17+ hour, 25+ min ago  (749+ words) While Jane Jacobs is widely known for her critique of midcentury urban planning in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she applied a similar analysis to urban economies in her underappreciated second book, The Economy of Cities. She…...

6+ day, 17+ hour ago  (175+ words) By Duo Dickinson, Martin C. Pedersen On the importance of drawing: "We're all part of the digital world to some extent, but there's now an entire generation of young architects who can't draw. They can't scribble. And without the thinking and…...

1+ week, 16+ hour ago  (85+ words) By John Claflin, Lindsay Sturman The Science of Good Design The science behind how our physical environment makes us feel is fascinating. Decades of research in fields like neuroscience and environmental psychology show that design engenders a response in humans'which,…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago  (358+ words) A good friend who at that time was running a very public-facing art space out of her and her husband's live/work space but who was shutting it down and moving back to England said when I brought up my…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago  (350+ words) Water is not a passive element but a living intelligence. Water moves dynamically'swelling with the tides daily, rising with the moon monthly, replenishing the land through seasonal floods, withdrawing in times of drought, and, when displaced, returning to restore lost…...

2+ week, 17+ hour ago  (860+ words) Humans go to extreme effort to build things. The monumentality of the Pyramids, the complexity of Stonehenge, the glories of Rome'all of these are timeless manifestations of our fundamental need to build beyond shelter and commerce. These possibilities can make…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago  (510+ words) The name "Sunnyside" originated around 1710, when French Huguenots purchased the land and named it "Sunnyside Hill." After the consolidation of New York City into the five boroughs in 1898, the area began to be developed. Between 1903 and 1905, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company…...

3+ week, 1+ day ago  (512+ words) This is the problem that Architecture Week, the AIA's education outreach initiative, exists to solve. This isn't a new observation. More than a decade ago, Common Edge co-founder Martin C. Pedersen made exactly this argument, pushing the AIA to redirect its…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago  (323+ words) Among his many talents, Elon Musk has a singular knack for taking things that are cool'fast cars, rockets, (arguably) marijuana'and making them nauseatingly uncool. Equally impressively, he is adept at taking things that are decidedly not cool and pretending they…...

1+ mon, 3+ day ago  (299+ words) Here's my story: I decided to study city planning at MIT because I liked cities, not because I wanted to fix them, as many of my cohort did. Nor did I have strong opinions about cities or a clear understanding of…...