Germane Barnes wants Opa-Locka to be known for something else...He knows [change] can happen because he lives there, and has seen the work of a group of artists and organizers slowly change the landscape...The city's history intrigued him, not merely because it seemed like a perfect case study for his thesis about revitalizing a community without gentrification, but because it also spoke to his own experiences. — Curbed
More on Archinect:In Chicago, forming economically integrated suburbs is more complex than it looksWelcome to Evanston, Illinois: the carless suburbiaBerliners are getting their hopes up for transformed Kulturforum arts districtWith a little compromise, illegal urban squats like Ljubljana's... View full entry
[On Thursday, November 5], the Commission on Chicago Landmarks unanimously voted to recommend Chicago Landmark status to the Marina City complex. [...]
A resolution will be drafted and will head to the Chicago City Council in December for a final vote.
— chicago.curbed.com
This seems like a done deal. As quoted in Loop North News, Commission on Chicago Landmarks chairman, Rafael Leon: "everybody recognizes those buildings around the world, that the moment that they see it, they see Chicago. I’m so glad that we have gotten to the point of designating these... View full entry
Looking back at the Season 1 finale of Archinect Sessions this past summer — featuring Thom Mayne and Eui-Sung Yi, our listeners had the chance to win a copy of "Haiti Now". The book is a visual almanac of the "Haiti Now" project from the NOW Institute. Founded by Thom Mayne, the Now Institute... View full entry
With their sustainable growth slowing down, things didn't look good at all for the future of Turkey's malls. [...]
With interest in city conservation growing, a popular opposition against gentrification projects rising, and a newborn curiosity for the country's Ottoman-era buildings being threatened by construction companies, talking positively about shopping malls came to be considered sacrilegious from 2013 on.
— psmag.com
More on Istanbul's architecture:Istanbul’s introverted megaspacesIstanbul's 'illegal' towers to be demolished after landmark court rulingAn urbanist's guide to Istanbul: ‘We live in a giant construction site’Gezi Park: Architecture and the Aestheticization of Politics View full entry
Our new podcast, Archinect Sessions: One-to-One is an interview show, straight-up. Each episode features a single interview with a notable figure in contemporary architecture – it's that simple. Usually, One-to-One will be led by me or Paul Petrunia, while occasionally others will serve as... View full entry
Cairo is an unruly urban sprawl that has spun out of control. Now, officials want to build a new capital in the desert -- a potent symbol of President Sisi's regime. But will it ever happen? [...]
The old Cairo is an ugly city, an affront to the senses. [...] a city of contradictions, created from the bottom up, even though that had never been the intention. It has been growing wildly since the 1960s -- from 3.5 million back then to 18 million now -- against the will of the country's rulers.
— spiegel.de
Previously in the Archinect News: A New "Capital" for Cairo?Egypt's urban growth threatens Nile farmlandPhotographer documents Egypt's monumental housing developments in the desert View full entry
Besides the thing itself, architecture concerns itself with two kinds of sign about it: iconic signs and symbols. Iconic signs resemble the thing itself. They are the plans and elevations and isometrics. The more symbolic architecture is that of language, the word, the logo and so forth. The postmodern turn shifted the emphasis from the iconic to the symbolic.
I think [Eyal] Weizman has created an architecture about a whole other kind of sign – the index.
— Public Seminar
"Indexical signs are traces of events: where there is smoke there is fire. The smoke does not resemble the fire. It is not an icon. Nor does it have a code like a symbolic sign system. Forensics is a matter of working backwards from the index to the event of which it is the sign, like in a... View full entry
Until an earthquake in 226 BCE knocked it down, the Colossus of Rhodes, a 98-foot-high iron and bronze statue of the Greek god Helios, sat near the harbor of Rhodes, Greece, for 54 years.
Now a plan put forth by a small team of scientists seeks to rebuild the ancient statue and boost tourism and local jobs in the process. [...]
The proposal also includes an interior library, museum, cultural center, exhibition hall, and, of course, a crowning lighthouse
— uk.businessinsider.com
Learn more about the initiative on the Colossus of Rhodes project site:The idea of building a contemporary Colossus of Rhodes begun to arise in the ideas of some young professionals, after the break out of the economic crisis in Greece. As unemployment rose and destroyed dreams and ambitions of a... View full entry
How do designers experience their cities as locals? No two people, let alone architects, perceive even the most frequented cities in the same way. There's no city that embodies that like the way Los Angeles does it. Beyond the ample sunshine and smog, juice diets, drought consciousness (or not)... View full entry
You might have already heard that Amazon opened its first physical bookstore earlier this week, called (in very non-SEO fashion) Amazon Books. Located in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle – ironically within a mall that used to house a Barnes & Noble – most everything in the brick-and-mortar... View full entry
It’s a reminder that decommunisation is a project which might actually be physically impossible to execute in full, which hopefully begs the question — if Soviet Ukraine can't be wished away, what should be conserved, and what should be rejected? [...]
The nationalist purging of any traces of socialism from the landscape is a fool’s errand at best, gross historical revisionism at worst.
— calvertjournal.com
Related on Archinect:Owen Hatherley on the mass housing history of Moscow’s suburbsMoscow skaters reclaiming hidden spaces on top of Soviet-era buildingsParadise lost? The enduring legacy of a Soviet-era utopian workers’ district View full entry
Virgin Media has joined forces with Chiltern District Council in the U.K. to blanket Chesham’s high street with super-fast Wi-Fi. The unlimited service is available to all 21,000 residents and businesses in the town as well as visitors [...]
The Smart Pavement enables those in the area to ‘streetsurf’ with speeds of up to 166Mbps, which is seven times the average U.K. broadband speed.
— psfk.com
More on the internet and civic infrastrucutre:China's New Weapon to Censor the Internet'Internet Slowdown' Campaign Aims to Raise Awareness of Threats to Net NeutralityMap Plots the World's Internet DevicesInfrastructural Tourism View full entry
The [Lower Manhattan Development Corp's] latest take envisions a roughly 80,000-square-foot building, rising three to four stories aboveground, where new works of theater, dance, music and digital art would be produced, said the center’s director, Maggie Boepple.
Over the past few months, center officials have been working with consultants and an unnamed architectural firm to revamp the plan.
— Wall Street Journal
The new plan for the center won't be formally unveiled until the next board meeting of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. However, this smaller, less expensive version is still expected to function as a "a gathering place for downtown residents" according to Catherine McVay... View full entry
November 5th marks the celebration of Guy Fawkes day in the U.K., in which bonfires are lit to celebrate the capture of the titular royal traitor and the subsequent preservation of the life of King James I in 1605. Of course, lighting things on fire to commemorate dates isn't limited to the... View full entry
With the issues of serving openly in the military and same-sex marriage now largely resolved, the fight for all-gender restrooms has emerged as the latest civil rights issue in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (L.G.B.T.) community — particularly the “T” part.
Schools and universities (...), museums (...), restaurants (...) and even the White House (...) are recasting the traditional men’s/women’s room, resulting in a dizzying range of (often creative) signage and vocabulary.
— the New York Times
