Skyscrapers tend to become lightening rods for the neighborhoods they’re in—and nowhere is that more true than in Johannesburg’s Ponte City, a hulking 54-story tower has gone from Apartheid enclave to drug dealer haven to symbol of urban renewal.
The standard advice authorities offer when lightning starts crackling across the sky is for people to take shelter inside buildings. Through lightning rods affixed to the roof, electrical wiring, and plumbing that can direct the electricity away from occupants and into the ground, substantial structures offer protection.
Back in 2013, when Istanbul was still competing to host the 2020 Olympics, the city announced plans to build "the world’s largest and busiest airport terminal." The Olympic bid ended up failing—but Istanbul still wants to build its mega-airport.
I love old type specimen books. Any foundry, any period, it doesn’t matter. They will have me hypnotized. But I don’t usually linger at the title pages. Who would, really? All the fun and exciting stuff comes after that: the impossibly small text faces, the spectacular display faces, all the sample uses variously dowdy and natty.
As China designs a roadmap to bring 100 million rural citizens into cities
French engineers have been experimenting with a technique that could redirect seismic energy away from structures such as cities, dams, and nuclear power plants, sparing them from damage. It involves digging large, cylindrical boreholes into the ground, forming a defensive geometry of lace-like arrays that, researchers hope, could deflect seismic waves and thus make whole landscapes "invisible" to earthquakes.
The Olympic Games are often a bittersweet milestone for a city, filled with economic and political ups and downs
To us, the bridge is a way to get across the water, but to cormorants in San Francisco Bay, the old Bay Bridge is home sweet home. And the 800 protected birds currently nesting there are not very keen on moving to the new Bay Bridge span—despite its shiny $700,000 bird "condos." If Caltrans can’t lure the cormorants away in time, then the plan to demolish the old Bay Bridge
Transit maps are as unique as the cities they represent. To know Tokyo’s subway, you have to know the quirks of its subway map; to navigate NYC, you have to familiarize yourself with its mapping idiosyncrasies, too. But what if design was standardized across every city in the world?
A coalition of 100 investors announced plans to build a "Chinese-controlled economic zone" populated by skyscrapers and luxury residences. Their new city will be in Kenya, but the goal is to "match the glamour of Dubai." What would motivate investors to go to the trouble of building a massive new city in a country other than their own? It’s pretty simple, actually.
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