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Last night two of the biggest cities in Brazil (and the world), Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, were plunged into darkness for several hours after a failure at a massive hydro-electric dam. From what we know about urban masses in such situations of widespread confusion, people will either go crazy or come together, and [...]

Maybe it’s because buildings tall and short seem to be slapped together over a few weeks or a couple months these days, or maybe people just realize that watching long construction processes reduced to a 20-second video is really cool, but we’ve become addicted to time-lapse clips of epic skyscrapers rising from their foundations [...]

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 [...]

As you’ve likely read/heard/seen, there have been some over-reported and under-analyzed protests in London around the blockbuster G20 world leader summit. Typically, a large share of the protest iconography is devoted to graphic display – banners, posters, signs and costumes – reducing political action to fashion statements and visual culture. Perpetuating that trend with a [...]

A 37-year-old woman in London is accused of having her boyfriend punch a man who shouted at her for cutting the line in a grocery store. He ended up punching the wrong man–and killed him.
The world is finally getting wise to your pirating ways, Somalian Pirates.
“The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is [...]

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 [...]

As we all disperse towards our favored holiday partying and wintering places, our weekly psychoanalysticle Freudian Fridays asks that you keep your eyes open for gratuitous instances of the most familiar form in modern architecture: the phallus.
As Freud tells us constantly, every human activity that isn’t sex is the direct result of displaced sexual impulses, [...]