Urban Activation Device & TXP

Spanish art & architecture collective Todo Por La Praxis is seeking collaborators and participants for their experimental research on activating the urban void. > Read More

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When Cities Fall: Urban Histories and Political Memory

Destroyed city of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995. Photo by Thom Hoffman.

Our experience of the present is shaped by our understanding of the past. By ignoring the urban narratives of  monuments, structures, city parks, memorials…what messages are we missing for the present?  > Read More

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Save SLO County!

Heading into Paso Robles from the west, 2013

 

Will San Luis Obispo (SLO) County remain predominantly agricultural, or will it sink into the same morass of rural sprawl that took out Orange County? It could go either way, but there’s still hope if we act now. > Read More

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The Living Newspaper: Extra Extra

Image courtesy of Southern Exposure

Southern Exposure is launching a public art program, The Living Newspaper: Extra Extra, the first West Coast performance project by the artist Liz Magic Laser and her collaborators, the actors Audrey Crabtree and Michael Wiener. > Read More

The Floods in Budapest

Eyes on the River. Photo by Christopher Herring.

The stone banks alongside the river contain the city. Despite them, here is the river, rising.  Silently, swiftly the waters swarm downstream; the swell of water does not much alter the river’s appearance.  You know there is more of it now only because benches, parks, and the bike road are being submerged.  It has not yet risen to the main city wall, about 20 feet higher; three more days of flooding expected.  

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Contributor Profile: Elizabeth Snowden

Photo by Christopher Herring.

Elizabeth Snowden is a Berkeley-based writer and editor. A graduate of Bard College, she has edited catalogues raisonnés on Picasso and Gris for Wittenborn Art Books in San Francisco.

Shortlink http://q.gs/ERsMI

Mr. Waka’s Dog House

Joseph Kosuth reviewing plans for the art installations at the Dog House. Photo by pm cook.

 

“Get out at the Sakuragaoka post office. Turn around and you’ll see a Lawson’s. Walk to it and then turn left. Walk up that street and you’ll see the Dog House on the right.” Typical Tokyo directions from the art impresario and entrepreneur Joni Waka. > Read More

Shortlink http://q.gs/ERrHe

Lost in Translation

At Roundhouse One Gallery: Lost in Translation: How prototyping is reshaping architecture, an exhibit (12 June – 9 August) and panel (27 June). > Read More

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Bay Lights Ignite: One Part Business, Two Parts Pleasure

Photo by Lucas Saugen, courtesy thebaylights.org

 

Perched on a bar stool at Sinbad’s Pier 2 Restaurant with a friend, I sipped a glass of white wine on a warm spring night. Sinbad’s is definitely a touristy establishment with its wonderful view of the Bay Bridge. And that is why I was there—to take in the recently ignited “Bay Lights” project on the Bridge’s Western span. > Read More

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WHY? WHY NOT?…& more

 

Join San Francisco design doyenne (and TraceSF fan) Barbara Stauffacher Solomon at the launch party for her autobiographical book, Why? Why Not?: 80 Years of Art & Design in Pix & Prose, and her experimental Utopia Myopia: 36 Plays on a Page, May 3, 2013, 7–9 p.m., McRoskey Mattress Co., 1687 Market @ Gough, third floor. $5 or free with book purchase.

 

Shortlink http://q.gs/ERrH0

SANAA’s Anti-Louvre

Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” at the terminus of the Louvre-Lens’ grand gallery. (Photo by Richard Ingersoll.)

Just before Christmas a superb new museum—a subsidiary of the Louvre in Paris—opened in the ex-coal mining city of Lens in northern France. To promote this breakthrough in museology, the curators chose the familiar icon of revolution, Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” one of some 200 artworks on loan from the parent institution, the world’s most popular museum. Richard Ingersoll paid a visit. > Read More

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Did Muji take a wrong turn in San Francisco?

Where’s Muji? The Japanese chain opened its first West Coast store on a challenging block of Ninth Street last fall.

 

Muji finally opened in San Francisco late last year, ending a low-grade yearning that has nagged local devotees since the Japanese chain landed in New York in 2007. But unlike the fanfare that greeted Uniqlo, another Japanese brand that debuted here last fall, Muji’s arrival was more akin to sneaking in the back door—literally. > Read More

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ACADIA 2012: Synthetic Digital Ecologies

 

The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) convened late last fall at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco for its annual four-day conference, organized this year by CCA’s Jason Kelly Johnson.[1] It headlined an impressive list of international speakers, including Manuel DeLanda, Saul Griffith of otherlab, Greg Lynn, and Achim Menges. > Read More

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Contributor Profile: Thérèse Tierney

 

Thérèse Tierney is the Director of the URL: Urban Research Lab, a research group exploring networked technologies and the built environment at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.  > Read More

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Kengo Kuma – on Scale and Pattern

Kengo Kuma

Kengo Kuma splits his time between professional practice and academia. He began his practice in the early 90‘s with a small office in Tokyo; his practice is now over 150 employees with offices in Tokyo and Paris, and projects in Europe, the US, and China. Kuma balances the demands of his global practice with his academic pursuits, heading the Kuma Lab at Tokyo University where he tests his theoretical speculations before applying them in real-world scenarios. > Read More

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Under The Surface, Past The Image, and Towards a Conversation: An Interview With TRACESF’s Editors

This past fall, the four founding editors of TraceSF (Yosh Asato, Yuki Bowman, John Parman, and I) sat down with Sarah Peck of Landscape Urbanism to discuss our vision for the role of TraceSF as a locally-focused, independent space for dialogue exploring Bay Area design, culture, and urbanism. Check out the interview here. > Read More

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The New Urban Opera House

The future of opera may soon arrive at the 16th Street Station in Oakland. Photo by Christopher Hall.

Opera is a child of the city. It was born in 1600 in Florence, the cradle of civic humanism, in the homes of a wealthy group of intellectuals who were investigating Greek drama. With its agglomeration of poetry, drama, music, costume, sets and stagecraft, opera became a popular entertainment that spread to other urban centers with a supply of musicians and artisans large enough to create and articulate the spectacle. > Read More

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Paul Crabtree

Contributor Profile: Paul Crabtree

 

Paul Crabtree is a composer and social commentator based in Oakland, California.

Shortlink http://q.gs/ERtIp