thresholds 44: workspaceeditors: christianna bonin | nisa ariCALL FOR SUBMISSIONSWhen an employee at Google’s Mexico City office takes a post-lunch plunge into the on-site ball pit, is she working or playing? And when an employee in one of Foxconn’s factory sites in China leaps from his... View full entry
"I know this is going to be an offensive simplification of the value of a human body," she (Carpenter-Boggs) wrote in an e-mail, "but one could compare the fertilizer value to 100 pounds of cottonseed meal." She linked to a bag of "6-2-1" cottonseed-meal fertilizer on sale at Amazon.com. "Which, from this source, would be two of the 50-pound bags = $144"
Of course, the nutrient value of human beings as soil is only a small component of the Urban Death Project's overall mission.
— Brendan Kiley, The Stranger
A somewhat long-read on a proposal for turning dead human bodies into compost, and the young architect who is proposing a structure for cities to do so. Check out more renderings and information at Urban Death Project. View full entry
Excellent news for all fans of FALSE SOLUTION, the latest architecture-inspired play by Oren Safdie (yes, son of Moshe Safdie): the piece not only just came out in publication but re-orders are only $6.99 this week.Find some more detailed information we've received from Oren below, and also listen... View full entry
Seattle-based architect [Katrina Spade], originally from New England, has a vision that could radically reshape not just the death-care industry but the way we think about death itself.
She calls her plan the Urban Death Project, and it proposes a middle road between burial and cremation: compost. [...]
The centerpiece of the idea is an approximately three-story-high building in an urban center where people could bring their dead.
— thestranger.com
“There was an intense flowering of experimental and futuristic architecture in the 1960s and 70s, which the young African countries used to express their national identities,” says [Swiss architect Manuel] Herz, who has curated an exhibition of more than 80 buildings from sub-Saharan Africa, showing at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, until May. “But we simply don’t know about it... we wanted to show this incredible cultural wealth that also exists.” — The Guardian
Usually the projects of African "big man" leaders, the modernist buildings were often constructed for propagandistic purpose and tended to be designed by European architects. Noted architectural photographer Iwan Baan took many of the photographs in Herz's exhibit. View full entry
Built largely in secret and under decidedly unorthodox circumstances, the Whitney [Plantation] had been turned into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery — the first of its kind in the United States.
Located on land where slaves worked for more than a century, in a state where the sight of the Confederate flag is not uncommon, the results are both educational and visceral.
— nytimes.com
It’s not uncommon to live in Los Angeles and still feel like a tourist. The author and seminal California-commentator Carey McWilliams remarked that it took seven years of living in Los Angeles before he no longer felt in exile, and the city has struggled with a history of atomization and... View full entry
Islamic State militants ransacked Mosul’s central museum, destroying priceless artefacts that are thousands of years old, in the group’s latest rampage which threatens to upend millennia of coexistence in the Middle East.
The destruction of statues and artefacts that date from the Assyrian and Akkadian empires, revealed in a video published by Isis on Thursday, drew ire from the international community and condemnation by activists and minorities that have been attacked by the group.
— theguardian.com
The push is on to incorporate brain science into design and architecture...
Hopefully, the days of windowless classrooms to prevent vandalism and distraction are over.
— Al Jazeera
Science once agains confirms what we already know, and architects turn it into a marketing tool. View full entry
Along the highways leading from Los Angeles into the Coachella Valley desert, there are two types of sign-posts. One is the rocky, harsh faces of the imposing mountains – the closer the mountains are cut to the side of the road, the narrower the perspective and the less intimidating the... View full entry
Nothing screams commitment like something that is built on a concrete foundation and set in stone: literally. Go ahead, then. Design something that will last forever. — CollegeAtlas
While people working in architecture, whether through practice or academia, can give insight into the reality of the field, how does broader modern society perceive architects and architecture as a career?In one of the more amusing approaches to that topic, sexy has stood as one assumption... View full entry
In the last 20 years, just one NFL stadium has been built solely through private funding. [...]
Still, when it comes to getting the best deal out of an arena, leaving taxpayer money off the tab is only a good start.
Studies have repeatedly shown that sports teams don’t have the far-reaching economic impacts that one might assume, and experts have noted that stadiums aren’t as catalytic as some franchise owners might tout.
— nextcity.org
Previously: Is LA Finally Going to Get a Football Stadium?Special law for NFL stadium project unconstitutional, lawsuit claimsFarmers Field: Bringing Football Back on a Need-to-Know Basis View full entry
Already a couple years old, but a great piece by Tom Sachs on the beauty and nature of plywood. h/t kottke.org View full entry
Spirit of Space, in collaboration with Trahan Architects, has created a short film featuring the award-winning design of the Louisiana State Sports Hall of Fame and Regional History Museum in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The museum was recently awarded the prestigious 2015 AIA Institute Honor Award... View full entry
New York-based Thinc Design revealed their exhibition design for the USA Pavilion in the upcoming Milan Expo 2015 this May. Collaborating with Friends of the USA Pavilion, Thinc Design's exhibition highlights America's role in the future of the global food system, as a response to the Expo's... View full entry
