general
The Problem with Solutions
Places Journal
We need to engage troubled landscapes without presuming to fix them. Notes toward a history of non-solutionist design.
Design and the Green New Deal
Places Journal
If landscape architects want to remake the world, we can start by remaking our discipline.
Urbanizing the Mojave
Places Journal
America’s greatest boomtown went bust. An examination of the troubled history of mining, militarization, tourism, and water politics in Las Vegas.
Demedicalize Architecture
Places Journal
Curators at the Canadian Centre for Architecture explore the evolving concept of “healthy” buildings and argue against the new moralistic philosophy of healthism.
Warp and Weft
Places Journal
The Carolina mills spun our cotton bolls into cloth that would wrap you in life and shroud you in death. Today the windows are bricked up, the doors covered with plywood.
Paper Architecture, Emerging Urbanism
Places Journal
Underemployed designers are proposing speculative solutions to unfolding environmental crises and infrastructural needs. Let’s ground this work in the realities of urban design.
Architecture in Uniform
Places Journal
What role did architects play during World War II? A new book from the Canadian Centre for Architecture argues that designers were as indispensable as engineers.
Resurveying the West
Places Journal
A contemporary photographer’s work resonates with 19th-century views of the American West.
Rural Visions: Grace Farms and Rural Studio
Places Journal
Grace Farms and Rural Studio would seem to reflect the extreme inequality of wealth that afflicts the world today. But it’s not so simple.
Beyond Google Earth
Places Journal
Satellite imagery might seem neutral, but it is constructed by systems which not only present but also transform the raw visual data.
A Short History of the Campsite
Places Journal
A landscape historian traces the story of the campground, from early wilderness caravans to today’s domesticated sites.
Roads to Rails
Places Journal
Laying out the math for a modern streetcar revival, supported by municipal investment in urban rail.
The Emergence of Container Urbanism
Places Journal
The repurposed shipping container, now a fixture of urban architecture, is part of a movement that can be traced back to Archigram and the Metabolists in the 1960s.
Working Public Architecture
Places Journal
Can we envision a contemporary counterpart to the New Deal? WPA 2.0 is an ambitious competition and symposium created by cityLab at UCLA.
Maintenance and Care
Places Journal
A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations.
Earthward
Places Journal
A landscape historian reviews @everytract — a Twitter bot created by artist and urban planner Neil Freeman that is slowly posting satellite pictures of all 74,134 U.S. census tracts.
Writing Through Prison Storms
Places Journal
Writing happens in a place and is of that place. What happens when that place is San Quentin in the time of coronavirus?
Memphis Burning
Places Journal
To understand racial inequality in America, start with housing. Here, in the nation’s poorest major city, the segregationist roots go deep.
Backwater: Landscapes of the Mississippi Delta
Places Journal
Resuscitating the Mississippi Delta with river diversions and sediment siphons would be the world’s largest coastal restoration project. But it could happen.
The British Heat Wave and Aerial Archaeology
The New Yorker
Dangers in the Air: Aerosol Architecture
Places Journal
An exploration of innovative projects that conceptualize air — the atmosphere that surrounds us — as a dynamic and even political component of buildings and landscapes.
Trouble with Terminators
Places Journal
Why not make buildings today as they once were made? This is actually a really good, really radical question.
Willful Waters
Places Journal
Los Angeles and its river have long been enmeshed in an epic struggle for control.