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A central part of the Fuggerei social housing complex’s 500th anniversary festival of events that began over the weekend, MVRDV’s newly-opened NEXT500 Pavilion examines the future of the all-important typology through the inclusion of proposed designs which would install inspired versions... View full entry
Any visitor to New York over the past few years will have witnessed this curious new breed of pencil-thin tower. Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense. They stand like naked elevator shafts awaiting their floors, raw extrusions of capital piled up until it hits the clouds. — The Guardian
In his latest long-form piece, The Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright shows how the advent of the new 'pencil tower' building type is rapidly transforming New York City's skyline, digs in the history of zoning laws, and explains how "air rights" allow (an abundance of) cash to buy a... View full entry
Two weeks ago, somebody untied Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s $40 million yacht from its mooring. It got me thinking about another opulent display of wealth owned by DeVos: her 22,000-square-foot nautical-themed summer mansion, located in Holland, Michigan. Just a few more years of climate change and it’ll be floating too. — vox.com
Kate Wagner critiques Betsy DeVos’s Michigan summer mansion on her humor blog McMansion Hell. Wagner unpacks not only the architectural design but also the greater social implications of why the education secretary's McMansion is so horrendous. The essay is dedicated to "all of the public... View full entry
For all the concern about the gentrification, rising housing prices and the growing gap between the rich and poor in our leading cities, an even bigger threat lies on the horizon: The urban revival that swept across America over the past decade or two may be in danger. As it turns out, the much-ballyhooed new age of the city might be giving way to a great urban stall-out. — The New York Times
Richard Florida paints a gloomy picture of the state of the great American urban revival in his NYT op-ed, "The Urban Revival Is Over," citing gentrification, income disparity, rising crime numbers, unaffordable housing prices, and the anti-urban agenda of the current White House tenants. Joe... View full entry
Trump is President, the climate is chaos, and the wealth gap is starting to qualify as its own national canyon. So if you've got vats of money and are afraid of all the people who don't, what do you do? Build doomsday architecture to survive the collapse of society! In this piece for The New... View full entry
If causal factors leading to housing unaffordability are not resolved over multiple generations, the social stratification will start to resemble countries like Russia, where a small elite control a vast share of the country’s total wealth.
The result? A society where the threat of class warfare would loom large. [...]
San Francisco and the Bay Area have long been committed to values which embrace inclusivity and counterculture. To see these values fraying so publicly adds insult to injury
— qz.com
More from San Francisco's housing crisis on Archinect:What these “pre-rent control” stats might reveal about SF's soaring housing costsBay Area media ban together for homelessness advocacyDon't blame the tech bros: SF's housing crisis is bonkers because of zoning, not startupsMan living in... View full entry
