Spiffing up materials the city puts out to promote safe driving “is definitely not what this is about,” Reynolds said. “It's going much deeper into the way we think about designing the streets. Art has the power to get people to sit up and pay attention and jolt them out of their normal ways of thinking. We can infuse unexpected elements into the design of the streets and the way of moving through the streets.” — The Los Angeles Times
For more on the (changing) art of street navigation: • What Do Pedestrian Traffic Icons Say About Your Culture?• Los Angeles has Created the Perfect Parking Sign• Seeking identity through city fonts• From California to Texas, car culture is losing its monopoly View full entry
[Kundig] builds houses that look like rustic jewels atop glacial rock in the Cascade Range of Washington state, or along the San Juan Islands waterfront or in the California high desert.
Typically made of some combination of weathered wood, concrete and rusted steel, the structures also include generous stretches of glass [...]
The son of Swiss émigrés, Mr. Kundig was strongly influenced by the rugged topography of the Pacific Northwest, where he was raised.
— wsj.com
More on Tom Kundig's work in the News:Tom Kundig loses lawsuit against his Washington valley cabinLawsuit Filed Against Architect Tom KundigTom Kundig on the Frey House II View full entry
A presentation about a world that is increasingly mediated by screens and digital conceptualizations of space on three screens with digital conceptualizations of space is not just meta: it was the engaging and immersive format of Liam Young's lecture/performance Wednesday night at SCI-Arc, "City... View full entry
Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. [...]
in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built. [...]
We do not encounter one another in cars. We grind along together anonymously, often in misery.
— vox.com
More on the repercussions of sprawl:Urban sprawl costs the American economy more than US$1 trillion per yearThe true costs of sprawlSeven Myths About New UrbanismWhy sprawl may be bad for your health View full entry
Hippie modernism focused not on rigorous form but rather on a kind of socially inspired bricolage. Hippie modernism has been not only misunderstood but also underestimated. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of a ‘design science revolution’ inspired the hippie bricoleurs to shoulder their generation’s emerging notion of environmental stewardship. — PLACES JOURNAL
Greg Castillo pens a great article about one of the most overlooked and often dismissed role of hippies in what we have today greedily claimed by the millenials and known as "environmental movement."“Hippie Modernism” is published in coordination with the Walker Art Center... View full entry
I would like to argue that a more potent threat to the ongoing political viability of historic preservation is the perception that the preservation industry has become a conservative, indeed revanchist force; that it is elitist and sometimes even racist in its abetment of gentrification.
How did this happen?
Historic preservation in New York, according to the favored creation myth, was born in the postwar era as a progressive grassroots movement...
— Places Journal
"Steelhenge," BUREAU A's design for the inaugural BIG biennale for independent art spaces, isn't just 50 blue shipping containers arrayed to mimic Stonehenge's layout in the center of Geneva: it was also the site of a four-day party in June to celebrate the open-spirited biennale, which... View full entry
It’s 2040, and Los Angeles has just begun to recover from a devastating epidemic that wiped out much of its population. Former residents slowly trickle back, alongside new immigrants drawn to the city’s surplus housing stock. But at a lab in Westwood, epidemiologists fear the disease is... View full entry
James Corner Field Operations (JCFO) has been selected to design the National Building Museum's Summer Block Party 2016 installation. The National Building Museum selected JCFO after the success of 2015's "The BEACH," an installation designed by Snarkitecture that allowed 180,000 Washington... View full entry
For as long as architecture has been reduced to a service to society or an “industry” whose ultimate goal is only to build, there have been others who imagine it instead as a field of intellectual research: energetic, critical, and radical.
But how can we produce or maintain this position?
— Giovanna Borasi – Chief Curator, CCA
The Other Architect, an expansive exhibition that considers "architecture’s potential to identify the urgent issues of our time" through twenty-three case studies from the 1960s to the present, opens tomorrow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.Curated by Giovanna Borasi... View full entry
Related Midwest, the Chicago division of New York-based Related Cos., will honor the prolific, albeit little-remembered, Chicago architect Edward H. Bennett and name its 843-foot apartment and condo tower at 451 E. Grand Ave. "One Bennett Park." [...]
"I think that the buyers and the people who rent in this building will be people that are interested in architecture. I think they're the types of people who will recognize the Bennett name and who will be interested in learning more."
— chicagotribune.com
When Airbnb put up ads suggesting various ways San Francisco could use the company’s tax payments, it was undoubtedly aiming to drum up good will.
“Dear Parking Enforcement,” one of the ads read, “Please use the $12 million in hotel taxes to feed all expired parking meters. Love, Airbnb.”
[...]
But instead of good will, the flippant tone of the ads, which went up on billboards and bus stops around the city on Wednesday, unleashed a torrent of sarcasm and anger on social media.
— NY Times
Last week, a deluge of anger and annoyance rained down on Airbnb after their new ad campaign popped up around San Francisco. Billboards plastered with phrases suggesting ways various government agencies could better use the roughly $1 million in taxes per month generated by the company were... View full entry
Le Corbusier, who died 50 years ago, is widely recognised as one of the founding fathers of modern architecture. Renault tells us this long, chamfered concept was “inspired by the architect’s modernist principles and theories”, and references the “golden era of the automobile of the 1930s”. Top Gear is no historical expert, but does not remember seeing anything like the Corbusier concept in photos from the Thirties. — topgear.com
Would Le Corbusier have chosen "suicide doors"? Renault whipped up the design for part of an exhibition put on by Centre des Monuments Nationaux in France, “Cars for living: the automobile and modernism in the 20th and 21st centuries,” which focuses on the history and legacy of the heyday of... View full entry
But still strong is the seduction of the Bilbao Effect — when an architecturally exciting project makes an institution more of a destination, like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Spain. And with the success of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, which is drawing droves downtown, everyone seems to be grabbing for hammers — NYT
Robin Pogrebin explores how with more than a dozen New York cultural institutions planning major projects, fundraisers are hoping to tap into the deepest pockets. Strategies include selling naming rights, targeting heavyweights donors, remembering certain 'Dos and Don’ts' and expanding boards... View full entry
The plateauing and decline in U.S. vehicle miles traveled per capita that occurred between [2005-2014] was described by some hopeful commentators as a dramatic shift that was indicative of the preferences of a new workforce...Marginal changes in the way a new generation behaves...cannot overcome the realities of a country where more than three-fourths of jobs are located more than three miles from downtowns and where only one-fourth of homes are in places that their residents refer to as urban. — The Transport Public
More about car transit on Archinect:Welcome to Evanston, Illinois: the carless suburbiaDawn of the self-driving car: testing out Tesla's autopilot functionFrom California to Texas, car culture is losing its monopolyCan a loss of driver autonomy save lives?Designers imagine a world of self-driving... View full entry