Reposted from Design Observer: Places Journal – Essay: Mimi Zeiger This past December, just as retailers were making their holiday markdowns and non-profits issuing their year-end appeals, the Storefront for Art and Architecture was opening its last exhibition of 2011. Spurred by Occupy Wall Street, Strategies for Public Occupation featured “ projects and strategies that offer a new, creative [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Places Journal – Gallery: Hadley Arnold & Peter Arnold By definition, water scarcity is the central challenge of sustaining life in arid lands. It’s easy to forget how large that challenge is: Arid and semi-arid lands make up one-third of the earth’s land surface and over one-third of the continental United States. The [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Places Journal – Interview: Julia Czerniak & Joe Sisko Joe Sisko, Trevor Lee and Julia Czerniak. In 2005 the Syracuse University School of Architecture, under the new leadership of dean Mark Robbins, established UPSTATE, an interdisciplinary center focusing on design, research and real estate, with the goal of expanding the impact of architecture and planning [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Places Journal  – Essay: Stan Allen Architecture studios at Harvard University, Princeton University and Cornell University. And it’s always interesting, I think, to see how the future, or rather the forward-looking form of any discipline, always carries within it the seeds of its own triteness. — William Gibson Among the participants in the first ANY (Architecture [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Places Journal  – Essay & Gallery: Giovanna Borasi & Mirko Zardini Kayt Brumder, Breathing Room, thesis project at The Cooper Union, New York, 2009. We live in a state of pervasive anxiety. Every day we are confronted with environmental problems: the energy crisis, pollution, decreasing biodiversity, climate change, new epidemics, the externalities of industrial [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Places Journal  – Essay: Will Holman Left: Arcosanti, central Arizona. Center: Rural Studio, H.E.R.O. Playground, Greensboro, Alabama. Right: YouthBuild Community Garden, Greensboro, Alabama. I guess it was about 1993, though it’s hard to remember the exact year. Browsing the stacks of the Stoneleigh Elementary library one day, I came across the Kid’s Whole Future Catalog , [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Places Journal  – Essay: Jonathan Massey From the We are the 99 Percent Tumblr archive. They got bailed out, we got sold out! They got bailed out, we got sold out! They got bailed out, we got sold out! Chanted by protesters in Lower Manhattan and beyond during the early weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement, [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Places Journal – Interview: Ila Berman & Mona El Khafif Project presentation by Alexa Getting and Lauren Tichy, CitySpaceShare studio, URBANlab. As part of our occasional series on university-based design centers, which began last year with a  profile of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center , we are pleased to feature the work of URBANlab at the [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Places Journal – by Matthew Moore Gallery: Matthew Moore Time lapse of the growth of a black-seeded Simpson head lettuce. My family began farming 35 miles northwest of Phoenix, Arizona, in the 1930s. We’ve grown everything from alfalfa and cotton to parsnips and chard. Growing up, I always knew that whatever else I [...]