The Second Avenue Subway is more than 80 years in the making. Some said it would never be done. Yet, deep underneath Manhattan this spring, the final framework is being laid for a system that will carry millions of commuters through the city—and it looks downright primordial.
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"Vision Zero," New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to eliminate traffic deaths in the city, is audacious but not unprecedented. Like almost all good social policies, the Swedes did it first. And we could learn a thing or two from them.
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When it comes to radical mega-infrastructure projects, we can only dream—but we dream big. Here is one such staggering proposal to build miles and miles of 1,000-foot tall super-walls that will once and forever save Tornado Alley from its eponymous natural disaster.
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Connecting Alaska to Argentina, the Pan-American Highway runs some 30,000 miles north to south. Construction to widen the highway briefly stopped, however, to make way for dead whales back in 2010, when workers digging through a remote stretch of the Chilean desert found a huge trove of bones millions of years old. Now, scientists think they have figured out how the extinct whales ended up on land in the first place.
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This stunning new design for an antenna tower outside the Turkish city of Çanakkale has just won an international competition, beating out such big-name firms as Snohetta, Fernando Romero, and Sou Fujimoto. Designed by IND and Powerhouse Company—who worked with structural engineers ABT to make sure it’d all work as planned—the antenna is a racetrack-like loop through the forest, sporting an outdoor pedestrian walkway and indoor public spaces at the tower’s base.
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As a big urban walker, I like to head for the hills. So when I stumbled upon this list of the steepest streets in the U.S., I just had to see what they looked like, and I started planning a trip to hit all of the most insanely steep stretches of our American streets. The scariest thing? People live (and park!) on them.
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You might not realize it, but quitting our addiction to oil means more than just finding something besides gasoline to put in our cars. If we really want to stop using fossil fuels, we have to change the way we make roads—and cooking oil might just be the answer.
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I stumbled on this photo while writing last night’s post
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NYC’s East Side Access Project continues apace, and these recent images, taken last month by MTA photographer Rehema Trimiew, show a whole new view of the mind-boggling underground caverns now being constructed beneath Manhattan. From raw walls of exposed geology to this, the space is finally taking on the look and feel of architecture.
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The next time you’re passing through Newark airport, look up and smile. The airport’s new super-efficient LED light fixtures are also embedded with cameras and sensors—and they’re part of a growing market for surveillance technology that is built into other, everyday systems.
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