irishboyinlondon:

Artinfo: Pop-Up Populism: How the Temporary Architecture Craze is Changing Our Relationship to the Built Environment

America is fast becoming a pop-up nation. From sea to shining sea, her cities have been swept up in the frenzy for temporary architecture: Brooklyn vendors sell their wares in artfully arranged shipping containers; Dallas’s Build a Better Block group champions DIY painted bicycle routes and pop-up small businesses; architects in San Francisco are repurposing metered parking spaces into miniature parks; residents in Oakland, California rallied to create an entire pop-up neighborhood. The phenomenon has even climbed its way from grassroots origins to the agendas of local authorities: D.C.’s office of planning sprouted a Temporary Urbanism Initiative, while New York’s transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is implementing what she calls “Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses” with her fast-acting interventions favoring pedestrians and cyclists. The temporary, so it seems, is overtaking the permanent. But how permanent is our current fascination for the temporary?

(via humanscalecities)

archiveofaffinities:

Parisian Mansion Block, Section, 1853

glukauf:

Recreation time for the seminarists at St. Ignatius Loyala shrine at Azpeitia, Gipuzkoa (Guipúzcoa) in Spain, 1955.

(via theatlantic)

shinpei:

best overstock shop name in Paris from @littleknife instagram

I love it a little le too much.

fsgbooks:

vikingpenguinbooks:

How New York Pay Phones Became Guerrilla Libraries

An interview with the creator

The concept, sponsored by Locke’s imaginary Department of Urban Betterment, is that New Yorkers will pick up unfamiliar titles while running their errands and then, perhaps, replace them the next day with favorite books of their own. That’s in an ideal world. Of the twoguerrilla libraries that the artist has fashioned, one has been used properly while the other has had its entire collection repeatedly ganked by sticky-fingered pedestrians. Its shelves were also stolen.

But Locke has many more libraries planned. With plywood consoles that slip over payphones as neatly as aprons, these sidewalk objets are endlessly replicable. (No doubt they’ll feature in his 2012 Columbia course, “Hacking the Urban Experience.”) I caught up with Locke over the weekend to ask him about what was and wasn’t working with these literary outposts, as well as why he started the project in the first place. 

More at The Atlantic

This is an incredible idea. I’m going to try and find one pronto.

(via theatlantic)

refero-mundus:

Escape the city (by roundtheplace)

(via shinpei)