Spaces like the Museum of Ice Cream and the Paul Smith Pink Wall offer a perfect setting for a highly shareable image—and that’s it. What happens to art, or travel, or the outside world in general when taking a photograph becomes an experience itself?

As photo-driven social networks continue to grow more powerful, they are both transforming boutique economies and exercising visual influence over our modern day cuisine, travel destinations, clothing labels, and makeup trends. — The Ringer

Photographer Benny Lam has documented the suffocating living conditions in Hong Kong’s subdivided flats, recording the lives of these hidden communities. — The Guardian

Known for portraying a “clean and analytical minimalist aesthetic” in his work, New York-based photographer Todd Eberle has captured sharp, personable portraits of architectural icons like David Adjaye, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Phyllis Lambert, and Philip Johnson...Most recently, Woodbury University's Julius Shulman Institute bestowed its prestigious JSI Excellence in Photography Award to Todd Eberle for 2017. — Bustler

A self-described “unlicensed architect” who splits his time between Tokyo and New York, [Hiroshi] Sugimoto has brought his monastic Modernist aesthetic to life through the firm New Material Research Laboratory, which he co-founded with the architect Tomoyuki Sakakida in 2008. “Most of my ideas are illegal,” says Sugimoto, who considers it Sakakida’s job “to make it look like it’s legal.” — The New York Times

Its architecture is painfully lost in its own time and its updates only confuse by neither integrating well into the original structure or standing out as truly contemporary. The pink kiosks, orange tiles, teal chairs and green paneled rooms, the purple plush seating in the JC Penny dressing room, and the bright blue tiered entryways are, along with other decor flourishes, seemingly random, with no coherent pattern. — NewCo Shift

After her grandparents passed away, Kelly Wise Valdes found a treasure trove of candid pictures taken by her grandfather, Chester "Chet" Wise, a master craftsman and woodworker who worked on the construction of the Magic Kingdom in Florida. [...]

Thousands of construction workers were there during the Magic Kingdom construction. Disney kept a small handful of these master craftsmen and made them full-time Disney employees, and my grandfather was one of the chosen few. — CNN

Danila Tkachenko is a Russian photographer whose series Restricted Areas crystallises the tendencies of many artists working on themes of the post-Soviet space. As Calvert 22’s Power and Architecture season demonstrates, there is a healthy interest in the abandoned or neglected buildings that once served as landmarks of Soviet ambition: the rack and ruin of utopia. What sets Tkachenko apart is the unforgiving simplicity of his compositions. — calvertjournal.com

Bunker Hill, an area of roughly five square blocks in downtown Los Angeles, holds a place in city lore similar to that of the water wars or the construction of Dodger Stadium: beginning in 1959, it was the subject of a massive urban-renewal project, in which “improvement” was generally defined by the people who stood to profit from it [...] subject of this short film by Keven McAlester, which compares what the same streets in downtown Los Angeles looked like in the nineteen-forties and today. — newyorker.com

In particular, La Brea to Fairfax, which parallels Miracle Mile on Wilshire, was a hotbed of dispensaries with some areas having up to 3 on the same block, making it “the Green Mile.” [...]

I began noticing how the dispensaries branded themselves through signage and typography, and what these choices might convey to their prospective clientele. Second, the fleeting nature of these businesses was such that the green paint hardly dried before a “For Lease” sign would appear — lataco.com

In any city, space is a commodity. In South African cities space is historical and emotional. A new photo series by an American living in Cape Town captures the dramatic inequality of South Africa’s most beloved city. From an aerial view, Cape Town’s scenic beauty gives way to a stark reminder of the country’s past and the continued racial segregation. [...]

“Looking straight down from a height of several hundred meters, incredible scenes of inequality emerge,” he writes on his website. — qz.com

“I set about programming algorithms to generate an imaginary city...One that I could populate with buildings and structures without having to draw or 3-D model.”

[Daniel] Brown begins by plugging random numbers into the program, which uses fractal mathematics to create unique shapes that resemble a 3-D graph. He spends several hours “exploring” the terrain until he finds an interesting form. Brown isolates the shape, and tweaks it until he arrives at something he likes. — wired.com

Lisa Anne Auerbach created a ‘megazine’ of structures reminiscent of shopping malls or warehouses, hidden away from city centers, where thousands of people worship every week [...]

The conception of the cathedral is not only where one goes to be spiritual or commune with God, but to feel awe through the grandeur of the architecture [...] the US megachurch buildings are stripped wholesale of that sense of wonder and connection to the past; they are also far from the focal point of a city. — theguardian.com