Category Archives: architecture

They just don’t make them like they used to

Krugman (“What Happened Today?”, NYT, 9 oct ’08):
On a separate note, one good thing is that there haven’t been any reports of people on Wall Street jumping out of windows. That’s because the windows in modern office buildings don’t open.
Yet.

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Anamorphic parking garage signage

is the kind of thing that wins design awards

but shouldn’t—for several reasons:

Vague allegory

Cellphone pic of pig and rooster talking on the phone, carved into the capital of a column near a bank of payphones in Riverside Church.

The Birth of poptimism

The NYT has an “interactive” piece—an aggro Flash thing that takes its inspiration from OSX’s Dock—about development of the Olympic torch from 1936 to the present.

Three alternate/additional designs for the Mexico City ’68 torch can be found at the site of Olympic Museum. Here’s a clearer detail of Type B:

Bitten

Mall owners pay tenants to “improve” spaces then don’t audit how the money’s spent. WSJ (McCracken, Lattman, Hudson, “Retailer’s Collapse Hits Mall Owners,” 14 July ’08):
For mall owners, large anchor spaces, which were once occupied almost exclusively by department stores, are especially important. Their role is to draw lots of shoppers into malls, enabling owners [...]

Urban Versioning System 1.0

Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque, with illustrations by David Cuesta:

This document proposes that another lesson can be learned for architecture from computing: the way in which software is made. Here, we want to concentrate on the current most significant mode of software development—Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)—steering clear of ubicomp fantasies that may [...]