The Make It Right foundation has unveiled its new home designs for the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes of Fort Peck, Montana. Following LEED Platinum certification and Cradle to Cradle practices, the foundation is known for building sustainable homes for people in need. For the Ft. Peck project, Make... View full entry
Using images provided by cultural organizations worldwide, some of which were captured with Google’s Street View camera technology, [the Google Cultural Institute's Street Art Project] includes street art from around the globe, including work that no longer exists [...]
Google is the latest organization to wade into debates about how or whether to institutionalize, let alone commercialize, art that is ephemeral and often willfully created subversively.
— nytimes.com
The Spanish pavilion "Interior" at the 2014 Venice Biennale conveys its multi-layered concept with an enticing labyrinth-like design. Visitors can formulate their own experience as they walk through the open maze, which is "guided" by large images of contemporary and traditional Spanish architecture. — bustler.net
The pavilion is set up as an interactive exploration of Spanish modernism throughout the last century, mixed in with other main points like the influence of digital technology, or comparing traditional Spanish architecture with the contemporary. Sio2 Arch (formerly F451arquitectura) designed the... View full entry
Oita, a medium-sized manufacturing city in the southwest of Japan, hopes to make its mark next summer as the host of the first Toilennale—an arts festival celebrating toilets. [...]
Tourism is the main focus of the art exhibit, but the Toilennale also promises to improve city services by renovating and beautifying bathrooms throughout downtown, beyond the 12 being turned into installations.
— qz.com
Is it too late for Koolhaas to include the Toilennale in the "toilets" Fundamentals tome?Get up to date on Venice Biennale news (toilet and non-toilet):Terri Peters' coverageRound-up of critical reactions from architectural publications View full entry
"...these days, the future of this hidden beach on the San Francisco Peninsula is being fought in a courthouse 25 miles away, in a battle that has become the latest class-charged standoff involving a wealthy entrepreneur in this polarized part of California..." — the New York Times
The struggle being waged over Martin's Beach is just one in a long history of disputes over public beach access in California. While legally everything below the mean tide line is public, physical walk paths often have to be carved out of private property, something not perfectly accounted for in... View full entry
A team of researchers from Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia are working on another solution: A swarm of tiny robots that could cover the construction site of the future, quickly and cheaply building greener buildings of any size. [...]
"The robots can work simultaneously while performing different tasks, and having a fixed size they can create objects of virtually any scale, as far as material properties permit”
— fastcoexist.com
Check out the Minibuilders in action below: View full entry
“The future — of a walkable, transit-friendly Los Angeles — is being built right now,” the report says. “It will allow people to drive everywhere they want, assuming they can put up with the traffic, and provide the option of walkable urbanism for those who want it.” — latimes.com
This year's Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by Rem Koolhaas, officially opened on June 7, under the theme "Fundamentals". The deluge of criticism and reporting coming out of the Biennale will surely continue until it closes November 23, but so far reactions from the architectural... View full entry
Though many scholars focusing on penitentiaries suspect that staff-prisoner relations are molded by institutional architecture, little empirical work has been completed on the topic. Now, a new study led by Beijersbergen and published in Crime & Delinquency has concluded that building styles, floor plans, and other design features do indeed have a significant impact on the way Dutch prisoners perceive their relationships with prison staff. — psmag.com
Following their "How Does the Brain Respond to the City?" event last month, Van Alen Institute released a short video expanding on the Dumbo Mental Map Project. Collaborating with GSAPP's Cloud Lab, the video gives an insider look at the experiment, which uses EEG brain computer interfaces to... View full entry
Due to plummeting enrollment and a troubled district, vacant school buildings—heck, just vacant buildings—are none too rare in Detroit. After 19 years of abandonment, the Nellie Leland School, however, is no longer vacant—it, as abandoned urban buildings are want to do, is back in session as condos. [...]
Today, the school is known as Leland Lofts, a set of expansive condos in the Lafayette Park neighborhood near downtown Detroit, where a 1,465-square-foot, one-bedroom loft goes for $175K.
— curbed.com
Illustrator Federico Babina from Barcelona looks to some of the world's most influential musicians in his latest series, "Archimusic." Depicted in Babina's signature whimsical style, he architecturally renders 27 familiar names in various music genres like J.S. Bach, Miles Davis, The Beatles... View full entry
You can’t build your way out of congestion. It’s the roads themselves that cause traffic. The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. [...]
What [economists] Turner and Duranton (and many others who’d like to see more rational transportation policy) actually advocate is known as congestion pricing. This means raising the price of driving on a road when demand is high.
— wired.com
Daniel Libeskind preaches the importance of drawings for creating architecture, in the latest short film from Chicago-based creative agency, Spirit of Space. Shot at Libeskind's "Sonnets of Babylon" pavilion for the 2014 Venice Biennale, the quick interview reflects on Libeskind's attention to... View full entry
Popular shows also are important predictors of the future of the built environment, thanks to Hollywood’s extensive consumer research and the instant feedback to current shows, and so TV tends to reflect how we live today and, more importantly, what we aspire to tomorrow. [...]
We selected the most popular of six eras that captured best how we aspired to live “as seen on TV” based on time period and the development pattern that was being represented.
— nextcity.org
