One reason for weakness: many young people, saddled with student loan debt, elevated unemployment and less-than-perfect credit scores, are staying out of the market. — NPR
New research from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, focuses in on the role of millennial generation in driving demand and shaping recovery. As Gregory Walker noted recently, in broad terms, looking at US economy, it is clear we're not really 'there' yet. Remember, the last... View full entry
Nicholas Korody penned a review - The Trouble with a Bird’s Eye View. The piece dissects a summer exhibition of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Design. He concludes the pairing of aerial photographs by Los Angeles-based Lane Barden with a geo-mapping project by the German-American... View full entry
Situating The Mound of Vendôme, the current exhibition on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, requires looking back into Paris' history after the French Revolution. For a tumultuous two months in 1871, the city was under the control of the Commune de Paris, a socialist revolutionary... View full entry
The city of Boston has been the stage for a long history of experiments with public space. Most notably, the Boston Common is the oldest public park in the country – and perhaps the first public urban park in the world. Originally a shared cow pasture until overgrazing led to a real-life example... View full entry
According to data compiled by the firm PropertyShark, since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in large-scale Manhattan developments have been to purchasers who either listed an overseas address or bought through an entity like a limited-liability corporation, a tactic rarely employed by local homebuyers but favored by foreign investors [...] “The global elite,” says developer Michael Stern, “is basically looking for a safe-deposit box.” — New York Magazine
PBS taps into the growing presence of 3D digital preservation on their new show, Time Scanners, which will premiere its first episode tonight at 8 p.m. ET. The three-part series will peruse the ancient iconic sites of the Egyptian Pyramids, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and the city of Petra... View full entry
A dramatic architectural landmark—two large concrete and aluminium cubes towering above a transparent glass base—opened its doors to the public this weekend in the north-eastern Spanish city of Zaragoza. The building is Spain’s seventh CaixaForum, one of a string of cultural centres financed by La Caixa, the foundation of the Barcelona-based savings bank. — theartnewspaper.com
Human Rights Watch said that, along with the Crystal Hall, stage of the 2012 Eurovision song contest, and the park-cum-shopping mall of the Winter Garden, the centre is one of the city's many oil-fuelled grand projects that have seen local people evicted by force. — theguardian.com
From earlier today: Zaha Hadid wins the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year Award 2014While almost 250 homes were cleared to make way for Hadid's building, (questions have also been raised about the rights of those who built it. In 2010, while the project was under construction, the global... View full entry
In a paper he recently published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B, Tao points to two regions of China... that have a similar geographic location as the Midwest—but far fewer tornadoes. The difference, he says, is that China's plains are surrounded by three east-west mountain ranges, which slow down passing winds enough to prevent tornados from forming.
Tao, then, is essentially suggesting we build mountain range-sized walls across Tornado Alley...
— motherboard.vice.com
The piece was completed last Friday and it consists of a single, diminutive swimming pool located somewhere in the southern Mojave Desert between Joshua Tree and Apple Valley. The public is allowed to use the pool, but in order to do so visitors need the key that unlocks it (it is kept covered) as well as the GPS coordinates. Only once you have the key, which is kept at the MAK Center, are you given the coordinates. — latimes.com
The skyline of Yujiapu in the Chinese city of Tianjin looks more like an expensive, abandoned movie set than it does “China’s new Manhattan,” as the financial district was once billed. A patina of dust covers the glass doors of the 47 office buildings and hotels that still sit empty, and in come cases unfinished. — qz.com
Take a gander at our latest roundup of Kickstarter and crowdfunding projects for Archinect's curated Kickstarter page! Here are our picks for June 2014:Sydney Opera House Architectural Model KitMarcus Bree of Brisbane-based Little Building Co. continues to showcase his talent in crafting exquisite... View full entry
This, if it is a harsh way to describe the British Museum's attempts to update itself over the last two decades, with the help of the most famous architects in the land and hundreds of millions in generous donations, nonetheless reflects what's going on. Like large cultural institutions everywhere, the museum finds itself dealing with similar pressures to those of commercial players in the fields of leisure and entertainment [...] and it reaches for similar solutions.. — theguardian.com
For some meals, it's not the food that makes it special, but how it was prepared. A cake made by a dear friend can taste better than the one bought from the bakery; instant oatmeal becomes transcendent made over a campfire in the woods. The traditions of cooking that we abide by are part... View full entry
Hardcore Wes Anderson fan and Lego model designer Ryan Ziegelbauer, in reverence to the director's most recent film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, has made a miniature replica of the Hotel completely out of Legos.Over the course of 575 hours, Ryan and a team of eight model builders designed and built... View full entry
