"Come as you are in the family car" — Robert H. Schuller

Lewis Kruger, Chairman of the Board of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), today announced the appointment of Shannon Stratton to the position of William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator, effective June 2015.  In this role, Stratton will work closely with Nanette L. Laitman Director Glenn Adamson to oversee the Museum’s diverse exhibition program and collections, foster relationships with artists and designers, and develop new strategies to engage contemporary audiences. — MAD Museum

...the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives. But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd. -Laing — The Guardian

[Airbnb] says its model—stay in somebody’s home, pay less than a hotel would charge—will help it facilitate travel that won’t pave over Cuba’s unique character, forged by decades of isolation from its northern neighbor.

“Think about the big hotel chains coming in, with mass development,” says Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb co-founder ... “The idea here is to support growth in travel that isn’t disruptive, that actually celebrates and preserves Cuba as a distinct destination.” — bloomberg.com

The galleries are immense, the Renzo Piano design is arresting and the views of the Hudson River are expansive. As it prepares to open its new $422 million Lower Manhattan home on May 1, the Whitney Museum of American Art is pulsing with anticipation as it plans the inaugural events, including a neighborhood block party.

But behind the scenes the museum is also preparing for the challenge of paying to operate a building that is three times as large as the old one. — nytimes.com

Though New York City is expected to surpass its 2020 population projections this year, rest assured that there’s plenty of space for all of these folks—and then some. An amusing and quite informative experiment conducted by Tim Urban takes a look at just how much space you would need to fit the world’s population comfortably—for the most part. The investigation, which puts 7.3 billion folks cozily shoulder to shoulder, hinges on the assumption that you can fit ten humans into a square meter. — 6sqft

California Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday imposed mandatory water restrictions for the first time on residents, businesses and farms, ordering cities and towns in the drought-ravaged state to reduce usage by 25%... [amounting] to roughly 1.5 million acre-feet of water (an acre-foot of water equals about 325,000 gallons) over the next nine months... "We're in a new era," Brown said. "The idea of your nice little green grass getting lots of water every day, that's going to be a thing of the past." — CNN

Alastair Graham hopes Violence Prevention Through Urban Upgrading, an initiative of the government of Cape Town, South Africa, will end better. He calls the effort, which has been revamping areas around train stations since 2006, part of “a package of potential solutions … either improving safety, or improving socioeconomic situation, or improving quality of life.” The project is aimed at curbing violence by augmenting the public spaces in which violent crime frequently occurs [...]. — nextcity.org

Architecture has entered into a new engagement with digital culture and capital—which amounts to the most radical change within the discipline since the confluence of modernism and industrial production in the early twentieth century. Yet this shift has gone largely unnoticed, because it has not taken the form of a visible upheaval or wholesale transformation. To the contrary: It is a stealthy infiltration of architecture via its constituent elements. — Art Forum

...Fernando Casado and Paula García, the founders of the Towards the Human City project, [are] travelling the world to find how cities are trying to be more people-oriented...Trends like smart cities make us believe that large structures are needed to change urban spaces, yet there are countless examples of transformative bottom-up initiatives that have come from a simple idea and flourished without public money. It is this citizen-led type of urbanism that they hope to highlight and champion. — The Guardian

Until the advent of cable television and then the Internet, Latin Americans, creators and consumers alike, were often more aware of trends in Europe and the United States than in nations neighboring theirs: Whatever similarities in style that emerged regionally were largely the result of discrete, parallel responses to the challenges of urbanization, poverty and the need to somehow integrate modernity and tradition. — The New York Times

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf tossed out an idea that she admitted might sound a bit crazy: What if San Francisco housing developers could fulfill their affordable housing requirements by building some of that housing in Oakland? [...]

The idea is for San Francisco residents who qualify for below-market-rate housing to live in affordable units that would be built in Oakland. [...]

The foundation for the partnership is already being prepped in Oakland — sfgate.com