Artist and animator Sam Grinberg revisits the fight over the future of the American Folk Art Museum. — ny.curbed.com
Ridescout, the “Kayak of ground transportation” that aggregates over 300 rideshare services, announced today that it will integrate carpooling into its app. This move comes on the heels of recent announcements from Uber and Lyft, which on the same day earlier this month revealed they would gradually begin to allow their users to carpool. While ridesharing has up to this point been a mostly single-user service, Ridescout’s announcement reinforces a general trend toward multi-user integration. — urbanful.org
For the latest edition of Student Works: Justine Testado spoke with project architect, Duncan Baker-Brown, about The Waste House, designed/built by faculty and students from the Faculty of Arts and City College Brighton & Hove. Olaf Design Ninja_ did some quick math "The numbers tell... View full entry
Meandering down a section of Robson Street on the iconic 800 block in downtown Vancouver, passers-by can sit, relax, play, and socialize on the "Urban Reef" installation. Designed by Kaz Bremner and Jeremiah Deutscher with local furniture collective Higher Works, Urban Reef won the inaugural VIVA Vancouver: Robson Redux design-build competition out of 78 submissions worldwide. — bustler.net
The competition had entrants create a temporary urban installation to transform the block to a welcoming public plaza from Canada Day (July 1) until Labor Day (September 1).More details on Bustler.Check out a timelapse video and the making-of teaser below. View full entry
"Amale Andraos, principal of New York–based architecture firm WORKac, has been named dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), succeeding Mark Wigley. Currently on faculty at GSAPP, she has also taught at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the American University in Beirut." — Architect's Newspaper
Is architecture a trade or an art?For Alvin Boyarsky, the answer was clear. As longtime chair of the Architectural Association (AA) in London, and one of the most influential figures in 20th-century design education, Boyarsky argued that architecture was not only a profession but also an artistic... View full entry
Friday, August 8:Guggenheim Bullies Journalist: Molly Crabapple reports for Vice on inhumane immigrant labor conditions on Saadiyat island in the UAE, where a new arm of the Guggenheim (and Louvre, and NYU) is being built. The Guggenheim holds its cards close and skirts responsibility when... View full entry
Hanoi has faced the same population pressures as other Asian cities. But thanks to vague and informal conventions, the state has been able to avoid extreme levels of disservice, even to the most impoverished new urban areas. And the construction of homes themselves has remained at least loosely connected to the regulations of the more formal suburbs. Together these factors have prevented the formation of slums as they are typically defined. But how has this come about? — theguardian.com
Readers respond to a letter by Peggy Deamer, an architect, calling for less arrogance and more collaboration in architecture. [...]
It is not only the public that is fed up with this idea of The Architect, but also the profession itself. Having watched ourselves increasingly backed into the corner of aesthetic elitism, we are now more interested in models of practice that do away with the egos and the glamorous buildings they are associated with.
— nytimes.com
Previously:NY Times Enters the "Starchitect" DebateInvitation to a Dialogue: Less Ego in Architects View full entry
Pretty much every architect in the alphabet has produced a chair, a miniature version of their particular aesthetic. [...]
Buildings are all very well, but it seems you haven’t truly made it as an architect until you’ve given us something to sit on. [...]
“Mentally, it’s a very good exercise, to go from [designing] a building to the smallest bit in a building,” [Alex Michaelis] says. “You go back to the detail of the human body."
— moreintelligentlife.com
While most attention falls on the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, the city itself hosts an uncertain number of simultaneous, satellite events, operating somewhat under the public's radar but still orbiting around the Biennale's curatorial center. There are the Biennale-recognized roster... View full entry
The American Community Survey is a massive annual effort by the Census Bureau to measure various aspects of American life. Among many other things, respondents are asked if they speak a language other than English at home, and if so, what language is spoken. Using this data, as explained in more detail at the bottom of this post, Business Insider was able to map out New York City's most popular non-English languages. — Business Insider
Business Insider also made a map of New York's most common languages not including English or Spanish: View full entry
On Monday, artist Molly Crabapple published “Slaves of Happiness Island,” a firsthand report of the slave-like worker conditions on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island; the Guggenheim, Louvre, and NYU are all building enormous new enterprises there [...] These conditions violate local and international labor laws. We have now received leaked email correspondence between the Guggenheim and Crabapple ... [that] reveal a shocking unwillingness to provide any statement to journalists [...] — ArtFCity
SketchFactor ... is a Manhattan-based navigation app that crowdsources user experiences along with publicly available data to rate the relative "sketchiness" of certain areas in major cities. [...]
The founders are also bracing for potential complications from an app that asks anonymous users to judge a neighborhood's sketchiness. After all, fear can be subjective. And the site could be vulnerable to criticisms regarding the degree to which race is used to profile a neighborhood.
— crainsnewyork.com
Downey needed something tactile to work with, and he found it in a kids' toy. Spread out before him on the table are stacks of embossed plans ... marked up with brightly colored wax sticks. [...]
The sticks warm to the touch and bend easily; they can make precise angles, and—crucially for Downey—their tackiness makes them stick to paper. "Once I realized that, I thought, 'Oh, I could use that to draw on top of an embossed drawing.'" Suddenly, he had a way not just to read, but to make.
— sf.curbed.com
Previously, the LA Times profiled Downey and his firm: Blind architect sports an upbeat vision View full entry
