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A New York developer has scored a $92 million loan to finish a project which is billed as the largest speculative office building in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood. — Urbanize New York
The construction loan was granted to Baruch Singer, whose Triangle 613, LLC will use the funding to develop a 10-story, 215,379-square-foot Class A office and retail building located at 1497-1538 Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. The loan from private lender Parkview Financial came... View full entry
Through a series of postcards and a love letter, Toronto-based practice Atelier RZLBD has proposed a conceptual project that would add a 35-mile long tower above Toronto’s Yonge Street, the longest street in the world. Titled #YongeCity, the megastructure would be composed of space frame... View full entry
Visionary plans, policy, and infrastructure have all played crucial roles in the development of the city and consequently in the definition of its edge. Today, conflicting interests regarding ownership, use, and value of the Lakefront have produced a stalemate of what this civic treasure could become. — Chicago Architectural Club
A hotspot for land-use disputes, the urban development of Chicago's Lakefront is the subject of the 2016 Chicago Prize competition, "On the Edge”. Launched on November 29 by the Chicago Architectural Club and the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the competition seeks speculative architectural... View full entry
Sorry, I’m not able to send this directly through SnapFace since your iPhone 6 doesn’t support neural chat. Old-fashioned text pixels will have to do. Remember the movie “Her”? That’s what Los Angeles is like in 2056. L.A. is the densest city in the U.S., with a population that’s about a third larger than it was in 2016. Taller buildings are everywhere, including New DTLA — a corridor of super-talls that runs the length of Wilshire all the way to Santa Monica. — Los Angeles Times
The speculative fiction details a "utopian" city primarily characterized by efficient, far-reaching public transport and fewer cars. There's no longer a drought, and buildings are wrapped in "solar skins" designed by Elon Musk.For more speculative visions of a future California, check out these... View full entry
Robert Urquhart visited BIG's 2016 Serpentine Pavilion and the new Summer Houses. Olaf Design Ninja_ approved "Adeyemi's is very architectural and tectonic. still modern while taking on that neo classical stuff. and Leibingers is nice too...." Plus, Nicholas Korody published 'The Permanent... View full entry
Among the many writers of disasters and crisis – from Barthes to Blanchot to Ballard – there is a strain of thinking that rejects the normative and reductive assumption that a disaster must be met with an austere temper or melancholic pragmatism. Rather, disasters can breed their own wild... View full entry
In the face of events that exceed our capacity for comprehension, humans tend to invent myths and stories that render things palatable. The passage of the sun across the firmament, the surge of the oceans in a storm, the crash of thunder that follows the flash of lightning – these all have been... View full entry
While the current drought is likely linked to larger issues like climate change, California has always had cycles of dry and wet seasons, as well as regular drought periods. But, for thousands of years, the inhabitants of the region were (for the most part) able to survive times of water scarcity... View full entry
Part and parcel to the image of Orange County in the popular imagination, the suburban tract home is a ubiquitous, popular, and oft-derided element of the Southern California architecture vernacular. The Freshly Squeezed: Survival on the Fringes Honorable Mention proposal crafts an extended... View full entry
Coping with California's drought and ensuing water restrictions have been stressful for everyone in the state, but some bear that stress more heavily than others. In Apart, We Are Together, the state's most affluent members will manage to detach the water infrastructure from everyone else to... View full entry
Grassroots Cactivism, by Ali Chen California is entering the fourth year of an epic drought. Urban households have reduced water usage by 25%. However, legislation does not apply to farmers, while 80% of the state's water usage goes towards agricultural production. A large percentage of that... View full entry
It’s a myth almost universally believed, that sits at the core of liberal technocratic thought, and has been embedded in practically every other work of speculative fiction for the last half century. You can sum it up like this: 'When we go into space, we will all magically become nice.'...It’s early days, but if we really want to create a progressive new world then issues like these should be at the hearts of our efforts from the very start. — The Guardian
The longtime space-age Manifest Destiny of humans inhabiting Mars and the prominently white, European male perspective that narrative perpetually emphasizes has become a bubbling multi-faceted discussion among science bloggers as Elon Musk's staunch ambitions to ultimately turn humans into a... View full entry
The Chicago Architectural Club launched its 2014 edition of the Chicago Prize ideas competition this past weekend: design the Barack Obama Presidential Library! From the lively discussion (if not frenzy) surrounding a Barack Obama Presidential Library possibly being built, the Chicago Prize invites architects and designers to send ideas of how the U.S. Presidential Library building typology should be reinvented. — bustler.net
The Chicago Prize 2014 competition aims to spark debate on the typology of the presidential library. Speculative proposals will fulfill functions like housing a collection of artifacts and documents relating to the president’s life while also providing educational infrastructure and framework... View full entry
MAS Studio is back with their latest competition, MAS CONTEXT: LEGACY. The open competition explores how the most influential people, places, buildings, ideas, films, etc. have affected -- and continue to affect -- the way we experience the urban environment. And LEGACY not only looks to the past, it also theorizes what legacies may define the future. — bustler.net
Submissions can be in the form of critical essays, photo essays, analytical studies, data visualizations, visual explorations, films, or interviews.So get started on those entries. The deadline to submit is Monday, December 1, 2014.Learn more important competition details on Bustler. View full entry
When driving through the streets of Los Angeles, one would expect the urban structures of a dynamic city to be as unique as its inhabitants. But that's not entirely the case, and why is that? The Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles poses that question--and what could have been--with their... View full entry
