Mile-high tower wars: How tall is too tall?: The structure set to beat them all was announced at the end of March. The Mile High Tower, to be built in a “mini city” near the Red Sea port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, will be about 1,600 metres tall – seven times the height of the Canary Wharf tower in London Docklands, or four Empire State buildings on top of each other. [Independent]
Last Call, Bohemia: Every successful society needs its Bohemia, a haven for the artists, exiles, and misfits who regenerate the culture. With the heart of New York’s West Village threatened by developers, London, Paris, and San Francisco have a message for Manhattan: Don’t do it! [Vanity Fair]
Revivifying Yale’s Brutalist Pile: A sullen gray megalith fashioned out of corduroy concrete, this bully of a building was perhaps the first on our continent to introduce the more subjective, Brutalist aesthetic that Le Corbusier had developed in the postwar period. To a culture that, for two decades, had been fed a mortifying diet of glass and steel, the abrupt intrusion of so much raw emotion was a shock to the system. [NY Sun]
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