...What [Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao] showed, [is that] if you picked a remote part of the world and put a world-class museum in it, the world would beat a path to your door. That's the so-called "Bilbao Effect," but you'll notice that doesn't mention art; it mentions tourism, travel and finance.
I feel we're in a strange time where we're building furious Potemkin villages of seeming life, behind which, if you looked with the right eyes, you would see cobwebs and skeletons.
— NPR
NPR has curated a list of noteworthy-quotes from Michael Lewis, an art history professor at Williams College, who's interviewed in the recent issue of Commentary Magazine.Never before has art sold better or museums drawn larger crowds. Yet, according to Lewis at least, most Americans have become... View full entry
We all have a pretty good idea which NYC neighborhoods command top dollar, but this incredible 3D map from NeighborhoodX really puts things into perspective by pinning the city’s 325 neighborhoods against one another in a visually jarring side-by-side comparison. Among the most expensive? In Brooklyn... — 6sqft
More on New York real estate:The rise of communal living in New YorkThis $250M mega penthouse might become New York's priciest homeNew York & London ranked highest in 2015 Global Cities IndexNYC's public-housing woes View full entry
Goldfinger’s [brutalist] buildings were decreed “soulless.” Inhabitants claimed to suffer health problems and depression from spending time inside of them. Some of Goldfinger’s buildings were vacated because occupants found them so ugly. Yet, architects praised Goldfinger’s buildings. [...]
This divide—this hatred from the public and love from designers and architects—tends to be the narrative around buildings like Goldfinger’s. Which is to say, gigantic, imposing buildings made of concrete.
— slate.com
Roman Mars, host of the design-centric podcast "99% Invisible", blogs for Slate on the polarizing quality of brutalist architecture – beloved by architects and hated by pretty much everyone else. Discussing the history of concrete in building architecture, Mars also puts brutalism in perspective... View full entry
If America decides to take on its growing slum problem, people will need to think hard about how to do so. Mobility programs are proven to work for the families who move, but what happens to the neighborhoods that people leave? Can affordable-housing projects in low-income areas also help poor families succeed, or are they doomed to fail their residents, no matter how nice they are, because of where they are located? — theatlantic.com
Related on Archinect:In Chicago, forming economically integrated suburbs is more complex than it looksAbandoned schools = new development opportunitiesNYC's public-housing woes View full entry
By the end of this year, some 20 million households in the U.S. will have some form of smart-home device, double the number in 2012 [...]
But some homeowners find themselves frustrated by the proliferation of smart-home technology. They complain of complex systems for once-simple tasks like turning on the light, “learning algorithms” that get their preferences wrong and systems that simply go on the fritz too often.
— wsj.com
More on Archinect:Enlisting the Internet of Things against California's historic droughtHackers Present Threat to Internet of ThingsWhen 'Smart Homes' Get Hacked: I Haunted A Complete Stranger's House Via The Internet View full entry
In 2007, [São Paulo] Mayor Gilberto Kassab implemented the Clean City Law, labelling outdoor adverts a form of “visual pollution”. In a single year, the city removed 15,000 billboards and 300,000 oversized storefront signs. [...]
The ubiquity of outdoor advertising means that we have come to take it for granted; accepting both its presence and its purpose as natural features of the urban environment.
— theguardian.com
Previously on Archinect: Rethinking Billboards as homeless shelters, and as land art projects in Art + Architecture: The Los Angeles Nomadic Division Sets Up Camp. View full entry
‘"It’s hard to think about ways to drain the swamp when alligators are biting your ass.’” — Placemakers.com
Immediately after a natural disaster, most residents want to get things back to normal, even if that "normal" wasn't particularly ideal. The story of the Katrina Cottages, a series of 400 to 800 square foot residences that would provide temporary relief housing in Mississippi after Hurricane... View full entry
Danziger addressed the issues of perception: How does a patient with a shifted perception experience space? He focused on color, the distribution of light, material, and shape. — NPR Berlin
While designing for medically healthy clients can occasionally drive an architect insane, an entirely different set of challenges is involved in creating a safe and healing environment for mentally ill patients. Architect Jason Danziger found himself asking questions like: what makes a bed... View full entry
Kakutani is the main farmer behind "Tokyo Salad," the Metro’s new farming enterprise, farming that takes place underneath the Tozai Line. [...]
Tokyo Metro started hydroponic farming this past January. They’re currently selling the lettuce varieties to a local Italian restaurant and The Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay Hotel. Over the next couple years, they’re hoping to expand. Maybe they’ll start selling to grocery stores, and maybe Kakutani says, "we’ll make salads or smoothies.”
— pri.org
More innovations from Japan:Japan's largest treehouse is also a high-tech engineering featTurning Japan's golfing greens into solar farmsJapan's simple logic for putting toilets in elevators View full entry
Burglary is a spatial crime: its very definition requires architecture...Indeed, burglary's architectural interest comes not from its ubiquity, but from its unexpected, often surprisingly subtle misuse of the built environment. Burglars approach buildings differently, often seeking modes of entry other than doors and approaching buildings—whole cites—as if they're puzzles waiting to be solved or beaten. — BLDGBLOG
More on Archinect:The Secret Service wants to build a fake White HouseArchitecture of paranoiaCurbing violence through better architectureSingapore's Sterile Authoritarianism View full entry
"You have generations of people under the age of 35 … who are choosing to live car free and car-lite." – Westside Councilman Mike Bonin — L.A. Times
From the newly installed "protected" intersections in Austin, Texas and Davis, California to additional proposed bus lanes and bike paths in Los Angeles, car culture is becoming less of a given and more of an expensive, perhaps even less desirable, option. Cities across the U.S. are starting to... View full entry
A court in Venice has refused to fast-track a legal claim filed by the Icelandic Art Center (IAC) seeking the reopening of artist Christoph Büchel’s mosque, which launched earlier this year in a disused church in Venice as part of the Biennale.
The IAC is the commissioner of the controversial project, which was housed in the former Catholic church [...]. The mosque closed at the end of May after only two weeks when city officials claimed that it breached health and safety regulations.
— theartnewspaper.com
Previously in the Archinect News: Police Shut Down Mosque Installation at Venice Biennale View full entry
Archive (“Architecture for Health in Vulnerable Environments”) proposes “bringing attention to the built environment and how it is a transmission vehicle for the spread and control of a respiratory illness like TB” [...]
Archive is starting small, with an as-yet-uninitiated project on respiratory health and indoor pollutants in Ethiopia and projects on TB awareness in London.
— nextcity.org
More on the intersection of architecture and public health:A story about death and architectureNew Parsons-led collaborative aims to make affordable housing healthierHow concrete floors can prevent child deaths in Bangladesh5 ways to build health into your architecture, as seen at GW’s new $... View full entry
Gornja Siga has come, over the last few months, to assume an outsize role in the imagination of many — not only in Europe, but also in the Middle East and in the United States...What novel society might be accomplished in a place like this, with no national claim or tenant? Such were the thoughts that had for some time inflamed the spirit of Vit Jedlicka, a 31-year-old Czech politician who traveled to the land earlier this year and, in broad daylight, planted a new flag in its unstable soil. — NY Times
The New York Times has posted a riveting portrait of the ongoing movement to establish a libertarian micro state in the borderlands of Serbia and Croatia. While unmentioned in the article, there's already fascinating connections between the potential state and the world of architecture.Last month... View full entry
At a macro level, Chicago is quite diverse. At a neighborhood level, it isn’t. — Five Thirty Eight Economics
How can a city be both diverse and segregated? In Chicago's case, the city is home to every major racial/ethnic group, but these groups rarely tend to live together in the same neighborhoods. In fact, on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level, Chicago has one of the higher residential segregation... View full entry