"We're working with the other owners of the property and with Metro," said LACMA Director Michael Govan. "There's good reason to build a major development there. You've got subway access and density on Wilshire. My dream is some beautiful piece of architecture with an architecture and design museum at the base, which would add to Museum Row."
If built, the tower would offer a dramatic vertical complement to the relentlessly horizontal LACMA gallery building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor
— latimes.com
How's this for a yin-yang in the new Los Angeles: if this goes through, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) would be responsible for two majorly different impositions on Wilshire Blvd., the city's foremost thoroughfare and itself an icon. One: a street-straddling horizontal art... View full entry
Dubai is already home to the biggest shopping mall in the world, but that apparently isn't enough.
The emirate is planning an even bigger mall, one so massive it's already being described as a temperature-controlled city. It's going to be called Mall of the World, and will stretch for 48 million square feet.
The plan may seem curious to Americans watching their neighborhood shopping malls start to fade.
— cbsnews.com
The big catharsis for UCLA Architecture and Urban Design comes by way of RUMBLE, an all-school expo held at the end of the academic year, that includes student work, final reviews, program installations, and lectures. Mixing content from students, practitioners, critics and faculty, the event... View full entry
Zaatari is becoming an informal city: a sudden, do-it-yourself metropolis of roughly 85,000 with the emergence of neighborhoods, gentrification, a growing economy and, under the circumstances, something approaching normalcy, though every refugee longs to return home. [...]
The change, accelerated by regional chaos and enterprising Syrians, illustrates a basic civilizing push toward urbanization that clearly happens even in desperate places.
— nytimes.com
One reason for weakness: many young people, saddled with student loan debt, elevated unemployment and less-than-perfect credit scores, are staying out of the market. — NPR
New research from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, focuses in on the role of millennial generation in driving demand and shaping recovery. As Gregory Walker noted recently, in broad terms, looking at US economy, it is clear we're not really 'there' yet. Remember, the last... View full entry
Nicholas Korody penned a review - The Trouble with a Bird’s Eye View. The piece dissects a summer exhibition of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Design. He concludes the pairing of aerial photographs by Los Angeles-based Lane Barden with a geo-mapping project by the German-American... View full entry
The city of Boston has been the stage for a long history of experiments with public space. Most notably, the Boston Common is the oldest public park in the country – and perhaps the first public urban park in the world. Originally a shared cow pasture until overgrazing led to a real-life example... View full entry
Skyscrapers and shanties, gleaming malls and rundown markets, palatial houses and the piss-poor guys who build them: Those are the divides in cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Manila. Rich and poor do not much mingle.
But a movement is afoot to change that. It aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. For this "inclusive cities" movement, urban renewal doesn't require razing slums and markets.
— npr.org
In a paper he recently published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B, Tao points to two regions of China... that have a similar geographic location as the Midwest—but far fewer tornadoes. The difference, he says, is that China's plains are surrounded by three east-west mountain ranges, which slow down passing winds enough to prevent tornados from forming.
Tao, then, is essentially suggesting we build mountain range-sized walls across Tornado Alley...
— motherboard.vice.com
The skyline of Yujiapu in the Chinese city of Tianjin looks more like an expensive, abandoned movie set than it does “China’s new Manhattan,” as the financial district was once billed. A patina of dust covers the glass doors of the 47 office buildings and hotels that still sit empty, and in come cases unfinished. — qz.com
The Municipal Art Society of New York has developed a new tool that shows where development could bring the most change across the city's five boroughs. This resource is a continuation of the group's "Accidental Skyline" initiative, an effort to curb the "as-of-right" development (which allows developers to bypass some regulatory hurdles) that has resulted in some of New York's tallest and skinniest new skyscrapers. — citylab.com
The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously struck down a Massachusetts law that barred protests near abortion clinics.
The law, enacted in 2007, created 35-foot buffer zones around entrances to abortion clinics. State officials said the law was a response to a history of harassment and violence at abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a shooting rampage at two facilities in 1994.
The law was challenged on First Amendment grounds by opponents of abortion
— nytimes.com
Massachusett's 35-foot buffer zone was initially enacted as a defensive mechanism, responding to a history of harassments and violence around clinics' entrances. The law had previously barred anyone from entering a fixed buffer zone around entrances to reproductive health care facilities... View full entry
Chinese diplomats on Wednesday said Congress’ decision to rename the street in front of Beijing’s embassy in the U.S. capital after a Chinese dissident is "really absurd" [...] On Tuesday the House Appropriations Committee voted to rename the street outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” — after a Chinese dissident who received the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia and is currently serving an 11-year prison term for subverting the government’s authority. — Al Jazeera
This is not the first time that place-naming – or toponymy – has provoked a political dispute. Actually, it's pretty likely that as long as people have been naming places, other people have been getting upset about it. For example, as immortalized by Jimmy Kennedy in the classic song, Istanbul... View full entry
While searching for images of highway interchanges in urban areas, I came across these historic aerial photos of Detroit on a message board, showing how the city fabric has slowly eroded. It’s a remarkable record of a process that has scarred many other American cities. — usa.streetsblog.org
The documentary Lagos Wide and Close - An Interactive Journey into an Exploding City, arose from Rem Koolhaas' 2001 visit to Lagos, Nigeria with filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak, hoping to document a phase in one of Africa's fastest growing cities. The doc's unique direction allows viewers to... View full entry
