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I think that, if anything, the quarantine experience that we’re having is the realization that large-scale, drastic changes are actually possible. — LA Forum/Delirious LA
LA Forum's publication Delirious LA interviews BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh on the quarantine as a possible enabler to change in architecture and other conjectures it may bring to architecture and urban design. "For me, as someone who writes about architecture, it was the idea that there was a way of... View full entry
The police had allowed me to fly with them so that I could see the world from their perspective. Through its aerial patrols, the division has uniquely unfettered access to a fundamentally different experience of Los Angeles, one in which the city must constantly be reinterpreted from above, in real time, with the intention of locating, tracking and interrupting criminal activity. This also means that the police are not only thinking about Los Angeles as it currently exists. — New York Times
"Their job is to anticipate things that have yet to occur — not just where criminals are, but where and when they might arrive next. They patrol time as well as space. In this sense, although it has been in continual operation for the past 60 years, the division has much to tell us about... View full entry
The sensory limitations of these vehicles must be accounted for, Nourbakhsh explained, especially in an urban world filled with complex architectural forms, reflective surfaces, unpredictable weather and temporary construction sites. This means that cities may have to be redesigned, or may simply mutate over time, to accommodate a car’s peculiar way of experiencing the built environment... — Geoff Manaugh on The New York Times
"...The flip side of this example is that, in these brief moments of misinterpretation, a different version of the urban world exists...If we can learn from human misperception, perhaps we can also learn something from the delusions and hallucinations of sensing machines. But what?"As self-driving... View full entry
It’s 2040, and Los Angeles has just begun to recover from a devastating epidemic that wiped out much of its population. Former residents slowly trickle back, alongside new immigrants drawn to the city’s surplus housing stock. But at a lab in Westwood, epidemiologists fear the disease is... View full entry
Geoff Manaugh is a design and architecture writer, contributing to publications such as Dwell, New Scientist and The New Yorker, as well as authoring several books and the long-running design and architecture site, BLDGBLOG.Manaugh’s perspective on the drought focuses on the ripe opportunities... View full entry
Burglary is a spatial crime: its very definition requires architecture...Indeed, burglary's architectural interest comes not from its ubiquity, but from its unexpected, often surprisingly subtle misuse of the built environment. Burglars approach buildings differently, often seeking modes of entry other than doors and approaching buildings—whole cites—as if they're puzzles waiting to be solved or beaten. — BLDGBLOG
More on Archinect:The Secret Service wants to build a fake White HouseArchitecture of paranoiaCurbing violence through better architectureSingapore's Sterile Authoritarianism View full entry
Police simulations such as these offer a peculiarly spatial insight into the ways humans attempt to make sense of the world. [...]
Someone builds a surrogate or a stand-in—a kind of stage-set on which to test their most viable theories—then they control that replicant world down to every curb height and door frame. Architecture then comes along simply as ornamentation, in order to give this virtual world a physical footprint
— bldgblog.blogspot.com
When I walked out to get breakfast this morning, clouds had obscured all but the topmost workings of the 1 World Trade Center site, visible through our living room window—a strange vision of machines, pulleys, cranes, and gears sort of hovering in the sky, like something out of Archigram by way of Hayao Miyazaki. — bldgblog.blogspot.com
For his thesis project at the University of Toronto, Clint Langevin, in collaboration with Amy Norris, proposed "repurposing abandoned mines as renewable energy infrastructure in the U.S." — bldgblog.blogspot.com
Check out more of Clint's work on his profile. View full entry
Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, historian, and educator based in Berkeley, California. His work spans a huge range of topics and scales, as his new and utterly fascinating book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, makes clear. — BLDGBLOG
Members of this organization begin the narrative process by examining city neighborhoods and commercial districts for compelling structures that appear to have fallen into disuse—“hidden gems” of the built environment. In varying states of repair, these buildings suggest only stories about the past, not the future. — bldgblog.blogspot.com
