Australia’s Timber Homes Are Where the Suburbs Meet the Frontier

May 10, 2023 Ι Bloomberg CityLab For an urban form of housing, Brisbane’s Queenslander houses are strikingly close to nature. Rustic but often elegant buildings constructed between the late 19th century and the Second World War, Queenslanders at their most refined are like breezy wooden tents, garden pavilions for full-time living. At their most utilitarian,… Continue reading Australia’s Timber Homes Are Where the Suburbs Meet the Frontier

The Office Tower Has a New Job to Do

Bloomberg CityLab Ι June 29, 2022 In 2015, private equity giant Blackstone Inc. purchased the Willis (née Sears) Tower and began a half-billion-dollar renovation that would radically change the role the former tallest building in the world would play in downtown Chicago. Today, anyone — not just workers in the 108-story office tower — can sample from… Continue reading The Office Tower Has a New Job to Do

A Radical Way of Teaching Architecture

April 5, 2022 Ι Bloomberg CityLab At the new architecture program at Bard College, now in its fourth semester, there’s lots of “troubling” and “unsettling” (used as verbs) to be done. Here, architecture is a method of critique, not a profession dedicated to making shelter. And instead of world-striding creative visionaries, its practitioners are presented… Continue reading A Radical Way of Teaching Architecture

Chicago’s Bungalows Are Where the City Comes Together

February 9, 2022 Ι Bloomberg CityLab In Chicago, there are plenty of reasons for South Side residents to keep Northsiders at arm’s length. This includes the North Side’s nonsensical lack of numbered streets, opposed baseball fandoms, and the outsized power of the city’s wealthier half — an imbalance that has created one of the most… Continue reading Chicago’s Bungalows Are Where the City Comes Together

Re-Shaped by Crisis, an “Anti-Biennial” Reimagines Chicago

Oct. 2, 2021 Ι Bloomberg CityLab  The 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial was held, like its two predecessors, in the Chicago Cultural Center, a sumptuous late-19th-century meeting hall in the downtown Loop. Two years later, rocked by Covid-19 and local protests against police violence, North America’s largest architecture and design show finds itself in very different surroundings.… Continue reading Re-Shaped by Crisis, an “Anti-Biennial” Reimagines Chicago

Why the Gaza Strip May be the City of the Future

Sept. 26, 2021 Ι Bloomberg CityLab When Americans turned on the TV or glanced at their smartphones for news of the deadly clashes that engulfed the Gaza Strip in May — or if they followed the more recent spasm of violence in August that threatened to break the region’s fragile truce — many saw scenes that looked familiar: streets flooded with protesters, engaged in… Continue reading Why the Gaza Strip May be the City of the Future

How a Plan to Save Buildings Fell Apart

April 7, 2021 Ι Bloomberg’s CityLab (with Elizabeth Blasius) In 2018, Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development felt that they had a progressive plan to preserve one of the city’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Pilsen, on the city’s southwest side, was home to Eastern European immigrants in the 19th century; in the 20th century, it drew… Continue reading How a Plan to Save Buildings Fell Apart

Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture

April 27, 2021 Ι Bloomberg’s CityLab In 1908, architect Ernest Flagg completed the Singer Building in Lower Manhattan, a Beaux-Arts showstopper made for the Singer sewing machine company. From a wide base, a slender 27-story tower rose, topped by a mansard roof and a delicate lantern spire. Every inch dripped with sumptuous detail inside and… Continue reading Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture

Chicago’s Bid to Reinvent the Corner Store

Bloomberg’s CityLab Ι July 31, 2020 When it’s completed, the corner grocery store at 63rd and Racine will look a lot different than the other carryouts and bodegas dotting this section of Englewood, on Chicago’s South Side. Designed by Wheeler Kearns Architects and developed by local nonprofit Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), the Go Green Fresh Market will essentially be… Continue reading Chicago’s Bid to Reinvent the Corner Store

The National Public Housing Museum Eyes a 2021 Opening

The Atlantic’s CityLab Ι Dec. 3, 2019 When you’re working to establish a museum with such contested subject matter as the National Public Housing Museum (NPHM), it pays to have a few shorthand expressions within easy reach, lest anyone get confused about creating a curatorial platform for an institution many associate with failure. Crystal Palmer,… Continue reading The National Public Housing Museum Eyes a 2021 Opening