Roman Mars raised over $170,000 on Kickstarter for the third season of his "tiny" radio show about design, 99% Invisible. © Raymond Ahner Roman Mars, host of 99% Invisible. As host of the weekly radio show and podcast 99% Invisible, Roman Mars takes a democratic interest in the stories behind all kinds of design. With typically “tiny” 4- to 10-minute segments (a project of KALW in San Francisco), Mars has explored the past and future of the Purple Hotel outside of Chicago, designed by John Macsai, the sound of the World Trade Center towers “breathing,” and depression induced by airport

Experts and residents rally in an ambitious plan to save a struggling city. Photo © Dave Jordano Detroit Works recommends expanding existing neighborhood initiatives, like the Spirit of Hope garden in Midtown. In Detroit, the statistics are jarring: The city has 26 jobs for every 100 people, 47 percent of residents are functionally illiterate, and, with 344 homicides in 2011, its violent-crime rate eclipses that of any other major U.S. city. Twenty-three percent of the housing stock is vacant, and though municipal tax rates in Detroit are 2.5 times the national average, services are spread thinly across the city’s expansive

Two architecturally ambitious developments have stalled following accusations of municipal malfeasance. Photo via Wikipedia Following a corruption investigation, bidding has stalled on a $1-billion project to redevelop the Miami Beach Convention Center site. Architects, no matter how successful, are dependent on clients; even the indomitable Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas can see their best efforts dashed when clients get in trouble. That’s the situation in Florida, where the two starchitects were in the running to design a billion-dollar development on the site of the Miami Beach Convention Center. Now the project has been set back by charges of municipal corruption,

The recession decimated the architecture profession, with firms closing or laying off large numbers of employees, architects left jobless for months or years, and many leaving the profession entirely. But a survey recently conducted by McGraw-Hill Construction (Record’s parent company) came to the counterintuitive conclusion that some U.S. firms expect a shortage of qualified designers to meet their workloads by 2014. The survey of 1,007 U.S. designers found that nearly one-quarter of respondents anticipated a shortage of architects resulting from a combination of designers exiting the profession, baby boomers retiring, a lack of skills among architects looking for work, and

The AIA releases its 2012 firm survey. Courtesy Cooper Carry/TVS Architects The Marriott Marquis Convention Hotel, designed by Cooper Carry and TVS Architects, is under construction in downtown Washington, D.C. The Great Recession has hardly been good to architects. But the extent to which it fundamentally changed the industry was not always clear. Now comes a sweeping 40-page report released this month from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the industry’s leading trade group, that specifically details the recession’s damage and what firms did to cope. And those survival strategies may portend new ways of doing business. The bad news

The Carnegie Museum of Art's White Cube, Green Maze highlights a more democratic and dispersed model of museum-making. Children explore Convex/Concave, an outdoor sculpture by Dan Graham at the Jardín Botánico de Culiacán. An exhibition at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art highlights a new trend in museum design—away from Bilbao-esque icons and toward a more democratic model in which architects, often working in teams, create dispersed structures that defer to the surrounding landscape, as well as to the visitors’ journey. White Cube, Green Maze: New Art Landscapes opens tomorrow, September 22, and runs through January 13, 2013. It will then

What does architecture have in common with writing a novel? If you ask Peter M. Wheelwright, the answer is a lot. The principal of PMW Architects in New York City, Wheelwright recently released his debut novel, As It Is on Earth, which was published in September by Fomite Press. Wheelwright is also a professor at New York’s Parsons the New School for Design, where he teaches design studios mixed with heavy doses of theory, history, and philosophy—subjects that play a major role in his novel, about a young professor delving into his family’s past. Photo © Eliza Hicks Peter M.

Autodesk recently released Revit LT 2013, a cheaper software tailored to small architecture firms. It has been ten years since Autodesk acquired the Revit Technology Corporation. In that time, Revit has become one of the most widely used BIM (Building Information Modeling) products in the AEC industries. However, the software’s learning curve, its processing power requirements, and its cost ($5,775 for a standalone version) scare off many would-be users—particularly smaller firms with projects that don’t demand the collaboration of multiple consultants. To capture this segment of the market, Autodesk released this week its first pared-down version of Revit, Revit LT

A SHoP-designed weathered steel facade—and the involvement of the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z—will influence the controversial arena's success. The Barclays Center in Brooklyn. New York City felt “baited-and-switched,” says Gregg Pasquarelli, the principal of SHoP Architects, explaining how his firm came to design Barclays Center, the 675,000-square-foot arena in Brooklyn, home to the Brooklyn (formerly New Jersey) Nets. The arena officially opens tonight with a Jay-Z (aka Hova) concert. The bait-and-switch occurred when Bruce Ratner, the developer of the arena, dangled a design by Frank Gehry, helping him win city approval for the project, then dropped Gehry after the financial meltdown