“Well, ‘what happens in Vegas … ’?” began a Yale University professor, Emmanuel Petit, about halfway through the first day of the “Architecture After Las Vegas” symposium held at the New Haven institution in January. It was just a matter of time before someone invoked Sin City’s marketing slogan—such low-hanging fruit at a highbrow conference. The crowd that filled the auditorium of Paul Rudolph Hall—academics, architects, and students—tittered at the pop-culture quip. Read More …
“Well, ‘what happens in Vegas … ’?” began a Yale University professor, Emmanuel Petit, about halfway through the first day of the “Architecture After Las Vegas” symposium held at the New Haven institution in January. It was just a matter of time before someone invoked Sin City’s marketing slogan—such low-hanging fruit at a highbrow conference. The crowd that filled the auditorium of Paul Rudolph Hall—academics, architects, and students—tittered at the pop-culture quip.
Kicking aside the Kone Dirt Devil flotsam, I pluck a plastic bottle from the oily surf. To cross the Palm by sunrise, I’ll need resources: water, anti-bacteria wipes, and ammo. The Avant Garde control the easternmost fronds and the Urban Gardeners’ Free Ranger Chickens patrol the west. In this archetypal battle—abstraction versus nature—my comrades and I fight for beauty.
This decade is our chance. At dawn, Burj Skeleton broadcasts the revolution. Its remaining infrastructure will vibrate with our adhan. Chengdu, listen.
The GeoEye satellite crests the horizon. It’s nearly time. My balaclava itches. Bottle tucked in my waistband, I run.
Spoiler alert! The Japanese maple in Jeff Dauber’s San Francisco backyard is not at the center of a carbon-sucking vortex. Sorry, sci-fi fans, but the Berkeley-based architect Thom Faulders’s perfectly flat deck only looks like its far corner has its own warped gravity. Ever since Francesco Borromini’s Gallery Spada, in Rome, forced perspectives and architectural patronage have gone hand in hand, but whereas the Renaissance architect employed a mathematician to make that arcade seem longer through foreshortening, Faulders used 3-D–modeling software to achieve Deformscape’s dipping effect. Read More …
Design USA: Contemporary Innovation is a retrospective of American invention. The exhibition, which opened last month at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and coincided with the fourth annual National Design Week, marks ten years of the National Design Awards program. Organizers Jeannie Kim, National Design Awards manager, and associate curator Floramae McCarron-Cates, present 78 award winners in the Cooper-Hewitt’s ground-floor galleries. It is a straightforward conceit: Design USA looks backward in order to look forward. Read More …
There are some unexpected pairings at Street, the restaurant recently opened in Los Angeles by the chef Susan Feniger. Take, for example, the menu, which draws on pushcart offerings from around the world: Korean mung-bean pancakes and Thai curries face off but don’t fuse. The least likely union, however, has to be between Feniger, famed as a co-owner of the Border Grill and a co-host of the 1990s Food Network show Too Hot Tamales, and Street’s architect, the coolly cerebral Neil Denari. Read More …
DOMINIQUE CAMACHO is passionate about the old architecture of the East Village. She holds sustainability workshops, supports preservation as a member of the East Village Community Coalition and, for much of the past 15 years, has gazed enviously at a former synagogue on East Seventh Street. Read More …
On Feb. 19, President Barack Obama signed an order establishing the White House Office of Urban Affairs. First announced just days after the historic U.S. election last November, the office—which will be headed by Bronx Borough president Adolfo Carrión Jr., who has a master’s in urban planning and spent three years in the New York City Department of City Planning—will serve as a bridge between federal dollars and the programs that affect metropolitan America. Among other pursuits, its mandate covers community development, housing, job creation, manufacturing innovation, sustainable technologies, and infrastructure. Read More …
A loaded paintbrush in hand, the artist Kathryn Pannepacker crouches down and applies a black stroke to a steel panel. It’s a late afternoon in January, and it’s starting to snow. The welcoming glow of the Sunoco mini-mart and the car wash’s green neon signs cut through the gathering dusk. She finishes the touch-up on her Wall of Rugs #2 mural (Jordon now reads Jordan), rights her tall frame and surveys Philadelphia’s Broad and Lehigh Streets. Kitty-corner is the empty Botany 500 building, the apparel company’s brick edifice, a commemorative remnant of a once-booming garment district. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, Philadelphia was famous for its textiles—silk hosiery, men’s suits and wool carpets. Read More …
NATALYA KASHPER sat in her minimalist living room, a light-filled space made rich with rough brick walls, a sculptural masonry fireplace and wooden ceiling joists. She looked out of the arched windows, framed in deep wood casements, and took in the view.
“I remember coming to SoHo with my mom and thinking, ‘This is so beautiful,’ ” said Ms. Kashper, who grew up in California. “SoHo is the epitome of an old American city.” Read More …