... thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.
Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards.
— wired.com
If you drove far enough, from Maine to Georgia, from the Midwest to Southern California, or simply from one end of Los Angeles to the other, you would start to notice that there were different ecologies, and that some were geographical and some were cultural, but that they intersected and collaged to form a vast, sprawling, layered network whose patterns were discernible only if you took the long view and just kept driving. — Places Journal
In an essay for Places, Gabrielle Esperdy (of American Road Trip) follows architectural critic Reyner Banham out of Los Angeles and out onto the open road, placing him in the tradition of European travelers, from de Tocqueville and Dickens to Alistair Cooke and Stephen Fry, whose observations... View full entry
F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab are pleased to present the Free Universal Construction Kit: a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten* popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids. — fffff.at
This is totally brilliant. View full entry
Wynn’s hotels are famous for having brought a luxurious, five-star approach to Vegas. But their real achievement may be psychological: they have remade the architecture of gaming itself. The received wisdom of modern casino design was codified by a former gambling addict named Bill Friedman in his book “Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition.” — The New Yorker
Jonah Lehrer pens a piece in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, in which he visits Roger Thomas, the head of design at Wynn Resorts, who has revolutionized casino design in Las Vegas. View full entry
In Inner Mongolia a new city stands largely empty. This city, Ordos, suggests that the great Chinese building boom, which did so much to fuel the country's astonishing economic growth, is over. Is a bubble about to burst? — BBC
China, of course, is not new terrain for international architects. Many top American firms have run offices inside China for a decade or more. The new arrivals, though, come not by invitation or out of curiosity but because they need work. They are, as Michael Tunkey, head of the China office for the North American firm Cannon Design, says, “refugees from the economic crisis.” — New York Times
This compilation of texts written since 1986 reveals a parallel activity to Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s professional life. The book is like a sniper’s log, a register of events and accumulated experience, for the purpose of identifying tendencies and assessing performance, rather than to establish truths. — AA Website
This looks like an interesting book. View full entry
In its latest issue #15 Rotterdam-based MONU magazine set out on a daring journey to investigate, as chief editor Bernd Upmeyer proclaims, “one of the most fascinating and biggest issues of our time and in culture, or what is left of it: the non-ideological – or better... View full entry
Van Alen Books is a new architecture and design bookstore and public reading room located in NY. How will @DelaineIsaac fare with this newly industrialized space? Does LOT-EK address the dearth of public meeting and forum spaces in the city? — YouTube
Apple is actually taking a site that is now parking lots and low-rise boxes and making it worse for the community. Yes, it will be iconic, assuming you think a building shaped like a whitewall motorcycle tire is iconic, but it will reduce current street connectivity, seal off potential walking routes and, as I wrote some time back, essentially turn its back on its community. With a parking garage designed to hold over ten thousand cars, by the way. — Switchboard
Kaid Benfield, staff member at the Natural Resources Defense Council, slams Apple on it's proposed new HQ in Cupertino. Before you run off to return your idevices, though, consider that the new Archinect iPhone app will be released shortly ;) Related: Apple's new headquarters lacks vision Plans... View full entry
THE Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, has devised a new index which ranks the competitiveness of the most prominent cities across the globe using a number of economic, demographic and social variables. The 120 cities in the index are home to some 750m people and $20.2 trillion worth of GDP, 29% of the world's total. — The Economist
The book answers questions like: Why did the flushing toilet take two centuries to catch on? Why were kitchens cut off from the rest of a home? And did strangers really share beds as recently as a century ago? (Yes, they did.) — npr.org
We may perhaps have been preconditioned to search out irony, but this, like most of our preconceptions, quickly began to fade. Eight years and thousands of miles later, this view has shifted into a multiplicity of facets describing a place that is far more difficult to define. Our once hermetic view of the supposedly hermetic suburban world has taken on a prismatic new form — and with it a far greater sense of omnipresence. — The Design Observer Group
Also, The Book Discussion: In 2002, Jason Griffiths and Alex Gino set out to explore the American suburbs. Over 178 days they drove 22,383 miles, made 134 suburban house calls, and took 2,593 photographs. In Manifest Destiny, Griffiths reveals the results of this exploration. Structured through... View full entry
Many of us evaluate a restaurant based on the food; after all, restaurants are about eating. But how many of us stop and think about the design--like the look of the interior, the materials used, and the color scheme--when it comes to our food experiences?
This is the question that the Chicago Architecture Foundation wants you to think about through their series Appetite for Design.
— gapersblock.com
Berlin-based Barkow Leibinger Architects have shared with us "Loom-Hyperbolic," the architects' installation at the 2012 Marrakech Biennale "Higher Atlas" in Morocco which commenced earlier this week (the installation however is still on view until June 3rd at the ruins of the Koutoubia Mosque). This year's Moroccan biennale of contemporary international culture was curated by Carson Chan and Nadim Samman. — bustler.net