Photos from Detroit taken the summer of 2013. They include shots from Hamtramk, the Fisher Body Plant, the Thornapple Slaughterhouse, Michigan Central Station, the Brewster-Douglass housing projects, the Packard Auto Plant, the Lee Plaza Hotel, Saint Agnes church, Corktown, Eastern Market, and various other scenic spots throughout the downtown area. — johnszot.com
Following up from yesterday's post, Can Detroit's Architectural Past Inspire It to Claw Back to Greatness?, today we share some photos by John Szot. View full entry
Almost no one in America has heard of the Alaskan village of Kivalina. It clings to a narrow spit of sand on the edge of the Bering Sea, far too small to feature on maps of Alaska, never mind the United States.
Which is perhaps just as well, because within a decade Kivalina is likely to be under water. Gone, forever. Remembered - if at all - as the birthplace of America's first climate change refugees.
— bbc.co.uk
“We’re not willing to back down on this.They can put forward as much pressure as they would like but I’m very committed to this program and I’m very committed to the well-being of our neighborhoods.” - Gayle McLaughlin, Richmond’s mayor — NYT
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times The power of eminent domain has traditionally worked against homeowners, who can be forced to sell their property to make way for a new highway or shopping mall. But now the working-class city of Richmond, Calif., hopes to use the same legal tool to... View full entry
Bruce Katz, vice president of the Brookings Institution, says that many American cities show promising signs of renewal. He's written a book with Brookings Fellow Jennifer Bradley called The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy. The book argues that metro areas — or, cities and suburbs together — are powerful economic engines with considerable political influence... — npr.org
Chinese cities have recently become notorious for their sheer degree of copying and reproduction, with hundreds of replicas of famous historic buildings and even of recent ones – such as the copy of Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House, under construction almost immediately after the original was completed. But in London, the Crystal Palace replica is only the most vast – and probably the least likely – of a smaller but still significant series of proposed reconstructions. — guardian.co.uk
“Urban Innovation” are two words I hear in tandem a lot these days, along with “civic hackathon” and “crowdsourced urbanism.” Contrary to what you might think, these buzzwords have not been coined by urbanists attempting to appear more innovative. They’ve been coined by tech innovators attempting to be more urbanist. — nextcity.org
It often happens that news events create a new context for existing photo projects, and such is the case with Philip Jarmain’s photos of Detroit in light of the city’s recent filing for bankruptcy. Jarmain’s series American Beauty documents architecture from a pre-Depression era Detroit — a time when the city was on the rise. They now stand in contrast to its current rock-bottom economic straits. — wired.com
The opening of Work Towards Fairness by architect Eric Moed signifies the first step towards the restoration of Casa do Passal in central Portugal. The Casa do Passal was formerly inhabited by Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat who helped around 30,000 people escape into neutral... View full entry
He was best known for large-scale outdoor works that often involved simple if rather extravagant ideas or gestures: a SoHo loft filled with two feet of earth, for example, or a solid brass rod two inches in diameter and one kilometer long driven into the ground in Kassel, Germany, so that only its smooth top was visible (a work consistent with an artist who once noted that “the invisible is real”). — New York Times
It works like this: people empty their latrines into a sewage receptacle (currently, latrines are often emptied into rivers), the waste gets funneled through a series of tubes and is pressurized at extreme temperatures, and the byproduct is clean, possibly drinkable water. Deshusses describes the process as “a pressure cooker on steroids.” — wunc.org
As John Kerry was trying to renew negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority late last week, the "Architactics" exhibition opened at the ZeZeZe Architecture Gallery in Tel Aviv Port. This coincidence provides an injection of realism into what, a week earlier, seemed like a series of interesting mental exercises, but far from the present reality. The aim of the exhibition... is to mobilize tools from the world of design and architecture to help to promote the peace talks. — haaretz.com
"The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is based mainly on a territorial problem, and therefore architects must play a central role in finding its solution," says architect Yehuda Greenfield-Gilat, who, together with fellow architect Karen Lee Bar-Sinai, founded Saya in... View full entry
Yesterday, led by Speaker Christine Quinn, the New York City Council voted to limit Madison Square Garden’s permit to operate on top of Penn Station to just 10 more years.
Building a new Penn Station and the next Madison Square Garden will not only improve the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who use the station every day – it will revitalize the surrounding area and bring tremendous long-term economic value to the region.
— mas.org
“Ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are far away from everything.” And it is this observation that for me epitomizes the problem of the driverless car — it’s the worst kind of solutionism. By becoming so enamored with how technology might transform the car, we’ve neglected to adequately explore how getting rid of cars might transform how and where we live. We’d do well to heed Gorz’s exhortation to “never make transportation an issue by itself.” — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
It's a given that America continues to be a car-obsessed society despite the more painstaking reality of driving a car in many major cities of today. In The New York Times, editor Allison Arieff of SPUR points out that the U.S. is still fixated on selling, using and enhancing the car when... View full entry
Keeping up-to-date with your favorite architects, firms and schools has just become WAY easier! As you know, Archinect delivers a lot of news and information, every day, reflecting the activity of the architecture community at large. For some people, this can be too much information! So... View full entry
Antiterrorist paraphernalia litter parts of nine square blocks, or at least a dozen acres -- all to protect the New York Stock Exchange from attacks.
Where Broadway opens to Wall Street, jaw-like truck barriers and a plastic-tent guard booth block the street. A fence squeezes pedestrians into one narrowed sidewalk.
Concrete Jersey barriers posing as planters are particularly hideous, part of a new antiterrorist aesthetic that afflicts courthouses and City Hall.
— bloomberg.com