My Bookmarks
The Modern Urbanism of Cook's Camden
Places Journal
The council housing designed 50 years ago for a progressive London borough remains a potent symbol of the achievements of postwar social democracy.
Expect Everything
Places Journal
Los Angeles has been so heavily mythologized — as paradise or dystopia, or both — that it can be difficult to resolve the idea of L.A. with its actual presence.
Public and Common(s)
Places Journal
A philosophical view of the terms public and commons, from the 20th-century treatises of Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas to recent books by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
The Arab City
Places Journal
Today there is no better context in which to investigate the complexities of global practice in architecture than that of the rapidly changing Arab city.
A Tiny Orchestra in the Living Room
Places Journal
The introduction of stereophonic sound systems, in the postwar decades, transformed the American house.
Ugly America
Places Journal
In its depiction of the midcentury commercial landscape, Life embodied our contradictory efforts to reconcile civic ideals and free-market economics.
All Those Numbers: Logistics, Territory and Walmart
Places Journal
Walmart is targeting major cities as the next big (box) market. How can architects adapt the retailer’s logistical expertise to make better-performing environments?
The Demagogue Takes the Stage
Places Journal
The 45th president of the United States rose to power using the stage, the props and scenery, of white nationalist patriarchy. To build democracy, we must disassemble the stage.
Occupy: What Architecture Can Do
Places Journal
Can architects once again participate in a movement to make a better and more equitable society?
Methodolatry and the Art of Measure
Places Journal
The new wave of urban data science (and solutionism) is trending toward an obsession with data-for-data’s-sake and an idolization of method.
Mapping’s Intelligent Agents
Places Journal
How do machine intelligences read and write the world? And what Other intelligences deserve our attention?
Infrastructural Tourism
Places Journal
For decades tourists have marveled at monumental dams of the American West. These days they trace infrastructures like satellite communications and nuclear waste transport.
Interfacing Urban Intelligence
Places Journal
As we build so-called “smart” cities, we need to consider the point of engagement where citizens interface with the city’s operating system.
Speculative Archaeology
Places Journal
Faux-ethnographic dioramas, modern interiors reimagined as psychedelic ruin-worlds, invented histories of proto-architecture: archaeology, as model or metaphor, has been surfacing a lot in art practice and design theory.
History of the Urban Dashboard
Places Journal
Futuristic control rooms with endless screens of blinking data are proliferating in cities across the globe. Welcome to the age of Dashboard Governance.
Indexing the World of Tomorrow
Places Journal
How the 1939 World’s Fair anticipated our current obsession with urban data science and “smart” cities.
Cloud and Field
Places Journal
On the resurgence of “field guides” in a networked age. We’ve moved from birding to dronewatching, from natural history to dark ecology. But are we still looking through colonialist binoculars?
The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments
Places Journal
Inside the material archives of climate science, which get wilder and dirtier the deeper you go.
Closet Archive
Places Journal
Closets are not just for storage. They are also active, generative spaces where media are made and knowledges born.