The way it works is each loop, outside and in, is equipped with a bed, study, kitchen, bathroom, and little dresser, arranged so that when the wheel stops the matching item is available to each person at the same time. To switch over to a new activity, they both have to walk in tandem... — hyperallergic.com

Silicon Valley long prided itself on building world-changing technologies from the humble garage, or the nondescript office park. The new spaces are more distinctive, as companies seek to build a consumer profile [...]

[There] is a sense that nothing is permanent, that any product can be dislodged from greatness by something newer. It’s the aesthetic of disruption: We must all change, all the time. And yet architecture demands that we must also represent something lasting. — mobile.nytimes.com

... you can find in his full body of work a sustained attempt to measure how much the physical or architectural setting of a scene contributes to a narrative and how much it takes us out of one. — latimes.com

Upon the recent conclusion of Norway's July 22 memorial site competition, Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg was unanimously selected by the competition jury to be the designer.

Dahlberg's designs will become the two public-art memorials, each commemorating the 77 victims who tragically lost their lives in the Oslo bombing and Utøya massacre on July 22, 2011. — bustler.net

Before the path arrived, Indianapolis didn’t have a mainstream bike scene — just streets designed to improve traffic flow. Now, children and the elderly have joined the spandex swarms of longtime cycling enthusiasts...

The public art along the trail accentuates the path’s role as a sculptor of the city’s evolving identity. For example, Donna Sink’s “Moving Forward” is a series of seven stained-glass-hued eco-friendly bus shelters covered in lines from poems by local writers. — mobile.nytimes.com

The historic Grand Palais is due for a contemporary touch-up from French firm LAN, who recently won the competition to restructure and expand the monument...Looking beyond the museum's Beaux-Arts style, LAN highlights the museum's durability and flexibility in an effort to bring out the building's full potential. — bustler.net

"Ai Weiwei, who helped design the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, stayed away from the opening ceremonies because he said he wanted his building to represent freedom, not be a trophy for an autocratic regime uninterested in change." — hyperallergic.com

It's party prep time for the City of Karlsruhe in Germany. Berlin-based architecture firm J. MAYER H. and Rubner Holzbau were recently commissioned by the city to design a temporary pavilion for its 300th anniversary in 2015. The wooden pavilion will be built in Schlosspark and serve as an event venue for the celebration. Construction will begin in March 2015. — bustler.net

In 2013, we picture cities a little differently, with demography and photography. Cities live in Instagram, in patterns of light from space, in blueprints and visualizations and—most like Canaletto’s civic landscapes—on Google Street View.

Now, an artist in London has done some creative, comparative history, pairing Canaletto’s Venice and London with contemporary depictions, as glimpsed by the Google van. — theatlantic.com

In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. [...]

In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area. — Marin Independent Journal

The commercialisation of the urban landscape has resulted in the privatisation of public space. As city centres have become tributes to consumption, private interests have permeated these spaces. They have become awash with pseudo-public consumer spaces which belong to corporations rather than the citizenry. Although these places hold the semblance of being “public”, they are owned by corporate interests and are therefore under private control and not accountable to the public. — New Left Project