Sacrifice
An eccentric monk’s singular scrap cathedral reveals the chaos and genius of his mind.
Architecture
How the Coronavirus Will Reshape Architecture
What kinds of space are we willing to live and work in now?
Downtown Is for People
On the then-new phenomenon of dead downtowns.
“It is not only for amenity but for economics that choice is so vital. Without a mixture on the streets, our downtowns would be superficially standardized, and functionally standardized as well. New construction is necessary, but it is not an unmixed blessing: its inexorable economy is fatal to hundreds of enterprises able to make out successfully in old buildings. Notice that when a new building goes up, the kind of ground-floor tenants it gets are usually the chain store and the chain restaurant. Lack of variety in age and overhead is an unavoidable defect in large new shopping centers and is one reason why even the most successful cannot incubate the unusual--a point overlooked by planners of downtown shopping-center projects.”
The Air Conditioning Trap: How Cold Air Is Heating the World
The warmer it gets, the more we use air conditioning. The more we use air conditioning, the warmer it gets. Is there any way out of this trap?
Condos of the Living Dead
A mid-boom critique of New York City’s high-priced, mostly glass condo buildings.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "The Halfway House"
A decrepit building and a shameful family legacy.
Malls and the Future of American Retail
Malls were supposed to die. Instead they’re just being reimagined (again).
Things Fall Apart
A feat of elegant design wowed elite architects and promised to bring education to poor children in Nigeria. Then it collapsed.
Disneyland with the Death Penalty
On the sanitized wonderland that is Singapore.
My Lost City
When New York was perpetually on fire.
The Couple Who Saved China's Ancient Architectural Treasures Before They Were Lost Forever
How a poet and an architect rescued a nation’s riches.
The Tiny-House Revolution Goes Huge
A dispatch from a tiny-house convention:
Here the stories pivoted around Turning Tiny. Before Tiny, there was an unhappy marriage, unpaid bills, stifling office work, a home of 2,500 square feet or more; after Tiny came freedom, new love, debt relief, self-employment, and, of course, a handmade nest.
Finding North America’s Lost Medieval City
A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois... At the city's apex in 1100, the population exploded to as many as 30 thousand people. It was the largest pre-Columbian city in North America, bigger than London or Paris at the time.
The Pyramid at the End of the World
In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history.
The Architect Who Became a Diamond
The archive of Mexican architect Luis Barragán has been hidden away for decades. Then an artist decided to make a performance of getting it back.
The Man With His Head in the Clouds
When it’s finished, architect Adrian Smith’s Jeddah Tower will be the tallest building in the world, over a kilometer high. He’s already thinking about pushing past a mile in the air.
Gary Barnett, Controversial Master of New York City Luxury Real Estate
The developer responsible for the tallest residential building in New York—the penthouse just sold for $90 million—lives in a two-story house in Queens.
Showdown at the Four Seasons
The battle over a New York Picasso.
Champ de Mars
A woman's attempt to maintain stability with a troubled daughter and an architect husband succumbing to Alzheimer's.
"Even a year ago, he had still been the old Dory, the real Dory, forgetful, but not so much that it turned his insides out: he couldn’t remember the name of Ellen’s place of work, the institute that she’d founded decades before—The Children’s Place? The Children’s Center? It’s the Learning Center? Are you sure? Then he couldn’t remember how to adjust his drafting table, then he didn’t know where his fine-tip pens were."
The Slumdog Millionaire Architect
How Hafeez Contractor is creating an alternate India in the sky, where professionsals are “insulated from the chaos that has long hamstrung their homeland.”
Jeff
A bartender contemplates architecture, gender identity, and sadomasochism.
"But Penthouse 808Ravel has promise. Shag carpet. Doors that shut heavily. Porridge doors thicker than mush. I have sexual feelings about Penthouse 808Ravel. Ligature feelings. Relational feelings, knots, bandages."
Ornament and Crime
A young woman seeks an appropriate way to dispose of the ashes of her father, a fervid design critic.
"He always wished to be a geometric form (so often did he rail against 'the tyranny of the organic') so I could tell myself he’d be happy, but he also hated bric-a-brac and I think right now he’d qualify, being a small object with no function."
Forensic Topology
How architecture has made Los Angeles a bank robber’s paradise.
Embracing The Void
A visit to Star Axis, a desert art installation that connects you to the cosmos.
City of Human, City of Machine
An "architectural fiction" centered around a city built by machines, for machines.
"Social spaces for machines bear the fragments of their tasks, and nothing superfluous. Machines don't need places to eat or sleep, but they need places for their own sorts of socially evocative maintenance rituals. They need places where auto parts can be partially assembled and taken apart, time and time again, like a game. Machines hang out in cafes while working on mundane maintenance tasks, with their component addresses made public in unique ways, so that other machines can gather together and show off their range of operations. Machines that build other machines take their half-finished constructions out in the company of other machines, so that they can build them together and get input on possible alternatives. There are public machine exercise spaces, where machines go through their range of motions and data abilities, for the purpose of showing off their various tolerances."
