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In this New York Times article from Monday, Henry Fountain takes the recent unveiling of the glass boxes on the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower as a jumping off point (pun intended) to discuss how new kinds of glass are finally making the architectural impulse towards completely translucent buildings a possibility. What would a [...]

One of the most iconic images of modern history is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary: on June 5th, 1989 an unknown man faced down a row of tanks on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where months of protest had finally ceased when the military removed protesters from the public plaza by force. Nobody ever discovered who [...]

According to an unverified source, today is the anniversary of the first public library opening. Dating this aniversary is all the more problematic because if you go back far enough, people’s definitions of “public library” start to differ significantly . For instance, did the dry sections of Roman baths where there were scrolls available for [...]

It seems like most major professional sports teams in the U.S. have undertaken a stadium change in the last ten years. In New York alone we have the new Mets stadium Citi Field, Yankee Stadium, and the Meadowlands’ Jets stadium all under construction. There are also more long term (likely imaginary) plans for a new [...]

Some time ago, in an earlier edition of our weekly psychoanalysticle Freudian Fridays, we looked at some of the most overt, excessive and unsubtle phallic monuments built by man. While the need to put power, potency and might into concrete (and steel and glass) expression smacks of typical late-capitalist chauvinism, it would be a mistake [...]