It was International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin's great dream to marry the aesthetic with the athletic—thus, every Olympics between 1912 and 1948 awarded gold, silver, and bronze medals to artists. There were five categories of individual competition: Architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music. — theatlantic.com
Charles Downing Lay was the only American to win a medal in 1936, taking home silver in the Municipal Planning division of the Architecture category for his design titled "Marine Park in Brooklyn." View full entry
The 600 seats in question only concern 10-meter platform events, which start Monday. Small portions of the dives may not be visible. The Zaha Hadid-designed Aquatics Centre features a dipping roof that limits viewing from the highest seats. — sfgate.com
Max Steiner's Cement Cinder Block Necklaces are actually cast from poured concrete and cured for a month before being sold. At 3/4" tall, they're the cutest construction materials with which you can adorn yourself. — boingboing.net
Could the entire mood of a neighborhood depend on something as simple as street width? That was the question David Yoon, a writer, designer, photographer, and self-confessed urban planning geek living in Los Angeles, asked himself after returning from a trip to Paris. He started documenting existing streets of Los Angeles and narrowing them to see the effects that his manipulations had on the city. — mascontext.com
Though little known outside the art world, this surprisingly drab series of buildings is renowned by dealers and collectors as the premier place to stash their most valuable works. — nytimes.com
the city-as-a-system approach described earlier can be applied as a methodology to identify how complex problems that may appear unrelated...interact with each other in the context of a given city or threat network. Taking this approach may allow planners to identify emergent patterns within the complex adaptive system of a relevant city, make sense of the system logic, and thus begin to design tailored interventions. — Global Trends 2030
David J. Kilcullen (former Senior Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007 and author of the bestselling books The Accidental Guerrilla and Counterinsurgency) analyzes three megatrends; urbanization, littoralization and connectedness as well as their implications for future conflict. View full entry
Wired shares images of executive board rooms for some of the world's most powerful groups. Most of these look just like my grandparents dining room. View full entry
The cycle superhighway, which opened in April, is the first of 26 routes scheduled to be built to encourage more people to commute to and from Copenhagen by bicycle. More bike path than the Interstate its name suggests, it is the brainchild of city planners who were looking for ways to increase bicycle use in a place where half of the residents already bike to work or to school every day. — nytimes.com
Less than a fifth know architects prepare construction drawings, and only nine per cent understand that they control site budgets; 15 per cent don’t even know that architects design buildings. — architectsjournal.co.uk
Autodesk is known for architectural and design software, but in recent years has started offering products aimed at ordinary consumers. Besides $60m for Socialcam, which makes video authoring and publishing software, Autodesk paid $32 million for Instructables... And it purchased a company called Pixlr, which is an online photo editor, for an undisclosed sum. Autodesk also developed consumer software for drawing and painting online, which it calls SketchBook. — bits.blogs.nytimes.com
... a cache of biological samples appeared through the criminal networks of Mumbai, in the vain hope that it might provide new marketable narcotic opportunities. The collective drive and expertise of the refugees managed to turn theses genetically-engineered fungal samples into a new type of infrastructure - providing heat, light and building material for the refugees. Dharavi rapidly evolved it's own micro-economy based around the mushrooms. — tobiasrevell.com
Mr. Landman views these attempts at defining the critic’s frame of reference — Kimmelman-style and Scott-style — as entirely appropriate. Critics, he said, are not supposed to be objective; they are free to champion certain kinds of work. They are “free to like or dislike anyone or anything.” — NYT
Arthur S. Brisbane, (the Public Editor) provides some insight into the workings of the NYT Arts section. He spoke with Jonathan Landman, The Times’s culture editor, in an effort to better understand the rules that The Times plays by. Specifically, when it comes to the New York... View full entry
Seung, who is the third Korean architect ever selected and the only one to get invited twice, says he hesitated to participate in the Biennale. This is because of the 64 star architects invited, there were only two from Asia: Seung and Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima. “I thought the European architecture world doesn’t respect Asian architecture. After hesitating, I decided to go and discuss Asian architectural values that aren’t found in Western architecture.” — english.hani.co.kr
Gruen’s idea transformed American consumption patterns and much of the environment around us. At age 60, however, the enclosed regional shopping mall also appears to be an idea that has run its course — theatlanticcities.com
University presses will endure as long as they are in a position to offer significant value to academic authors and their readers, and as long as they have the support of their home institutions. In the present and near future, we will see new models for the university press including funded open access models, collaborative publishing models, and global partnerships to develop and disseminate high quality scholarship worldwide. — chronicle.com