Municipal laws in New York City are hampering the city's real estate developers and building owners as they look to embrace the use of drones to perform periodic building and facade inspections on their properties, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. In New York City... View full entry
A new housing typology will be coming to the Chicago neighborhoods of West Humboldt Park and Bronzeville, where Perkins + Will architect Greg Tamborino will bring his independently-produced, competition-winning affordable housing designs to a pair of vacant lots. Tamborino was recently announced... View full entry
With a certain bulb-shaped observation tower in the news again, perhaps now is a good time to revisit another seminal observation tower project: The Welton Becket and Associates-designed Reunion Tower in Dallas, Texas. Crafted as a three-story, lightbulb-studded geodesic dome hoisted atop a... View full entry
One of Frank Lloyd Wright's most notable disciples, John Lautner made a distinct impact in California, specifically in Los Angeles. Known for his residential works, Lautner's exploration of space and material echoes Wright's organic architectural influence. The eye-catching... View full entry
How will we live together? That’s the question on the minds of Paolo Baratta, president of La Biennale di Venezia, and Hashim Sarkis, curator of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, as they unveil a guiding vision for the 2020 Venice Biennale. Baratta and Sarkis announced the... View full entry
The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) has announced a call for proposals to solicit feedback and concepts for the next version of LEED certification standards. According to the announcement, the organization is looking to expand and improve upon its recently... View full entry
In the 2018 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 396,448 people were booked into an ICE detention facility, up 22.5% from a year earlier, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Between October and January, apprehensions along the southwest border rose to 201,497, up a third from the same period a year ago. — The Wall Street Journal
According to The Wall Street Journal, the private prison business is booming as a result of the hardline immigration policies of President Donald Trump. Despite the growing controversies surrounding the government's treatment of detained migrants in increasingly makeshift and inadequate... View full entry
Henning Larsen has completed work on a new 750,000-square-foot opera house and cultural center in Hangzhou, China. The opera-in-the-park-style complex is wrapped by a fractured metal panel and glass facade designed to reference the cracked ice that forms during the winter months along... View full entry
When the so-called House of the Century rose from the swampy earth back in the early 1970s, it arrived as a vision of the future, a biomorphic experiment in modern living. Back then it was a bright white jumble on the shoreline, and depending on your angle of approach, it looked like either a man's erect genitalia or a giant schnoz.
Today, this futuristic house is a decaying relic of the past, and its future is a subject of concern and conjecture.
— Dallas News
Though Ant Farm, the experimental architecture firm founded by Doug Michels and Chip Lord in 1968, is not among the most well known firms of that era, they produced a number of projects both famous and deserving of fame. They are perhaps best known for their early experiments with inflatable... View full entry
“A Pattern Language” is not about architecture, but about how specific design choices can help us build better relationships. By fitting a series of those choices—the patterns—together, you get a room, a house, a neighborhood and eventually a city. — Curbed
Curbed architecture critic Alexandra Lange takes us on a journey through some of the key lessons from Christopher Alexander's seminal work, A Pattern Language. The book, originally published in 1977 has long been out of fashion in architecture schools, but, Lange argues, with the rise... View full entry
MIT’s Self Assembly Lab and Maldives-based Invena have unveiled Growing Islands, a provocative underwater structural system that redirects wave energy and sand accumulation flows to build new islands and help rebuild existing beaches ravaged by rising sea levels. Diagram showcasing the... View full entry
Miami’s high-end real-estate market has drastically slowed in the past several years, as the Latin American buyers who led a frenzy of postrecession purchases have all but disappeared. South American economies that were roaring in the early years of the decade, including Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela, are now facing severe economic distress, which has devalued their currencies and left purchasers from those countries with far less buying power in the U.S. — wsj.com
Oversupply, the unknown threat of climate change, and shifting immigration patterns are pushing high-end condominium prices downward in Miami, where, The Wall Street Journal reports, sales have fallen off 24 percent from last year. “There’s just an abundance of inventory,” Alexandra... View full entry
First-year professional degree students of Yale School of Architecture are hard at work designing and building a new three-unit affordable housing complex in New Haven's Hill neighborhood. Formally known as the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, the year-long studio has been an... View full entry
While the work of modern masters will always lurk in the shadows of contemporary design, few have been imitated or referenced as frequently as the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. His material palette and deceptively simple methods of spatial organization indirectly inspired... View full entry
Fashion designer Marc Jacobs has paid $9.175 million for a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in the wealthy New York suburb of Rye. Mr. Jacob's agent Laura DeVita of Julie B. Fee Sotheby's International Realty, said her client had been searching for an architecturally significant home in Westchester and planned to use the property as a weekend retreat from his busy job. — Wall Street Journal
Formerly owned by Maximilian E. Hoffman, the residence was one of the last projects Wright worked on before he died. Hoffman commissioned Wright to design the home after Wright designed an auto showroom for his Jaguar dealership in New York. Located at the north end of Manursing Island, the... View full entry
