How Advertising Conquered Urban Space
In cities around the world, advertising is everywhere. We may try to shut it out, but it reflects who we are (or want to be) and connects us to the urban past. Local signs connect us to the past, to vernacular styles, to folklore. The best examples catch our eye as children and stay with us.
Why Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be The Norm
In cities like New York, Paris, Rotterdam, and soon San Francisco, car-free streets are emerging amid a growing movement. Cities have limited space, and how it is allocated is tremendously important for people. The denser a place, the dearer each square foot is. Yet all over the world, cities were retrofitted to accommodate cars.
How I. M. Pei Shaped The Modern City
I. M. Pei died at the age of 102 after a long career as an architect of great renown. The China-born, U.S.-trained architect took on commissions that helped reshape cities around the world through the second half of the 20th century.
Nike Reveals Space Hippie — Sustainable Sneakers Made From Waste
Nike has launched a new, exploratory collection, aptly named Space Hippie. By taking the company’s own “space junk” from the floors of its manufacturing warehouses, Nike is turning waste into feedstock, creating a sustainable sneaker that combines high performance with low impact.
The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is A Haven For White Supremacists
Extremism flourishes on Amazon’s self-publishing arm. The company gives extremists and neo-Nazis banned from other platforms unprecedented access to a mainstream audience — and even promotes their books.
Waste Heat From Underground Begins Warming London’s Homes
The Bunhill 2 Energy Centre has started capturing excess heat from the London Underground to help warm over 1,000 buildings in the UK capital. A perforated red-metal pavilion distinguishes the Bunhill 2 Energy Centre, which occupies the site of the disused City Road tube station.
TRS Studio Envisions Shipping Containers As Affordable Housing In Peru
Two shipping containers are joined together and topped by an angular polycarbonate extension in this conceptual design for low-cost housing by Peruvian firm TRS Studio. TRS Studio designed the speculative dwellings for communities that struggle with housing issues and lack resources to devote to buying construction materials.
Why Do So Many U.S. Cities Have Gridded Streets?
Many U.S. cities were founded with a street grid. Why? This video describes the historic factors that contributed to the adoption of a grid. This includes influential city designs from Versailles, London, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Reno.
I’ll Take You There: Breaking The Myths About Public Housing
In the 1930s, Atlanta was the first city to build modern public housing units. They were marketed largely to working-class white people, a temporary stop on the way to presumed home ownership. But as lenders approved more loans to white Americans, black families became the face of public housing.
Salvador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Will Tell Your Surreal Future
The deck was originally created for the 1970s James Bond film Live and Let Die, starring Roger Moore and Jane Seymour, but it never appeared in the picture. Now, Dalí cards are available to all in Taschen Books‘s reproduced edition of the deck.
Why We Can’t Build Small Homes Anymore
U.S. homes are roughly 600 to 800 feet larger than those of comparable highly industrialized countries. The American obsession with large houses—a matter of culture, policy, and economics—restricts smaller, more affordable options.
Human Terrain, Visualizing The World’s Population In 3D
Kinshasa is now bigger than Paris. Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen are forming an epic, 40 million-person super city. Over the past 30 years, the scale of population change is hard to grasp. How do you even visualize 10 million people?
The Suburbs Are Coming To A City Near You
In some ways, living in a dense urban area has become much more pleasant for certain types of people — namely the affluent and those who prize proximity to the action above all else. Is a city still a city if urban living is a luxury good?
My Life Under Armed Guard
Since 2006, Italian journalist Roberto Saviano has faced constant threat of death for exposing the secrets of the Naples mafia in his book Gomorrah. Is the price of life under armed guard too much for a writer to pay?
How Poor Americans Get Exploited By Their Landlords
It is a mistake to see slums as a byproduct of the modern city, rundown areas that occur by accident. Instead, researchers contend that the slum has long been a “prime moneymaker” for those who profit from land scarcity, racial segregation, and deferred maintenance.
Art, Architecture And Crazy Painted Basketball Courts
It seems artists have found a new canvas on the floors and lines of basketball courts. From Modernism inspired graphics to Memphis, Pop, and styles in between, no one can accuse these courts of looking boring.
MIT’s Color-Changing Ink Lets You Jazz Up Your Art, Clothes, Car Every Day
If you’ve ever purchased two articles of the same clothing because you couldn’t decide on a color, here’s a game-changer: color-changing ink. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a “reprogrammable ink” that lets you change the color of objects whenever you wish by exposing them to light of various wavelengths.
The ‘Ocean Community’ Responds To Rising Sea Levels With Luxury Houseboats
RCA intelligent mobility graduate Wojciech Morsztyn envisions ‘Ocean Community’, a series of inter-linked luxury houseboats as the solution to rising sea levels. Connected via walkways, the floating pods make for autonomous living, with the ability to store and filter water, channel airflow for cooling and harvest energy from the sun and wind.
AR For The Naked Eye Transforms Outdoor Advertising
London-based media technology startup Lightvert has created a new method for using unexpected and unusual locations. Lightvert’s ECHO technology projects images into the air. Moreover, the images are particular to that location and cannot be seen even a few feet away from the optimal viewing position.
War Propaganda: How To Get A Country To Go To War
The war propaganda function in the United States is finely tuned. It’s sophisticated and most of all it blends into the media terrain. While the names of the countries changed, and of course each circumstance was different, there were some parallels that cried out for examination.
The First State-Approved North Korean Novel In English
“Friend” by Paek Namnyong was first published in 1988 in North Korea where it became a bestseller and a television series. Thirty years later, Friend has become the first state-sanctioned North Korean novel to be published in English. It is, most surprisingly, a novel about love, marriage, and divorce.