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The United States Army Corps of Engineers this week issued Southwest Valley Constructors a contract modification worth $524 million for design-build services on a barrier wall replacement project in Tucson, Arizona, at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. The change brings Southwest's contract amount for the project to almost $1.2 billion when combined with the May 2019 initial contract's award of $646 million for the same project. — Construction Dive
While construction of all non-essential projects in several US states has been ordered to stop to contain the spread of COVID-19, planning of fortification elements along the US-Mexican border near Tucson, Arizona is going ahead with full steam, as Construction Dive reports. View full entry
In a statement posted the American Institute of Architects (AIA) website, the organization explains that a group of former AIA presidents have written a letter directly to President Donald Trump denouncing the "Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" executive order. Previously on... View full entry
Following a great deal of uproar in the architectural community in response to President Trump's proposed "Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” executive order, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has written a letter to the president officially opposing the initiative. ... View full entry
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), Docomomo US, and the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) have joined the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in voicing deep... View full entry
In a seven-page draft executive order obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, Trump declares that the federal government since the 1950s has “largely stopped building beautiful buildings that the American people want to look at or work in.”
Future federal government buildings, he decrees, should look like those of ancient Rome, Greece and Europe.
“Classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style,” he states.
— The Chicago Sun Times
The Chicago Sun-Times has published the draft text of President Donald Trump’s proposed “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” executive order that seeks to impose a classically-inspired architectural style on the nation’s federal buildings. The American Institute of... View full entry
Is neoclassicism about to make a big comeback? It looks likely, as a new executive order under consideration by President Donald Trump attempts to make classicism the "preferred and default style" for new and upgraded federal buildings. According to an exclusive report by... View full entry
Imports of steel and aluminum into the United States have declined since the tariffs went into place, he said, but imports of products made with those metals had “significantly increased.” [...]
As a result, [President Trump] said, the United States will expand its tariffs to cover products made of steel and aluminum — like nails, tacks, staples, cables, certain types of wire, and bumpers and other parts for cars and tractors — as of Feb. 8.
— The New York Times
The New York Times reports that the cost of foreign-made steel products like nails, staples, and cables will go up next month as President Donald Trump moves to reconfigure his unsuccessful efforts to protect these industries from foreign competition. Up until now, the tariffs have applied to raw... View full entry
The Fair Housing Act [...] prohibits not only intentional segregation, but also policies and practices whose effect is to discriminate for no defensible reason, even if there is no evidence of a racial motive. Lawyers describe such actions as having a “disparate impact” on minorities.
Now, however, the Trump administration is about to put into effect procedures to make it virtually impossible to prove disparate impact, no matter how egregious a discriminatory policy or practice may be.
— The New York Times
Richard Rothstein, author of the influential book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, presents an opinion piece in The New York Times highlighting the latest multi-pronged efforts on the part of the United States Department of Housing and Urban... View full entry
President Trump is preparing to divert an additional $7.2 billion in Pentagon funding for border wall construction this year, five times what Congress authorized him to spend on the project in the 2020 budget. — The Washington Post
According to The Washington Post, the funding would give the government enough money to complete about 885 miles of new fencing by spring 2022, far more than the 509 miles the administration has slated for the U.S. border with Mexico. So far the Trump administration has completed... View full entry
The history of housing discrimination in this country is in significant part a history of deliberate government policy, not market forces or individual choice. Ghettos such as those in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore, in fact, reflect federal policies of the mid-20th century that made segregation a condition for federal support of various kinds. That was social engineering of the most shameful sort. — Washington Post
The Washington Post editorial board sounds off on a recent plan advanced by United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson that seeks to further weaken Obama-era "affirmatively furthering fair housing" regulations. According to the editorial, the wording... View full entry
Tensions in the Middle East keep escalating after the U.S. President followed his drone assassination of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani with a tweet that publicly threatens to strike dozens of target sites in Iran, including "important" cultural sites, if the country dared to... View full entry
President Donald Trump has nominated J. Brett Blanton as the next Architect of the Capitol. Blanton would follow two acting directors, Christine Merdon and Thomas Carroll. If confirmed by the United States Senate, Blanton will serve a 10-year term as the official in charge of maintaining the... View full entry
The president and his administration said last week that they plan on building between 450 and 500 miles of fencing along the nearly 2,000-mile border by the end of 2020, an ambitious undertaking funded by billions of defense dollars that had been earmarked for things like military base schools, target ranges and maintenance facilities. — The Columbian
The construction has commenced in Yuma, Arizona, where the 30-foot-tall fencing will replace existing shorter barriers. "The Trump administration says the wall—along with more surveillance technology, agents and lighting—is key to keeping out people who cross illegally,"... View full entry
Hudson Yards’ nonprofit arts center, The Shed, has been shunned by the fashion elite since developer Stephen Ross’ Trump ties were exposed in early August.
Sources say that Michael Kors, Vera Wang and the Academy of Art University were all slated to show their collections at the sleek, $475 million venue but have pulled out. Rag & Bone publicly nixed the space, which opened in April, right after news broke of Ross’ Aug. 9 Trump fundraiser in the Hamptons.
— New York Post
Fern Mallis, the mogul who created New York Fashion Week in the 1990s, told The New York Post that The Shed is “kind of over,” adding, “If you know people showing at The Shed, please tell me because I don’t know who is." The fallout comes after news broke in August that Stephen Ross... View full entry
President Trump has instructed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Alaska’s 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions imposed nearly 20 years ago [...]
The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it to potential logging, energy and mining projects. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the “roadless rule,” which has survived a decades-long legal assault.
— The Washington Post
The move comes as global awareness over widespread deforestation in the Amazon and other tropical regions around the world intensifies. In Brazil, where land clearance and deforestation have increased rapidly this year under the country's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, smoke from the burning... View full entry
