Created from low-cost, low-energy, shipping containers, the refreshing design has a focus on sustainability and efficiency. The converted units will create a mini-city, providing much needed flexible studio, retail, office and workshop space in one of London’s most vibrant communities. — POP Brixton

Colonialism found in the Modernist project a powerful and willing partner for the shaping of conquered territories in the southern hemisphere. Today, amid a new wave of colonial activity based on subtler and less easily identifiable strategies, little is done to understand its effects on the way people live and give form to their shelters. Neo-colonialism is an urgent issue but one which most of the profession is ill-prepared to interrogate. — Architectural Review

We need to talk! We at MONU think that the time has come to talk with you about "participation" in architecture and urbanism and re-evaluate and re-examine developments around this topic in recent years and what the future might hold.

(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, May 2015) — http://www.monu-magazine.com/news.htm

Richard Serra’s new sculpture, 'East-West/West-East,' is a set of four standing steel plates rolled in Germany, shipped via Antwerp, and offloaded, trucked, and craned into place in the middle of the western Qatari desert...the steel is the same that he’s used in his other pieces, and it will oxidize in the same way, albeit more quickly in the hot, salty conditions of the Brouq Nature Reserve. The plates will [ultimately] turn a dark amber—approximately the same color...as the Seagram Building. — The New Yorker

Gilles Vesco calls it the 'new mobility'. It’s a vision of cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones...'Multi-modal' and 'interconnectivity' are now the words on every urban planner’s lips...This model of denser, less car-dependent cities is becoming the accepted wisdom across the developed world. — The Guardian

But supplementing that aesthetic of “the future” sketched in imaginary edifice, the full SF vision of the future city is a mosaic, constructed from fragments of the cities that we recognize, including symbols that are decidedly from the past. [...]

If SF functions by taking the world we know and altering it with a constructed future fantasy, the Statue of Liberty serves as the junction point, the axis where the speculative fantasy begins and ends. — motherboard.vice.com

Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today issued an executive order to establish a California greenhouse gas reduction target of 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 - the most aggressive benchmark enacted by any government in North America to reduce dangerous carbon emissions over the next decade and a half. "With this order, California sets a very high bar for itself and other states and nations, but it's one that must be reached - for this generation and generations to come," said Governor Brown. — gov.ca.gov

It’s a Thursday morning in Beijing, and the world’s most famous living artist, Ai Weiwei, is sitting with one of the world’s most controversial technologists, Jacob Appelbaum, in the second-floor lobby of the East Hotel. [...]

On a whim, Ai suggests that they call Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living for the last two years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. [...]

Ai and Assange talk for several minutes about the mundanities of the dissident life. — fusion.net

Self-driving cars will certainly change our habits on the road. But truly autonomous vehicles will also affect how we work, says Tim Brown, chief executive officer and president of design consultancy IDEO...Without having to navigate city streets, people will be more productive during their commute. IDEO also envisions self-driving trucks...delivering everything from new jeans to grilled cheese. Most radical of all: Your workplace could be set on wheels to travel to you, rather than you to it.   — Bloomberg

After claiming he saw his friends injured in pothole-related bike accidents, one anonymous resident has taken matters into his own hands.

He goes by Wanksy. And using what appears to be an industrial level chalk, he draws penises around the potholes, creating moments of visual terrorism that the city can’t ignore. [...]

within 48 hours of Wanksy’s efforts, many of Manchester’s problematic potholes, which had been a nuisance for years, were filled. Within a week, even more were fixed. — fastcodesign.com