Reports on the latest and greatest from the architecture and building-product industries.
Image courtesy Adrian Heid In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Vint Cerf, the godlike co-creator of the Internet during its rudimentary military phase, recently proclaimed that the Internet is not a human right. Cerf reasoned that technology, which is a tool and an enabler of rights, is not to be confused with…
The open plan was supposed to free a building’s inhabitants from the historical, social, and psycho-spatial bonds that inhibited their creativity and general enjoyment, not to mention repressed their ludenic and sexual selves. Yet despite its lofty ideals, the partition-less plane engendered traumas and uncertainty, where the comfort of enclosing walls was obliterated by a…
Syncom 1, the first geosynchronous satellite. Image via NASA. The patent complexity of architecture,its need to bring together many minds and many hands to enact physical change upon the environment, once restricted the medium’s services to a powerful elite. But these days, architecture’s more pluralistic streak has emerged, approaching full force in the forms…
Rapunzel Tower by Guy Nordenson and Associates When Walter Benjamin wrote that “Architecture is the most important testimony to latent ‘mythology,'” he was describing how we dream in architecture–namely, through collective buildings and the commerce and spectacle they inhere. Benjamin was explicitly pointing to 19th-century arcades, which he believed fostered the necessary conditions for the…
Ishio Abe (R) and his wife, next to their temporary accommodation in Ishinomaki city in Japan. Image(c) AFP Photo/Antoine Bouthier. AFP reports today that tens of thousands of Japanese tsunami victims are facing a brutal winter, despite the efforts of relief workers and designers who have worked to build thousands of temporary housing structures…
Horizonte, a “Journal for Architectural Discourse” established by students from the Bauhaus University in Weimar, is currently hosting a call for submissions. Published twice annually since its launch in the summer of 2010, Horizonte follows an increasingly popular “Archi-zine” formula, collecting interviews, essays, photography and projects that center around a single topic, one that brings…
The Dream: Howard Roark; Reality: Unemployment line *Kidding–what did you think? Results froma new study conducted by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, of course, state the opposite. As the Washington Post reports, the findings, which were released today and contain zero surprises in them, hold that among recent college graduates those…
Photo: Jeanne Noonan for New York Daily News Since the dawn of the High Line, every derelict railwayhas become prime real estate. The downtown New York attraction has inspired a string of impersonators around the world, as cities immediately caught on to the frenzy for linear parks and sought to duplicate its formula for…
从sgnlr在Vimeo Kolotoč/旋转木马。罗马ns protest the surge in the number of billboards (upwards 60,000) that have draped the historic city in ads, while São Paulo businesses have thrived since the city purged its streets of the visual pollutants five years ago. Digital billboards with flows of ad feeds have been banned in…