Sure, a Jet’s Wings Need Scrubbing, But Its Guts Need a Flush, Too

Breakthrough planes from Boeing and Airbus, fresh approaches to cabin design, and new services on the ground aim to change air travel for the better.

“It’s not just that Bill is a brilliant engineer — which his buildings are demonstrating,” says Carol Willis, director of the Skyscraper Museum in New York City. “He’s posing new structural approaches rather than reworking old ones, and that’s what it takes to build something unprecedented.”

Thirteen years after the genocide, the tiny African nation begins imagining its future.

Publishers grapple with online video

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism.

People who are about to drop $300 on a bottle of Chateau Margeaux want the experience to be awesome — bouquet, color, mouthfeel, yada yada. But what about the ordering? Avid wine snobs might think about a trip to Adour, the restaurant opening at New York’s St. Regis Hotel in November. Pull up a stool […]

Olympic-size is for plebs. Thanks to advanced hydrotechnology, swimmers can paddle in a private ocean — like this $3.5 million, 20-acre, half-mile-long, 66 million gallon leviathan recently certified by Guinness as the largest pool in the world. Located in Algarrobo, Chile, about 70 miles west of Santiago and just yards from the Pacific, the pool […]

En Suite Garages Make for Dee-Luxe Apartments in the Sky (link)In most Manhattan apartments, a closet counts as a bonus. But a new condo building at 200 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea ( conveniently located just steps from a nudie bar and a taxicab body shop) takes New York real estate excess to dizzying heights. Behold […]

San Francisco Federal Building from AIA San Francisco on Vimeo. Produced for the exhibition STREET CRED San Francisco: Architecture and the Pedestrian Experience, this podcast features architect Thom Mayne, principal of the Los Angles-based firm Morphosis and designer of the new San Francisco Federal Building, in conversation with Andrew Blum, a Brooklyn-based writer and contributing […]

Weather Project Artist Eliasson Brings Techie Installations to U.S. (link) For Take Your Time, a major new exhibition that opened September 8 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the internationally-celebrated artist Olafur Eliasson changed out the gallery lights, put mirrors on the ceilings, created a small fog bank, filled a room with a […]

The future of “mediatecture” (link) In his 2001 book, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, architect James Sanders describes the relationship between the city and iconic films like Annie Hall and Miracle on 34th Street. Recently, though, as he discussed at a recent event in New York, Sanders has been thinking a lot about […]