New skyscrapers will do anything for attention—which is why an under-construction supertall in Los Angeles, soon to be the tallest building on the West Coast, is trying to break another record, too. Starting Saturday, construction crews will pump 21,200 cubic yards of concrete onto the Wilshire Grand site, which might make it the largest continuous foundation pour in the world.
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If you could build your own High Line, what would it look like? That’s the question the QueensWay Project, an effort to turn an abandoned stretch of railway in Queens into an elevated pedestrian and bike path, recently asked designers to answer. Some of the winners announced today are truly wild.
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San Francisco’s skyline has a handful of famous landmarks dotted around the city—the Transamerica Tower, the Painted Ladies, the Golden Gate Bridge—but the most visible might be Sutro Tower, standing 977-feet-tall on Twin Peaks since 1973. As icons go, it’s definitely got the minimal, industrial-chic vibe going on—essentially the complete opposite of this ambitious 1933 plan for an illuminated monument and water feature cascading down the hillside. Whaaaa??
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A shiny new city recently opened in northern Virginia’s Caroline County. It has a school, a church, a mosque, a subway station, and even an embassy that, at five stories, may be the county’s tallest building. But nobody lives there.
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Moby wants you to join his perpetual pool party in Los Angeles, and a group of scientists wants China to use "spatial economics" to design more walkable cities. Plus: informal transit in Nairobi, a failed utopia in California, radical ideas for the Vegas of 2034, and a significant prehistoric site that’s currently being uncovered in downtown Miami. Check out this week’s Urban Reads.
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It’s almost showtime for Sochi, which may or may not have its shit together
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How the Super Bowl failed its transit-riding attendees, an L.A. museum that collects houses, and why Monarch butterflies are dying (spoiler: because of us). Plus a McDonald’s in Queens, Millennials in St. Louis, and biking in Las Vegas. It’s time for your weekly Urban Reads.
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More than 300 years ago, settlers traveling up the St. Lawrence River founded the small town of Verchères. To commemorate the landing, Quebec architects Les Ateliers Guyon recently installed these elegant outdoor seats along the river’s banks. The idea is to transport the "to the seventeenth century, a time without roads; when the only means of transportation was a ship, propelled by water and wind." [Daily Tonic]
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The stretch of Broadway that runs through Midtown Manhattan is always an overwhelming sensory experience—but, this week, it’s even more intense.
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