Aerial footage from a helicopter of the largest demonstration in history when millions of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir square and other squares in Cairo demanding the fall of the Muhammad Morsi and Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood regime.) View full entry
One of the most gratifying bits of feedback I ever received from one of my Ranger projects came from a 60-something woman who’d attended a campfire program on freeway landscapes in Los Angeles. Months later, she told me that she never looked at a freeway in the same way. Who knows what this kind of change in perception might ultimately lead to? — Places Journal
For decades intrepid tourists have been journeying to the monumental dams of the American West to marvel at the infrastructures of hydroelectric power. These days they're just as likely to be on a field trip to trace the pathways of the Internet, or the footprint of communication satellites, or... View full entry
Steven M. Davis, a partner in Davis Brody Bond, which designed the museum, said he and his colleagues had been guided by the principles of memory, authenticity, scale and emotion.
The museum will not open to the public until next spring, but officials have begun taking reporters through the unfinished galleries, confident that what was a construction zone a year ago, and a disaster area after Hurricane Sandy, now looks more like a museum.
— nytimes.com
Now that the exhibition has opened at the museum's Geffen Contemporary branch in Little Tokyo, where it will limp along through the middle of September as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents series, it's clear that it is the product of an architectural ruling class in Los Angeles that is not so much dysfunctional as increasingly insular. — Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times
It’s odd how little architects have had to say on the subject of sex. If they’re routinely designing the buildings in which sex happens, then you might expect them to spend more time thinking about it. Buildings frame and house our sexual lives — Aeon
Richard J Williams (Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures at the University of Edinburgh) is the author of Sex and Buildings: Modern Architecture and the Sexual Revolution (2013). In a recent piece he explores the relationship between sex, communal living and architecture. Mr... View full entry
"We hoped the canals would simply make it easier to move around the city, for civilians and police but the reality is Water Level is one giant port of entry for whoever has the cash."
- Yoko Aramaki, City Planner
— Flickr
At Brickworld 2013, Nathaniel Brill and a team led by Carter Baldwin, worked together to produce a vision of a cyberpunk city of the somewhat near future. h/t Fred Scharmen View full entry
Wainwright -
"So Leandro we are sitting on a window ledge in Dalston. Can you tell us why we're here?
Erlich -
"The idea is to create a facade that will resemble the architecture of the . . . neighborhood and um - that has always been part of my interest to bring the ordinary architecture as a stage for the public to participate in a kind of fiction that would be built through the experience."
— The Guardian
Though edging on the sphere of art, Erlich's Dalston House provides a publicly accessible perversion of what would otherwise be banal architecture. This project uses that unexpected architectural content to foster rich narratives both as unique experiences and serendipitous performances. As... View full entry
Crank the A/C in the office just to stay awake,
Espresso and Red Bull till I got a stomach ache.
With our cotton blazers high, we have a sense of style,
But to the rest of the world we just point and smile
I read code books, while I'm on vacation
Take pictures of, my latest creation
We wear black and gray, with no logos on our threads
So many sleepless nights we're like the walking dead
— youtube.com
The solution, or so the city’s traffic planners hope, is to encourage people to cycle for longer distances by creating the cycling equivalent of freeways, which will provide fast, direct routes of up to 22 kilometers into the center. A total of 28 highways are planned, providing 495 kilometers of dedicated bike tracks... Nine routes are under construction and should be completed by 2015 at a cost of 208 million krone, or $36 million, divided equally between central and local government. — nytimes.com
The prototype of the shelter is now being tested in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. The refugee families who would be making the shelter their homes will have a direct say in how the product is developed, putting their experience at the heart of this collaborative process. — ikeafoundation.org
The Empire State Building starred in first-ever music video over the weekend as the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s released their latest single, “Despair.” High atop the observation deck from 2 a.m. to sunrise (the only hours that the tourists are at bay), the quintessential New York band rocked the quintessential New York building — blogs.artinfo.com
Chee Pearlman, a design consultant and curator, ventured that nests are “probably the purest antidote to the heavy steel-and-concrete building footprints that, city by mega-city, are overtaking the globe.” — NYT
Penelope Green explores the work of a number of contemporary "nest" makers such as Jayson Fann and Porky Hefer, who make nests for relaxation, comfort or pleasure. Ms. Green also discusses some recent examples of Twigitecture created as either fine art or performance art. View full entry
Smart city infrastructure can augment the ability of managers, planners, designers and engineers to define and implement a fundamentally better next generation of buildings, cities, regions — right? Maybe. For that to be a serious proposition, it’s going to have to be normal for planners and designers not only to collaborate productively with engineers, but to do so with the full and competent participation of the only people they mistrust more than each other ... customers. — Places Journal
"A city is not a BMW," writes Carl Skelton. "You can't drive it without knowing how it works." In a weighty think-piece on Places, he argues that the public needs new tools of citizenship to thrive in a "new soft world" increasingly shaped by smart meters, surveillance cameras, urban informatics... View full entry
Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X takes stock of seventy little magazines from this period, which were published in over a dozen cities. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazine” was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals. —
This month the boundary has been finally crossed. It is because the exhibition and ongoing research project Clip/Stamp/Fold has landed in the south hemisphere by this month until July 2013. Santiago has had the chance for this first landing. The local version of the project became real due to the... View full entry
"Turrell has continued to develop a series of works that address architecture and the space of the viewer. As part of his evolving practice, he has utilized architectural interventions, created immersive environments, designed and erected autonomous outdoor spaces, and continues to build structures within Roden Crater-an extinct volcano in Arizona." — LACMA Pamphlet
As the world is transitioning to a more sustainable lifestyle the implications of such a shift have already permeated the architecture & design realm. From the Starbucks prototype-cafe in Tukwilla, Washington, to the establishment of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, it is evident that a change... View full entry