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Suburban design has clearly reached its sad and tragic end, but finding a way to make something out of the mess it’s left behind all over North America and the world is a massive and intimidating project. It seems as though for every suburb there’s an environmentally-sensitive plan for how things could be better. Well, [...]

The second place winner in the recent VisionWorks competition, which sought new ideas and technologies to help create and sustain better living conditions, was an unusual proposal by Philipp Hermes that involves using track-mounted containers to ship objects, documents and goods around the city. Though the project, dubbed Urban Mole (pictured), sounds expensive, the beauty [...]

Bus stops are interesting street furniture items. Everybody’s got them, nobody’s are the same (although New York’s new corporate steel ones are strikingly generic) and we pretty much all use them at least a few times every year.So why do they tend to be so poorly designed and boring?
As Toxel’s listicle of 15 Unusual and [...]

Predominantly a feature of hideously disposable and generic suburban and highway architecture, gas stations are rarely much to look at. This dependable lack of visual appeal, strangely, makes them a popular challenge for photographers, doing their best to make something ugly look pretty or interesting.
Fortunately, every so often someone designs an innovative gas station to [...]

It’s funny, this obsession we have with predicting the cities of the future, no? It’s as though urban space is always already outdated, battered, overused and redundant, in need of updating, up-scaling and re-development. Such reverie isn’t strictly the province of the toiling masses either. Architects, engineers, businessmen and politicians are equally prone to dreaming [...]

When we used to live in Montreal (oh, those were simpler times) we’d see Roadsworth’s clever urban art all over the place and we eventually didn’t even notice. Looking at it now though, we’re remembering just how cool it was and how poorly the city handled this renegade visionary (they threatened to banish him from [...]

Last year, an ambitious plan to redesign the Tappan Zee Bridge just North of New York City got us all excited. After all, bridge construction in this city is basically a once-in-a-century sort of thing, and we had bold hopes for a nifty new bridge design because, let’s face it, nice solid 19th century structures [...]

In what is perhaps the most brilliant anti-gentrification performance art-as-protest achievement ever, a serial arsonist has been lighting luxury condo construction site porta-potties ablaze (pictured at right) all over the rapidly developing Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.
As if news of this hilarious and brilliant string of anti-gentrification vandalism wasn’t enough, one foreman has reacted [...]

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 [...]