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When tracking the performance of cities across the United States, various factors come into play. Growth in population and employment are often the first to be researched and analyzed. However, not all cities are seen and discussed in the same light. CityLab co-founder and... View full entry
Construction has just begun on MVRDV's Lyon Part-Dieu, a shopping mall located in Lyon, France. The new design features a porous facade breaking up the exterior pattern and allowing for greater fluidity with its surrounding environment. Lyon Part-Dieu Shopping Center by MVRDV, located in Lyon... View full entry
In this thoughtful ode to the unexpected charms of brutalism, Felix Salmon explores why the formerly nightmarish architectural style is experiencing a renaissance, or at least a renewed appreciation. Salmon's observation that ubiquitous, unimaginative glass towers have replaced brutalism as the... View full entry
Once known as the city of single family homes, Los Angeles is now developing high-density housing complexes, not only in downtown, but according to this Urban Land article, on the traditionally reluctant-to-develop West Side.The developments mark a shift in how Los Angeles conceptualizes living... View full entry
According to the Knight Frank Wealth Report, released on Wednesday, the population of multimillionaires in major cities around the world now changes radically from month to month...The American rich, he says, are moving from second-home ownership to more of a hub-and-spoke model. — NYT
Robert Frank reports on the seasonal nature of today’s ultrawealthy and the resulting resortification, of architecture and real estate in major global cities. View full entry
NBBJ calls the concept No-Shadow Tower, though it would be more accurate to call it the Smaller-Shadow-From-One-of-Two-Towers, since it depends on a pair of buildings separated by an open space. For that reason, the technique is an awkward fit for New York — NY Magazine
A weeklong series of ideas for improving urban life, ranging from an examination of how Next-Generation Drones Will Save New York City’s Infrastructure, to how new building designs will usher in the Age of Shadowless Skyscrapers. View full entry
Every time we build something, we manipulate the conditions of people’s lives, but most planners don’t know enough about this manipulation...I have worked very hard to find out what the life is that goes on inside our buildings and how our buildings influence that life...Because if you just do form, then you are doing sculpture, but if you look after the interaction between life and form, you are doing architecture. — Metropolis
More on Archinect: Is Jan Gehl winning his battle to make our cities liveable? Jason Danziger heals psychosis with design MIT's "Placelet" sensors technologize old-fashioned observation methods for placemaking We're suckers for any architecture that looks like us Our infrastructure is expanding to... View full entry
With a $35,000 grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, [MITs Elizabeth Christoforetti] and her team are working on a project called Placelet, which will track how pedestrians move through a particular space. They’re developing a network of sensors that will track the scale and speed of pedestrians [and vehicles] over long periods of time. The sensors, [currently being tested in downtown Boston], will also track the 'sensory experience' by recording the noise level and air quality of that space. — CityLab
More on Archinect:The Life of a New Architect: Elizabeth Christoforetti (Featured interview)MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bikeMIT's Newest Invention Fits All the Furniture You Need in One Closet-Sized BoxMIT develops self-assembling modular robots View full entry
After the dramatic decline in concentrated poverty between 1990 and 2000, there was a sense that cities were “back,” and that the era of urban decay—marked by riots, violent crime, and abandonment—was drawing to a close. Unfortunately, despite the relative lack of public notice or awareness, poverty has re-concentrated. — Paul Jargowsky for The Century Foundation
The Century Foundation publishes a Paul Jargowsky paper laying out the facts and statistics of decline and poverty's impact on American cities. Paul Jargowsky is a fellow at The Century Foundation where he writes about inequality, the geographic concentration of poverty, and residential... View full entry
Americans living in rentals spent almost a third of their incomes on housing in the second quarter, the highest share in recent history. Rental affordability has steadily worsened, according to a new report from Zillow, which tracked data going back to 1979...While mortgages remain relatively affordable, landlords have been able to increase rents because demand for apartments remains strong. The U.S. homeownership rate fell to the lowest level in almost five decades in the second quarter. — Bloomberg
More on Archinect:Shipping container village crops up in Oakland, offering alternative to sky-high SF rents500 Square Feet and FallingPlay "Inside the rent", and become a virtual developer in NYCMonterey Park City Council adopts tougher penalties for landlords of illegal boarding homesL.A.'s... View full entry
Slapped in the face is exactly how many Venetians are feeling by the tidal wave of new money. And the local tech boom, prompting 'Silicon Beach' references around town, is just one source of it — The Washington Post
More on Archinect:The rise and spectacular fall of Venice Beach's Pacific Ocean ParkAre apps the virtual gateway to physical gentrification?Oren Safdie's play "False Solution" finishes up its 3-week run this weekend in Santa MonicaThose hipster millennials might not be the true gentrifiers of U.S... View full entry
The truth is that Los Angeles, once a pioneer in defining the freeway’s place in urban life, has fallen behind other cities. From Dallas to Paris to Seoul, the most innovative ideas about freeways and how they can be redesigned are coming from places far from Southern California. It’s time for L.A. to catch up... — Los Angeles Times
Following his recent review of the 405 Freeway expansion through the Sepulveda Pass, Christopher Hawthorne sums up why the time is ripe for Angelenos to refresh their perspectives on the city's freeways.More on Archinect:Archinect's critical round-up: the week's best architectural critiques so... View full entry
Laundromats have recently been closing down in San Francisco, which prompted a Google employee to tweet in response "cost of disruption: washio and others have removed need for laundromat on every block." Who needs laundromats when there's an app for that? Well, people who can't afford to spend... View full entry
Many [university presses] have a storied history of amplifying voices that were long ignored...The litany is endless, underscoring the audacity of university presses in believing that every city deserves the best ideas possible. We need that. As we make choices about our modern cities, as policymakers, advocates or citizens, we need these books to ground our vision, to help us imagine what is possible. And that’s why the tenuous future of university presses is so alarming. — nextcity.org
More on Archinect:Pump Out the Volumes: 50,000 free books form 1 art installationBradley Garrett on the importance of gonzo journalism for understanding citiesWilkinson Eyre-renovated Weston Library at Oxford now reopenedArchinect's Screen/Print series View full entry
When Loft Living was first published, artists’ laments about real estate in New York City mirrored the concerns that have plagued residents for much of the last century. Namely, it’s tough to find a suitable and affordable place to live. Since the late ’80s, the tenor of that complaint has shifted from one of anxiety to one of fear... — Guernica
Guernica magazine interviewed sociologist Sharon Zukin following the 25th-anniversary release of her 1989 landmark book "Loft Living" last year. Revisiting her timely book -- which focuses on NYC's SoHo neighborhood when upscale real estate properties took over industrial lofts and artists'... View full entry
