Tips and tricks to help you specify the right building-products and design better buildings.
London might be home to the Gherkin, and soon, the Can of Ham and the Tortilla Wrap, but a city half way around the world is now home to an enormous brown lunch bag — meant, perhaps, to put them all in. Frank Gehry’s addition to the business school at the University of Technology in Sydney…
“Geologists talk about the age where we are living as Anthropocene… this idea that we are livi ng in a time where human presence is the strongest force of change.” So says Bjarke Ingels, enfant prodige of contemporary architecture — borrowing the words of a scientific community that has yet to reach a consensus on when…
There has been no end of attempts by London’s army of urban planners to address the issues caused by the capital’s burgeoning population, and the traffic that comes with it. In 2003 we were treated to the congestion charge, aiming to deter car users from entering the city’s congested heart, and 2010 saw the launch…
While drones are changing the way we document architecture and cities, both from the perspective of architectural photography and grassroots activism, the technology remains a complex and sometimes controversial topic. Just last week, the FAA posted a friendly reminder that the University of Phoenix Stadium would be a “No Drone Zone” during the Super Bowl.…
A quarter of a century after the eastern German Democratic Republic opened its borders to the West, the once looming legacies of the socialist state are slowly disappearing from sight and mind. East Berlin is almost unrecognizable as the former capital that was characterized by un-renovated 19th-century buildings, concrete towers, and the ruins of World…
On April 24th, 2013, the building known as Rana Plaza, located in the town of Savar, Bangaladesh, co llapsed. The structure housed clothing factories and shops crammed into poorly planned space where around 5,000 people total were employed. The factories in the building supplied garments to companies including Benetton, Primark, and Walmart. Cranes were brought in…
The ingenious philanthropic model of the public/private partnership has long sustained America’s cul tural and civic assets, relied upon by museums, historic places, parks, hospitals, and libraries for design, building, and ongoing program operations. The model constitutes the core of the nation’s uniquely market-reliant nonprofit sector — it is the bedrock of civic goodwill and public…
Would you be happy living in the shadow of a skyscraper? That is the question being asked by many lo cal residents on both sides of the Atlantic at present: As a row of glittering new towers begins to rise along the southern exposure of Central Park in Manhattan, a debate is raging over similar plans…
What is happening in Downey, California? First, it was the original Taco Bell, and now its Norm̵ 7;s restaurant that is under threat of demolition, though the latter is being considered for historical protection by the Cultural Heritage Commission. Both buildings have hashtags dedicated to saving them, #SaveTacoBell and #SaveNorms, respectively, because they are icons of…