Dash fits squarely into the current age of smart-home technology... It is not simply a matter of practical efficiency but of a proactive, preëmptive way of living, in which inefficiency is the worst kind of waste. The way we manage our chores is a measure of our worthiness. No one wants to live in a stupid home... And only a chump would ever run out of toilet paper.

But what if there is actual value in running out of things? — the New Yorker

...the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives. But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd. -Laing — The Guardian

[Airbnb] says its model—stay in somebody’s home, pay less than a hotel would charge—will help it facilitate travel that won’t pave over Cuba’s unique character, forged by decades of isolation from its northern neighbor.

“Think about the big hotel chains coming in, with mass development,” says Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb co-founder ... “The idea here is to support growth in travel that isn’t disruptive, that actually celebrates and preserves Cuba as a distinct destination.” — bloomberg.com

Architecture has entered into a new engagement with digital culture and capital—which amounts to the most radical change within the discipline since the confluence of modernism and industrial production in the early twentieth century. Yet this shift has gone largely unnoticed, because it has not taken the form of a visible upheaval or wholesale transformation. To the contrary: It is a stealthy infiltration of architecture via its constituent elements. — Art Forum

The 40-storey building at 888 Collins Street, in Victoria Harbour, will interpret real-time weather data from the Bureau of Meteorology and will transmit the next day's forecast every half-hour. However, rather than showing the weather report in numbers and with a temperature display [lighting designer] Canadian-born Bruce Ramus said it would be more of an abstract representation and reflection of the environment of Docklands. — Domain

A source close to [Hyperloop Technologies Inc.], who was not authorized speak publicly, confirmed the company has moved into the space, which was chosen in part so Hyperloop could be around artists and designers and other creative types in a space big enough to build large-scale hardware. [...]

Funded by a reported $8.5 million in seed money, the company has raised an additional $20 million of the estimated $80 million it will need to build a five-mile Hyperloop test track — latimes.com

The technology of supertall buildings is a bit like genetic testing or nuclear energy: a volatile form of power. Technological capacities have outpaced our judgment. We know we can do it, but we don’t know when not to do it. And so some endlessly wealthy mogul [...] will eventually move into a preposterously expensive penthouse so far above the Earth’s crust that the air is thin and gales hammer at the glass. A mile’s not science fiction. It’s not even an outer limit.  — nymag.com

A research team from the Mechanical Engineering department at University of Utah is using high-performance computing resources from XSEDE to instantaneously and accurately simulate how infrastructure elements, such as parks, buildings, and parking lots, as well as their specifications and variations, affect air characteristics and quality in urban settings. — Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment

Driverless pods, gliding above city streets using a network of elevated guideways. This is SkyTran -- but is it the future? SkyTran wants to do away with train schedules and central stations to develop a grid system above the ground with multiple "off ramps" acting as stations where users can board pre-booked pods – a cab service for the skies. Call for SkyTran on your smart phone and a computer-controlled, magnetically levitating pod arrives. It will whisk you across the city... — CNN

I think our hope is that it will make guests connect to the hotel in a different way by understanding the thoughts of the architect and the designer, who wanted to create more of a community than a typical hotel lobby — intransit.blogs.nytimes.com

They used computer modeling to design a pair of buildings, one of which works like a gigantic, curved mirror. The glass surface of the northernmost building reflects light down into the shadow cast by its southern partner. And the carefully defined curve of that glass allows the reflected light to follow the shadow throughout the day. — wired.com

It's a special building because it lives, grows, breathes and changes over time. Its terraces are dotted with 150 tall trees which together with 50 plants in the court produce about 150,000 liters per hour of oxygen, at night absorbing about 200,000 liters of carbon dioxide per hour. Also slashing particulate matter caused by cars, protecting from noise, following the natural cycle of the seasons, growing day by day, creating an ideal microclimate. — Divisare