Lectures
Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft
Places Journal
The phenomenal rise of the free zone, an opportunistic urban hybrid that has powered the rise of glittering world cities like Singapore and Dubai.
Head of the Dragon: The Rise of New Shanghai
Places Journal
The fast-forward reinvention of Shanghai, a dynamic and contradictory city that has yet to live up to its historic promise — to sort out what it means to be Chinese and modern.
Yangon: History of the Present
Places Journal
Emerging from a half century of dictatorship, can Myanmar’s principal city be a model of sustainable, democratic development?
Divide and Conquer
Places Journal
The abstract lines we’ve drawn across America — the Mason Dixon Line, the Transcontinental Railroad — still resonate in the cultural landscape of the nation.
Library as Infrastructure
Places Journal
Reading room, social service center, innovation lab. How far can we stretch the public library?
The Flora of the Future
Places Journal
Celebrating the botanical diversity of cities. A photo survey of urban wild plants.
Building Hyperdensity and Civic Delight
Places Journal
Americans are conflicted about urban development: somehow we’ve demonized both sprawl and density. Here’s the case for the hyperdense city: prosperous, sustainable, delightful.
Makeshift Metropolis
Places Journal
Unplanned, informal settlements are home to a billion people worldwide.
The iUrbanisms of Los Angeles
Places Journal
For ambitious L.A. architects, city talk has gone deeply out of fashion. Yet insightful protagonists continue to seek a better future for L.A. architecture vis-à-vis L.A. urbanism.
The Fight for San Francisco
Places Journal
Two photographers document labor landmarks that are forgotten in a city where workers’ histories are constantly overwritten.
Beautiful and Terrible: Aerial Views of Suburbia
Places Journal
Aerial photographs of the postwar suburban boom in Lakewood, California, were out of date as soon as the prints were dry, but the anxieties they evoked became timeless.
The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas
Places Journal
The architect’s career embodies the inevitable contradictions in trying to marry art and capitalism, radicalism and pragmatism, icon-making and city-making.
A Mound in the Wood
Places Journal
Reconsidering Adolf Loos’s proposition: “Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument.”
“The moment for something to happen”
Places Journal
The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies was a heady mix of think tank, exhibit space, journal publisher, and cocktail party.
Kiyonori Kikutake: Structuring the Future
Places Journal
Kiyonori Kikutake was one of the most gifted and influential of the Metabolist generation that dominated postwar Japan. His architecture remains as powerful as ever.
A Short History of American Urban Exceptionalism
Places Journal
American urban development has long pursued its own distinctive course — an urbanism without fixed limits, with endlessly extendable boundaries.
The Westward-Moving House
Places Journal
Now online, a classic essay on the American homestead.