Jan 20
It’s a question that pops up again and again during the perennial cycle of annual architecture awards: Why do we only honor new buildings for great design
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Jan 20
Martin Luther King’s 1956 tips for riding integrated buses, examining how design has helped an Alaba
Posted in: Today's Chili
Martin Luther King’s 1956 tips for riding integrated buses, examining how design has helped an Alabama county, building instant cities in Accra and instant skyscrapers in Mumbai, and how two New York architects are tearing down the work of their former friends. It’s all this week in our favorite Urban Reads.
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Jan 19
Mumbai’s housing market is a series of extremes: There are hundreds of skyscrapers being built, yet more than 60 percent of its citizens live in slums. Single families occupy immense towers, but the average living space is less than 14 square feet per person. Alicja Dobrucka, a Polish artist, set out document the city’s changing landscape last year.
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Jan 19
361 Broadway, a cast-iron building in lower Manhattan, has stayed put as the neighborhood around it transformed its factories and workshops into restaurants and high-end boutiques. Now, after 133 years, it’s changing too—thanks to two $15 million metal penthouses due to alight on its roof.
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Jan 17
Starchitects don’t build ’em like they used to—and now one’s getting sued for it. Chris Christie remains in troubled waters over a bridge. And if you thought the Polar Vortex was bad, how about the looming Emergency Drought? It’s all this week in What’s Ruining Our Cities.
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Jan 17
Every year, the American Institute of Architects invites its members—some 83,000 licensed architects—to enter the buildings they’ve designed in the past five years for an award. It’s about as solid an award as an architect can receive, and this year’s winners were just made public.
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Jan 16
Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, this house was actually built upside down. The roof is on the floor, the Mini Cooper is parked in the sky and every fixture in the house is flipped around. But when the house is upside down it’s actually right side up, if that makes any sense, because the interior is flipped too.
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Jan 14
Construction on the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro, the largest church on earth, started 28 years ago in the small Ivory Coast city of Yamoussoukro. Planned by then-president Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who led the country through two decades of economic boomtime known as the "Ivorian miracle," the church would be a monument—to God, but also to himself.
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Jan 14
If you head along to this year’s Sochi Winter Olympics, you could be the face of the games. Quite literally, actually, thanks to the British architect Asif Khan‘s Megaface—a giant pinscreen on the side of a building that will morph to display the scanned faces of visitors.
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Jan 12
Barack Obama may still have three years left in his presidency, but the debate over his presidential library is already reaching fever pitch. Planning the outgoing POTUS’ library is an extremely sweet gig, and it’s already been assigned to one of Obama’s advisors. Still up in the air, though, is where it will be built—and who should design it.
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