Construction safety netting may not sound like the stuff which picturesque cityscapes are made of, and yet: Vancouver, B.C. was host to an art installation known as "City Fabric" this past August and September which produced more gorgeous visuals (and sly references to real estate speculation)... View full entry
Paris’s car-free day was not without controversy, not least because it wasn’t a totally carless day and was limited to only around one-third of the city. After a standoff with police, authorities were only able to make car-free certain parts of the city centre, stretching between Bastille and the Champs Elysées, and the outer Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes, and only between 11am and 6pm. In the rest of the city, cars were allowed but at 20km an hour. — The Guardian
Paris, which had a mostly car-free day on Sunday, September 27th, experienced smog-free blue skies and a largely smiling populace, but it's not the first major metropolis to sort of go pedestrian. During a July weekend in 2011, famously car-centric Los Angeles shut down one of its main transit... View full entry
Researchers estimate that driverless cars could, by midcentury, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent. Which means that, using the number of fatalities in 2013 as a baseline, self-driving cars could save 29,447 lives a year. In the United States alone, that's nearly 300,000 fatalities prevented over the course of a decade, and 1.5 million lives saved in a half-century. — CityLab
Accidents happen. But do they have to? Researchers estimate that driverless cars could save up to $190 billion in health-care costs and 50 million lives worldwide over five decades. For more of Archinect's coverage on changes in driving and car culture, check out these stories:• Traffic Lights... View full entry
[...] Team China beat out Team Kazakhstan to host the games. Zhangjiakou, a city of 4 million people in the mountains of Hebei province, will host the games alongside Beijing. [...]
They're worried I'll talk to people like Lu Wanku, who will be forced to move to make way for the region’s investment boom. Lu herds cattle and has lived in his tiny brick home for more than 20 years. His home is now in the way of a Four Seasons Town Dream Resort ski run. [...] Lu has two weeks to move out.
— marketplace.org
Related in the Archinect news:Olympic Displacement: Atlanta 1996 to Rio 2016Putin's Olympic steamroller in SochiOlympic Infrastructure Displaces Brazilian Families View full entry
"What we propose here is a different format for making architecture," Camille Lacadee states in a deadpan tone, "with multiple clients, multiple users, backers, lovers, following a bottom-up mode of exchanges and desire." A robotic arm extends into the frame and offers her a bowl of bird's nest... View full entry
In a lecture hall that sat a third empty due to the eclipsed "super blood moon" transpiring outside, Paul Goldberger discussed his new biography of Frank Gehry, "Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry" with J. Paul Getty Trust C.E.O. James Cuno at The Getty Center. Goldberger spent the... View full entry
“My growing interest in how cultural districts can shape cities led me to this new, exciting opportunity in New York City.” — New Cities Foundation, NY Times
Maxwell Anderson is returning to New York, to be Director of Grant Programs at The New Cities Foundation. Dallas' loss (and formerly Indianapolis' deeply felt loss) is good urbanism's gain. I am excited about this change in focus by someone who I know to be a great thinker.Press release from... View full entry
My philosophy is based on: I think everyone deserves a soupçon of glamour in every bit of their home. [...]
When people look back on early 21st-century design, they will remember: the chaos produced by the technological revolution, a chaos that can be interpreted as either depressingly meaningless or excitingly free.
— wsj.com
Adolf Hitler was an extreme anti-Semite, convicted traitor, and leader of a violent paramilitary force. In a remarkable press campaign, the Nazis reinvented him as a genial Bavarian gentleman. — Places Journal
How did the Nazis reinvent Adolf Hitler — an extreme anti-Semite, convicted traitor, and leader of a violent paramilitary force — as a genial Bavarian gentleman? View full entry
“It took multiple spacecraft over several years to solve this mystery, and now we know there is liquid water on the surface of this cold, desert planet,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington.
“It seems that the more we study Mars, the more we learn how life could be supported and where there are resources to support life in the future.”
— NASA
In an announcement made this morning, NASA stated that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has detected "the strongest evidence yet" of liquid water on the fourth planet from the Sun. The new evidence emerged from data collected by an imaging spectrometer mounted on the spacecraft, which was... View full entry
Over the past five weeks, more than 150,000 people have visited the subversive theme park in a derelict seafront lido, which had been shut since 2000 and reopened in a blaze of publicity on 20 August. [...]
But, it is the town's tourist businesses that have reaped the benefit - to the tune of £20m, says Visit Somerset, more than three times what the trade body initially suggested. [...]
Everyone has noted the irony of the anti-capitalist art show boosting business.
— bbc.com
Previously: Banksy about to open "Dismaland" pop-up exhibition in British seaside resort View full entry
Music ensemble Third Angle will team up with choir group Cappella Romana for a new project, “Frozen,” on Oct. 3-4. They’re giving a voice to one of Oregon’s most famous buildings...the Mount Angel Abbey library in St. Benedict, Oregon [...]
“We’re going down into a stairwell and we started singing, and we found a pitch that really resonated the hell out of the building...We want this to be, in effect, a harmony of the building. We want to reimagine the building as an instrument.”
— opb.org
No two people, let alone architects, perceive even the most frequented cities in the same way. How do designers experience their cities as locals? Archinect got in touch with Scott Durst, owner of Chicago-based seDURST, who shared a snappy list of go-to places where he likes to spend his... View full entry
For the past seven years, Ewan has been painstakingly researching London's pubs, both past and present, cataloguing them and taking photos before uploading details to his online database Pubology...his mission is to photograph every pub in London – although, as he tells me, it's difficult to know just how close he is to that goal. — Vice
Estimating the total number of pubs in London at somewhere around 5,000, photographer Ewan Munro has tried to draw some distinctions to limit the scope of his massive project. For example, how does one define London, and how does one define a pub versus a bar?From historic, centuries-old... View full entry
The London garden bridge project has been placed in jeopardy after a London council withdrew its support because of public costs and the Labour mayoral candidate, Sadiq Khan, said he would ditch the proposed horticultural Thames river crossing if he took office. — The Guardian
Thomas Heatherwick's proposed Garden Bridge, which recently inspired a satirical contest of unpalatable entries, may be doomed to remain a hotly contested rendering. The £30 million of public funds needed to fund the bridge has temporarily been withdrawn because Lambeth council leader Lib Peck... View full entry