In 1969 Reyner Banham in his book The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment marked the shift between the concept of interior to that of an artificial environment. Technology and new human needs in fact had become an integral part of architecture, defining a new paradigm to describe indoor... View full entry
In the heart of Hollywood's Barnsdall Park, Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House will officially reopen on February 13, as recently announced by L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, Councilmember Mitch O'Farrell, and the Barnsdall Park Art Foundation. This isn't the first time the iconic house has been... View full entry
Long accustomed to basing its reputation on the grandeur of its old buildings, the city now finds it almost impossible to agree on how to build new ones.
In recent months, traditionalists have blocked efforts to introduce contemporary architecture in the historic core [...]. Modernists are rolling their eyes at new buildings that copy traditional styles, arguing that they pervert a record of architectural progress long documented in mortar and stone.
— nytimes.com
Don't miss these heated discussions on the subject matter:Clemson scraps its modern building planNew Clemson University architecture building set to test Charleston's limits on context View full entry
Big, brash, and full of energy, Moscow is a city that knows how to make an impression. But for all its attractions — world-class museums, clubs and rapidly transforming food scene, to name a few — its downsides are impossible to ignore. [...]
This week, The Calvert Journal considers Moscow’s prospects, consulting experts at the Moscow Urban Forum, looking in detail at two projects in the pipeline — VDNKh and Zaryadye Park — and checking out some neighbourhoods that are already going places.
— calvertjournal.com
The upcoming publication and exhibition "Treatise: Why Write Alone?" at the Graham Foundation in Chicago utilizes the architectural treatise as a platform for experimentation, theoretical inquiry, and debate through the collective works of 14 emerging designers.↑ Bureau Spectacular (Jimenez... View full entry
Street artists are showing how they’d map cities differently in a new show that lets visitors step into their clandestine worlds.
[...] Mapping the City, an exhibition of the responses by 50 international street artists to being asked to map their cities “through subjective surveying rather than objective ordinance”. Conventional cartography this is not.
— theguardian.com
The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into “inner” and “outer,” “higher” and “lower” beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments. — brain pickings
Susan Sontag would have been 82 years old this week. Here is a link to some of her illuminating writings as pointed by Maria Popova. We could use some of these ideas applying them to architecture as we, hopefully, move towards more "interesting" criticism after a period of sling-shotting and... View full entry
Decimated by manufacturing losses, some smaller cities are turning for help to an unlikely group of people: typeface designers. Can new fonts really breathe life into the postindustrial city? [...]
Type has a lot of effect on the atmosphere of a place, he says, calling it “the voice of the city”: “I think cities that don’t have this very dynamic energy, they don’t feel the need to change their identity.”
— theguardian.com
In The Wall Street Journal Magazine's upcoming February issue, writer Tony Perrottet tells the history and potential of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and its location in Moscow's Gorky Park, as he visits the site to meet with art philanthropist Dasha Zhukova and Rem Koolhaas. Founded by... View full entry
It’s time to retire the term gentrification altogether. Fourteen years ago, Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard of the Brookings Institution wrote that gentrification “is a politically loaded concept that generally has not been useful in resolving growth and community change debates because its meaning is unclear.” That’s even truer today. Some U.S. cities do have serious affordability problems, but they’re not the problems critics of gentrification think they are. — slate.com
What's your take on John Buntin's Slate piece? View full entry
This map shows the difference in living costs around the world using figures from the world's largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide. The Consumer Price Index, used to determine the difference in the living costs between countries takes into account the prices of groceries, transportation, restaurants and utilities.
The CPI in the infographic is a relative indicator of a country's living costs compared to New York.
— MoveHub
The top five cheapest countries are: India, Nepal, Pakistan, Tunisia, and Algeria.The most expensive countries are: Switzerland, Norway, Venezuela, Iceland, and Denmark. View full entry
North Africa used to be a civilizational crossroads in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews not only lived alongside one another but also shared one another's language and culture. This mingled society, formed from many intense particularities, is what we call cosmopolitanism. It was born in the Middle East, and it now seems to be disappearing there, including from the one place where the cosmopolitan ideal reached its supreme realization: Alexandria. — Foreign Policy
As a researcher interested in the intersection of urban form and place, Joseph Heathcott set out to explore how one of New York’s borders shapes the lived experience and physical environment of its surroundings. Through historical research, photography, and deep observation, he traces the city’s only major internal land boundary — the Brooklyn-Queens border — and draws out the social and spatial conditions of this largely invisible urban seam. — urbanomnibus.net
At a hearing earlier today, Los Angeles’ Culture Heritage Commission voted to consider granting Historic-Cultural Monument status to Norms Coffee Shop on La Cienega. This would protect the iconic building in the Googie modern style until a final decision is made by the commission. According to the Los Angeles Conservancy, the new owners of Norms were issued a demolition permit on January 5, triggering a wave of outrage from architectural preservationists. — hyperallergic.com
The building that housed the world’s first Taco Bell is under “imminent threat of demolition,” according to the Downey Conservancy [...]
Although Downey is more famously recognized as the site of the oldest operating location for [McDonald's], it is Taco Bell that built its very first location within the city. [...]
“The [Conservancy] recognizes that the building’s current location may not be the best for its future and, as such, is also looking at opportunities to relocate"
— thedowneypatriot.com
Why does this matter? Not because Taco Bell is inherently newsworthy, but because fast food spots are arguably Downey's local urbanism icons. The city in southeast Los Angeles County is known for its Googie fast-food joints, historic McDonald's and drive-ins (as well as the birthplace of the... View full entry