbara’s proposed plan to add billionaire real estate investor Charles Munger’s massive self-designed dormitory building to its exhausted stock of student housing has been addressed by the university in a campus-wide Q&A... View full entry
Josh Niland interviewed Graham Foundation grantee Alican Taylan. Their chat referenced Archizoom’s 1969 No-Stop City, Virilio and dromology among other things. A key phrase, overcoming or even "Confronting Carbon Form". Both Donna Sink and Will Galloway found "Lots to think about" and felt the... View full entry
With expediency in mind, Los Angeles is looking to adopt a successful blueprint to solve the growing number of large homeless encampments that have been cropping up in the city since the beginning of the pandemic last spring. Silverlake-based Lehrer Architects is expanding on its... View full entry
As the first part of a projected $6 billion residential and commercial development, the construction start was a kickoff for Lincoln Yards itself, in the planning stages for more than five years.
Investors and city planners see it as a revival of riverfront land that will connect prosperous areas of the Near North Side, Bucktown and Lincoln Park.
— Chicago Sun-Times
Located on Chicago's North Side, the multibillion-dollar mixed-use Lincoln Yards master plan was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, CBT Architects, and landscape architects James Corner Field Operations. The first building of the scheme breaking ground at 1229 West Concord is the... View full entry
