An organization’s culture is reflected everywhere, especially in office space. Today Facebook decorated its roof with a 42-Foot wide QR code, which while silly, but I was struck by how layout of Facebook’s campus (which used to be Sun Microsystems) resembles an ancient hill-top town.
Below, I created a series of figure-ground studies of the Facebook Campus, illustrating different realities:
David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has been dealing with these issues in the fishbowl of the World Trade Center site, where he designed Seven World Trade Center and is the architect of the Freedom Tower. He has also confronted them in his terms as Chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission and Chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, DC.
The Laws That Shaped L.A. will spotlight regulations that have played a significant role in the development of contemporary Los Angeles. These laws – as nominated early on by a variety of experts we’ve been polling – may be considered by readers and nominators to have either been beneficial to the city or malevolent.
Globalization and the resultant economic restructuring further weakened existing social relations, and traditional ways of maintaining social order, such as the police and schools, were no longer seen as effective. The gated residential community became a socially acceptable solution for neighborhood residents who felt threatened by this breakdown in social control. The transformation of established neighborhoods into gated communities—a step towards building what author Mike Davis dubbed the “fortress city”—became an alternative strategy for regulating and patrolling the urban poor, comprised predominantly of Latino and black minorities. But while the protected area shields its privileged few occupants from the “dangerous” behavior of outsiders, it has the drawback of diminishing collective responsibility for the collective safety of society.
The home is becoming a center for preventative health care, energy production, distributed work, and new forms of learning, entertainment, and communication. We are developing techniques for capturing and encoding concepts related to human needs, activities, values, and practices. We are investigating solutions built from an expanding set of building blocks, or “genes,” which can be combined and recombined in various ways to create a unique assembly of spaces and systems.
The new Urban Architects:
These and many others are our new urban architects. I am not suggesting that the traditional roles of urban planning and architecture aren’t still important to our cities.
Yes, please!
A perfect little picture, showcasing a man’s work and life, often intertwined. Discussing this movie with people around NYC, everyone has their Bill story, often with a cutting of showing their inclusion in the Weekend Styles section (or, more often than naught, lamenting that they were next to someone who was in the Style section).
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