Category Archives: apartment living

A City Is Not a Computer

Just as important as the data stored and accessed on city servers, in archival boxes, on library shelves and museum walls are the forms of urban intelligence that cannot be easily contained, framed, and catalogued. We need to ask: What place-based “information” doesn’t fit on a shelf or in a database? 

https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-computer/?gclid=CjwKCAjw9J2iBhBPEiwAErwpeQHVt79G7jzEW3h3qz-0x-OsBS7DzJEehv_ddOMjEX47sVfclHjTNRoCPG8QAvD_BwE&cn-reloaded=1

Our home is a narrative system

Our home is a narrative system. To develop effective speculative design strategies we must understand the relationship between design, meaning, and use. To cultivate sustainable systems we must consider how any specific design requires a shift in habits that can be constantly impacted by changing externalities.

As part of the Culture Mapping workshops I share with students and clients, we map these evolving meanings to understand how our design must anticipate changes that provide better investments and direction of resources.

By mapping the evolution of our design as a system of language we can uncover narrative codes. Our homes offer a corpus of language embedded in the evolving design of how we live. The concept of “a machine for living” today is something quite different than it was after WW2. Our desire to be closer to food systems is one obvious example. Today’s “machine for living” is a home that learns and adapts to a changing world with fewer resources and an increasing ambiguity between home and other spaces in our world.

#culturemapping #home #designthinking #semiotics #speculativedesign #foresight

Is Invasive Species Dining The Next Frontier?

Whether it’s raccoon-size rodents called nutria using massive chompers to clear-cut Louisiana marshes into mud flats or shrubby Japanese knotweed smothering local flora up and down the East Coast, there are thousands of examples with people thoughtlessly introducing a species into a new environment, then battling to bring it under control. Invasives have cost the world an estimated $1.3 trillion by ruining agricultural yields, undermining tourism, and hurting public health over the past half century. Even worse, these outlaws are responsible for roughly a third of extinctions over the past 500 years, including, in 2021, the loss of the Maui ʻākepa bird and a Hawaiian variety of flowering mint. There are now 4,300 nonnative types of wildlife in the United States destructive enough for conservationists to label them as invasive.

The bold idea to eat them out of existence occurred to conservation biologist Joe Roman 20 years ago, when he developed the concept of invasivorism. Back then, it was considered more a topic for quirky cocktail conversation than a serious scientific discussion. Over time, however, Roman, based at the University of Vermont, has watched the stars align, with research and chefs like Paine advancing the practice, and individuals in general taking an interest in the ecological consequences of their gustatory habits.

https://www.saveur.com/food/eating-invasive-species/

The rise and rise of the branded residence

Now that old-world glamour is having a revival via the relaunch of the Waldorf Astoria, which was the world’s largest and tallest hotel when it opened in 1931. An immaculate restoration has added condominiums above the 375 hotel rooms, and “The Towers of the Waldorf Astoria” (where apartments are for sale from $1.8mn, through Knight Frank and Douglas Elliman) have already attracted more than 12,000 inquiries. 

https://www.ft.com/content/7483ebff-8b1c-4269-a222-a25f30ac2d07

The 15-minute city is already here. It’s called Paris

Is the “15-minute city,” a concept in which all of life’s necessary amenities are no more than a brisk walk away, a vision of urban paradise or a thinly disguised open-air prison? Town planning experts tend toward the former, conspiracy theorists toward the latter.

The maps, by the Paris Urbanism Agency (Apur), reflect the result of the latest triennial survey of shops, cafés, and restaurants in the French capital in 2020. The survey shows that there were 1,180 boulangeries (bakeries) and/or patisseries (cake shops) in the city. After declining in the first decade of the 21st century, their number has remained stable over the decade up to 2020. In the previous three years, 94 businesses had closed, but 91 new ones had started up.

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/15-minute-city-paris/

This Trend Is a Mess

Clutter has long been shoved under beds and banished to storage units; it is the villain of an entire genre of television. But messiness is a part of most people’s lives, and instead of angling their cameras away, some are now documenting, or even flexing, their imperfect homes online in all of their gory detail.

https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/style/clutter-messy-room-tiktok-instagram.amp.html

How Architectural Digest became the new Vogue

A new generation of digital-native celebrities, relaxed about the blurring of boundaries between public and private lives, have embraced celebrity home tours as a tool to promote their personal brands and to challenge public preconceptions. Emma Chamberlain, a social media influencer who found fame via YouTube, confounded expectations with her sophisticated taste in mid-century design and grown-up love of a kitchen island and copper taps when a video of her home went viral. When Khloé Kardashian posts content showing her impeccably organised pantry on YouTube, it is greeted with the kind of swooning comments that were once reserved for Carrie’s walk-in closet in the film Sex and the City.

https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/feb/10/how-architectural-digest-became-the-new-vogue

How are U.S. cities rebuilding after the pandemic? Richard Florida on the resilience of urban life in America.

In the U.S., the axiom about the imminent death of the big cities depended on a belief that people would abandon New York and San Francisco for the hinterlands, or for far-off suburbs, or for Miami and other smaller metropolitan areas—and we would see this great reshuffling of the American population.

https://www.thesgnl.com/2023/01/post-covid-us-cities-richard-florida/

Apple to Expand Smart-Home Lineup, Taking On Amazon and Google

The Cupertino, California-based technology giant has struggled in the home space and has ceded much of the market to its rivals. Its current devices remain limited in their functionality, with Apple’s Siri voice-control service lagging behind Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant. The new devices — along with upcoming changes to Siri — are aimed at turning around Apple’s fortunes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/apple-to-expand-smart-home-lineup-taking-on-amazon-and-google

Our Homes reveal the story of culture…. Do You Really Want a New Kitchen Counter?

A home plays two essential roles for many people: It’s the place you live your day-to-day life, and it’s the single most important asset you’ll ever have. Housing has served these dual purposes for much of the country’s history, but over the past 50 years in particular, as rising home values have far outpaced wage growth, Americans have begun to stake their financial future even more heavily on their home. If you’re one of the nearly two-thirds of adults in this country who own a home, it’s pretty likely that its potential sale price is a major factor in your long-term financial stability, even if you don’t plan to sell anytime soon.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/lifestyle-media-home-improvement-trends-obsession/672168/?utm_source=twitter&utm_term=2022-11-18T12%3A30%3A55&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social

Our homes reveal the story of culture…