Brasília’s design limitations offer a crucial lesson for many other cities. By resisting the temptation to fill every square inch of space on their paper and instead leaving as many blank areas as possible, architects and urban planners can allow people and changing times to co-create a city as spontaneous as life. — Project Syndicate

“A Pattern Language” is not about architecture, but about how specific design choices can help us build better relationships. By fitting a series of those choices—the patterns—together, you get a room, a house, a neighborhood and eventually a city. — Curbed

By championing virtues such as speed, technology, youth, and flight, the Futurists worked to cement Italy’s status as highly advanced and, thus, superior. In Asmara, the handsome structures built between 1935 and 1941 became multi-faceted tools of oppression.

Eight decades later, these Italian-designed edifices are still standing, albeit in need of rehabilitation. But preserving Asmara’s Futurist architecture necessarily preserves the fascist agenda that erected them in the first place... — Atlas Obscura

In proposing his prototype 21st-century city, Spilhaus correctly diagnosed many of the shortcomings of the 20th-century one. He cottoned on early to concepts such as air pollution, even speculating that it was changing the Earth’s atmosphere. — The Guardian

More speculation on the always-relevant subject of "Old People in Big Cities Afraid of the Sky." #futurism #urbanism #demographics #climatecrisis #Mid21C — McKinsey & Company

Within 40 hours of the project being announced in 2016, over 100,000 people had applied for citizenship on Asgardia's website. After three weeks, Asgardia had 500,000 applicants. — CNN

Make no mistake: Drones are coming, and they’re going to change a lot of things about how we shape our lives. So why shouldn’t we change how we shape our buildings to get ready for them?

[...]

That’s the basis for my Drone Tower, which would look like a futuristic condo building, with large balconies built to accommodate small electric aircraft or shipping drones. You wouldn’t need to buy your own drone, you’d simply order a ride with an app like a taxi—and hop in right from your terrace. — Wired

Elon Musk has plenty of other ideas. If anyone asks and he has a moment to explain, he'll talk distractedly of as-­yet-­unrealized concepts—a vertical takeoff­-and­-landing supersonic electric jet for long­-distance travel; an entirely new form of transport that he's named the Hyperloop... He is a man with the rare problem of having more ideas for how to radically change our world than the time to realize them.

Still, you do what you can. And so this Monday evening, his mind is on space suits. — GQ

...From seemingly out of nowhere, a large quad-rotor drone drops out the cloudless sky over Dubai Internet City, hovering insect-like just above the heads of the men, watching them with camera-eyes.

Before they can even notice, a squad of policemen – wearing helmets, body armour, and carrying assault rifles – rush them...

Welcome to Dubai, and to one of the more awkward moments of an already odd competition called Drones For Good. We’re here to watch teams compete for a million-dollar prize... — the BBC

But supplementing that aesthetic of “the future” sketched in imaginary edifice, the full SF vision of the future city is a mosaic, constructed from fragments of the cities that we recognize, including symbols that are decidedly from the past. [...]

If SF functions by taking the world we know and altering it with a constructed future fantasy, the Statue of Liberty serves as the junction point, the axis where the speculative fantasy begins and ends. — motherboard.vice.com

My bewilderment quickly yields to a growing sense of dread. How is it that even in the heart of Silicon Valley it’s completely acceptable for smart technology to be buggy, erratic, or totally dysfunctional? ... We are weaving these technologies into our homes, our communities, even our very bodies — but even experts have become disturbingly complacent about their shortcomings. The rest of us rarely question them at all. — Places Journal

Rod Serling, creator of the 1950s television series "The Twilight Zone", defined science fiction as "the improbable made possible." The same might be said for the practice of architecture. After all, architects by trade conceive of spaces, places, and worlds that do not (yet) exist. Furthermore, the ability to make the improbable possible is held in especially high regard today and is oftentimes what defines an architectural practice as “innovative” in the first place. — CLOG

*This screed is awesomely entertaining and full of cool links, even though it’s almost entirely implausible..There’s also the occasional built-from-scratch Brasilia. So, some people might build a city like this in some central-planned, high-tech rush, before realizing that urban drones, bacteria, and 3DPrinters are fated to become as old-fashioned and pokey as swoopy, Space Age Brasilia is right now. - Bruce Sterling — Co.Exist. - Fast Company

All human artifacts and activities — not just our objects and architecture, but also our organizations and operations, policies and procedures, systems and infrastructures — have been designed, and too many of the most critical have been badly done by professionals and politicians who didn’t know the first thing about design. While we cannot blame them for what they didn’t know or couldn’t see, the stakes have gotten too high for us to continue in this way. — Places Journal