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You may have noticed that we’re huge architecture nerds, and, to a lesser degree, comic book fans. In a weird way, though, we’re maybe even more fond of the places where science fiction and architecture intersect and help to create spectacular, imaginary new constructions. We really enjoyed Architects Journal’s vidsticle of the Top 5 Comic [...]

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, [...]

On our bike ride to work (20 minutes), we pass under, alongside and near a highway (the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) that basically cuts three successive neighborhoods off from the city, not to mention burying their immediate surroundings in noise, shadows and imposing concrete superstructures. Not a day goes by that we don’t wish that bulky aberration [...]

What’s a good sci-fi or fantasy series without a fascinating, deeply rich urban locale to serve as its backdrop? Batman’s got Gotham, Superman has Metropolis, and any comparable franchise that plans to stick around would do good to create comparable settings from which subplots and supporting characters can emerge to provide new narratives and continuing [...]

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 It’s as though urban space is always already outdated, battered, overused and redundant, in need of updating, up-scaling and re-development.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 [...]

Yes, real estate in bigger, older cities is awful uncertain in the current climate, but all that seems like so many small fries when compared to the disasters unfolding in many mid-size cities whose ballooning real estate markets were mostly based on projectioons of continuous growth. In a piece chronicling the lightning fast transition from [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

With streets, neighborhoods and entire cities increasingly surveilled around the clock by cops, cameras and private security forces, street art has never been so vital. Not surprisingly, it’s also practically impossible in wealthy neighborhoods, so the areas with the richest street culture tend to be the poorest and most officially neglected, a kind of sweet [...]