Alissa Walker

Architecture for Humanity’s Founders Step Down After 14 Years of Work

One week after winning a prestigious design award, Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr have left Architecture for Humanity, the humanitarian design organization they founded in 1999 and that currently counts 59 chapters in 16 countries. Sinclair and Stohr are recipients of the Curry Stone Design Prize‘s new Vision Award, which recognizes leaders who have inspired…

Redrawing America’s political boundaries in two different ways, a tour of Hong Kong’s outdoor escalators, the race to build bigger bike share programs, and a devastating typhoon. Let’s start the week off right with some nice urban reads. 10,000 people are feared dead after one of the most powerful typhoons ever to make landfall devastates…

11 Photos of 1980s Malls That Will, Like, Totally Blow Your Mind

Of the thousands of images that photographer Michael Galinsky took in malls during the summer of 1989, this one really seems to strike a nerve, but not necessarily because of the big bangs and acid-washed leggings, he says. “I get so many comments about Tape World.” Memories of lost stores and dubious fashions abound in…

Watch These Crazy Animations of How Three Cities Commute

New York City mostly rides transit, Los Angeles loves its cars, and San Francisco has a dedicated population of bike commuters. UC Berkeley planning Ph.D. student Fletcher Foti recently built a brilliant data visualization that brings these facts to life by animating commuting patterns for the Bay Area, L.A., and NYC. Foti uses data taken…

Mayors, Mascots, Illegal Condos: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

This week in What’s Ruining Our Cities: Racist mascots! Illegal apartments! Hedge fund slumlords! Basically everything you’d expect from some Sin City bargain bin fan fiction, except in Calfornia, China, and beyond. An offensive mascot is ruining Coachella Valley The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is asking the school district in Southern California’s Coachella Valley to change…

The Best U.S. Cities for People 35 and Under (Based On What They Like)

While there are thousands of “best places to live” lists, hardly any of them focus on the world’s most important population segment: Americans under 35. The Livability Index, compiled by Vocativ, a new Vice-esque site, measures cities in the only ways that really matter: from the percentage of young people, to the number of vintage…

The Los Angeles Aqueduct Turns 100, or The Mules That Built L.A.

Wicked dust storms spun through Newhall Pass during the centennial celebration of the Los Angeles Aqueduct on Tuesday. The winds shuddered against the tent that held hundreds of LADWP workers and sent blinding poofs of dirt into the faces of the civic dignitaries seated onstage. It was a rather ominous sign. Although the mood was…

A Map of Where Americans Are Moving (Hellooooo, Vegas!)

Each year, 10 million Americans pack up their lives and move to another part of the country. But where are they going? The University of Wisconsin-Madison has made an awesome interactive map that tracks the net migration to different counties across the U.S. The map uses data sets that include age, race, Hispanic-origin, and sex…

12 Monumental Structures Made From Type

When architects and designers want to make a point, they certainly love to spell it out for us. So check out these buildings, statues, and sculptures made from letterforms, from Lettering Large: The Art and Design of Monumental Typography, a new book by Steven Heller and Mirko Ilić. While carving a sign from a slab…

You want urban reads? We got your urban reads right here. On this November day: Icelandic elves, Lou Reed, the lost & found art of walking, what “smart city” really means, and an adorable dancing traffic cop. Icelanders still believe in invisible elves—which is very good for the environment [The Atlantic] Part of the English…

The New Reality Show Urban Suburban Makes Homeowners Choose Sides

Shows like Million Dollar Listings are fun and all—but, like, who can relate? The new Discovery Fit & Health show Urban Suburban might represent a more realistic real estate conundrum for most Americans: a real-life version of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, where homebuyers have to decide between settling down in suburbia or…

Sriracha, Shade, and Other Cities: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

It’s time for another edition of What’s Ruining Our Cities! This week: a factory that pepper-sprays its neighborhood, Canada’s favorite crack-smoking mayor, dreary urban shadows, and rural towns banding together to secede from their big-city brethren. Hot sauce is ruining Irwindale, California Neighbors of the Irwindale Sriracha factory are complaining that the smell is making…

Dress to Match LAX’s Colorful Tunnels With These Brilliant Socks

If you’ve flown into Los Angeles International Airport anytime in the last 50 years, the final segment of your journey may have taken you down a long hallway featuring a gorgeous color-blocked tile mural. Well, on your next flight to L.A., you can wear the socks to match it. The murals are the work of…

The 12 Best Airline Safety Videos, Reviewed

Virgin America, the airline that invented the sassy in-flight safety video, has rolled out a brand new sassy in-flight safety video: A live-action musical number. It’s still heads and shoulders above most airlines, but is it the best? Airline safety videos have been around as long as in-flight entertainment systems but have really only taken…

From Abington to Yorkleigh: What to Name Your Subdivision in 1949

Did you grow up in a place called Colonial Terrace? Lawndale? Hawthorne Grove? Then you might want to thank Stanley L. McMichael. In his 1949 book Real Estate Subdivisions, the real estate guru took all the guesswork out of naming new suburban streets, providing a supersafe and hypersanitized vanilla list of options for future subdivision…

The Only Population Map You Need to Understand the World

Which countries are emerging superpowers? Which countries are in decline? This excellent infographic of population change, country by country, explains pretty much everything you need to know about what’s going to happen geopolitically in the next few decades. The data comes from the United Nation Population Fund, which has just released its State of World…

A Haunted House Filled With DIY Tricks From Disney’s Haunted Mansion

Haunted houses have gone over the top in the quest for guts, gristle and gore. But the Alvarado Caverns and Mystery Theater in Los Angeles offers a clever, DIY twist on scare tactics. Its fascinating—yet still freaky—lo-fi haunting techniques are cribbed from one of the country’s original spooky addresses: Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. https://gizmodo.com/behind-the-scenes-of-blood-manor-one-of-nycs-scariest-1451588825 Alvarado Caverns…

One year ago today, much of New York City and the surrounding region was without power, its basements and transit tunnels flooded with seawater from the tidal surge and relentless rainfall of Hurricane Sandy, its suburbs caged in by fallen trees. Gawker’s own Lower Manhattan servers were inundated and we were working on a bare-bones…

I’m a Bird! This Pigeon Simulator Lets You Soar Over London

Who hasn’t dreamed of soaring over a city, dipping between the rooftops, peering into people’s windows? A new simulator allows anyone to have a real-life birds-eye view of London. It’s a pretty simple idea: University College London’s Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith rigged up the experience using a Kinect and a Google Earth 3D plug-in, and the…

How to Protect Cities from Sandy-like Storms? It’s All About Islands

One year ago, Superstorm Sandy tore a path of destruction up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Earlier this week, ten architecture and planning teams revealed their solutions for rebuilding the city in a way that would promote resilience when the next hurricane comes along. One big takeaway? We need new islands. The proposals are part…