Arch.itect.us

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but a Subway sandwich shop made of shipping containers is helping workers at the World Trade Center building site get their noontime grub on more efficiently. The shop will rise along with the building’s construction to its eventual 108-story height, making it easier for construction [...]

With much of the East coast of the US under a heavy blanket of snow, it’s starting to look (and feel) almost like the cold wilderness of Siberia. Luckily for us, spring and summer will eventually return. But in Russia the winters are even longer and harsher, and military operations can be hindered by meter-deep [...]

Ruben Brulat hasn’t been a photographer long; the French artist picked up his first camera just two years ago. But since then, he’s been exploring what it means to be a human and how we interact with our environment. His series “Primates” places him – both as photographer and as subject – in inhospitable terrains [...]

Google’s Street View has made it easier for us to find our destinations, but has it influenced us in other ways as well? When Google sent out a fleet of automobiles armed with GPS units, laser rangefinders, and multi-eyed cameras, their goal was to make it easier to navigate places around the world. But the [...]

It’s common knowledge that living in a city as large as New York can be chaotic, and the laws meant to provide order and protect citizens can be beyond confusing. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have a user’s guide for navigating key NYC laws? Artist/graphic designer Candy Chang is doing her part to help make [...]

Rooftops have long been popular urban substitutions for yards; city dwellers use their rooftops for sunbathing, grilling a few hamburgers, hanging clothes out to dry, or even a bit of rooftop gardening. But these clever dwellings use sky-high rooftop space as a prime location for living quarters. Rooftop dwellings run the range from shanties to [...]

People have been dreaming of flying cars since the very first day we realized that human flight was possible. We love cars, we love flying, we love traveling, and we love independence: all of those things are brought together in the idea of a car that we can fly or drive as the mood strikes [...]

It’s a surreal, otherworldly scene: ornate palaces with the finest appointments being used as temporary shelter for American soldiers. The detritus of their everyday lives mingles with the ornate columns, shiny marble floors and war rubble in the palaces built by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. After the dictator was forced from power and his [...]

Remember the fairy tales featuring scary trolls who lived under bridges? We were terrified of them as children, and many of us still get a strange, subconscious feeling of danger when approaching the underside of a bridge. But there are people all around the world who really do inhabit bridges. In fact, inhabited bridges were [...]

When negative comments are made about public art, they usually revolve around the art being unattractive, too permanent, or a waste of city funds (either for commissioning a sanctioned piece or cleaning up an unsanctioned one). But two different public art projects in France are capturing attention and imaginations with their simplicity and impermanence – [...]