From Seattle’s well-known corporate behemoths—Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Costco—to its less-obvious innovators, like Nirvana and Dale Chihuly, a new permanent exhibition funded by Jeff Bezos explores the idea that innovation is a key part of the city’s identity. The Bezos Center for Innovation at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry features 5,000 square feet of exhibits which tell a story of science, design, and technology through a sense of place.
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Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit—an emergency shelter developed during WWII—isn’t his most well-known work. In fact, for years, it’s been unclear if any DDUs still existed. But this week, The New York Times tells the story of a handful of shelters that have resurfaced, after being abandoned on an army base just 30 miles outside of NYC.
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Anyone can take a tour of this waste treatment plant in Valencia, Spain, to check out its automatized trash-sorting systems. The Israeli architects who designed the 759,600-square-foot system describe it as a public observatory, a place to "contemplate" contemporary life. After all, some archaeologists claim that sorting garbage is "the ultimate zen experience of our society." [Architizer]
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A team of architects has updated and fleshed out its SkyCycle plan—a bizarre concept that would use the empty channels above some train lines to build floating, bike-only cycle superhighways.
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"I like watching these buildings burn," says Jing Jing Naihan Li, a young Beijing architect. That would normally come off as ominous, but in this case, it’s awesome: Naihan makes candles that are modeled after the tallest buildings in the world. Because, after all, aren’t skyscrapers just the candles on the glitter-covered double chocolate ganache birthday cake that is the city?
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The tallest skyscraper. The deepest tunnel. The largest building. 2013 was a year of extremes for the construction industry, with new buildings, bridges, tunnels, and even the odd steel sarcophagus reaching completion all over the world.
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Phoenix, Madrid, even Astana: These are the cities we tend to hold up as examples of the havoc that construction booms—and busts—can wreak on a housing market. Ireland is in the news less, but its situation is just as dire; thousands of brand-new Irish homes have sat empty for years. And now the government is demolishing them.
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The looming affordable housing crisis will likely be the biggest issue facing our cities in 2014. A convergence of cataclysmic real estate prices, a development slowdown, and a weak job market are squeezing low-income residents out of urban areas. But all is not dire: I found seven new projects that are bright spots in the U.S.’s affordable housing future.
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The Colosseum in Rome is being cleansed of car exhaust that has built up over decades, ever since Mussolini’s ill-advised decision to build a major road nearby.
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Sure, the larch-wood cladding gives Ufogel a kind of rustic charm, but I’ll be damned if this Austrian guest house doesn’t really look like it just beamed down from a quaint corner of outer space.
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