In late May of 2012, my friends and I travelled up to Montreal from upstate New York for the first time, only vaguely aware of the escalating student demonstrations there. When we arrived, we found ourselves in a sea of red. The students we stayed with all had little red felt squares pinned to... View full entry
As the state has withdrawn, Santiago Cirugeda has stepped in to turn abandoned sites in Seville and other Spanish cities into dramatic art spaces that are inspiring a new breed of architect — theguardian.com
The United States is currently engulfed in one of the worst droughts in recent memory. More than 30% of the country experienced at least moderate drought as of last week's data. In seven states drought conditions were so severe that each had more than half of its land area in severe drought. Severe drought is characterized by crop loss, frequent water shortages, and mandatory water use restrictions. — USA Today
California and Oklahoma are both experiencing "exceptional drought" – the most severe category – in 25-30% of the state. Both of these states, particularly California, are major agricultural regions and the effects of the drought will have profound ripples economically. North Texas has been in... View full entry
Certainly, it's a minor miracle that Epiphany wasn't gutted at some point in its long life to make way for late 20th-century design nightmares such as drop ceilings and wood paneling. But more significantly the church represents an interesting period in Southern California history. — latimes.com
The Church of the Epiphany was an iconic meeting spot for activist groups throughout the 20th century -- including Cesar Chavez, who gave talks there -- and continues to be a valuable community space today. After a 2011 art auction to preserve the aging church, a second benefit auction is... View full entry
Friday, August 15 Farewell to the Old Okura: The famous Hotel Okura, built in the 1960s in a distinctive fusion of modern and traditional Japanese styles, is closing in response to prohibitive earthquake retrofits and larger, newer hotels in the area.Samsung Acquires SmartThings, A Fast-Growing... View full entry
Marshall, Garrick and Piatkowski are talking about a different set of health concerns: not communicable diseases like cholera, but lifestyle diseases like diabetes. "The literature suggests," they write, "that the shift in industrialized nations toward a more sedentary lifestyle is linked to increasingly auto-dependent lifestyles, which in turn is linked to lower density developments and auto-friendly land uses." Maybe we're designing places, in other words, that make it harder to be active. — washingtonpost.com
As a report from the Obama administration warns that one in four bridges in the United States needs significant repair or cannot handle automobile traffic, engineers are employing wireless sensors and flying robots that could have the potential to help authorities monitor the condition of bridges in real time. — ScienceDaily
Brad Buchanan spends his summer weekends, and some predawn mornings, atop an ATV checking on his cattle along Kiowa Creek. [...]
But each weekday, Buchanan shifts gears... The weekend farmer who's also a longtime architect ... is five months into his job as Denver's head city planner.
That juxtaposition — an Eastern Plains rancher responsible for making key decisions about Denver's increasingly dense urban footprint — has some critics of the city's building bonanza grumbling.
— denverpost.com
In that ancient fable of localized identity, a city-dwelling mouse and his country-dwelling cousin try out life in each other's shoes. There are countless versions of this story, found in civilizations from all over the world. Invariably, when each mouse visits his cousin, he feels uncomfortably... View full entry
current conventional wisdom embraces density, sky-high scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments. It reflects a desire to create an ideal locale for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers. [...]
Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and “human scale” neighborhoods.
— washingtonpost.com
In cities around the country, the geographical hubs of gay culture — so-called “gayborhoods” — are changing. Amin Ghaziani, author of a new book, There Goes the Gayborhood?, says this subtle cultural shift holds enormous significance for the gay community in urban America and beyond. [...]
Yet while positive social and legal shifts have led to this change (from the Castro to Chelsea), we haven’t quite evolved past the point of needing them.
— nextcity.org
Samsung is making a big push into being the center of the smart home today with its acquisition of SmartThings, which allows people to sync up their connected gadgets onto a single smartphone app and hardware hub. — forbes.com
Looks like Samsung is trying to catch up with Apple's upcoming HomeKit. View full entry
The intensive militarization of America’s police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. “The blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement, police militarization” as “the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.” — THE INTERCEPT
And close to home, here at bigger Archinect circle, its impact on urban environments emphasized here. DEMILIT View full entry
It relates to scale, who's going to be there, what reflects the culture and interests of the community. People's first notion about a park is Central Park — big, grassy, lush. So adjusting expectations about that aesthetic, we have a hard row to hoe in L.A. This is the era for our city to think about parks and the river and the urban forest as all one thing. — latimes.com
I see nothing wrong with replacing the hegemony of cars with the hegemony I am proposing, of bikes. Those who need buses would be no worse off than they are now. But a problem would come if a city like Amsterdam had a bike modal share of 90 percent, as could achieved if end-of-trip strategies were built into all buildings to eliminate the problem of bike theft, and if shelter removed the inequity of cycling being the one mode remaining where people get wet. — cycle-space.com
Culture officials in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine have ordered museums to put their most valuable pieces into storage, and some institutions have closed to the public, as fighting continues between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces.
Ukraine’s culture ministry has also asked that the media refrain from “emphasising objects of cultural heritage” to avoid their being targeted [...].
— theartnewspaper.com
