“An out-of-the-ordinary restroom is very telling about the business itself,” said John Engel, spokesman for restroom cleaning and supply company Cintas, which runs the competition. “If they pay that kind of attention to their restroom experience you can bet the overall experience will be phenomenal too.” — mashable.com
This week, he signed over £285,000 of his £9m High Street Fund, created in March, to projects which will "re-energise the capital's high streets"...the mayor's office is donating to these projects through Spacehive, a civic crowdfunding website through which campaigners can raise money from the public to fund their community schemes. — CityMetric
From a proposed revitalization project known as the "Peckham Coal Line" that, much like New York City's High Line, would transform abandoned coal sidings into a foliage-rich walkway for pedestrians and cyclists, to a public library in an alley known as a "Literalley," designers and dreamers alike... View full entry
In 2005, the now defunct Rebar placed coins in a San Francisco parking meter not to park a car but to erect a small public park. Every third Friday in September since then, activists worldwide who wish to foster a conversation about the lack of public space have been transforming parking spaces... View full entry
Like humans, cities and neighborhoods have their own unique fingerprints. The maps were created by researchers at the center’s Urban Age program, who have been studying how the layout of rapidly urbanizing cities can affect their livability. — CityLab
New York is a grid, London is an airy whirl, Hong Kong is dense: at least, that's according to the black and white "fingerprint" maps put together by the Urban Age program at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The project helps researches see at a glance the macroscopic... View full entry
Europe will soon have more physical barriers on its national borders than it did during the Cold War. This year’s refugee crisis, combined with Ukraine's ongoing conflict with Russia, has seen governments plan and construct border walls and security fences across Mediterranean and eastern Europe... Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 40 countries around the world have built fences against 64 of their neighbours. — the Economist
The Economist takes a look at the world's borders, (mostly) new and old. Of the 40 countries that have built physical border walls since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 30 of those happened after 9/11, and 15 this year alone. Check it out the interactive graphic here.Related coverage:Passage: an... View full entry
Scientists in Korea have discovered that using antibacterial soap when hand-washing is no more effective than using plain soap, according to a paper published today in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy... The study examined the effect of triclosan...on bacteria in two ways. The first was to examine the bactericidal effects of triclosan in soaps against all 20 strains, and the second compared the ability of antibacterial and non-antibacterial soap to remove bacteria from human hands... — Science Daily
For related Archinect articles:Between Sampling and Dowsing: Field Notes from GRNASFCKArchitecture of the Anthropocene, Pt. 2: Haunted Houses, Living Buildings, and Other Horror StoriesEven bacteria are architects View full entry
It's something like cultural alchemy: the sale of a single painting is set to pay for half of a new OMA-designed annex space for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, according to an announcement made today by the congregation. Donated by the philanthropist Audrey Irmas, the painting is a... View full entry
Perparim Rama is an award-winning architect based in London. He came to the U.K. as an asylum seeker in 1992, fleeing war and persecution in the former Yugoslavia. Here is his take on the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. — bloomberg.com
Related on Archinect:Passage: an architectural intervention to span the Mediterranean SeaRefugees Welcome: the "Airbnb for Refugees" View full entry
Portlanders apparently upset with the direction of the local housing market are slapping "no Californians" stickers on For Sale signs in the city, real estate agents say. — Oregon Live
Portland, Oregon denizens are apparently worried that a tightening real estate market is partly the fault of monied Californians, who allegedly start bidding wars and make already scarce housing inventory even more expensive. This fear is manifesting in the appearance of a wordless, red and black... View full entry
What is the role of creative exploration in architecture? From the L.A. Times to The New Republic, this question is very much on critical minds. In a piece entitled "How to Make Architecture Human," Anna Wiener reviews Witold Rybczynski's latest collection of essays, Mysteries of the Mall, which... View full entry
Midcentury modernist architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler may have been good friends when they studied together in Vienna, but by the time they ran into one another one last time in a Los Angeles hospital in 1953, they were bitter enemies.
Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.'s production of The Princes of Kings Road, now playing at the Neutra Institute in Silver Lake, imagines what it might have been like in the hospital room they shared
— laweekly.com
With real estate prices soaring so high and so quickly, a lot of us are questioning if we even want to live in New York anymore—not to mention if we can. According to NeighborhoodX‘s latest map the price paid for a Bed-Stuy or Harlem apartment could get you a pretty sweet pad in the South of France or even trendy Paris. — 6sqft.com
Instead of relying on a subway that breaks down and causes interminable delays, what if the 17 miles of London's Circle Line were replaced with three moving walkways, much like the ones in airports, that allow pedestrians to step on at three miles per hour and then amble over to a fast lane of... View full entry
A combination of (mostly) public transit along with some Uber rides can be affordable for a wider range of customers than Uber alone. — Five Thirty Eight Economics
According to a study of New York City's private-car hiring habits, many of those who hired Uber did so as an extension of public transit: in other words, instead of Uber-ing all the way to a particular destination, a wider socioeconomic spectrum of New Yorkers frequently use some combination of... View full entry
...From seemingly out of nowhere, a large quad-rotor drone drops out the cloudless sky over Dubai Internet City, hovering insect-like just above the heads of the men, watching them with camera-eyes.
Before they can even notice, a squad of policemen – wearing helmets, body armour, and carrying assault rifles – rush them...
Welcome to Dubai, and to one of the more awkward moments of an already odd competition called Drones For Good. We’re here to watch teams compete for a million-dollar prize...
— the BBC
