Last week's post about Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens stirred some full-throated debate that's worth revisiting. Some liked the Pickens Plan's sense of urgency, and some bemoaned its lack of acknowledging the long-term consequences of global warming. As the first of these comments trickled in, a piece by Cato Institute research fellow Will Wilkinson on NPR caught my ear, and Wilkinson sees Pickens' media campaign and promise to enlist legions of lobbyists in a far more dubious light.
Continue reading "Pickens on Peak Oil, Part II" »
"In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, the real star has been the architecture," writes AIA EVP/CEO Chris McEntee in the August Institute Update. "The architectural marvels of the Beijing Olympics and the great building boom transforming China's cities was covered in every section [of the media]—front page, editorial, business entertainment, and sports." A separate issue, though, isn't what was covered but what seems to have been covered up.
Continue reading "Bird's Nest or Barbed Wire?" »
We asked for fantasies, but we got a nightmare.
Or more specifically, a darkly satirical structure whose architect would never want it to be built.
It's called Toxicwall, and its description brief begins with a grimly Malthusian quote from cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash: "In the real world ... there are somewhere between 6 and 10 billion people. At any given time, most of them are making bricks or field stripping their AK-47s."
Continue reading ""Weaponizing" Architecture " »