The hotel's name refers to the idea that you'd only need to spend nine hours there — a radical concept in a world of lodging that offers a host of amenities to tempt you away from the place you're actually meant to be visiting. But the people behind Nine Hours believe you're better off spending as little time as possible under their roof: just one hour to get ready for bed, seven hours to sleep, and one hour to get up in the morning. — theverge.com

The Principals, a Greenpoint-based design studio, set off to explore that intersection of interactive design and technology with an art installation for MoMA PS1's summer Warm Up series. Hit the jump to see how the Spatium Yamamoto installation grooved to the beat for an unforgettable, psychedelic experience this past summer. — Inhabitat

Eric Ho watches the boom on the Lower East Side...and sees...Detroit. Specifically...vacant storefronts — more than 200 of them in the area east of the Bowery and south of 14th Street.
How was it possible, he thought, that in a neighborhood where space was at such a premium, so much of it was sitting idle? ...an architect who once intended to design housing for disaster zones,, he thought: What could be done with them? — New York Times

A 28-year-old Richard Meier received his first and by far most modest commission from the artist Saul Lambert back in 1962. “Lambert had purchased a very small site on the ocean, on Fire Island,” says Meier, “and said, ‘We don’t have very much money—actually, we have $9,000 to spend on the construction of this house. Could you design something for us?’ ” — New York Magazine

"The differences in unemployment rates, participation rates, and average earnings between whites, blacks, and Hispanics aren't just stark. They're also sturdy, rarely yielding over the last 40 years.

Whites account for about 81 percent of the workforce. But there are 33 occupations counted by the BLS (particularly those on farms, around heavy machines, in doctor's offices, and in C-suites) where whites officially account for nine in ten of all workers, or more. Here they are." — The Atlantic Online

China's wealthy patrons like Mr. Lu's family are underwriting a major cultural boom, spending billions of yuan on grand buildings to showcase impressive collections of art, antiques and other cultural rarities. Their largesse and ambitions echo American industrialists who sponsored the arts in the early years of the 20th century... — online.wsj.com

The default recourse to data-fication, the presumption that all meaningful flows and activity can be sensed and measured, is taking us toward a future in which the people shaping our cities and their policies rarely have the opportunity to consider the nature of our stickiest urban problems and the kind of questions they raise. — Places Journal

Shot with the full cooperation of nypl.org and their rad labs team. Seems like most likely the first drone ever flown inside the NY Public Library. — boltron.com

"As Autumn Leaves" by the Laboratory for Computational Design (LCD) is an art installation that mixes the emotive with precise computational design. The piece was installed during Beijing Design Week 2013 from Sept. 26 - Oct. 3. — bustler.net