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The Trump administration said Tuesday that it will waive environmental reviews and other laws to replace a stretch of border wall in San Diego, moving to make good on one of the president’s signature campaign pledges.
Critics including the Center for Biological Diversity criticized the move as overreach and a threat to the environment.
— pbs.org
"Last week, the House of Representatives approved the administration’s request for $1.6 billion to start building Trump’s border wall," PBS NewsHour reports, "which would include replacing 14 miles (22 kilometers) in San Diego covered by the latest waiver and building 60 miles (96 kilometers)... View full entry
Last week, we covered the newly released designs for a landmark sculpture that would be built at Flint Castle in Wales. The sculpture, designed by George King Architects, was to be a cantilevered bridge structure made of weathering steel and engraved with words chosen from the local community. At... View full entry
Good walls make good neighbours – but not, it seems, when they are made entirely of glass. Five residents of the multi-million-pound Neo Bankside towers, which loom behind Tate Modern like a crystalline bar chart of inflated land values, have filed a legal claim against the museum to have part of its viewing platform shut down. They claim that its 10th-floor public terrace has put their homes into a state of “near constant surveillance”. — The Guardian
In an apparent case of art interfering with life, the owners of the apartments next to the Tate Modern's viewing platform are trying to legally erect some kind of visual barrier between them and the visitors of the museum (although the exotic technology of curtains has apparently not yet made it... View full entry
As we discussed at the Witte, the EPA’s “Energy Star,” indoor air quality, and materials safety programs directly support the design and construction industry each and every day.
The proposed EPA budget eliminates funding for these programs and will severely impact the ability of engineers and architects to meet client demands, fulfill our contractual obligations, and carry out the duties of our licensure to protect the public.
— Letter from David Lake via The Rivard Report
In response to a letter in which Texan Republican Congressman Lamar Smith told David Lake that he gets all of his news from a "biased liberal media," Lake not only kindly (and eloquently) rebutted this inaccuracy, but also encouraged the Congressman not to defund the EPA if he still wants to live... View full entry
Not content to creepily stalk you with tailored ads on Facebook and Google, ISPs can now sell your internet browsing history to third-parties for cash, thanks to the corporately-backed husks that voted for the move in the U.S. House of Representatives. According to The Washington Post:Congress's... View full entry
As if the challenges of politics, engineering, and weather weren't enough, now self-driving cars face another obstacle: purposeful visual sabotage, in the form of specially painted traffic lines that entice the car in before trapping it in an endless loop. As profiled in Vice, the artist behind... View full entry
Rael writes that one of the most devastating consequences of the wall is “the division of communities, cities, neighborhoods and families, resulting in the erosion of social infrastructure.” When we talked, he wondered how we might create something positive from something so horrible: “Can reform happen through borderland investment? If you build 150 libraries along the border, you’d get a very different outcome.” — The New York Times
The RFP for the border wall is out, but the conscience-bearing architectural community is staying in (and trying to imagine alternatives to this xenophobic concrete smear job). In particular, in this New York Times article they're suggesting building anything but walls, suggesting that perhaps... View full entry
Almost singing the refrain, "What do awards have to do with it?" writer Ben Willis investigates the disconnect between the plethora of architectural awards, both those that recognize aesthetics and those that focus on data-driven technical specs, and the public's (and for that matter, other... View full entry
Don't pay your national AIA dues if you don't agree with the direction of the association. At least, that's what Mette Aamodt is doing this year. According to a press release issued by the firm, Aamodt explains that she: is calling on architects to join her in refusing to work for... View full entry
When president-elect Donald Trump nominated Ben Carson to lead the department of Housing and Urban Development, the response was resoundingly: huh?The neurosurgeon came onto the national political scene in 2015, during his run for the Republican nomination, but after Trump took the presidency and... View full entry
The perenially opinionated Patrik Schumacher, who gave a speech about his "urban policy manifesto" at the November 17th World Architecture Festival in which he called for an end to all social housing and privatization of public space, has attracted push-back from an unexpected source: the firm he... View full entry
“They spend $25,000 per employee per year on perks like free beer and pool tables and massages ... That’s great, but can they spend $1,000 to help the rest of San Francisco survive?”
As it turned out, they could not. Representatives of tech organizations reacted fiercely against the tax, saying that it would suppress growth in the industry that has made the city – parts of it, at least – wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.
— The Guardian
Widening the gap between San Francisco's wealthy and poor, the budget committee of the city's board of supervisors rejected on Monday the tech tax, which “would have imposed a 1.5% payroll levy on technology companies that generate more than $1m in revenues a year, including Uber, Google... View full entry
"We’re not against art or culture," [says Boyle Heights activist Maga Miranda.] "...But the art galleries are part of a broader effort by planners and politicians and developers who want to artwash gentrification."
"We’re saying that they need to make a bigger effort to amplify the voices of the people that are gonna be most affected by this, and that doesn’t happen to be artists in this situation. It happens to be people who can’t afford to live here anymore."
— LA Weekly
Amid widespread gentrification in LA, activists in Boyle Heights have been scrutinizing the art galleries that set up shop there in recent years — including significant spaces like Self Help Graphics, which helped put the Eastside neighborhood on the cultural map. While activists want to... View full entry
All the radar systems, lighthouses, barracks, ports and airfields that China has set up on its newly built island chain in the South China Sea require tremendous amounts of electricity, which is hard to come by in a place hundreds of miles from the country’s power grid.
Beijing may have come up with a solution: floating nuclear power plants.
A state-owned company, China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, is planning to build a fleet of the vessels to provide electricity to remote locations [...]
— nytimes.com
Previously in the Archinect news:New satellite images show progress in China's island-building projectChina is busy building islands in the South China Sea View full entry
A group of German architects and planners has started a campaign to rebuild the Wolf House, widely seen as a link between van der Rohe’s early, more conventional designs and his later buildings, like the Barcelona Pavilion and the Farnsworth House, that would redefine modern architecture. [...]
But the plan has run into resistance from other architects and scholars who say that the Wolf House would be too hard to reconstruct [...].
— nytimes.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Two of a kind: photographer Robin Hill contemplates the Farnsworth House and Glass House simultaneouslyRedesign of DC's main Mies library tip-toes around the good and the badDavid Chipperfield pledges to carefully "optimize" Mies van der Rohe's Neue... View full entry
