This post is brought to you by Reliance Foundry Long before they began making the news as protection against vehicle attack, security bollards were an important part of the urban landscape. These useful little posts stand guard in front of storefronts, utility meters, playgrounds, and sidewalks... View full entry
With more options that ever for getting around cities, and finite space, the question of how we use this infrastructure, and who controls it, is more important than ever. By regulating how these new transportation options evolve, cities can potentially bring about a more sustainable, multimodal, and less car-centric transit future. — curbed.com
Our city curbs are transportation battles for space in the flow of traffic. While private tech startups are producing popular transportation solutions, such as Bird's electric scooters, the city is the one paying to build and maintain these public spaces. An upswing in dockless vehicles has far... View full entry
The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and the Swedish furniture retailer Ikea are teaming up to produce a range of accessible and affordable tools that function without mains electricity and use renewable energy.
Eliasson’s Little Sun project, co-founded with Frederik Ottesen, created a solar-powered torch for the 1 billion people worldwide who live off the power grid. It is now sold cheaply in more than 600 African outlets. [...] The products developed will be available in Ikea stores.
— The Art Newspaper
Olafur Eliasson is a busy man these days: after recently completing his first building, he's now announced a major design collaboration between his Little Sun initiative with IKEA to create a line of sustainable and affordable off-the-grid tools. Little Sun Original in Burundi. Photo: Aminata... View full entry
New York’s nightscape is as iconic [...] as it is taken for granted. A city without streetlights is impossible to imagine, but New York’s 396,572 street-side luminaires are as unremarkable as the streets’ paving — invisible until something changes. An initiative to replace sodium and halogen bulbs with energy- and cost-efficient LEDs has thrown the nightscape suddenly into question, as some city residents bemoan the loss of romance (and sleep). — Urban Omnibus
In her piece for Urban Omnibus, landscape and urban designer Emily Schlickman takes a fascinating closer look at the history of New York City's system of street-side luminaires (the largest in the nation), and how the recent transition to LED technology is affecting the city and its... View full entry
Taken as whimsical follies by the design press and broader culture, Amazon's architectural and logistical patents are altogether more sinister, signalling new, automated urban ambitions. [...]
While some of these patents could be marked as routine publicity stunts, lurking beneath Amazon’s bravado is an obsession with organisation and productivity: oriented towards abstract users, measured in data, and governed by algorithms.
— Failed Architecture
In his piece for Failed Architecture, designer and writer Matthew Stewart investigates the implications of the overwhelming flood of architectural and logistical patents filed by Big Tech, and Amazon in particular, on our cities and expectations of the world of the future. "We’ve been treated... View full entry
Architecture isn’t normal. We take for a given that architecture has to operate the way it already does — but it doesn’t. What appears as natural is in fact constructed, and has mutated dramatically through time. “Architecture,” that is, refers not just to the practice of building but... View full entry
Launched on the Google Arts & Culture platform today, the project includes drone footage of ancient sites and structures like the ziggurat in Borsippa and the Archway of Ctesiphon, 3D models of now lost architecture, like Babylon’s famous Ishtar Gate, and documentation of sites that have been damaged or destroyed by Isis, including Nimrud, Hatra and Mosul. — The Art Newspaper
"Using drone footage, 3D models and videos, the tech giant is working with cultural institutions to make preservation efforts accessible to a larger public," The Art Newspaper reports.View the Preserving Iraq's Heritage online exhibition here. View full entry
This post is brought to you by AA Istanbul Visiting School. AA ISTANBUL VISITING SCHOOL – ROBOTIC MEDIATIONS Monday June 25 – Friday 6 July 6, 2018 AA Istanbul Visiting School, in collaboration with Istanbul Bilgi University, is a unique learning and making experience. The program continues... View full entry
Initially Sidewalk's deal with the organisation will cover a 12-acre site but it is believed it wishes to expand this to the whole area - which at 325 acres will represent a huge land-grab....As part of the planning process of bidding to develop the waterside location, the firm looked at 150 examples of smart cities, including those built from the ground up such as Masdar, in Abu Dhabi and Songdo in South Korea. — BBC News
Jane Wakefield chatted with both critics and proponents of a, Sidewalk Labs, proposed project on Toronto's Eastern waterfront. View full entry
London-based firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners recently completed the Macallan Distillery and visitor experience in Speyside, Scotland. The design is set into the landscape of the The Macallan estate, a distillery established in 1824 producing one of the most sought after whiskys in the... View full entry
A Crunchbase News analysis of residential-focused real estate startups uncovered a raft of companies with a shared and temporary housing focus that have raised funding in the past year or so.
This isn’t a U.S.-specific phenomenon. Funded shared and short-term housing startups are cropping up across the globe, from China to Europe to Southeast Asia.
— TechCrunch
Crunchbase reporter Joanna Glasner takes a look at the new crop of shared and short-term housing startups that have recently raised millions of dollars in funding, such as Common, Starcity, Roomi, Ollie, HubHaus, and others. View full entry
With the cloud being increasingly lifestyled and infrastructured into a range of everyday social and economic practices and processes, data centres continue to grow in size. Far from a massive database in the sky, it is the planet’s surface and our everyday lives that are gradually being colonised by the cloud. — Failed Architecture
This piece by Alexander Taylor, a social anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, looks back on the evolution of data center infrastructure, which continues to grow larger as our everyday lives become increasingly influenced by cloud computing. View full entry
In order to demonstrate the capabilities of a new nanorobotic system, French scientists have built a "microhouse" that sits on the cleaved end of an optical fiber.
The diminutive home was built by a team from the Femto-ST Institute in Besançon, France, using the new μRobotex nanofactory system. That setup utilizes a robotically-controlled ion gun and a gas injection system, operating within a large vacuum chamber, to assemble microstructures on the tips of optical fibers with extreme accuracy.
— New Atlas
The 'Tiny Houses' trend is so passé—Micro Houses are all the rage now. This charming nanobungalow built by the French Femto-ST Institute sits on a plot measuring only 300 by 300 micrometers. Credit: FEMTO-ST InstituteAll you need to get started on your own fun projects is a large vacuum... View full entry
After months of hard work reviewing submissions, selecting content, editing, designing and working with the best printers in the industry, we're excited to announce the second issue of Ed, "Architecture of Disaster," is now available for purchase. If you're an annual subscriber, your copy has... View full entry
If Uber is to get its “flying taxi” service off the ground, it will need dozens of launchpads and landing sites on rooftops around cities as a supportive infrastructure. At the ride-hailing company’s second annual Elevate conference in Los Angeles, six architecture firms presented their winning designs of what these so-called “Skyports” could look like. And holy cow, these things look straight out of Star Wars. — The Verge
It was all futuristic sky towers, helipads, and beehive references this week when six architecture firms presented their "uberAIR Skyport" design proposals for Uber's autonomous flying taxi service in the not-too-distant future. According to the call for proposals, all facilities needed to be... View full entry
