Filmmaker Wes Anderson has a knack for creating fictional spaces with attention paid to the last excruciating detail. His latest space is real, though, and even better, you can get a drink there. [...]

Three new buildings, which were part of a century-old distillery and transformed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, will now house art rather than alcohol. But for the thirsty there’s also a new bar, called Bar Luce, that Anderson designed himself. — qz.com

Instagram may very well have enabled a whole generation of false artisans—and even encouraged cliché street imagery by promoting hashtags like #middleoftheroad and #strideby through its Weekend Hashtag Project—but the effect may not be so terrible. Quoted in The Telegraph in 2011, Teru Kuwayama, a photojournalist who is now photo community manager at Facebook, compared the rise of Instagram to the advent of electronic music, both of which stimulated “amateur expression.” — americanphotomag.com

But supplementing that aesthetic of “the future” sketched in imaginary edifice, the full SF vision of the future city is a mosaic, constructed from fragments of the cities that we recognize, including symbols that are decidedly from the past. [...]

If SF functions by taking the world we know and altering it with a constructed future fantasy, the Statue of Liberty serves as the junction point, the axis where the speculative fantasy begins and ends. — motherboard.vice.com

It’s a Thursday morning in Beijing, and the world’s most famous living artist, Ai Weiwei, is sitting with one of the world’s most controversial technologists, Jacob Appelbaum, in the second-floor lobby of the East Hotel. [...]

On a whim, Ai suggests that they call Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living for the last two years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. [...]

Ai and Assange talk for several minutes about the mundanities of the dissident life. — fusion.net

The work of Lebanese photographer Serge Najjar shows a striking mix of vibrant colors and stark architectural geometry. His pictures generally feature a small, lone figure in the midst of an overpowering backdrop, giving an impression of man’s smallness as he moves through the world he’s created — an inverted power relationship in which the man-made dominates the maker. — Hyperallergic

“[Directors are] projecting a future by imagining how it would look in ruins,” said Michael Hays, a professor of architectural theory at Harvard. “All the flesh has been removed and you just see the architectural bones. I’ve always thought Portman’s buildings would make very beautiful ruins, because the essence of them is so powerful and so direct.” — The Atlantic

Architecture is a perpetual conversation between the present and the past, knowing full well that the future is listening. So what happens when this dialogue is influenced by contemporary modes of communication such as texting, Twitter, and Instagram? Chatter: Architecture Talks Back looks at the diverse contemporary methods and approaches wielded by five emerging architects: Bureau Spectacular, Erin Besler, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, Formlessfinder, and John Szot Studio. — Art Institute of Chicago