"The design of a school itself might matter as much as something like a gym class. 'The environments in which we live affect not just our behaviors, but our lifelong attitudes about things like healthy eating and active lifestyles...It's also clear that it's so much better to help prevent children from becoming obese than to try to help adults lose weight.' — Fast Company
More on Archinect:Abandoned schools = new development opportunities"Active design" movement wants to trick you into taking the stairsJason Danziger heals psychosis with designNew Parsons-led collaborative aims to make affordable housing healthier View full entry
Although fashion magnate Tom Ford does not make much of the fact that he studied architecture at Parsons The New School for Design, that early influence can still be felt in his body of work, as it can with Daniel DuGoff, an architectural alum of Washington University in St. Louis turned... View full entry
In any event, it's as you were for the "haves" at the top of list, with Melbourne taking the top spot for a fifth year running, with Vienna, Vancouver, Toronto and Adelaide/Calgary (tied at 5) completing the top five most livable cities in 2015.
[...] these cities have "relatively few challenges to living standards," and enjoy a good infrastructure, healthcare system and a low murder rate.
Unsurprisingly, Damascus remains the least livable city, with Syria embroiled in a bloody civil war.
— cnn.com
Other articles related to liveability on Archinect:Think you live in a nice county? Find out where it stands on the nationwide Natural Amenities Index.Planning for Local and Liveable Neighbourhoods in MelbourneIs Jan Gehl winning his battle to make our cities liveable?Melbourne named world’s... View full entry
Although jaded art critics might argue that there is nothing new under the sun, they are overlooking the fact that there is important work that has been shaded by time. Concrete poetry, an art form that emphasizes the physical arrangement and visual presentation of poetry as much as its literary... View full entry
Ventura County, Calif., is the absolute most desirable place to live in America.
I know this because in the late 1990s the federal government devised a measure of the best and worst places to live in America, from the standpoint of scenery and climate. The "natural amenities index" is intended as "a measure of the physical characteristics of a county area that enhance the location as a place to live."
— washingtonpost.com
Wanna find out how well or how poorly your home county scored? Head over to the Washington Post article and hover your mouse over the interactive map. (Residents of the Great Lakes Region - prepare yourselves for disappointment.) View full entry
Rumors have been circulating around the internet for a few days, but later this week Banksy is now set to open a new pop-up exhibition entitled "Dismaland" at in Weston-Super-Mare, UK.
The venue is called "Tropicana", a 10,200-square-foot site to be transformed into "Dismaland", a probable attack on American entertainment giant Disney. [...]
As usual with Banksy, the details are very scarce, but earlier this morning Iain Brimecome and Jon Goff were able to fly their drone above the site [...].
— streetartnews.net
Another aerial view of "Dismaland," expected to open later this week. Photo: Iain Brimecome & Jon Goff, image via streetartnews.net.Photo via @francisclarke on Twitter.Banksy in the Archinect news:After Banksy: the parkour guide to GazaAn interview with man behind the “Stealing Banksy?”... View full entry
Germany might still be a car-obsessed country, but it's starting to build an Autobahn for bikes. — Fast Company
From the U.S. to Germany, urban planners and major corporations are starting to purposefully design for bicycles instead of individually operated cars. In Munich, a proposed network of two-lane bike paths would radiate out from the city center to the surrounding suburbs, creating 400 miles of... View full entry
Disney raised more questions than it answered at the D23 Expo with the announcement of plans to unveil Star Wars Lands at Disneyland in Anaheim and Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando, Fla.
Here’s what we know so far: The new 14-acre lands will each feature two attractions set in a remote frontier town on the outer rim of the “Star Wars” galaxy. No opening dates have been set for either the California or Florida projects.
— Los Angeles Times
Star Wars fans may be salivating at the mouth right now, with a new trilogy on the horizon and now Disney's announcement of two themed parks at the D23 EXPO. Construction will begin at the Anaheim version in 2017 in the Big Thunder Ranch area, which is currently a bit of a no-man's land for themed... View full entry
Isil militants have beheaded one of Syria’s most respected archaeologists and an expert on the ancient Roman city of Palmyra. Khaled Al-Asaad, who was director of antiquities at the Unesco World Heritage Site from 1963 to 2003, was murdered on 18 August and his body tied to an ancient column within the 2,000-year-old archaeological site.
According to Abdulkarim, Al-Asaad was [...] killed for refusing to help Isil find antiquities that were hidden before the invasion of Palmyra.
— theartnewspaper.com
Previously in the Archinect news:ISIL destroys ancient mausoleums in historic PalmyraISIS allegedly not interested in bulldozing Palmyra architecture but intends to "pulverize" statuesISIS militants seize control of ancient Syrian city of PalmyraAncient Syrian city of Palmyra under threat by ISIS View full entry
With a $35,000 grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, [MITs Elizabeth Christoforetti] and her team are working on a project called Placelet, which will track how pedestrians move through a particular space. They’re developing a network of sensors that will track the scale and speed of pedestrians [and vehicles] over long periods of time. The sensors, [currently being tested in downtown Boston], will also track the 'sensory experience' by recording the noise level and air quality of that space. — CityLab
More on Archinect:The Life of a New Architect: Elizabeth Christoforetti (Featured interview)MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bikeMIT's Newest Invention Fits All the Furniture You Need in One Closet-Sized BoxMIT develops self-assembling modular robots View full entry
Dublin is building a water park — in the middle of the worst drought in California’s modern history. [...]
“It just looks bad, frankly ... It looks like we are out there thinking, ‘Let’s just go out there and build a water park,’ when the rest of the state is suffering.” [...]
“Even if the drought weren’t to end,” said Lori Taylor, a spokeswoman for the city, “there will be a need for places where kids need to learn how to swim.”
— nytimes.com
More on California's drought:Will California's drought turn the state into something like the Australian outback?Coating the LA reservoir in "shade balls" will save 300M gallons of waterCalifornia drought sucks San Jose's Guadalupe river dryArchinect's "Dry Futures" competition featured by MSNBC... View full entry
The question of the monuments’ removal comes after several US states...have withdrawn the Confederate flag, acknowledging it as a symbol of racial hate...The [statues] are on public land 'which means that African American tax money is being used to maintain them', [says Carol Bebelle, co-chair of the Mayor’s committee for racial reconciliation]. 'What does it mean to be a city that pays tribute to part of its history that was about oppressing the major portion of its population?' — The Art Newspaper
More on Archinect:That new Texas Confederate Memorial on Martin Luther King Jr. DriveDocumentary to Explore Racial Discrimination in Transportation PlanningBuilding the First Slavery Museum in America View full entry
...What [Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao] showed, [is that] if you picked a remote part of the world and put a world-class museum in it, the world would beat a path to your door. That's the so-called "Bilbao Effect," but you'll notice that doesn't mention art; it mentions tourism, travel and finance.
I feel we're in a strange time where we're building furious Potemkin villages of seeming life, behind which, if you looked with the right eyes, you would see cobwebs and skeletons.
— NPR
NPR has curated a list of noteworthy-quotes from Michael Lewis, an art history professor at Williams College, who's interviewed in the recent issue of Commentary Magazine.Never before has art sold better or museums drawn larger crowds. Yet, according to Lewis at least, most Americans have become... View full entry
We all have a pretty good idea which NYC neighborhoods command top dollar, but this incredible 3D map from NeighborhoodX really puts things into perspective by pinning the city’s 325 neighborhoods against one another in a visually jarring side-by-side comparison. Among the most expensive? In Brooklyn... — 6sqft
More on New York real estate:The rise of communal living in New YorkThis $250M mega penthouse might become New York's priciest homeNew York & London ranked highest in 2015 Global Cities IndexNYC's public-housing woes View full entry
Goldfinger’s [brutalist] buildings were decreed “soulless.” Inhabitants claimed to suffer health problems and depression from spending time inside of them. Some of Goldfinger’s buildings were vacated because occupants found them so ugly. Yet, architects praised Goldfinger’s buildings. [...]
This divide—this hatred from the public and love from designers and architects—tends to be the narrative around buildings like Goldfinger’s. Which is to say, gigantic, imposing buildings made of concrete.
— slate.com
Roman Mars, host of the design-centric podcast "99% Invisible", blogs for Slate on the polarizing quality of brutalist architecture – beloved by architects and hated by pretty much everyone else. Discussing the history of concrete in building architecture, Mars also puts brutalism in perspective... View full entry