Frank Gehry

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Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion): Discussions with Google employees as well as comment from Chris Yeh in response to Harvard Business Review blog posting: “What Google Could Learn from Pixar,” by Peter Sims, August 6, 2010. Chapter 5 Frank Gehry: Interview with Gehry. Visits to Disney Hall and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “America’s Best Leaders: The Man With the Most Unusual Lines,” by Betsy Streisand, U.S. News and World Report, October 22, 2006. On feeling lost without constraints: “Interview with Frank Gehry,” Academy of Achievement, June 3, 1995. On Disney Hall design and configuration: Symphony: Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney, by Frank Gehry, Harry N. Abrams (2003), p 49; “How Frank Gehry’s Design and Lillian Disney’s Dream Were Rescued to Create the Masterful Walt Disney Concert Hall,” by James S.

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Google founders credited their Montessori education as a major factor behind their success in an interview with Barbara Walters, “10 Most Fascinating People of the Year,” ABC News, February 2004. John Lasseter: “Lunch with the FT: John Lasseter,” Financial Times, January 16, 2009. Chapter 7 Frank Gehry: Interview with Frank Gehry. Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary film by Sidney Pollack, Sony Pictures (2006). Evidence from creativity research about the value of diverse insights: Individual level: Openness to experience is one of the foremost characteristics throughout the personality and psychology research on creative people.

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Richard Tait: Interview with Tait. Dr. Keith Sawyer: “Educating for Innovation,” by R. Keith Sawyer, Thinking Skills and Creativity, vol. 1, 41–48. Classroom: Taken from visit to the Nueva School, I-Lab, an experimental design thinking laboratory for elementary-school students. Frank Gehry: Interview with Frank Gehry. Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary film by Sidney Pollack, Sony Pictures (2006). In Gratitude Although this book has one author, it stands on the shoulders of countless people whose work, insights, and research inform it. The greatest initial inspiration came from George Kembel, a cofounder and the executive director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school).

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays by Witold Rybczynski

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", additive manufacturing, airport security, Buckminster Fuller, City Beautiful movement, classic study, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Jane Jacobs, kremlinology, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Eisenman, rent control, Silicon Valley, the High Line, urban renewal, young professional

As adults, we feel more or less at home more or less everywhere. This is not just a question of habit. I don’t mean that there aren’t locales that appear exotic, but it’s rare that we find ourselves in places that are truly incomprehensible. This is not just because buildings fall into recognizable types (a concert hall designed by Frank Gehry is still a concert hall; the relationship between performers and audience follows a well-understood convention) but also because television and movies have brought us in contact with so many places we would never ordinarily visit: prisons, morgues, missile silos. Last summer, I toured a World War II submarine moored alongside San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf; it was the first time I had ever been aboard such a vessel, but thanks to Lloyd Bridges and Sea Hunt as well as many submarine movies, the confined mechanical interior of the USS Pampanito felt, if not exactly familiar, at least not unfamiliar.

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This is a favorite device of commercial home builders and is obviously a crowd-pleaser, although the roof has always seemed to me an odd thing to spend your money on. The complexity of the roof was mirrored by the intricacy of the windows: there were half a dozen different shapes and sizes. The modest house was hardly in a league with Frank Gehry or Peter Eisenman, but it was busy. I realized that I had to say something more substantive, but I wasn’t sure where to start. I believe that small, inexpensive houses like Danièle and Luc’s should be as simple as possible. This is partly a question of economics; complexity costs money, after all, and I would rather see a restricted budget devoted to better-quality materials than to architectural bravura.

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There is a plain office block that might be of the late nineteenth century, a two-screen cinema—the only building not quite finished—that looks as if it might turn out to be Art Deco, and a bank whose colored horizontal streamlining stripes are straight out of the 1920s. In addition, there are buildings that look quite modern, such as the town hall, the post office, and a visitor center. Michael Eisner is an architecture buff, and in the past he has commissioned world-famous architects to design buildings for Disney: Arata Isozaki, Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, Aldo Rossi. Celebration, too, has a cast of celebrated architects. Graves designed the post office, Philip Johnson the town hall, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown the bank, Cesar Pelli the cinema, and Charles Moore the visitor center. I dislike the town hall; like so much of Johnson’s work, it tries to be monumental and manages to be merely bombastic.

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

It commissioned the fashion photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders to take a picture of American architecture’s oldest grand old man, seated in the thick of a dense cloud of his acolytes in the lobby bar of the Four Seasons, the restaurant that he designed at the foot of the Seagram Tower. It is inconceivable that any other architect would have had the same treatment, not even Frank Gehry, who, with Brad Pitt in and out of his office, is certainly no stranger to stardom. The Vanity Fair photograph is a tribute not so much to the significance of Johnson’s contribution to the history of architecture as a reminder of his importance to the cult of fame. Frank Gehry sits on one side of Johnson, alongside Peter Eisenman. Arata Isozaki has flown in from Tokyo, Rem Koolhaas from Rotterdam and Zaha Hadid from London. Their presence seems to suggest not just a tribute to Johnson on their part, but a sense of an acceptance of the old man’s benediction, a laying-on of hands that has certainly helped their careers over the years.

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The non-American winners were clearly not an option for such a symbolically charged project, and by all accounts none of the other American recipients – Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, Richard Meier, even Frank Gehry – managed to hit it off with Clinton. What, the president was in the habit of asking, do you think of that museum in Balboa? And how do you think that titanium will look in twenty years? There was a certain amount of lobbying. Steven Spielberg had recently had a house designed for him in the Hamptons by Charles Gwathmey, and he suggested that he might be just the architect for the job. Disney’s Michael Eisner – who had transformed the Mouse Kingdom with buildings by Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, Robert Stern, Antoine Predock and Arata Isozaki – offered some names.

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He is a magic figure radiating light, like the Sun King hemmed in by lesser mortals lost in darkness. It is a scene as carefully designed as one of Speer’s party rallies, just as pregnant with meaning and, in theory, as astonishing a tableau as if George W. Bush had decided to tour Baghdad in the company of Jeff Koons, Philip Johnson and Frank Gehry. The dictator is demonstrating his priorities and making his intentions manifestly clear: Hitler, the great architect, is ready to redesign the world. And yet, somehow, we never entirely got the message: he wanted to be seen not as a military leader, or a political figure, but as an artist. For so many leaders, architecture represents simply a means to an end.

Architecture: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Ballantyne

dematerialisation, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, late capitalism, means of production, plutocrats, Stewart Brand, the built environment

That they could be brought on to the site and assembled is little short of miraculous. It is a world away from the studio conditions in which Gehry invents the building form. He once made an armchair by gluing corrugated cardboard into a large block, and then modelling it with a chainsaw. 24. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (1997); architect: Frank Gehry (born 1929). Frank Gehry was born in Canada, first moved to California as a student, and then settled and started an architectural practice there, initially making fairly conventional designs. His experimental work, starting with his own house in Santa Monica, has taken him in the direction of designing buildings that have more in common with the traditions of sculptural form than with architecture.

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Kersting 17 Model of Temple of Juno Sospita, Lanuvium – Etruscan temple, according to Vitruvius (5th century BC) © David Lees/Corbis 18 Seagram Building, Manhattan, New York City (1954–8); architects: Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and Philip Johnson (born 1906) © Bettmann/Corbis 19 Opera House, Sydney, Australia (1957–73); architect: Jorn Utson (born 1918) © Eye Ubiquitous/Corbis 20 Chicago Tribune Tower, Chicago, Illinois (1923–5); architects: John Mead Howells (1868–1959) and Raymond Hood (1881–1934) Underwood & Underwood/Corbis 21 Métro entrance surrounds, Paris, France (1899–1905); architect: Hector Guimard (1867–1942) © Philippa Lewis/Edifice 22 Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain (begun 1882); architect: Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) © A. F. Kersting 23 Mausoleum of the Taj Mahal, Agra, India (1630–53); architect: Ustad ‘Isa (dates unknown) © A. F. Kersting 24 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (1997); architect: Frank Gehry (born 1929) Erika Barahona Ede/© FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao 25 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (1977); architects: Renzo Piano (born 1937) and Richard Rogers (born 1933) © Eye Ubiquitous/Corbis Introduction I met a traveller from an antique land Who said, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert.

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Commercial buildings of this type dating from the 1980s are to be seen in many cities around the world (Figure 1). There have been other rallying cries and manifestos in the architecture-world since then, but they have not as yet been given names that have made a lasting impression on a wide public. Frank Gehry’s art museum in Bilbao might conceivably be presented as an example of Deconstructivism (Figure 24), but an explanation of what that term means certainly lies beyond the scope of a very short introduction to architecture. 1. AT&T Building, New York (1978–80); architect: Philip Johnson (born 1906).

Eyewitness Top 10 Los Angeles by Catherine Gerber

Berlin Wall, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, East Village, Frank Gehry, haute couture, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan, transcontinental railway

It has as its center a three-story tall pair of binoculars For downtown architecture See p77 Building ( Bradbury The light-flooded atrium Chiat/Day Building designed by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The pile of angled rust-colored columns on the right resembles a deconstructed forest. d Map A5 • 340 Main St, Venice • Not open to public Disney Concert Hall & Walt This Frank Gehry-designed downtown extravaganza is easily recognized by its shiny and dynamically curved exterior. It is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and seats over 2,000 people. The city-block-sized complex also comprises two small outdoor amphitheaters (see p54 & p72). of Our Lady ) Cathedral of the Angels Behind the fortresslike exterior of LA’s new cathedral, designed by José Rafael Moneo, awaits a minimalist hall of worship where the lack of right angles and supporting pillars creates a sense of spacious loftiness.

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Alas, name-brand knock-offs are not uncommon, so beware. d Map T6 • Between Olympic Blvd & 12th St, downtown ) Once an ancient crumbling Old Town Pasadena historic district, Old Town Pasadena was given a makeover in the 1990s. Today, Colorado Boulevard and its side streets offer a pleasant shopping experience in mostly mid-priced chains and specialty stores (see p87). Center @ Beverly Upscale retail assortment within a fortress-like façade. d Map L5 • 310-854-0070 Monica Place £ Santa Frank Gehry-designed mall with great food courts. d Map A4 • 310-394-5451 Galleria $ Glendale Dedicated mall-crawlers Los Angeles Top 10 Grove at Farmers ! The Market will love this heaven of over 250 mostly mid-priced stores. d Map E1 • 818-240-9481 Pavilion % Westside Neighborhood mall with state-of-the-art Landmark Film Center for independent films. d Map C3 • 310-474-6255 Shopping^ Westfield town Century City Elegant shopping area with boutiques and valet parking. d Map C2 • 310-553-5300 Colorado & Paseo Trendy Pasadena “urban village” with 65 stores and Mediterranean architecture. d Map F1 • 626-795-8891 & Highland * Hollywood Shop beneath the Hollywood Sign at this fanciful outdoor mall in Tinseltown. d Map P2 • 323-467-6412 Shopping( Westfield town Fashion Square Indoor mall that prides itself on outstanding service. d Map C1 • 818-783-0550 ) 7th+Fig Fun architecture, great food, and a colorful farmers market on Thursdays. d Map T5 • 213-955-7150 The Wine Merchant’s cellars (310-278-7322) in Beverly Hills are superb for top-quality wines 53 Los Angeles Top 10 Left Music Center Center Pantages Theatre Right Greek Theatre Performing Arts Venues Bowl !

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The LA Opera, directed by Plàcido Domingo, makes its home at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, while cutting-edge plays are presented at the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum. d Map V4 • 135 Griffith Park, the popular Greek Theatre (see p28) has featured such musical greats as B.B. King. Stars leave their handprints on the Wall of Fame. d Map D2 • 2700 N Vermont Canyon • 323-665-1927 • www.greektheatrela.com N Grand Ave, Downtown • 213-972-7211 £ Walt Disney Concert Hall This Frank Gehry creation, the newest part of the Music Center, features cleverly designed seating which makes listening to the LA Philharmonic Orchestra, playing beneath the sail-like ceiling of the hall, an unforgettable experience (see p41 & p72). Amphitheatre ^ Gibson Next to Universal Studios and Universal City Walk, this state-of-the-art indoor music venue draws up to 6,300 people with a star-studded calendar of events that have included Fleetwood Mac and Sheryl Crow. d Map D2 • 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City • 818-622-4440 (box office) Hollywood Bowl 54 For the latest information, log on to www.musiccenter.org (Music Center) Top 10 Comedy Clubs Laugh Factory !

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

That has not stopped the growth of an Utzon cult in Australia and beyond; a cult which presents him as a wronged genius. It’s a cult that has played into the mania of the first years of the twenty-first century for icon building, one that has thankfully subsided somewhat from its peak at the creation of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim building in Bilbao. Not uncoincidentally, Utzon was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2003, a tribute from a jury that included Frank Gehry. And, perhaps equally revealingly, Utzon, who was born in Copenhagen and studied architecture at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, worked in the Helsinki office of Alvar Aalto, another champion of non-standard building types and curves.

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It was a commission won in a competition against Norman Foster and it would be difficult to imagine two more polarized designs. In fact, Graves went so far as to suggest that he would rather practise law than build high-tech architecture. For a moment Graves was being described by Charles Jencks as the greatest American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, and he acquired much the same aura that Frank Gehry attained a quarter of a century later when he completed the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Since then, Graves has declined into the construction of a sequence of exhibitionistic holiday resorts on a huge scale. There is a melancholy feel to looking at those ancient copies of Blueprint now. Why would anybody set out to start a new magazine once Amazon had sold more Kindle downloads than physical hardback books for the first time?

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Le Corbusier was said to have been spotted hanging around the site, lost in wonder at the remarkable stream of objects that he saw going in. The Maison de Verre is one of the handful of buildings that have the energy and the imagination to be able to change everything that follows them. Charles Eames’s house in Los Angeles was equally influential. Frank Gehry’s own house from the 1980s in Santa Monica or Rem Koolhaas’s house outside Bordeaux are probably the most recent examples of this exceptional breed. They depend on an individual designer, like Chareau, who is bursting with ideas, unwilling to take anything on trust, and determined to rethink literally every detail, The project did not succeed in rescuing Chareau, who was notoriously bad at business, from his financial difficulties.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

It’s tape T1217 in the MIT archives, online at: http://teachingexcellence.mit.edu/from-the-vault/mits-building-20-the-magical-incubator-1998; a definitive account of the merits of Building 20 is in chapter three of Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Viking, 1994). 20. Robert Campbell, “Dizzying Heights in Frank Gehry’s Remarkable New Stata Center at MIT, Crazy Angles Have a Serious Purpose,” The Boston Globe, April 25, 2004. 21. Robin Pogrebin and Katie Zezima, “M.I.T. Sues Frank Gehry, Citing Flaws in Center He Designed,” The New York Times, November 7, 2007. See also Spencer Reiss, “Frank Gehry’s Geek Palace,” Wired (May 2004), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/mit.html. 22. Reiss, “Frank Gehry’s Geek Palace.” 23. Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 32. 24.

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Amid gushing newspaper write-ups about the “workforce of the future,” Jay Chiat announced a radical plan to sweep away cubicles and offices and even desks. Armed with the best mobile technology available—in 1993—Chiat/Day employees would roam free in open spaces, winning sales and creating great ads wherever they wished. What’s more, those spaces would be playful, zany, and stylish. The agency’s new Los Angeles offices, designed by Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenburg, boasted a four-story sculpture of a pair of binoculars, and curvaceous two-seater pods from fairground rides were installed with the hope that people would sit together in them and think creative thoughts. The New York office, designed by Gaetano Pesce, had a mural of a vast red pair of lips, and a luminous multicolored floor with hieroglyphs all over it.

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When Building 20 was at last demolished in 1998, MIT held what could only be described as a wake. Engineering professor Paul Penfield organized the commemoration “to help each other through the grieving process.” Building 20 was replaced by the ultimate architectural status symbol—a building designed, like the Chiat/Day headquarters, by Frank Gehry. Gehry’s Stata Center, which opened in 2004, is designed as a symbol of creativity. Imagine one of Dr. Seuss’s architectural fantasies bursting fully formed onto the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you begin to get the picture. The architecture critics loved the center’s messy appearance.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

On Martha Graham: Jenny Dalzell, “Martha Graham: American Modern Dance Pioneer,” Dance Teacher, January 2, 2013, https://www.dance-teacher.com/history-lesson-plan-martha-graham-2392370093.html; “Martha Graham: The Graham Technique,” Human Kinetics (Canada), accessed November 10, 2020, https://canada.humankinetics.com/blogs/excerpt/martha-graham-the-graham-technique; “About,” MarthaGraham.org, accessed November 10, 2020, https://marthagraham.org/history. Frank Gehry on gravity: “Frank Gehry Teaches Design and Architecture,” MasterClass, video course, accessed November 4, 2020, https://www.masterclass.com/classes/frank-gehry-teaches-design-and-architecture. Gehry on building without constraints: “What It Takes—Frank Gehry,” American Academy of Achievement, April 6, 2018, https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/what-it-takes-frank-gehry/4302218.html. On a French novel without the letter e: In 1969 the French writer Georges Perec wrote a three-hundred-page novel La Disparition (A Void) entirely devoid of e, following the restrictions dictated by the Oulipo artistic movement to which he belonged.

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She also imposed other kinds of constraints, most literally in her most famous work, Lamentation, in 1930, in which the dancer is contained in a fabric tube. And the Graham technique imposes restrictions in ways that other dance companies may not expect: it is a registered trademark. As in the cases of Dr. Seuss and Martha Graham, boundaries need not be confining but serve as an opportunity. The architect Frank Gehry believes that the very secret to his creative successes is the limitations he must work through. “As an artist, I got constraints. Gravity is one of them,” he adds with a chortle. “But within all those constraints, I have fifteen percent of freedom to make my art.” Gehry said his most difficult assignment was when he was asked to build a home for a wealthy patron with no constraints.

Frommer's Seattle 2010 by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence

With the 21st century in full swing, this 1960s-vintage image of the future may look decidedly 20th-century retro, but still, it’s hard to resist an expensive elevator ride in any city. You can even take a monorail straight out of The Jetsons to get there (and, en route, pass right through the Frank Gehry–designed Experience Music Project). EMP, as the Experience Music Project is known, is yet another of Seattle’s architectural oddities. Its swooping, multicolored, metal-skinned bulk rises at the foot of the Space Needle, proof that real 21st-century architecture looks nothing like the vision of the future people dreamed of when the Space Needle was built for the 1962 World’s Fair.

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Positioning itself as a major metropolis has meant thinking big, and to this end Seattle has stayed busy in the past decade adding (and subtracting) large, sometimes controversial structures to its ever-changing cityscape. In 2000 Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen opened his Experience Music Project, a museum of rock ’n’ roll that started out as a simple memorial to hometown rocker Jimi Hendrix. The museum structure, designed by visionary architect Frank Gehry, is meant to conjure up images of a melted electric guitar and is one of the most bizarre-looking buildings on the planet. In 2004, Allen opened a Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame inside this same building. Also in 2000, Seattle’s venerable and much-disparaged Kingdome came crashing down in a cloud of dust as demolition experts imploded the massive cement structure to make way for a new football stadium for the Seattle Seahawks, the NFL team that happens to be owned by Paul Allen.

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BY MONORAIL If you are planning a visit to Seattle Center, there is no better way to get there from downtown than on the Seattle Monorail ( 20 6/905-2620;www.seattlemonorail.com), which leaves from Westlake Center shopping mall (Fifth Ave. and Pine St.). The elevated train covers the 11⁄4 miles in 2 minutes and passes right through the middle of the Experience Music Project, the Frank Gehry–designed rock-music museum. The monorail operates daily from 9am to 11pm. Departures are every 10 minutes. The one-way fare is $2 for adults and $1 for seniors, and 75¢ for children 5 to 12. BY STREETCAR Paul Allen’s rapidly evolving South Lake Union development district, stretching from the north end of downtown Seattle to the south shore of Lake Union, is served by the Seattle Streetcar ( 20 6/553-3000;www.seattlestreetcar.org).

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

The second phase is the restoration of the power station itself, which will feature a 2,000-seater venue on the second floor and a Norman Foster-designed infinity pool on the roof, while Phase 3 will see the creation of Electric Boulevard, a new high street connecting the development with the Northern Line extension, flanked by apartments designed by Frank Gehry and Norman Foster. The architecture critic and writer Rowan Moore described the scheme as ‘so richly fed on world class architecture’ that it ‘has managed a feat that might have been thought impossible, which was to make the power station look small’.30 Inside the Frank Gehry show home the open plan ‘LA style’ apartment was very pleasant, with its ‘winter garden’ balcony and architect-designed interiors, although the ceilings seemed low.

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From Chelsea Bridge clusters of towers of brand-new balconied apartments mushroom one behind the other as far as the eye can see, in developments with names like Vista, Chelsea Bridge. Access to the 42-acre construction site was about a mile away down Battersea Park Road, now defined by a hoarding stretching its length and low-rise council housing on the other side of the busy road. I passed a well-designed 1930s-style poster pointing the way to the Frank Gehry Show Apartment and rounded the corner to see a security gate and sentry box. Unlike high street estate agents, where interested purchasers can just walk in, visits to the Experience Suites of forthcoming developments are mainly by appointment. This was confirmed to me by the security guard who explained I would need to contact the sales team in advance and that ‘you need to be interested in buying a flat’.

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His stories chime with a wealth of anecdotal evidence of dirty tricks, including fake letter-writing campaigns and even actors attending planning meetings. Martyn, a film maker from Brighton, described to me how he had been offered ‘cash in brown envelopes’ to attend a planning meeting and pose as a supporter of Frank Gehry’s controversial plans for an iconic new development of 750 luxury apartments on the seafront. He remembers how ‘at least five of us’ from the drama school where he was studying were approached by an events company and asked if they’d like to participate. ‘We were told to go there and shout down the local opposition to the development.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

Photo by Americasroof JR: Mohamed Yunis Idris Courtesy of JR-art.net Alberto Giocometti: Piazza Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York © 2016 Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Anastasia Elias: Pyramide Courtesy of the artist Vic Muniz: Sandcastle no. 3 Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY The views through an unpolarized windshield and Land’s polarized one Courtesy of Victor McElheny Two photographs of Martha Graham from the Barbara and Willard Morgan photographs and papers (Collection 2278): “Letter to the World” and “Lamentation” Barbara and Willard Morgan photographs and papers, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Frank Gehry and Vladu Milunic: Dancing House, Prague, Czechoslovakia Photo by Christine Zenino [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Frank Gehry: Beekman Tower, New York City (No attribution required) Frank Gehry: Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Las Vegas, Nevada Photo by John Fowler [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Volute conforming tank Courtesy of Volute Inc., an Otherlad company Claes Oldenburg: Icebag – Scale B, 16/25, 1971.

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Starting in the 1920s, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham used innovative poses, movements and fabric to bend the human form. As dancers can change shape, so can structures. Using computer modeling and new building materials, architect Frank Gehry warps the normally flat planes of building exteriors into rippling and twisting facades. Three buildings by Frank Gehry: Beekman Tower The Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health Dancing House (with Vlado Milunić) Volute’s conforming fuel tank How might a similar bend allow the cars of the future to hold more fuel? One of the impediments to converting engines from gasoline to hydrogen is the bulkiness of the tank: standard hydrogen tanks are barrel-shaped and take up too much cargo space.

Fodor's Barcelona by Fodor's

Albert Einstein, call centre, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, low cost airline, market design, Suez canal 1869, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

–Sat. 10–7, Sun. 10–2 | Station: Arc de Triomf, Ciutadella. Port Olímpic. Choked with yachts, restaurants, tapas bars, and mega-restaurants serving reasonably decent fare continuously 1 PM–1 AM, the Olympic Port is 2 km (1 mi) up the beach, marked by the mammoth shimmering goldfish sculpture by Frank Gehry of Bilbao Guggenheim fame (Bilbao got a leviathan; Barcelona got a goldfish). In the shadow of Barcelona’s first real skyscraper, the Hotel Arts, the Olympic Port rages on Friday and Saturday nights, especially in summer, with hundreds of young people of all nationalities contributing to a scene characterized by go-go girls (and boys), fast-food chains, ice-cream parlors, and a buzz redolent of spring break in Cancún. | Station: Ciutadella, Vila Olímpica.

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–Sat. 9 PM–1 AM. Closed Sun. No dinner Mon. No lunch Sat. | Station: Paral.lel-Poble Sec Barceloneta and the Port Olímpic Agua. $$$–$$$$ | MEDITERRANEAN | With views through gnarled and ancient olive trees over the beach into the Mediterranean, this sleek slot hidden “under the boardwalk” near Frank Gehry’s gleaming goldfish may not be classical Barceloneta in decor or cuisine, but it’s an exciting place to dine, whether on the terrace on warm summer nights or sunny winter days, or inside the immense bay windows. Seafood is the main draw and value on the menu here, but risottos, steaks, and lamb are also equally available.

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Models and the generally babelicious come here decked out in sleek and chic designer kit to shake to house music laid on by star DJs. Alabaster pillars are disguised as date palms, and a range of exotic touches goes for the extreme opposite of rustic. | Nou de la Rambla 22, Raval | 08001 | 93/318–0840 | Station: Liceu. Shôko. The hottest of the glitzerati spots below the Hotel Arts and the Frank Gehry fish, this is the place to see and be seen in Barcelona these days. The excellent restaurant morphs into a disco around midnight and continues until the wee hours of the morning, with all manner of local and international celebrities perfectly liable to make an appearance at one time or another. | Passeig Marítim de la Barceloneta 36, Port Olímpic-Barceloneta | 08003 | 93/225–9200 | www.shoko.biz | Station: Ciutadella–Vila Olímpica.

Lonely Planet's Best of USA by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, mass immigration, obamacare, off-the-grid, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, the High Line, the payments system, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration

Is there another city that dresses its Picasso sculpture in local sports-team gear? Where residents queue for hot dogs in equal measure to some of North America’s top restaurants? Sure, the winters are brutal, but come summer, Chicago fetes the warm days with food and music festivals. Jay Pritzker Pavilion, designed by Frank Gehry / KIM KARPELES / GETTY IMAGES © USA’S TOP 12 PLAN YOUR TRIP 5 Miami How does one city get so lucky? Most content themselves with one or two highlights, but Miami seems to have it all. Beyond the stunning beaches and Art Deco Historic District, there’s culture at every turn. In cigar-filled dance halls, Havana expats dance to son and boleros; in exclusive nightclubs stiletto-heeled, fiery-eyed Brazilian models shake to Latin hip-hop; and in the park old men clack dominoes.

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CHICAGO St Charles Air Line Bridge and the Chicago River / JOE DANIEL PRICE / GETTY IMAGES © Chicago Steely skycrapers, top chefs, rocking festivals – the Windy City will blow you away with its low-key cultured awesomeness. High-flying architecture is everywhere, from the stratospheric, glass-floored Willis Tower to Frank Gehry’s swooping silver Pritzer Pavilion to Frank Lloyd Wright’s stained-glass Robie House. Whimsical public art studs the streets, and is a knock-out feature of the city’s much-loved Millennium Park. For an indoor art experience that can’t be beat, gaze in wonder at the massive Art Institute’s impressionist masterpieces.

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Each mug puckers up and spurts water, just like the gargoyles atop Notre Dame Cathedral. A fresh set of non-puckering faces appears in winter, when the fountain is dry. On hot days the fountain crowds with locals splashing around to cool off. Kids especially love it. Pritzker Pavilion Pritzker Pavilion is Millennium Park’s acoustically awesome band shell. Architect Frank Gehry designed it and gave it his trademark swooping silver exterior. The pavilion hosts free concerts at 6:30pm most nights June to August. There’s indie rock and new music on Monday, world music and jazz on Thursday, and classical music on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. On Tuesday there’s usually a movie beamed onto the huge screen on stage.

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism by Kyle Chayka

Airbnb, Blue Bottle Coffee, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Mason jar, offshore financial centre, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, undersea cable, Whole Earth Catalog

a sheet of blurry Polaroids … Polaroids found in Judd Foundation archives in Marfa, TX. “If we install it …” Author interview with Flavin Judd, 2018. “a phenomenon whereby cultural investment …” Moore, Rowan. “The Bilbao Effect: How Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Started a Global Craze.” Guardian, October 1, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/01/bilbao-effect-frank-gehry-guggenheim-global-craze. Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel … Lerner, Ben. 10:04. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2014. Chapter 3: Silence Sensory deprivation narrative and information comes from my reporting, including interviews with Graham Talley of Float Tank Solutions and James and Steven Ramsay of Superior Float Tanks.

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Richard Florida’s Creative Class theory, circa 2002, made it common knowledge that artists are on the front lines of reviving urban spaces—a process also known as gentrification. SoHo was the classic example. Judd and so many other artists demonstrated how factory loft living could be cool, giving postindustrial space a veneer of cultural capital that later made it possible for developers. Frank Gehry’s famous Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in 1997, a structure of arcing steel waves that became one of the largest museums in Spain, though the city was small. In the decade that followed, the museum’s instant landmark status, the tourism boom, and the artistic community that sprung up around it led to the coinage of the “Bilbao Effect.”

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

Unless you have strong evidence that distraction is important for your specific profession, you’re best served, for the reasons argued earlier in this chapter, by giving serious consideration to depth. Chapter Two Deep Work Is Rare In 2012, Facebook unveiled the plans for a new headquarters designed by Frank Gehry. At the center of this new building is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the largest open floor plan in the world”: More than three thousand employees will work on movable furniture spread over a ten-acre expanse. Facebook, of course, is not the only Silicon Valley heavyweight to embrace the open office concept.

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In MIT lore, it’s generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades. When the building was finally demolished to make way for the $300 million Frank Gehry–designed Stata Center (where I spent my time), its loss was mourned. In tribute to the “plywood palace” it replaced, the interior design of the Stata Center includes boards of unfinished plywood and exposed concrete with construction markings left intact. Around the same time that Building 20 was hastily constructed, a more systematic pursuit of serendipitous creativity was under way two hundred miles to the southwest in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

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To do so, let’s return once again to my own experience at MIT. When I arrived as a new PhD student in the fall of 2004, I was a member of the first incoming class to be housed in the new Stata Center, which, as mentioned, replaced Building 20. Because the center was new, incoming students were given tours that touted its features. Frank Gehry, we learned, arranged the offices around common spaces and introduced open stairwells between adjacent floors, all in an effort to support the type of serendipitous encounters that had defined its predecessor. But what struck me at the time was a feature that hadn’t occurred to Gehry but had been recently added at the faculty’s insistence: special gaskets installed into the office doorjambs to improve soundproofing.

Lonely Planet Best of Spain by Lonely Planet

augmented reality, bike sharing, centre right, discovery of the americas, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, market design, place-making, retail therapy, trade route, young professional

COVELO / GETTY IMAGES © JIL PHOTO / SHUTTERSTOCK © Cudillero/ PEETERV / GETTY IMAGES © SPAIN’S TOP 12 PLAN YOUR TRIP 11 La Rioja Wine Region Spain’s premier wine region bar none La Rioja is the sort of place where you could spend weeks meandering along quiet roads in search of the finest drop. Bodegas offering wine tastings and picturesque villages that shelter excellent wine museums are the mainstay in this region. The Frank Gehry–designed Hotel Marqués de Riscal, close to Elciego, has been likened to Bilbao’s museum in architectural scale and ambition, and has become the elite centre for wine tourism in the region. NICK LEDGER / GETTY IMAGES © SPAIN’S TOP 12 PLAN YOUR TRIP 12 The Pyrenees Spectacular mountains and Spain’s best hiking Spain is a walker’s destination of exceptional variety, but we reckon the Pyrenees in Navarra, Aragón and Catalonia offer the most special hiking country.

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o Top Tip The Artean Pass joint ticket for the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao and Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao offers a reduction of €2 off the admission price. The Exterior Some might say, probably quite rightly, that the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao is more famous for its architecture than its content. But Canadian architect Frank Gehry’s inspired use of flowing canopies, cliffs, promontories, ship shapes, towers and flying fins is irresistible. Gehry designed the museum with historical and geographical contexts in mind. The site was an industrial wasteland, part of Bilbao’s wretched and decaying warehouse district on the banks of the Ría del Nervión.

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On 29 June, Haro stages a wine festival Click here. 5 Take a Break Restaurante Amelibia in Laguardia serves outstanding Spanish cuisine with fine wine-country views. o Top Tip If you want to make your own wine, visit Rioja Trek. Hotel Marqués de Riscal When the owner of Elciego’s Bodegas Marqués de Riscal wanted to create something special, he didn’t hold back. The result is the spectacular Frank Gehry–designed Hotel Marqués de Riscal (%945 18 08 80; www.hotel-marquesderiscal.com; Calle Torrea 1, Elciego; r from €330; paW). Costing around €85 million, the building is a flamboyant wave of multicoloured titanium sheets that stand in utter contrast to the village behind. Unless you’re staying at the hotel, join one of the bodega’s wine tours or reserve a table at one of the two superb in-house restaurants (mains €24 to €30).

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The country was, as Big Data authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier note, “one of the most comprehensive surveillance states ever seen.”5 Like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project to develop hypertext, Mielke’s East Germany eliminated the concept of deletion. “We had lived like behind glass,” explained the novelist Stefan Heym. Mielke organized his society around the same kind of brightly lit principles that the architect Frank Gehry is now using to build Facebook’s new open-plan office in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg—who once described Facebook as a “well-lit dorm room” in which “wherever you go online you see your friends”6—describes this multimillion-dollar Gehry creation as “the largest open office space in the world.”

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Silicon Valley is transforming itself into a medieval tableau—a jarring landscape of dreadfully impoverished and high-crime communities like East Palo Alto, littered with unemployed people on food stamps, interspersed with fantastically wealthy and entirely self-reliant tech-cities designed by world-famous architects such as Norman Foster and Frank Gehry. Apple, a company that has been accused of cheating the US government out of $44 billion in tax revenue between 2009 and 2012,82 is building a Norman Foster–designed $5 billion Silicon Valley headquarters that will feature a 2.8-million-square-foot circular, four-story building containing a 1,000-seat auditorium, a 3,000-seat café, and office space for 13,000 employees.83 Before he died, Steve Jobs described Foster’s design for the new building as looking a “little like a spaceship.”

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Apple, a company that has been accused of cheating the US government out of $44 billion in tax revenue between 2009 and 2012,82 is building a Norman Foster–designed $5 billion Silicon Valley headquarters that will feature a 2.8-million-square-foot circular, four-story building containing a 1,000-seat auditorium, a 3,000-seat café, and office space for 13,000 employees.83 Before he died, Steve Jobs described Foster’s design for the new building as looking a “little like a spaceship.” Elon Musk should take note. After all, what’s the point of colonizing Mars when Martian architecture is already colonizing the Bay Area? And then there’s “the largest open office space in the world,”84 which Mark Zuckerberg has hired Frank Gehry to build for Facebook’s 3,400 employees. Zuckerberg’s new office resembles Facebook itself: an intensely opaque, secretive company that has built its multibillion-dollar brand upon the lies of transparency and openness. This building might be internally “open,” but—like the new Google or Apple corporate city-states dotting the Silicon Valley landscape—it will be firmly shut off from the outside world.

Lonely Planet Pocket Barcelona by Lonely Planet, Anthony Ham

Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, young professional

(www.vilaviniteca.es, in Spanish; Carrer dels Agullers 7 & 9; 8.30am-8.30pm Mon-Sat; Jaume I) 21 Custo Barcelona Fashion Offline map Google map Created in the early 1980s by the Dalmau brothers, Custo is the biggest name in contemporary Barcelona fashion and one of its trendiest exports. The dazzling colours and cuts of anything from dinner jackets to hot pants are for the uninhibited. It has five other outlets around town. (www.custo-barcelona.com; Plaça de les Olles 7; 10am-10pm Mon-Sat; Barceloneta) PEIX (FISH SCULPTURE) BY FRANK GEHRY. PETR SVARC/IMAGEBROKER © Barceloneta & the Beaches Barcelona’s waterfront is a fascinating corner of the city – a place where avant-garde public art is juxtaposed with the gritty thoroughfares of La Barceloneta, an 18th-century fisherfolk’s district. It’s in the restaurants of the latter that you’ll find the city’s best seafood and rice dishes, while beaches stretch away to the north.

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Platja de Sant Sebastià , closest to Barceloneta, yields to Platja de la Barceloneta , and both are broad and agreeably long sweeps of sand. An Olympic Port A 1.25km promenade shadows the waterfront all the way to the crammed marina of Port Olímpic ( Ciutadella Vila Olímpica) , which was created for the 1992 Olympics and is still the glamorous end of Barcelona’s waterfront. An eye-catcher on the approach from La Barceloneta is Frank Gehry’s giant copper Peix (Fish) sculpture, while just to the north is the agreeable Platja de Nova Icària . Sights 1 Museu d’Història de Catalunya Museum Offline map Google map From the caves of the Pyrenees to the air-raid shelters of the civil war, from prehistory to the present day, this well-presented and sometimes interactive display gives the Catalan version of how its people have ridden history’s ups and downs.

Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture by Deyan Sudjic

air gap, Alan Greenspan, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, low cost airline, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, Murano, Venice glass, Norman Mailer, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, young professional

For the engineers, that meant a low structure which did not have the effect of creating a visual tunnel, or cage. ‘We wanted people to be able to see out at every point,’ says Roger Ridsdill-Smith from Arup. ‘We saw it as a flying magic carpet, floating just above the river.’ The resulting design beat off a submission from Frank Gehry and Richard Serra to win the competition. The bridge has the effect of changing not only how a key part of the river looks, but also how it functions. For the first time it became possible to walk directly from the trading floors and the corporate headquarters of the north bank to the south-of-the-river world of lock-up garages, council flats and railway arches that is still at the heart of the London borough of Southwark.

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It was so slow that the fees it brought in were hardly enough to keep the office in London afloat. Stansted Airport was moving even more slowly as it ground its way through the intricate coils of the kind of public inquiry demanded by the British planning system. It was Foster’s drawing skills, pitted against formidable competition from Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel, along with the support of James Stirling, who was on the jury, that won him the Médiathèque project, an art-gallery-cum-library across the street from Nîmes’ miraculously well-preserved Roman monument, the Maison Carrée. Martin Francis remembers Gordon Graham using a stopwatch to time Foster in his hotel room while he practised doing a complete set of drawings that showed structure, circulation, and spatial sequences, seemingly instantly.

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The strategy paid off: he was appointed to design the new terminal for Stansted, London’s third airport, a design that served to redefine the way in which airports are planned. Services are kept below the main circulation areas, rather than on the roof, allowing lightweight structures and plenty of daylight. Foster beat Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry to secure the commission to design Nîmes’s Médiathèque, a library and art gallery just across the street from the Maison Carrée, the miraculously well-preserved Roman monument at the centre of the city. In such a sensitive context, it adopts a studiously unobtrusive approach. Foster’s interest in urbanism was demonstrated in the way that he used the building to develop a strategy towards clearing the streets of parked cars and clutter.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Most researchers in computer vision want to recognize objects by segmenting them from the background and identifying a few diagnostic features. Steve was more ambitious and wanted to understand how we extract the shape of objects from surface shading and telltale signs of creases and folds. In an interview at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2006, Frank Gehry, the architect who designs buildings that look like ship’s sails (figure 5.8), was asked how he got ideas for his buildings.9 He replied that his inspiration came from looking at shapes of crumpled paper. But how does our visual system piece together the complex shape of the crumpled paper from the complex pattern of folds and shaded surfaces?

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By looking at their projections to the output layer, which was trained to compute the curvature using a learning algorithm (discussed in chapter 8), we found that some of the hidden units were being used to decide between positive curvature (bulge) and negative curvature (bowl; figure 5.10). Like some simple cells, these units Figure 5.8 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry. Shading and reflections from curved surfaces give a strong impression of form and motion. Tiny people on the walkway calibrate the scale of the edifice. Insights from the Visual System 73 Figure 5.9 Altitude contours of a surface (top left) compared with isophotes (contours of constant intensity) of an image of the same surface (bottom left).

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Tsien, “Very Long-Term Memories May Be Stored in the Pattern of Holes in the Perineuronal Net,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110, no. 30 (2013): 12456–12461. 8. In Alzheimer’s disease, the integrity of the extracellular matrix is compromised, which may contribute to the loss of long-term memories. John Allman, private communication, July, 2017. 9. For a summary of Gehry’s talk, see Shelley Batts, “SFN Special Lecture: Architecture Frank Gehry and Neuro-Architecture,” ScienceBlogs, posted October 15, 2006. http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2006/10/15/sfn-special-lecture-architect-1/. 10. B. S. Kunsberg and S.W. Zucker, “Critical Contours: An Invariant Linking Image Flow with Salient Surface Organization,” May 20, 2017. https://arxiv.org/pdf/ 1705.07329.pdf. 11.

Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century by Adam, Georgina(Author)

BRICs, Frank Gehry, greed is good, high net worth, inventory management, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

The two institutions, while so close physically, stand at the opposite ends of the spectrum of what have often been dubbed ‘vanity museums’ and the vogue for these private art spaces is one of the most significant factors in boosting the art market over the last generation. The number of such spaces, which range from splashy new architectdesigned buildings such as the coming Frank Gehry-designed LVMH museum in Paris to the Berlin Sammlung Boros, housed in a comp­ letely refurbished concrete bunker, is rising constantly. According to Xinhuanet, China alone had nearly 535 private museums and 3,589 museums overall in 2012,94 and the BMW Art Guide by Independent Collectors in 2013 listed more than 217 spaces for contemporary art worldwide.95 The billionaire’s must-have – a private museum A private museum has become the ‘must-have’ for many of the world’s ultra-wealthy – ‘ego-seums’ as the Guardian has dubbed them.96 It gives them entrance to a private, rarefied club with their peers and 84 The New Taste-Makers access, as we have seen, to a glamorous and select lifestyle – and gives them bragging rights over everyone else.

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The 2008–9 financial crisis jolted the initial fervour, plans were scaled back and completion dates were postponed, and some doubt remains about whether all of the initial projects will be completed. Certainly going ahead is the Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel (planned to open on 2 December 2015) and the Sheikh 152 Emerging Economies Zayed National Museum (Norman Foster; completion 2016). The immense Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (Frank Gehry; completion 2017) has proved more problematic, with persistent rumours that it will never see the light of day as well as opposition from artists concerned about the working conditions for the labourers. These concerns have not been totally resolved. Art dealers inevitably see the Louvre and Guggenheim as honeypots and have been buzzing around the region for the last few years, as have some artists.

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

* * * top picks BUILDINGS WE LOVE DZ Bank Jüdisches Museum Neue Nationalgalerie Philharmonie Reichstag * * * And so Berlin became a virtual laboratory of architectural possibilities, as evidenced by the enormity of the Potsdamer Platz and Government Quarter undertakings, and the return of diplomatic courtiers and corporate headquarters. Berlin has indeed become an overnight showcase for the world’s elite architects – IM Pei, Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano among them. Their corporate palaces and governmental centres arose to signal that Berlin was once again the heart, soul and primary engine of the nation and its people. Return to beginning of chapter MODEST BEGINNINGS Berlin is essentially a creation of modern times. Only a few Gothic churches bear silent witness to the days when today’s metropolis was just a small trading town.

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Engulfed by all these modern structures stands the sole survivor from the original Potsdamer Platz, the Weinhaus Huth. Pariser Platz Pariser Platz was also reconstructed from the ground up. It’s a formal, introspective square framed by banks and embassies that, in keeping with critical reconstruction, had to be clad in sober yellow, white or grey stone. Even California-based deconstructivist architect Frank Gehry, known for his outrageously warped designs, had to cool his creative jets for the DZ Bank (2000; Click here), but only on the outside. Enter the foyer and you can glimpse a sci-fi-esque atrium with an enormous free-form, stainless-steel sculpture – a fish? a horse’s head? It’s actually a conference room.

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PARISER PLATZ Map Unter den Linden, 100, TXL The Brandenburger Tor stands sentinel over this elegant square, which was completely flattened in WWII, then spent the Cold War trapped just east of the Berlin Wall. Look around now: embassies, banks and a luxury hotel have snapped up the city’s priciest real estate and hired top architects to rebuild in style and from the ground up. California-based deconstructivist Frank Gehry, for instance, masterminded the DZ Bank (Map; admission free; www.axica.com; 8am-7pm Mon-Fri) at No 3, which packs a visual punch past those heavy doors. You’ll only get as far as the foyer but that’s enough for a glimpse at the vast atrium with its bizarre free-form sculpture vaguely reminiscent of a fish but actually a conference room!

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

DePinto talked about parking at a Manhattan hospital the way other city kids might talk about Fashion Week or the New York Stock Exchange. “Manhattan’s crazy, but it’s an animal, bro. You’re going to pay in because you’re making it. I was there during the recession and my business didn’t hiccup. Didn’t go down a damn penny.” He also designed the garage for Frank Gehry’s first residential skyscraper downtown. The mood at the conference in Orlando in 2019 was one of gentle defiance: Christine Banning, the president of the sixty-eight-year-old trade group, set the tone in an early address: “There is so much in the media ‘Parking is dead,’ ” she cried. “If I see one more report, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

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With features that bore the names of the city’s first corporate citizens—BP Pedestrian Bridge, Bank One Promenade, McCormick Tribune Plaza—the park symbolized Daley’s mission to vault Chicago out of its industrial past (the trains below) and into the ranks of global cities, represented here by yet another Frank Gehry concert venue and Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture, better known as the Bean. Millennium Park was Chicago’s new public square, and it had been built with over $100 million in donations from the city’s business titans and $208 million from selling off the city’s garages. Getting the private sector to take public responsibilities off his hands was one of Daley’s trademark strategies.

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(After all, her organization had done its share to help.) The whole building code was suburban. Downtown was like a captured village, prisoner to the laws of a conquering tribe of drivers. People had tried to bring round-the-clock life to downtown Los Angeles before. A huge public investment in Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, which broke ground in 1992, was supposed to serve as a catalyst. But the county ran out of money after spending seven years building another huge underground garage. In the end, Gehry’s wavy silver auditorium building wasn’t opened until 2003. (Its lease demanded that the hall put on 128 shows a year—enough to generate the needed parking revenue.

California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

To really understand it, let’s take a look at a familiar fantasy of a day in this Golden State of mind, then compare it to how Californians actually live. In the dream-world California, you wake up, have your shot of wheatgrass, and roll down to the beach while the surf’s up. Lifeguards wave to you as they go jogging by in their bikinis, and you take a moment to help some kids finish a Frank Gehry sand castle and kick a ball around with David Beckham. You skateboard down the boardwalk with Tony Alva to your yoga class, where Madonna admires your downward dog. A taco truck pulls up with your favorite: low-carb sustainable line-caught tilapia fish tacos with sugar-free organic mango chipotle salsa

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The city had 20 concert and opera halls before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake literally brought down the houses, but talented opera performers converged on the shattered city for free public performances that turned arias into anthems for the city’s rebirth. Among San Francisco’s first public buildings to be completed was the War Memorial Opera House, now home to the second-largest US opera company after New York’s Metropolitan. Walt Disney Concert Hall was inaugurated in 2003, but the venue remains better known for Frank Gehry’s splashy design and the Los Angeles Philharmonic than opera. * * * Spot the next big writer or artist in California’s influential indie arts journal Zyzzyva (www.zyzzyva.org) * * * Swing was the next big thing to hit California, in the 1930s and ’40s, as big bands sparked a lindy-hopping craze in LA and sailors on shore leave hit San Francisco’s underground, integrated jazz clubs.

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* * * But true to its mythic nature, California couldn’t help wanting to embellish the facts a little, veering away from strict high modernism to add unlikely postmodern shapes to the local landscape. Richard Meier made his mark on West LA with the Getty Center, a cresting white wave of a building atop a sunburned hilltop. Canadian-born Frank Gehry relocated to Santa Monica, and his billowing, sculptural style for LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall winks cheekily at shipshape Californian streamline moderne. Renzo Piano’s signature inside-out industrial style can be glimpsed in the sawtooth roof and red-steel veins on the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum extension of LACMA Click here

Lonely Planet Switzerland by Lonely Planet

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Eyjafjallajökull, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, smart cities, starchitect, trade route

Avant-Garde Culture Ever innovative, the Swiss have always embraced the new and the experimental. Capturing the zeitgeist up and down the country are cultural venues, attention-grabbing architecture and avant-garde galleries. Bern's wavy Zentrum Paul Klee bearing architect Renzo Piano’s hallmark, Basel's Frank Gehry–designed Vitra Design Museum and astounding Fondation Beyeler, Lugano's Mario Botta–splashed centre and state-of-the-art MASI gallery, and Geneva's thought-provoking Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in a revamped 1950s factory are just the tip of the cultural iceberg. Even in back-of-beyond corners of the Alps you'll encounter unexpected nods to modern aesthetics, contemporary art and fresh-faced design.

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Zürich | GEVISION/SHUTTERSTOCK © Top Experiences Art & Architecture in Basel World-class contemporary architecture is Basel’s golden ticket – the work of seven winners of architecture's Pritzker Prize can be ogled in and around this city on the Rhine. Kick off with a hop across the German border to the Frank Gehry–designed Vitra Design Museum, before devoting time to Switzerland’s best private modern-art collection at the Renzo Piano–designed Fondation Beyeler – the dream fusion of art and architecture. Linking the two is a new art-focused, 24-stop walking trail, the Rehberger-Weg, bearing the hallmark of German sculptor Tobias Rehberger.

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In the 1930s the Kunstmuseum acquired a priceless collection of modern works from Nazi Germany that Hitler and company considered to be ‘degenerate art’. DON'T MISS MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN BASEL Basel and its environs boast buildings designed by seven winners of architecture’s Pritzker Prize. Most of those winners – Frank Gehry, Álvaro Siza, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron – have works over the German border at the Vitra Design Museum. Several works by local firm Herzog & de Meuron are more central. The Basel-based company is renowned for designing London’s Tate Modern gallery, Beijing’s Olympic Stadium and Tokyo's Prada Aoyama building.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

8 Alter surveys the new housing towers being erected in London, New York and Toronto. He finds that the emerging housing is overwhelmingly dominated by large, multi-million-dollar, super-luxury condos within isolated high-end architectural towers designed by the likes of Frank Gehry and geared to global investors and the super-rich. ‘Buildings are not isolated Frank Gehry sculptures’, Alter retorts. ‘They exist to house people and give them places to work. They are part of a culture and a society [they are] not monuments. They should serve a societal need, not just park money for the very rich.’9 We will come back to the details whereby current elites are taking over the urban skies through housing towers built for the super-rich in various cities later in this chapter.

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Far from being a model of sustainability, affordability, and liveabiliy, then, Vancouver, as local architect Bing Thom puts it, has been remodelled into ‘a tourist resort and a place to park money’.54 New York: ‘Inequality Is Literally Blocking Out the Sun’55 In a very different case, the recent rise of a forest of slender, super-tall residential towers into the airy heights above midtown Manhattan presents more powerful evidence that building high does not necessarily enhance environmental sustainability or increase the supply of affordable housing. Designed by star architects like Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Jacques Herzog, Jean Nouvel, or Robert Stern, these super-tall structures, which reach between 800 and 1,800 feet, now dominate skyscraper construction in New York. The construction of these towers represents the latest phenomenon in a thirty-year process of hyper-gentrification whereby the global super-rich – Malaysian financiers, Indian building moguls, Mexican power brokers, Russian ministers (some of dubious provenance) and the like – have used untraceable shell companies to aggressively assert increasing control in Manhattan.56 In 2016 the US state is so concerned about the role that Manhattan’s elite real estate is playing in the laundering of ‘dirty’ money from around the world that it started requiring real estate agents to track the identities of purchasers.57 Indeed, the towers are only the most visible sign of a much broader shift.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

The redevelopment of such sites has allowed the city to rediscover the water’s edge and even to forge a new urban identity, attracting new industries. This happened in the 1990s in Bilbao, Spain, with the transformation of the industrial Abandoibarra district and the building of the visually stunning Guggenheim Museum (Frank Gehry, 1997). The port city of Shanghai has also experienced an astonishing revival. The historic Bund has been reconstructed and the Pudong district on the opposite side of Huangpu River transformed from farmland into China’s premiere financial and commercial hub with a soaring skyline. The redevelopment of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in the 1960s was a pioneering waterfront project.

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Sadly, lack of funds means that currently it only has 500,000 books. At the current rate of purchases it will take a century to fill the shelves. The Bilbao Effect Today, museums and galleries are often built as part of urban regeneration schemes. The most famous example of this was at Bilbao, where, in 1997, Frank Gehry’s soaring titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum of modern art transformed a town previously known for its heavy industry and port into an international tourist destination. In an age of increasing globalisation, such high-profile architectural developments are vital to cities competing on an international stage.

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Nevertheless, in an attempt to reproduce the ‘Bilbao effect’ by attracting the creative classes and investment to post-­industrial cities, ‘starchitects’ have been drafted into other urban centres and tasked with creating dramatic new museums and cultural centres. The results, both economic and aesthetic, have been mixed. The motivation behind the planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, is less urban regeneration than an attempt to brand a city as a high-end cultural destination. It is to be designed by Frank Gehry and built on the empty Saadiyat Island off the coast of Abu Dhabi. It will form a cultural hub, part of a leisure and residential district which will include luxury hotels, golf courses, museums, a theatre and a park, that is expected to cost $27 billion (£14.5 billion) and attract 1.5 million visitors a year once it is finished in 2018.

Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

This is the largest art museum in the western US, home to 100,000-plus works. 5 Hollywood Hitting the bars and clubs for a night of tabloid-worthy decadence and debauchery. 6 Santa Monica Learning to surf, riding a solar-powered Ferris wheel or just simply dipping your toes in the ocean. 7 Walt Disney Concert Hall Marveling at Pritzker Prize–winning architect Frank Gehry's creation with its undulating steel forms evoking the movement of music itself. 1Sights & Activities Downtown Los Angeles & Boyle Heights Downtown Los Angeles is historical, multi-layered and fascinating. It’s a city within a city, alive with young professionals, designers and artists who have snapped up stylish lofts in rehabbed art-deco buildings.

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oWalt Disney Concert HallNOTABLE BUILDING ( GOOGLE MAP ; %323-850-2000; www.laphil.org; 111 S Grand Ave; hguided tours usually noon & 1:15pm Thu-Sat, 10am & 11am Sun; p; mRed/Purple Lines to Civic Center/Grand Park)F A molten blend of steel, music and psychedelic architecture, this iconic concert venue is the home base of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but has also hosted contemporary bands such as Phoenix and classic jazz musicians such as Sonny Rollins. Frank Gehry pulled out all the stops: the building is a gravity-defying sculpture of heaving and billowing stainless steel. oMOCA GrandMUSEUM (Museum of Contemporary Art; GOOGLE MAP ; %213-626-6222; www.moca.org; 250 S Grand Ave; adult/child $15/free, 5-8pm Thu free; h11am-6pm Mon, Wed & Fri, to 8pm Thu, to 5pm Sat & Sun) MOCA's superlative art collection focuses mainly on works created from the 1940s to the present.

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Head right into Grand Ave, which will lead you to one of Downtown's most extraordinary contemporary buildings: modern-art museum 8Broad. The flanking courtyard – planted with century-old olive trees – is home to hot-spot restaurant Otium. The restaurant's exterior features a fishy mural by British artist Damian Hirst. On the other side of the Broad is Frank Gehry's showstopping 9Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to the LA Philharmonic. Beside it is the LA Phil's former home, ’60s throwback aDorothy Chandler Pavilion. Across the street is bGrand Park, a good spot to catch your breath and post those pics using the free wi-fi. Soaring at the end of the park is cCity Hall.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

At one point, there were sixty residential buildings simultaneously being either built or converted from commercial status. This included the seventy-five-story 8 Spruce Street, formerly Beekman Tower, a short distance from the World Trade Center site, a glass-and-titanium building designed by Frank Gehry that laid claim to being the tallest residential structure in the western hemisphere. It includes, in addition to the residences, a public elementary school with one hundred thousand square feet of space. Then something else happened, the economic wounds from which will take longer to heal than those of 2001.

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P.S. 234, a K–5 school in the area that consistently records some of the highest test scores of any public school in Manhattan, was operating at 139 percent of capacity in the fall of 2008, and it was difficult even for Wall Street neighborhood kids to find places there. A makeshift overflow kindergarten was established in the old New York County Courthouse at the north end of the district, near City Hall. In addition to the school in the Frank Gehry skyscraper on Spruce Street and one in Battery Park City, a new public high school for girls was being created at 26 Broadway, in the old Standard Oil Building. It remains true that the residential families of the Financial District are wealthy ones, even in hard economic times. But it is a myth that they all send their children to private schools, or wish to.

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

As a healing piece of the vision for rebuilding Ground Zero, the cultural program carried deep meaning: LMDC officials and planners wanted it to be a “living memorial,” a way to celebrate life through the arts and “infuse the redevelopment with hope and energy drawn from the human spirit.”1 Everyone agreed on the ideal, even family members of the victims of 9/11. All around the world, culture had taken on importance as a driver of economic transformation. It had become a well-established strategy. Museums were opening in all kinds of places, built as destinations; the celebrated Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry brought worldwide attention to the phenomenon. Arts and culture were rooted in policymakers’ ideas of what makes a strong and attractive urban district, and cities everywhere were investing heavily in culture. The logic of using arts needed little emphasis in New York. New York City, especially Manhattan, held uncontested primacy among American cultural centers.

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After much sustained effort, the Bloomberg administration secured an institutional victory that finally propelled the LMDC in February 2010 to authorize release of up to $50 million for the Port Authority to construct the underground elements and common infrastructure for the complicated PAC site. This early-action commitment seemed to rule out the public efforts by the LMDC president and its chairman to move the PAC to the site of the former Deutsche Bank Building (site 5), but nothing about culture at Ground Zero was ever assured. The estimate for the structure designed by Frank Gehry was still very high ($540 million).30 On the other side of the economic ledger, the proposed PAC agenda gained significant momentum when the LMDC supported the allocation of an additional $100 million in federal funds later that year. And with the Bloomberg administration’s creation of a six-person board (at the last possible moment in December 2011), the proposed PAC remained eligible for the LMDC’s $155 million funding.

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Dunlap, “The New Look at Ground Zero May Be the Oldest,” NYT, December 11, 2003; Justin Davidson, “Primary Plan for Redoing Towers Begins Wobbling,” Newsday, September 11, 2003. 8 Edward Wyatt, “Libeskind to Control Design of Trade Center’s Terminal,” NYT, June 19, 2003. 9 Robin Pogrebin, “The Incredible Shrinking Daniel Libeskind,” NYT, June 20, 2004; Deborah Sontag, “The Hole in the City’s Heart,” NYT, September 11, 2006. 10 Nicolai Ouroussoff interviewed by Charlie Rose, “A Look at the World of Art and Architecture,” The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, transcript, December 28, 2005. 11 Ada Louise Huxtable, “In the Fray: The Death of the Dream for the Ground-Zero Site,” WSJ, April 20, 2005; Ada Louise Huxtable, “The Next Great Center of the City: Daniel Libeskind Envisions Ground Zero,” WSJ, March 19, 2003; Ada Louise Huxtable interviewed by Charlie Rose, “A Conversation With Architects Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry; Discussion with Architecture Critic Ada Louise Huxtable,” The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, transcript, August 5, 2005. 12 Paul Goldberger, “Profiles: Urban Warriors,” New Yorker, September 15, 2003, 72–81, at 74. 13 George Pataki, “Governor’s Remarks at ABNY Lunch,” April 24, 2003; George Pataki, “Remarks Laying of the Cornerstone for Freedom Tower,” July 4, 2004.

Fodor's California 2014 by Fodor's

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donner party, Downton Abbey, East Village, El Camino Real, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Twice daily whale-watching trips on the Harbor Breeze depart from the dock adjacent to the aquarium; summer sightings of blue whales are an unforgettable thrill. | 100 Aquarium Way | Long Beach | 90802 | 562/590–3100 | www.aquariumofpacific.org | $25.95 | Daily 9–6. Cabrillo Marine Aquarium. Dedicated to the marine life that flourishes off the Southern California coast, this Frank Gehry–designed center gives an intimate and instructive look at local sea creatures. Head to the Exploration Center and S. Mark Taper Foundation Courtyard for kid-friendly interactive exhibits and activity stations. Especially fun is the “Crawl In” aquarium, where you can be surrounded by fish without getting wet.

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Downtown and Los Feliz Once the lively heart of Los Angeles, Downtown was a no man’s land until a few decades ago, when high-rise condos starting going up and urban renewal followed. While certain sections can still be gritty, some of the city’s most talked about restaurants, bars, and cultural attractions, including the Frank Gehry–designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, reside Downtown. In 2014, the debut of the Broad Museum will complete the neighborhood’s transformation. While first-timers tend to stick with Hollywood and the Westside, it’s worth exploring the fringe neighborhoods of Los Feliz and Silver Lake, which maintain a bohemian vibe.

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There you’ll find hipsters, bloggers, and creative types caffeinating at corner cafés while typing away on their iPads. Previous Map | Next Map | California Maps Top Attractions Fodor’s Choice | Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. A half-block away from the giant rose-shaped steel grandeur of Frank Gehry’s curvaceous Disney Concert Hall sits Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. It is both a spiritual draw as well as an architectural attraction. The exterior is all strict soaring angles and the building is as heavy, solid, and hunkering as the Gehry building is feminine and ethereal. Controversy surrounded Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo’s unconventional, costly, austere design for the seat of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Frommer's Los Angeles 2010 by Matthew Richard Poole

call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, upwardly mobile

Walt Disne y C oncert Hall The strikingly beautiful Walt D isney Concer t Hall isn’t just the ne w home of the Los Angeles P hilharmonic; it’s a key element in an urban revitalization effort now underway Downtown. The Walt Disney family insisted on the best and, with an initial gift of $50 million to build a world-class per formance venue, that’s what they got: A masterpiece of design b y world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, and an acoustical quality that equals or surpasses those of the best concer t halls in the world. Similar to Gehry’s most famous architectural masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the concert hall’s dramatic stainless-steel exterior consists of a series of undulating curved surfaces that partially envelop the entire building, presenting multiple glimmering facades to the surr ounding neighborhood.

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The 3 1/2-acre Concert Hall is open to the public for vie wing, but to witness it in its full glory, do whatever it takes to attend a concer t by the world-class Los Angeles Philharmonic (p. 274). Also highly r ecommended are free audio tours, which lead visitors through the Concer t H all’s histor y fr om conception to cr eation. The 45-minute selfguided tour is narrated by actor John Lithgow and includes interviews with Frank Gehry, Los Angeles P hilharmonic music dir ector Gustavo Dudamel, and acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, among others. O ne big cav eat is that y ou see just about ev erything except the auditorium: There’s almost always a r ehearsal in pr ogress and the acoustics ar e so good that there’s no discreet way to sneak a peek.

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F ree PASADENA Norton Simon Museum of Art 177 Named for a food-packing king and financier who r eorganized the failing P asadena M useum of M odern Ar t, the N orton Simon displays one of the finest private collections of European, American, and Asian art in the world (and yet another feather in the cap of architect Frank Gehry, who redesigned the interior space). Compr ehensive collections of masterpieces b y Degas, Picasso, Rembrandt, and G oya are augmented b y sculptures by Henry Moore and A uguste Rodin, including The Burghers of Calais, which greets you at the gates. The “Blue Four” collection of works by Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Klee, and Feininger is impressive, as is a superb collection of S outheast Asian sculptur e.

Frommer's Washington State by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, California gold rush, centre right, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, transcontinental railway, white picket fence

With the 21st century in full swing, this 1960s-vintage image of the future may look decidedly 20th-century retro, but still, it’s hard to resist an expensive elevator ride in any city. You can even take a monorail straight out of The Jetsons to get there (and, en route, pass right through the Frank Gehry–designed Experience Music Project). EMP, as the Experience Music Project is known, is yet another of Seattle’s architectural oddities. Its swooping, multicolored, metalskinned bulk rises at the foot of the Space Needle, proof that real 21stcentury architecture looks nothing like the vision of the future dreamed of when the Space Needle was built for the 1962 World’s Fair.

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BY MONORAIL If you are planning a visit to Seattle Center, there is no better way to get there from downtown than on the Seattle Monorail (& 206/9052620; www.seattlemonorail.com), which leaves from Westlake Center shopping mall (Fifth Ave. and Pine St.). The elevated train covers the 11⁄4 miles in 2 minutes and passes right through the middle of the Experience Music Project, the Frank Gehry–designed rock-music museum. The monorail operates daily from 9am to BY BUS 5 SEATTLE Getting Around 65 08_607510-ch05.indd 6508_607510-ch05.indd 65 9/28/10 8:41 PM9/28/10 8:41 PM SEATTLE Getting Around 5 11pm (in winter, Sun–Thurs 8am–8pm, Fri and Sat 9am–11pm). Departures are every 10 minutes.

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When your feet are beat, you can relax on a tour boat and enjoy the views of the city from the waters of Puget Sound, or you can take a 2-minute rest on the monorail, which links downtown with Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle. If your energy level sags, don’t worry; there’s always an espresso bar nearby. By the way, that monorail ride takes you right through the middle of Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project, the Frank Gehry–designed rock-music museum also located in Seattle Center. Allen, who made his millions as one of the cofounders of Microsoft, has spent many years changing the face of Seattle. He has renovated Union Station and developed the area adjacent to Qwest Field, which was built for the Seattle Seahawks football team, whose owner is . . . you guessed it: Paul Allen.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

The Jindal Group brings out a contemporary art magazine and supports some of India’s major artists (who naturally work with stainless steel). Essar was the principal sponsor of the Tehelka Newsweek Think Fest that promised “high-octane debates” by the foremost thinkers from around the world, which included major writers, activists, and even the architect Frank Gehry.27 (All this in Goa, where activists and journalists were uncovering massive illegal mining scandals, and Essar’s part in the war unfolding in Bastar was emerging.)28 Tata Steel and Rio Tinto (which has a sordid track record of its own) were among the chief sponsors of the Jaipur Literary Festival (Latin name: Darshan Singh Construction Jaipur Literary Festival), which is advertised by the cognoscenti as “The Greatest Literary Show on Earth.”

Frommer's California 2007 by Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert, Matthew Richard Poole

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

. • Hearst Castle (San Simeon): William Randolph Hearst’s 165room abode is one of the last great estates of America’s Gilded Age. It’s an astounding, over-the-top monument to unbridled wealth and power. See “San Simeon: Hearst Castle” in chapter 12. • Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles): You would have to fly to Spain to see Frank Gehry’s other architectural masterpiece, and this one is sufficiently awe-inspiring. And the dramatically curvaceous stainlesssteel exterior houses one of the most acoustically perfect concert halls in the world. See p. 526. • The Gamble House (Pasadena): The Smithsonian Institution calls this 1908 Arts and Crafts landmark one of the nation’s most important houses.

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At the back of R23’s single, large exposed-brick dining room, the 12-seat sushi bar shines like a beacon; what appear at first to be ceramic wall ornaments are really stylish sushi platters hanging in wait for large orders. More functional art reveals itself in the comfortable corrugated cardboard chairs designed by Frank Gehry. Genial sushi wizards stand in wait, with cases of the finest fish before them. Salmon, yellowtail, shrimp, tuna, and scallops are among the always-fresh selections; an excellent and unusual offering is seared toro, in which the rich belly tuna absorbs a faint and delectable smoky flavor from the grill.

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The striking Walt Disney Concert Hall is the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a key element in an urban revitalization effort downtown. The Walt Disney family insisted on the best and, with an initial gift of $50 million to build a world-class performance venue, that’s what they got: a masterpiece by Frank Gehry, and an acoustical quality that equals or surpasses the best concert halls in the world. Similar to Gehry’s most famous architectural masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the concert hall’s dramatic stainless-steel exterior consists of a series of undulating curved surfaces that partially envelop the Walt Disney Concert Hall EXPLORING THE CITY 527 entire building, presenting multiple glimmering facades to the surrounding neighborhood.

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

Many animals, including human beings, have a specialized set of organs that sense movement in exactly the same manner as our observant beer drinker. These structures, called the vestibular system, consist of a series of interconnected chambers and tubes within the middle ear. These wondrously shaped vestibules, looking a bit like a curvy architectural creation by Frank Gehry, are filled with a viscous fluid. Inside each of these tubes is a small chunk of gelatin, studded with tiny crystals of limestone to give it added weight. As our head accelerates and decelerates through space, the blobs of gelatin wobble around just like the beer in the glass. Tiny hairs embedded in the blobs are bent by each wobble, and these bending movements send signals to our brain.

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In a recent conversation I had with Robert Jan van Pelt, an architect with a strong interest in the history of ideas, he argued that most designers and architects today focus upon either the very large—airports, museums, and city halls—or the very small—corkscrews, lemon squeezers, and chairs. The large, one-of-a-kind architectural creation like I. M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Balboa can serve as a long-standing physical monument to the ideas of the architect that is talked about, photographed endlessly, and seen by all from afar. The small household object, sometimes crafted with the same exquisite concern for detail as a large building, can be reproduced in vast numbers using modern methods of mass production.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

In the 1990s, the town was overrun by gang violence, but it has been significantly gentrified in the time since then—so much so that in 2012, GQ named its central road, Abbot Kinney Boulevard, “the Coolest Block in America.” Venice has always attracted an interesting mix of creative types. A few blocks from Snapchat’s bungalow office sat the Binoculars Building, designed by Frank Gehry, which features a massive, eponymous pair of binoculars over the entrance. It now serves as Google’s Los Angeles office, but it was built for the famous advertising firm Chiat/Day, which created the “1984” ad for Apple and Steve Jobs that introduced the Macintosh. Google relocated its Los Angeles office from Santa Monica to the Binoculars Building in 2011, a move that began the migration of the Los Angeles tech scene to Venice.

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Evan responded coolly—he wasn’t sure when he would next be in the Bay Area—delivering the not-so-subtle message that he wasn’t going to plan a special trip just to see the Facebook billionaire. Zuckerberg noted that he would be in Los Angeles soon and they could meet then. Days later, Evan and Bobby traveled to a private apartment in Los Angeles to meet Zuckerberg in secret (Zuckerberg had obfuscated the purpose of the trip, saying he was going to meet architect Frank Gehry to discuss Facebook’s new headquarters). Zuckerberg asked probing questions about Snapchat and their vision for the product and company. He then wondered aloud what Snapchat might look like as a Facebook-owned company, with Evan and Bobby still at the helm, able to take advantage of the social giant’s resources and funding to grow more quickly, as Instagram had.

USA's Best Trips by Sara Benson

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, cotton gin, Day of the Dead, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, if you build it, they will come, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, McMansion, mega-rich, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, the High Line, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

The local chain roasts its own beans, and the baristas know how to percolate them (staff won the US Barista Championship in 2009). Sip by the window and watch the crowds pass by – they’re likely headed to Millennium Park, one block east. Where to start amid the mod designs? Pritzker Pavilion, Frank Gehry’s swooping silver band shell, on which the park centers? Crown Fountain, Jaume Plensa’s splashy water work, where images of locals spout gargoyle-style? Or “the Bean” (officially Cloud Gate), Anish Kapoor’s 110-ton, silver-drop sculpture? That’s the one. Join the visitors swarming it to see the skyline reflections.

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Downtown, long known for a bustling financial district that emptied at night, is in the midst of a massive Renaissance that’s attracting party animals as well as full-time residents. The symbol of the revitalization is the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the landmark that launched a thousand metaphors. Billowing ship? Blooming rose? Silver bow? No matter which comparison you prefer, it’s agreed that this iconic structure – designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 2003 – kick-started Downtown’s rebirth. Cascading escalators whisk visitors from the parking garage directly into the airy lobby, where tours highlight Gehry’s exquisite attention to detail – air-conditioning units are hidden inside smooth Douglas fir columns – throughout the building and gardens

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Do Amoeba Music Live performances, listening stations and a map are a few of the extras at this vinyl and CD emporium. 323-245-6400; www.amoeba.com; 6400 W Sunset Blvd; 10:30am-11pm Mon-Sat, 11am-9pm Sun Getty Center A driverless tram whisks visitors to art, architecture, gardens and stellar views. 310-440-7300; www.getty.edu; 1200 Getty Center Dr; admission free, parking $10; 10am-5:30pm Tue-Fri & Sun, 10am-9pm Sat; Grauman’s Chinese Theater Stand in the footprints of Gable, Clooney and Schwarzenegger just west of Hollywood & Highland while 200 people jostle you. 323-464-8111; www.manntheatres.com; 6925 Hollywood Blvd; admission free; Hollywood & Highland Shops, restaurants and movie screens are just part of the spectacle at this towering Hollywood complex. 323-467-6412; www.hollywoodandhighland.com; 6801 Hollywood Blvd; admission free; 10am-10pm Mon-Sat, to 7pm Sun; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Collection spans 1940s to present. 213-626-6222; www.moca.org; 250 S Grand Ave; adult/under 12yr/student & senior $10/free/5; 11am-5pm Mon & Fri, to 8pm Thu, to 6pm Sat & Sun New Beverly Cinema Indie cinema screens double features and eclectically themed retrospectives. 323-938-4038; www.newbevcinema.com; 7165 W Beverly Blvd; general/senior & child/student $7/4/6 Richard Riordan Central Library This 1926 building boasts a grand rotunda, stunning murals, whimsical cascading elevators and 2.1 million books. 213-228-7000; www.lapl.org; 630 W 5th St; admission free; 10am-8pm Mon-Thu, 10am-6pm Fri & Sat, 1-5pm Sun; Walt Disney Concert Hall Tours highlight architect Frank Gehry’s attention to detail, but concert tickets are needed to see the acoustically precise auditorium. 323-850-2000 concert tickets, 213-972-4399 tours; www.laphil.com; 111 S Grand Ave; tours free; 10am-2pm most days Warner Bros Hop a tram for a two-hour tour in which the secrets of Hollywood are revealed – forced perspective, fancy facades and fake bricks. 818-972-8687; www.wbstudiotour.com; 3400 Riverside Dr, Burbank; tours $45, min age 8; 7:30am-7pm Mon-Fri, tours 8:20am-4pm EAT & DRINK AOC From goat cheese to blue cheese, fancy fromages fill one full page on the menu and add to the epicurean fun. 323-653-6359; www.aocwinebar.com; 8022 W 3rd St; small plates $14-18; 6-11pm Mon-Fri, 5:30-11pm Sat, 5:30-10pm Sun El Coyote Combos are messy and margaritas are strong at this lively Mexican cantina that’s been pulling in locals for years. 323-939-2255; www.elcoyotecafe.com; 7312 Beverly Blvd; mains $5-12; 11am-10pm; Griddle Cafe Items named Banana Nana Pancakes and Peanut Bubba Crunchy French Toast make reading the menu fun. 323-874-0377; 7916 W Sunset Blvd; mains $9-12; 7am-4pm Mon-Fri, 8am-4pm Sat & Sun Lucky Devils From Kobe burgers and veggie burgers to fries and shakes, it’s all good. 323-465-8259; www.luckydevils-la.com; 6613 Hollywood Blvd; mains $8-16; lunch & dinner; Osteria Mozza Watch chef Nancy Silverton craft mouthwatering morsels from Italian cheese; reserve a month ahead. 323-297-0100; www.mozza-la.com; 6602 Melrose Ave; mains $11-30, Sun-Thu 3-course bar special $35; 5:30pm-midnight Rooftop Bar at the Standard Hotel Citywide views from the roof are worth hipper-than-thou hassles to get there. 213-892-8080; www.standardhotel.com; 550 S Flower St; cover after 7pm Fri & Sat $20; noon-1:30am Skooby’s Be sure to order fries with that chili-smothered dog. 323-468-3647; www.skoobys.com; 6654 Hollywood Blvd; mains $2.50-4; 11am-midnight; Toast Frothy lattes, hearty scrambles and valet parking at the corner of 3rd St and N Harper Ave. 323-655-5018; www.toastbakerycafe.net; 8221 W 3rd St; mains $8-17; 7:30am-10pm; SLEEP Beverly Laurel Motor Hotel Let the retro times roll at this spare but stylin’ budget option close to Mid-City and Hollywood. 323-651-2441; 8018 Beverly Blvd; r $115, pet fee $25; Figueroa Hotel Spanish touches and Moroccan-style rooms liven up this property, conveniently located next to the Staples Center. 213-627-8971; www.figueroahotel.com; 939 S Figueroa St; r $148-184, ste $225-265 Hollywood Roosevelt Who said historic can’t be hip?

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

Rather than being tied to tradition, religion, and family, Singapore is increasingly dominated by an ideology that former foreign minister S. Rajaratnam labeled “moneytheism.”128 These non-specific, unmoored values find physical expression in the architecture that dominates many global cities. As you travel these places, you see the same structures, be it from Frank Gehry or some other “starchitect,” in myriad cities. Increasingly, city skylines and waterfront developments appear remarkably similar—from London’s Docklands to Tokyo’s waterfront developments to Shanghai’s Pudong.129 By appealing to cosmopolitan tastes, these global centers are becoming what architect Rem Koolhaas labeled “the generic city.”

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Huge towers tend to dominate and change the tenor of neighborhoods, and in some cases, they even block out the light that once brightened the city streets and cast shadows over local parks, a classic case of how products for the wealthy impinge on the shared space of a city.141 After hearing about plans for yet more luxury high-rises, one Toronto resident seethed: Three jazzy overpriced condo towers owned by global investors? The city doesn’t need that. The base, full of cultural facilities and art galleries, paid for by the condo sales? How about taking the developer money and putting [it] into areas that need amenity and spreading the social benefit around[?] And a Frank Gehry monument to make Toronto world class? Please.142 Even city core-oriented people question the need for ever-denser housing developments. Some fear the “recovery” of the core, in the form it has taken, supplants local residents with a new demographic dominated by a global elite class and those who serve them.

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

Airbnb, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Ronald Reagan

We sat with our legs crossed Indian style, with the tray on the ground between us. I had known her since we were kids, and yet I had never really seen her. Now I found myself looking at her, really looking at her. Her eyes were dark and willful. Her nose was graceful, her smile generous. She glanced over my shoulder at Disney Hall. “You like Frank Gehry?” she asked. “That’s the architect? This thing looks like he smashed a can with his shoe. I could’ve done that for Disney and saved them millions.” She laughed. I liked the sound of her laughter. “I love it, actually,” she said after a moment. “It’s different from all the buildings around here.

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In the past, I had found in music a refuge from my sorrows and disappointments, but now I wasn’t sure it could be, not when it could be reduced by a panel of judges to a few dismissive words. “Do you still play music?” I asked. “No, not since high school. I don’t even know where my guitar is. Probably somewhere in my dad’s garage.” “Remember when we went on a field trip to see the L.A. Phil?” “Of course. Senior year.” “It was the first time I’d seen a Frank Gehry building. First time I’d been in a concert hall, even. I sat next to a woman in a satin gown and gloves who kept pointing out to her husband all the people she knew in the audience. She said she was excited to hear Massenet. That the Philharmonic played him too rarely. But afterward she said she didn’t like the performance because the conducting had been rebarbative.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Often developers choose a competitive response that copies what others are doing if that has proven to get media attention, politicians’ support, or higher sale prices for the finished product, such as hiring Richard Meier or another star architect to design a new apartment house in a poor location, or asking Frank Gehry to design a sports stadium and then replacing his design with a cheaper building when financing disappears. Competitive strategies also travel because they are noticed by the media and promoted by business and professional groups that lobby for them in meetings with colleagues around the world.

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National Identity and Globalisation in the Basque Country,” Political Geography 19 (2000): 473–94; “copies what others are doing”: Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 147–60. Real estate developer Forest City Ratner commissioned Frank Gehry to design a professional sports arena in Central Brooklyn, which was to be the central attraction in a mammoth development of new housing, offices, and stores that Gehry also designed, but when the economic recession of 2008 made financing difficult, the developer first requested reductions in and then scuttled Gehry’s design for the stadium, replacing it with a cheaper, generic model, and delayed construction plans on the mixed-use district.

City Parks by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, crony capitalism, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, the High Line, time dilation, urban sprawl

Daley, the city opened Millennium Park on 24.5 acres of northwest Grant Park, a shimmering green roof over some old railroad tracks and parking lots. Despite the city’s other problems, the half-billion-dollar public-private partnership has put a welcome gloss on downtown Chicago. The centerpiece is the Pritzker Pavilion, the Frank Gehry-designed outdoor performance center that now hosts Lollapalooza and other music festivals. Taste of Chicago, which has grown since 1980 to be the world’s largest food festival, has drawn as many as three and a half million people to the area. But nothing in the history of Grant Park can compare to what happened on November 4, 2008.

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin by Lonely Planet, Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, messenger bag, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Museum The Kennedys Set up like a walk-through family album, this intimate, nonpolitical museum (adult/concession €7/3.50; 10am-6pm) trains the spotlight on US president John F Kennedy, who has held a special place in German hearts since his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner! ’ solidarity speech in 1963. Besides photographs, there are various relics, including Jackie’s Persian lamb pillbox hat and a hilarious Superman comic edition starring the president. DZ Bank California-based deconstructivist Frank Gehry masterminded the headquarters of this bank, which packs a visual punch past those bland doors. You’ll only get as far as the foyer (open weekdays) but that’s enough for a glimpse of the glass-covered atrium with its bizarre free-form sculpture that’s actually a conference room. Top Tips › Pick up maps and information at the tourist office in the gate’s south wing. › For a few quiet minutes, pop into the nondenominational meditation room in the gate’s north wing. › Sunset and dusk offer the best light conditions for picture-taking. › Check out the schedule of exhibits, readings, lectures and workshops at the Academy of Arts (founded in 1696). › A free exhibition in the Brandenburger Tor U-Bahn station pinpoints milestones in the gate’s history.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

A cruise through Los Angeles illustrates the dynamic. The city’s downtown has been said to contain more parking spaces per acre than any other place on earth, and its streets are some of the most desolate. Back in the late 1990s, civic boosters hoped that the Disney Concert Hall, a stainless steel–clad icon by starchitect Frank Gehry, would pump some life into L.A.’s Bunker Hill district. The city raised $110 million in bonds to build space for more than two thousand cars—six levels of parking right beneath the hall. Aside from creating a huge burden for the building’s tenant, the Los Angeles Philharmonic (which is contractually bound to put on an astounding 128 concerts each winter season in order to pay the debt service on the garage), the structure has utterly failed to revive area streets.

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Connectivity counts: more intersections mean more walking, and more disconnected cul-de-sacs mean more driving.* The long-distance story is not unique to Atlanta. In 1940 the average person in Seattle lived less than half a mile from a store. By 1990 the distance had grown to more than three-quarters of a mile, and it has grown since. In 2012, after Facebook and architect Frank Gehry unveiled designs for a new 10-acre base across the Bayfront Expressway from Facebook’s old base in Silicon Valley, Gehry explained that his plan strove for “a kind of ephemeral connectivity” through its single-level, open-concept floor design. But no magical configuration of the office-park geometry could make up for the fact that half of Facebook’s workers actually lived thirty miles away in dense, walkable, networked San Francisco.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

But he made that work for him.” In the sixties, Fuller predicted that the designer of the future would rely extensively on computing: “He will put the data into the information machines, and it will be processed by automation into physical realization of his effective thinking.” This revolution was central to the art of Frank Gehry, the most famous architect of his time. Gehry paid an indirect homage to Fuller in his Dancing House in Prague, which he designed with Vlado Milunić: its roof was crowned with a twisted metal hemisphere, nicknamed Medusa, that resembled a dome caught halfway through an explosion, and it was lifted into place by a helicopter.

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Stumbling Along the Tortuous Road to Unanticipated Nobility: Melanesian, Indonesian, and Malaysian Expedition. Bethesda, MD: Study of Child Growth and Development and Disease Patterns in Primitive Cultures, National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, 1996. Gehry, Frank. Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process. Edited by Mildred Friedman. New York: Rizzoli, 1999. Geithner, Timothy. Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises. New York: Crown, 2014. Gerber, Alex, Jr. Wholeness: On Education, Buckminster Fuller, and Tao. Kirkland, WA: Gerber Educational Resources, 2001.

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“The idea that somebody”: Cynthia Haven, “Stanford Libraries Acquire the Archives of Leading Environmentalist William McDonough,” Stanford News Service, November 15, 2012, https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2012/pr-libraries-mcdonough-archives-111512.html (accessed January 2021). “in a very free”: Renzo Piano, Logbook (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 22. “Fuller did everything wrong”: Thom Mayne, ArtForum, November 2008, https://www.artforum.com/print/200809/thom-mayne-41980 (accessed January 2021). “He will put the data”: RBF, Education Automation, 85. Medusa: Frank Gehry, Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process, ed. Mildred Friedman (New York: Rizzoli, 1999), 214–15. James Dyson: “My History Hero: Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983),” July 6, 2012, https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/my-history-hero-buckminster-fuller-1895–1983 (accessed May 2021). Yves Béhar: Yves Béhar interview, “Buckminster Fuller: Utopia Rising,” https://www.nowness.com/story/buckminster-fuller-utopia-rising (accessed February 2021).

Think Complexity by Allen B. Downey

Benoit Mandelbrot, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, discrete time, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Guggenheim Bilbao, Laplace demon, mandelbrot fractal, Occupy movement, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, seminal paper, sorting algorithm, stochastic process, strong AI, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%

Analysis computation In classical engineering, the space of feasible designs is limited by our capability for analysis. For example, designing the Eiffel Tower was possible because Gustave Eiffel developed novel analytic techniques, in particular for dealing with wind load. Now tools for computer-aided design and analysis make it possible to build almost anything that can be imagined. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is my favorite example. Design search Engineering is sometimes described as a search for solutions in a landscape of possible designs. Increasingly, the search process can be automated. For example, genetic algorithms explore large design spaces and discover solutions human engineers would not imagine (or like).

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton

Frank Gehry, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl

Finland’s entry, made up of two separate but conjoined halves – a polished steel slab nestling against a curved extension of blond wood – spoke of a society which had succeeded in perfectly reconciling the opposing elements of male and female, modernity and history, technology and nature, luxury and democracy. Taken as a whole, the ensemble comprised an austerely beautiful promise of a dignified and graceful life. An ideal life in Finland: Above: Monark Architects, Finnish Pavilion, Expo ’92, Seville, 1992 An ideal of a career in banking: Above: Frank Gehry, DZ Bank, Berlin, 2000 The workers of the DZ Bank in Berlin were offered a comparable version of an ideal by their headquarters beside the Brandenburg Gate. While their work itself might often be routine and repetitive, on their way to the cafeteria or a meeting, the bank’s employees could look down into the giant atrium of their building at a strange, elegant conference room, whose lithe forms hinted at the creativity and playfulness to which their solemn bosses aspired.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

But the solution is expected to come from the team, not the quarterback. And the team is expected to include the client in the collaborative process. Rather than waiting until the outcome is just right, the client is exposed to a succession of prototypes that grow more right and more elegant with every iteration. Architect Frank Gehry is famous for this iterative style. The first design he presents typically provokes a firestorm of protests for its inadequacies. Gehry’s initial design for the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) elicited an apoplectic reaction from one of the gallery’s most important benefactors. Thinking the design slighted the part of the gallery he considered his baby, he resigned from the board, swearing off any further involvement with the institution.

Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions by Christian Lander

car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, David Sedaris, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Slavoj Žižek

If you promise to hook them up with a special selection from your home country, they will likely pay a high premium. 34 Architecture If you ask white people what they love about cities they don’t live in, they will say “restaurants,” “culture,” and “architecture.” They just can’t get enough of old buildings or ultramodern buildings next to old buildings. If you want to fit in with white people you need to learn about I. M. Pei, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, and a whole swath of others. Also, be prepared to say “Bauhaus” a lot. Once you have the basics down, you should choose a city that people are unlikely to have visited, then make up a name and choose one of the following: (a) opera house, (b) museum, (c) city hall, (d) civic center. Then put it all together into something like this: “Gehry is good, but I’m much more into the work of D.

St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley

Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, food miles, Frank Gehry, Great Leap Forward, means of production, railway mania, value engineering

It is perfectly possible that all these stories are true; certainly Scott exploited train travel for all it was worth, and the way in which the railway network grew and changed almost monthly must have been disorientating in ways we can now hardly imagine. But in some respects Scott’s practice now seems less phenomenal than it did to his contemporaries, especially in the use of a studio style and in the readiness to work beyond national boundaries, like such contemporary globe-trotting architects as Norman Foster or Frank Gehry – for Scott was as close to a ‘brand’ as the Victorian architectural profession would ever get. Lesser men might have used the hours left over from design work, client meetings and site visits for socialising or relaxation. Scott seems hardly to have relaxed at all, except when laid low by illness, more than once brought on by stress or overwork.

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Instead of all that, the aesthetic of the vibrant proposes a tail-chasing reverence for creativity itself, a power that is supposed to inspire the businessperson-spectator and lead him or her to conjure up bold and outside-the-box thoughts. Consider the trophy buildings that are, inevitably, the greatest expression of vibrancy theory—the assorted Frank Gehry and pseudo-Gehry structures that every city council seems to believe it must build as a sort of welcome mat to the creative class. Regardless of the particular shape that each structure’s fluttering and swooping exterior takes, the point of the buildings is, in a general sense, to flaunt their eccentricity, to conspicuously defy the straight lines and cheap construction materials of the conventional buildings that surround them.

Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

The great cities – Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Leipzig among them – come in more flavours than a jar of jelly beans but will all wow you with a cultural kaleidoscope that spans the arc from art museums and high-brow opera to naughty cabaret and underground clubs. And wherever you go, Romanesque, Gothic and baroque classics rub rafters with architectural creations from modern masters like Daniel Libeskind, David Chipperfield and Frank Gehry. Berlin's bars; part of Germany's cultural kaleidoscope BRUNO EHRS/CORBIS © GASTRO DELIGHTS Eating well is as important to a memorable journey as captivating scenery and great architecture. And you’ll quickly discover that German food is so much more than sausages and pretzels, schnitzel and roast pork accompanied by big mugs of foamy beer.

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Brandenburger Tor stands sentinel over Pariser Platz, a harmoniously proportioned square once again framed by banks as well as the US, British and French embassies, just as it was during its early-19th-century heyday. Pop inside the DZ Bank on the south side for a look at the outlandish conference room US-based architect Frank Gehry created in the atrium. The US embassy next door was the last building to open on Pariser Platz in 2008. Holocaust Memorial MEMORIAL Offline map Google map (2639 4336; www.stiftung-denkmal.de; Cora-Berliner-Strasse 1; admission free, audioguide €3; memorial 24hr, information centre 10am-8pm Tue-Sun, last entry 7.15pm Apr-Sep, 6.15pm Oct-Mar; Brandenburger Tor, Brandenburger Tor) The football-field-sized Memorial to the Murdered European Jews (colloquially known as the Holocaust Memorial) by American architect Peter Eisenman consists of 2711 sarcophagi-like concrete columns rising in sombre silence from undulating ground.

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Stops (where you may have to change trains) include Sasbach, Endingen, Riegel and Gottenheim. Sights & Activities Vitra Design Museum MUSEUM (www.design-museum.de; Charles-Eames-Strasse 1, Weil am Rhein; adult/concession €8/6.50, architectural tour €10.50; 10am-6pm, to 8pm Wed) Sharp angles contrast with graceful swirls on Frank Gehry’s strikingly postmodern Vitra Design Museum. The blindingly white edifice hosts thought-provoking contemporary design exhibitions. Buildings on the nearby Vitra campus, designed by prominent architects like Nicholas Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid and Alvaro Siza, can be visited on a two-hour architectural tour, held in English at noon and 2pm daily.

Barcelona by Damien Simonis

Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land reform, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, retail therapy, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

He’s a man of many parts, however, as his puppet-like series of sculptures, Heroes, which went on show in Mexico in 2009, shows. * * * STREET TREATS Barcelona hosts an array of street sculpture, from Miró’s 1983 Dona i Ocell (Map), in the park dedicated to the artist, to Peix (Fish; Map), Frank Gehry’s shimmering, bronze-coloured headless fish facing Port Olímpic. Halfway along La Rambla, at Plaça de la Boqueria, you can walk all over Miró’s Mosaïc de Miró. Picasso left an open-air mark with his design on the façade of the Col.legi de Arquitectes (Map) opposite La Catedral in the Barri Gòtic.

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Snooping around here confirms how much modern Port Vell has changed. Return to beginning of chapter PORT OLÍMPIC, EL POBLENOU & EL FÒRUM Drinking & Nightlife (Click here); Eating (Click here); Sleeping (Click here) On the approach to Port Olímpic from La Barceloneta, the giant copper Peix (Fish) sculpture by Frank Gehry glitters brazenly in the sunlight. Port Olímpic was built for the 1992 Olympic sailing events and has now become a classy marina surrounded by bars and restaurants. Behind it rise two lone skyscrapers – the luxury Hotel Arts Barcelona and the Torre Mapfre office block. From the marina, a string of popular beaches stretches along the coast northeast to the El Fòrum district, which marks the city’s northern boundary.

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

An estimated 300,000 people turned up for the inaugural festivities in 2004, and the park has remained wildly popular since. Its centerpiece is the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a stunning band shell named in memory of the philanthropist and Hyatt Hotels founder who, with his wife, Cindy, established architecture’s most prestigious prize in 1979. Honors for the pavilion design went to 1989 Pritzker Prize–winner Frank Gehry, and its exterior bears his signature billowing sheets of stainless steel. A steel trellis, which holds a state-of-the-art speaker system, extends over 4,000 fixed seats and the Great Lawn (with space for 7,000), distributing indoor-quality sound to the farthest reaches of the audience. The resident Grant Park Orchestra gives free summertime concerts, just as it has done in the park since the 1930s, and the adjacent Harris Theater provides indoor music and dance programs.

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Another Minneapolis art treasure is the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, an 11-acre urban oasis, sidled up against the Walker Art Center and linked by a footbridge to lovely Loring Park. Dozens of modern-art sculptures fill the garden, including Coosje van Bruggen’s whimsical Spoonbridge and Cherry, a 50-foot spoon topped with a water-fountain cherry that has become a Minneapolis icon. Other works include Frank Gehry’s stunning Standing Glass Fish, along with pieces by notable sculptors from Henry Moore to Claes Oldenberg to Jenny Holzer. Next door, the Walker Art Center gleams with a 130,000-square-foot, $74 million addition by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron. This new showstopper features a mesh skin of perforated aluminum panels rising from the street in a chunky, angular shape.

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DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES Los Angeles, California Long perceived as a completely different city than its more glamorous, informal, and beachy neighbors to the west, downtown Los Angeles was little more than a business destination that became a ghost town after 5 P.M. However, exceptional attractions have sprouted up in the past decade, making for an easy (if sometimes hilly) half-day walking tour. The Walt Disney Concert Hall is the sparkling centerpiece and architectural landmark courtesy of celebrated architect Frank Gehry. It’s an undulating mass of shiny steel that billows like a galleon ship at full sail, and the permanent home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which takes advantage of state-of-the-art acoustics that came with its $270 million-plus price tag. Included in the complex, along with a small café and an arty gift shop, is the acclaimed Patina, one of L.A.’s finest restaurants (see p. 824).

Spain by Lonely Planet Publications, Damien Simonis

Atahualpa, business process, call centre, centre right, Colonization of Mars, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, intermodal, Islamic Golden Age, land reform, large denomination, low cost airline, megaproject, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, young professional

* * * Gaudí: The Man & His Work, by Joan Masso Bergos, is a beautifully illustrated study of the man and his architecture, based on the writings of one of his confidants. * * * Further south, Valencia chimed in with its futuristic Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias (City of Arts and Sciences; Click here) complex, by Santiago Calatrava (b 1951). Frank Gehry (b 1929) is responsible for the single most eye-catching modern addition to the Spanish cityscape (so far) with his Museo Guggenheim (Click here) in Bilbao, where Calatrava has also been busy designing the city’s airport. Not to be left out, Sir Norman Foster (b 1935) designed the city’s new metro system.

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Elsewhere in the nascent hi-tech zone of 22@, a giant cube of a building, with partly inflatable facade to reduce energy consumption, will be part of the Parc Barcelona Mèdia multimedia complex and is due to open in late 2009. * * * In January 2008 two base jumpers managed to get onto the site of Madrid’s still incomplete 250m Torre Cristal and launched themselves off the top with parachutes. * * * Frank Gehry has plans for five twisting steel-and-glass towers that will feature a large degree of solar energy self-sufficiency for the new railway station and transport interchange planned for Barcelona’s until-now neglected La Sagrera district. Lord Richard Rogers is transforming the former Les Arenes bullring on Plaça d’Espanya into a singular, circular leisure complex, with shops, cinemas, jogging track and more.

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The Transbordador Aeri (Cable Car; Map; Passeig Escullera; one way/return €9/12.50; 11am-8pm mid-Jun–mid-Sep, 10.45am-7pm daily Mar–mid-Jun & mid-Sep–late Oct, 10.30am-5.45pm late Oct-Feb; Barceloneta or 17, 39, 64; ), strung across the harbour to Montjuïc, provides a seagull’s view of the city. Get tickets at Miramar (Map) in Montjuïc and the Torre de Sant Sebastiá (Map) in La Barceloneta. Port Olímpic (Map; Ciutadella-Vila Olímpica), a busy marina built for the Olympic sailing events, is surrounded by bars and restaurants. An eye-catcher on the approach from La Barceloneta is Frank Gehry’s giant copper Peix (Fish; Map) sculpture. The area behind Port Olímpic, dominated by twin-tower blocks (the luxury Hotel Arts Barcelona and Torre Mapfre office block), is the former Vila Olímpica living quarters for the Olympic competitors, which has since been sold off as apartments. More and better beaches stretch northeast along the coast from Port Olímpic.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

—Stafford Beer, “Cybernetic Praxis in Government”3 Introduction 1.  A New Architecture? In an address to the Council on Foreign Relations on the need for a new geopolitical architecture, the outgoing secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, made a rather striking recommendation: “We need a new architecture for this new world, more Frank Gehry than formal Greek.”4 She described the system dominated by the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and several other large organizations as the equivalent of the classical Parthenon in Athens. “By contrast, there's Gehry's Modern architecture [sic]. … Some of his work at first might appear haphazard, but in fact, it's highly intentional and sophisticated,” Clinton continued.

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If the campus is a sort of utopian idealization of the Google Cloud Polis itself, this version, unlike some others, at least makes some gestures toward including the outside User in its model. The project is still to be approved, if at all, by Mountain View city council, and so we shall have to wait and see what is actually built to compare the real environmental platform to that proposed.58 By contrast, looking at Frank Gehry's early proposals for a new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park (nicknamed “Zee Town” after company founder, Mark Zuckerberg) we see a plan for a more traditional corporate campus, designed, it appears, to ensure the managed serendipitous contact between employees in motion. In this encapsulated “company town” winding pathways and strategic lines of sight connecting interior and exterior views are embedded in a multilevel landscape where sub- and superterranean greenery twists and turns onto and under the collection of buildings.59 At their desks, the aggregate social graph of the on-site employee/resident population is framed and displayed to itself as it moves and involves itself within itself in airplane hangar–scale open-plan work space.

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See also Sabrina Van Der Ley and Markus Richter, Megastructure Reloaded: Visionäre Stadtentwürfe Der Sechzigerjahre Reflektiert Von Zeitgenössischen Künstlern = Visionary Architecture and Urban Design of the Sixties Reflected by Contemporary Artists (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008). 50.  The Bilbao region in Spain experienced significant economic growth concurrent with the opening of the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim Bilbao and opening in 1997. The “Bilbao effect” is a termed coined by Peter Eisenman to refer to the misguided hope of second-tier cites that adding some flashy new architectural icons would magically boost their city's brand and regional economy. 51.  Perhaps a future Erich von Daniken will interpret Foster's structures as proof of alien intelligence on Earth's moon. 52. 

The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Reopened in 1995, the new Chelsea Piers, whose commercial aura begs comparison with South Street Seaport (see p.61), is primarily a huge sports complex, with ice rinks and open-air roller rinks, as well as a skate park, bowling alley, and a landscaped golf driving range (for more details, see “Sports and outdoor activities,” p.412). Across from Chelsea Piers, at the end of 19th Street, warehouses and parking lots have given way to the billowing, fluid walls of Frank Gehry’s IAC Building, one of New York’s newest and most fanciful examples of contemporary architecture. By 2010 this strip will be jammed with condos, designed in a similarly eye-catching style. Eighth Avenue CHE L SE A | Eighth Avenue • East Chelsea Double back east along 23rd Street to Chelsea’s main drag, Eighth Avenue, where the more laid-back vibe of the West Village, below 14th Street, segues into a stretch of vibrant retail energy.

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Empire State Building The modern day Citicorp Center Street sign, midtown Manhattan Postmodernism afforded late twentiethcentury architects a renewed playfulness – witness the Chippendale pediment on the 1983 Sony Building on Madison Avenue - though these kinds of conceits are toned down a bit on the Citicorp Center (1978). More recently, the twin towers of the Time Warner Center (2003) at Columbus Circle stand out mainly for their (gargantuan) size, while the Condé Nast Building (2000) on Times Square has been a major trendsetter in the move to “green” architecture. Frank Gehry’s IAC Building (2007) in Chelsea is one of New York’s most exuberant examples of contemporary architecture, and the “Tower of Freedom” at Ground Zero will be the city’s tallest building by 2012 (see box, p.55). Manhattan skyline Skyscrapers New York is one of the best places in the world to see skyscrapers.

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A growing army of The new Battle of Brooklyn: Atlantic Yards 226 In a borough rampant with real estate development, no single project is as huge or as controversial as the one known as Atlantic Yards. First proposed by Cleveland developer Forest City Ratner in December 2003, the development initially called for the building of sixteen skyscrapers and a Frank Gehry–designed arena for the New Jersey Nets basketball team, all crammed onto a parcel only one and a half times the size of the World Trade Center site. Few disputed that the railyards that separated Fort Greene and Prospect Heights (p.235) needed some sort of makeover, but Atlantic Yards was deemed way over the top – upon completion, it would form the densest Census tract in America.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Exploiting the ability of computers to draw, and then to construct, convoluted and twisted shapes and structures, Post Urbanist projects are ‘bold and experimental’, ‘predictably unpredictable’, relishing the chance to ‘violate existing typologies’ (Kelbaugh 2008a: 108, 110) (FIGURE 2.12 and FIGURE 2.13) (see Chapter 7). FIGURE 2.12 Business School, Case Western University Campus, Cleveland (architect: Frank Gehry) (Image: Steve Tiesdell) FIGURE 2.13 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (architect: Frank Gehry) (Image: Matthew Carmona) Yet Kelbaugh (2008a: 113) also laments how Post Urbanism is ‘… too often an urbanism of trophy buildings, of which a city needs and can absorb only so many.’ He questions whether ‘despite their theoretical and aesthetic sophistication’, they ‘… give back as much as they take from the city around them.’ (2008a: 109).

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Iconic buildings are thus typically intended to signify a city’s cultural significance, its economic dynamism, the quality of life possible there and other desirable attributes. This has been labelled the ‘Bilbao Effect’ – the notion that a single building can transform the fortunes of an entire region. Rather than merely symbolising it, the suggestion is that the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim museum was of itself instrumental in the regeneration of Bilbao’s regional economy by bringing the city to the attention of the world, who, in turn, rushed to visit it. The regeneration formula was thus reduced to the need to procure an iconic building – though more considered accounts give the full story (see Del Cerro Santamaria 2007).

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms by Danielle Laporte

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, David Heinemeier Hansson, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak

When I do the following, I am guaranteed to feel close to 100 percent improved, lighter, and focused: When I do the following, I will likely feel a sense of relief or improvement: As for downing a carton of cookie dough ice cream, drunk dialing your former flame, sneaking a smoke in the airplane bathroom, watching Gene Simmons Family Jewels reruns instead of going to yoga class, and all manners of vengeful vandalism…let’s put that “comfort list” in its place. Even though I think that doing the following things will bring me relief and comfort, they actually aren’t helpful at all: A lot of the time, it’s better to quit than to be the hero. —Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson, authors of Rework NO MAKES WAY FOR YES One of Frank Gehry’s first buildings was a shopping mall, the Santa Monica Place. It was rigidly geometric and pale pink. Think bad eighties jungle gym. To please his investors he went L.A. style with a twist. He hated it. Meanwhile, for his own creative outlet, Frank went full-out “Gehry” on building his own home: sloping roofs, curvaceous windows, jutting peaks.

Understanding Exposure, Fourth Edition: How to Shoot Great Photographs With Any Camera by Bryan Peterson

Boeing 747, Frank Gehry, Y2K

Nikon D3X, Nikkor 24–85mm, ISO 100, at 85mm, f/11 at 13 sec. Without a tripod, a night shot like this just isn’t going to happen, especially when you are going to be the one to run into the shot and hold a pose to bring some scale to the scene. This is the brain clinic in Las Vegas, designed by the architect Frank Gehry. I was not leaving Las Vegas without photographing it, and fortunately for me and several of my students, we had the pleasure of meeting the security guard. She wanted to make sure we got a great shot, so she offered to turn on the colored lights inside the clinic while the sky was a dusky blue.

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

He emphasizes that in an increasingly heterogeneous world, multiple and sometimes even enigmatic meanings are precisely what turn buildings into popular icons. According to Jencks, the billowing white roofs of the Opera House could be read as sails, waves, or seashells.11 This has little to do with music, but it seems just right for Sydney Harbor and Australia. In 1991, when Frank Gehry entered an international competition to design a new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, his clients referred specifically to the Sydney Opera House. “It was a small competition with Arata Isozaki, Coop Himmelblau, and me and they—Thomas Krens [the director of the Guggenheim Museum] and the Basques—said they needed a hit there,” Gehry told Charles Jencks.

USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Massachusetts Institute of Technology COLLEGE CAMPUS Offline map (MIT) Nerds rule ever so proudly at America’s foremost tech campus. Stop at the MIT Information Center Offline map Google map ( 617-253-4795; www.mit.edu; 77 Massachusetts Ave; free 90min tours 11am & 3pm Mon-Fri) for the scoop on where to see campus art, including Henry Moore bronzes and cutting-edge architecture by the likes of Frank Gehry. MIT Museum MUSEUM Offline map Google map ( www.mit.edu/museum; 265 Massachusetts Ave, adult/child $7.50/3; 10am-5pm) Packed with wow-’em exhibits like the world’s largest holography collection, robots from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and cool kinetic sculptures. Swing by between 10am and noon on Sundays and admission is free.

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The striking Taubman Museum of Art (www.taubmanmuseum.org; 110 Salem Ave SE; adult/child $7/4; 10am-5pm Tue-Sat, to 8pm Fri, noon-5pm Sun) , opened in 2008, is set in a sculptural steel-and-glass edifice that’s reminiscent of the Guggenheim Bilbao (it’s no coincidence, as architect Randall Stout was a one-time associate of Frank Gehry). Inside, you’ll find a superb collection of artworks spanning 3500 years (particularly strong in 19th- and 20th-century American works). Currently undergoing a massive $27 million renewal project, Center in the Square ( 540-342-5700; www.centerinthesquare.org; 1 Market Sq; 10am-5pm Tue-Sat, from 1pm Sun) is the city’s cultural heartbeat, with a science museum and planetarium (adult/child $8/6), local history museum (adult/child $3/2) and theater.

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It’s busy all day, though not much happens at night other than in Millennium Park and the Theater District, near the intersection of N State and W Randolph Sts. Millennium Park PARK Offline map Google map ( www.millenniumpark.org; Welcome Center, 201 E Randolph St; 6am-11pm; ) Rising boldly by the lakefront, Millennium Park is a treasure trove of free and arty sights. Frank Gehry’s 120ft-high swooping silver band shell anchors what is, in essence, an outdoor modern design gallery. It includes Jaume Plensa’s 50ft-high Crown Fountain Offline map Google map , which projects video images of locals spitting water, gargoyle style; the Gehry-designed BP Bridge that spans Columbus Dr and offers great skyline views; and the McCormick Tribune Ice Rink Offline map Google map that fills with skaters in winter (and alfresco diners in summer).

Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

In the meantime, Bayern-München football team has sailed over to the Allianz Arena, a remarkable rubber-dinghy-like translucent object that will please football fans with more than just an architectural interest in stadiums. An unusual feature is the hatched entrance to the players’ tunnel. * * * Berlin as it really is leaps off the pages of Wladimir Kaminer’s highly readable and humorous short stories in Russendisko (Russian Disco; 2002). * * * Frank Gehry (b 1929) has left exciting imprints on German cities over the past two decades, first through the 1989 Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, and later with his wacky 1999 Neue Zollhof (New Customs House; ) in Düsseldorf, the Gehry-Tower (2001) in Hanover, and the 1999 DZ Bank on Berlin’s Pariser Platz.

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In the south wing is a Berlin Infostore (left). The gate stands sentinel over Pariser Platz (Map), an elegant square once again framed by embassies and bank buildings as it was during its 19th-century heyday as the ‘emperor’s reception hall’. Pop inside the DZ Bank (Map) for a look at the outlandish conference room US-based architect Frank Gehry created in the atrium. The US Embassy next door was the last Pariser Platz building to open, in July 2008. The first one was the faithfully rebuilt Hotel Adlon (now called the Adlon Hotel Kempinski, Click here). This posh caravanserai was the original Grand Hotel, where the 1932 movie starring Greta Garbo was filmed.

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Continue north on Ebertstrasse to the gargantuan Holocaust Memorial (5; Click here) where you should wander among the concrete blocks for the full visual and emotional impact. Next, get your camera ready for the majestic Brandenburger Tor (6; Brandenburg Gate; ), the ultimate symbol of German reunification. It anchors Pariser Platz (7; Click here), a harmoniously proportioned square where you should gawk at Frank Gehry’s eye-popping atrium inside the DZ Bank (8). Continue north on Ebertstrasse past the moving Wall Victims Memorial (9), which honours those who died trying to escape the GDR. The hulking Reichstag (10; Click here), where the German parliament meets, looms nearby. Walk north to the Paul-Löbe-Haus (11), where members of parliament keep their offices, then west on Paul-Löbe-Allee to the Bundeskanzleramt (12; Click here), the office of the German chancellor.

Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Massachusetts Institute of Technology COLLEGE CAMPUS (MIT;Click here) Nerds rule ever so proudly at America’s foremost tech campus. Stop at the MIT Information Center ( 617-253-4795; www.mit.edu; 77 Massachusetts Ave; free 90min tours 11am & 3pm Mon-Fri) for the scoop on where to see campus art, including Henry Moore bronzes and cutting-edge architecture by the likes of Frank Gehry. MIT Museum MUSEUM (www.mit.edu/museum; 265 Massachusetts Ave, adult/child $7.50/3; 10am-5pm) Packed with wow-’em exhibits like the world’s largest holography collection, robots from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and cool kinetic sculptures. Swing by between 10am and noon on Sundays and admission is free.

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The striking Taubman Museum of Art (www.taubmanmuseum.org; 110 Salem Ave SE; adult/child $7/4; 10am-5pm Tue-Sat, to 8pm Fri, noon-5pm Sun), opened in 2008, is set in a sculptural steel-and-glass edifice that’s reminiscent of the Guggenheim Bilbao (it’s no coincidence, as architect Randall Stout was a one-time associate of Frank Gehry). Inside, you’ll find a superb collection of artworks spanning 3500 years (particularly strong in 19th- and 20th-century American works). Currently undergoing a massive $27 million renewal project, Center in the Square ( 540-342-5700; www.centerinthesquare.org; 1 Market Sq; 10am-5pm Tue-Sat, from 1pm Sun) is the city’s cultural heartbeat, with a science museum and planetarium (adult/child $8/6), local history museum (adult/child $3/2) and theater.

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It’s busy all day, though not much happens at night other than in Millennium Park and the Theater District, near the intersection of N State and W Randolph Sts. Millennium Park PARK (www.millenniumpark.org; Welcome Center, 201 E Randolph St; 6am-11pm; ) Rising boldly by the lakefront, Millennium Park is a treasure trove of free and arty sights. Frank Gehry’s 120ft-high swooping silver band shell anchors what is, in essence, an outdoor modern design gallery. It includes Jaume Plensa’s 50ft-high Crown Fountain, which projects video images of locals spitting water, gargoyle style; the Gehry-designed BP Bridge that spans Columbus Dr and offers great skyline views; and the McCormick Tribune Ice Rink that fills with skaters in winter (and alfresco diners in summer).

Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

You may think you know what to expect from LA: celebrity worship, plastic surgery junkies, endless traffic, earthquakes, wildfires…And true, your waitress today might be tomorrow’s starlet and you may well encounter artificially enhanced blondes and phone-clutching honchos weaving lanes at 80mph, but LA is intensely diverse and brimming with fascinating neighborhoods and characters that have nothing to do with the ‘Industry’ (entertainment, to the rest of us). Its innovative cooking has pushed the boundaries of American cuisine for generations. Arts and architecture? Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry. Music? The Doors to Dr Dre and Dudamel. So do yourself a favor and leave your preconceptions in the suitcase. LA’s truths are not doled out on the silver screen or gossip rags; rather, you will discover them in everyday interactions. Chances are, the more you explore, the more you’ll enjoy. When to Go Feb The red carpet is rolled out for the Academy Awards.

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See them on one of the excellent tours offered by the Los Angeles Conservancy (Click here), or through its Last Remaining Seats film series of Hollywood classics on their big screens. Walt Disney Concert Hall CONCERT HALL, ARCHITECTURE (www.laphil.com; 111 S Grand Ave) This gleaming concert venue, designed by Frank Gehry, is a gravity-defying sculpture of curving and billowing stainless-steel walls that conjure visions of a ship adrift in a cosmic sea. The auditorium feels like the inside of a finely crafted instrument clad in walls of smooth Douglas fir. Check the website for details of free guided and audio tours.

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Postmodern Evolutions To find museums, galleries, fine-art exhibition spaces and calendars of upcoming artist shows, check ArtScene (www.artscenecal.com), Artweek LA (www.artweek.la), the San Francisco Bay Area Gallery Guide (http://sfbayareagalleryguide.com) and Juxtapoz (www.juxtapoz.com). True to its independent-minded nature, California veered away from strict high modernism to add unlikely postmodern shapes to the local landscape. Richard Meier made his mark on West LA with the Getty Center, a cresting white wave of a building atop a sunburned hilltop. Canadian-born Frank Gehry relocated to Santa Monica, and his billowing, sculptural style for LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall winks cheekily at shipshape Californian streamline moderne. San Francisco has lately championed a brand of postmodernism by Pritzker Prize–winning architects that magnifies and mimics California’s great outdoors, especially in Golden Gate Park.

Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

CIVIC CENTER & GRAND AVENUE CULTURAL CORRIDOR North Grand Ave is anchored by the Music Center of Los Angeles County, which comprises the famous Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theater. Walt Disney Concert Hall CULTURAL BUILDING (www.laphil.com; 111 S Grand Ave) Architect Frank Gehry’s now-iconic 2003 structure is a gravity-defying sculpture of curving and billowing stainless-steel walls. It is home base of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, now under the baton of Venezuelan phenom Gustavo Dudamel. Free tours are available subject to concert schedules, and walkways encircle the maze-like roof and exterior.

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Experience Music Project MUSEUM (EMP; www.empmuseum.org; 325 5th Ave N; adult/child $15/12; 10am-5pm Sep-May, to 7pm Jun-Aug) This modern architectural marvel or monstrosity (depending on your view), the brainchild of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, is a dream fantasy to anybody who has picked up an electric guitar and plucked the opening notes to ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ The ultramodern Frank Gehry building houses 80,000 music artifacts, many of which pay homage to Seattle’s local music icons. There are handwritten lyrics by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, a Fender Stratocaster demolished by Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles’ first album and the stage suits worn by power pop duo Heart. Science Fiction Museum MUSEUM (www.sfhomeworld.org; 325 5th Ave N; adult/child $15/12; 10am-5pm Sep-May to 8pm Jun-Aug) Attached to the EMP, this is a nerd paradise of costumes, props and models from sci-fi movies and TV shows.

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Postmodern Evolutions In 1915, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst commissioned California’s first licensed female architect Julia Morgan to build his Hearst Castle – a mixed blessing, since the commission would take Morgan decades, careful diplomacy through constant changes and a delicate balancing act among Hearst’s preferred Spanish, Gothic and Greek styles. Architectural styles have veered away from strict high modernism and unlikely postmodern shapes have been added to the landscape. Richard Meier made his mark on West LA with the Getty Center, a cresting white wave of a building atop a sunburned hilltop. Canadian-born Frank Gehry relocated to Santa Monica. His billowing, sculptural style for LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall winks cheekily at shipshape Californian streamline moderne. Renzo Piano’s signature inside-out industrial style can be glimpsed in the saw-tooth roof and red-steel veins on the Broad Contemporary Art Museum extension of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

As I was struggling to make sense of Kirk’s story, I stumbled across a new business book that had been making waves. It was titled Little Bets, and it was written by a former venture capitalist named Peter Sims.2 When Sims studied a variety of successful innovators, from Steve Jobs to Chris Rock to Frank Gehry, as well as innovative companies, such as Amazon and Pixar, he found a strategy common to all. “Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins” [emphasis mine].

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

Chomsky frequently grants interviews to periodicals around the world, and he maintains an exhaustive email correspondence. Meanwhile he reads voraciously: the mainstream press, journals, books and blogs from the United States and around the world. His office at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is in a building designed by Frank Gehry, where walls tilt inward as the horizontal stack of books on Chomsky’s desk climbs ever upward. Chomsky’s habit with newspapers is to read down the articles until he comes to the most revealing material, often submerged toward the end—such as the quote from the unnamed Bush adviser. This collection’s op-eds very much reflect Chomsky’s public exchanges, as at Occupy Boston.

Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History by Witold Rybczynski

A Pattern Language, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, company town, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton

All are a reminder that nothing ages as quickly as a contrived chair. 40/4 stacking chair (David Rowland) The Sottsass and Venturi chairs are emblematic of the brief postmodern episode, but like Hector Guimard’s sinuous Art Nouveau furniture of the fin de siècle they are too idiosyncratic to have a long life. A similar fate may befall a line of chairs that Frank Gehry designed for Knoll in 1990. They are constructed entirely of laminated maple veneer strips less than a quarter-inch thick, bent into curves and glued together. The playful chairs, which recall bushel baskets, are extremely light, and the flexible material makes them comfortable to sit on. The chairs have some of the easygoing charm of a deck chair, although their laid-back casualness is deceptive.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

airport security, Bob Geldof, City Beautiful movement, company town, David Sedaris, desegregation, Frank Gehry, gun show loophole, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine, white picket fence

The mausoleum, a colossal Gothic tower completed in 1889, features a chapel, a burial chamber, and stairs opening onto a balcony looking out across Cleveland — the downtown skyscrapers, a gray-blue blotch of haze that might be Lake Erie. From Garfield’s perch, trees outnumber the smokestacks. Two individuals can’t help but stick out from this view — architect Frank Gehry, whose unmistakable roof wiggles in the distance, and industrialist John D. Rockefeller, whose exclamation point of an obelisk thrusts up a few yards down the hill. Inside the mausoleum’s dome, the liturgical light of stained glass illuminates a larger-than-life-size statue of Garfield. Amy, Owen, and I march downstairs to the burial chamber to look at the flag-draped coffin of James Garfield and the one belonging to Lucretia, his wife.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Aaron Koblin makes a live-action video for Radiohead’s song “House of Cards” without cameras or lights, using 3-D tracking technologies that create data streams that viewers/users can then remix with new angles and visuals to post to YouTube. The green-on-black datascapes in The Matrix films simultaneously virtualize and realize the Wachowski Brothers’ pop mysticism. Even Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Disney Concert Hall, those most sensuous of twenty-firstcentury signifiers, can be seen as manifestations of the CATIA 3-D software used to design them. Ubiquitous computing and geographic information systems are virtual figuring machines, constantly popping out new data points from previously mute spaces and maps.

Pocket New York City Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, ghettoisation, machine readable, messenger bag, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, starchitect, the High Line, urban renewal, walking around money

The talent is often exceptional, as are the dazzling Central Park views. ( tickets to Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola 212-258-9595, tickets to Rose Theater & Allen Room 212-721-6500; www.jazzatlincolncenter.org; Time Warner Center, Broadway at 60th St; A/C, B/D, 1 to 59th St-Columbus Circle) 31 Signature Theatre Theater Offline map Google map Now in its new Frank Gehry–designed home – complete with three theaters, bookshop and cafe – Signature Theatre devotes entire seasons to the body of work of its playwrights-in-residence. To date, featured dramatists have included Tony Kushner, Edward Albee, Athol Fugard and Kenneth Lonergan. ( tickets 212-244-7529; www.signaturetheatre.org; 480 W 42nd St btwn Ninth & Tenth Aves; A/C/E to 42nd St-Port Authority Bus Terminal) 32 Carnegie Hall Live Music Offline map Google map This legendary music hall may not be the world’s biggest or grandest, but it’s one of the most acoustically blessed venues around.

Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

At the back of R23’ s single, large exposed-brick dining room, the 12-seat sushi bar shines like a beacon; what appear at first to be ceramic wall ornaments ar e really stylish sushi platters hanging in wait for large orders. More functional art reveals itself in the corrugated cardboard chairs designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry—they’re funky y et far mor e comfortable than wood. G enial sushi wizar ds stand in wait, cases of the finest fish befor e them. Salmon, yellowtail, shrimp, tuna, and scallops ar e among the always-fresh selections; an excellent and unusual offering is sear ed toro, in which the rich belly tuna absorbs a faint 14 W H E R E TO D I N E Ciudad L ATIN The latest L.A. v enture of celebrity chefs S usan F eniger and Mary Sue Milliken is this intriguing restaurant in the heart of downtown.

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Walt Disne y C oncert Hall The strikingly beautiful Walt D isney Concer t Hall isn’t just the ne w home of the Los Angeles P hilharmonic; it’s a key element in an urban revitalization effort now underway downtown. The Walt Disney family insisted on the best and, with an initial gift of $50 million to build a world-class performance venue, that’s what they got: A masterpiece of design b y world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, and an acoustical quality that equals or surpasses those of the best concer t halls in the world. S imilar to G ehry’s most famous ar chitectural masterpiece, the G uggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the concert hall’s dramatic stainless-steel exterior consists of a series of undulating curved surfaces that partially envelop the entire building, presenting multiple glimmering facades to the surr ounding neighborhood.

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The 31/2-acre Concert Hall is open to the public for vie wing, but to witness it in its full glory, do whatever it takes to attend a concert by the world-class Los Angeles Philharmonic. Also highly recommended are the $12 audio tours, which lead visitors through the Concert Hall’s history from conception to cr eation. The 45-minute self-guided tour is narrated b y actor John Lithgow and includes inter views with Frank Gehry, Los Angeles P hilharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, and acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, among others. One big caveat is that you see just about everything except the auditorium: There’s almost always a rehearsal in progress, and the acoustics ar e so good that ther e’s no discreet way to sneak a 14 L .

Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Top of section what's new Our authors have hunted down the fresh, the revamped, the transformed, the hot and the happening. Here are a few of our favourites. For up-to-the-minute reviews and recommendations, see lonelyplanet.com/france. ART IN PARIS 1 The new ‘flying carpet’ Islamic art gallery at the Louvre, the Louis Vuitton arts centre à la Frank Gehry, the Musée Picasso. Oh, what capital openings art lovers are enjoying! ( Click here ; Click here ; Click here ) GOURMET BURGERS 2 The burger trend sweeping Paris is, unsurprisingly, très gourmet ma chère . Hot on the heels of Blend, with its hand-cut meat in brioche buns, comes the achingly cool Beef Club. ( Click here ; Click here ) LOUVRE-LENS 3 Ingenius.

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The world’s most extravagant tennis museum, the Tenniseum-Musée de Roland Garros (www.fft.fr; 2 av Gordon Bennett; adult/child €7.50/4, with stadium visit €15/10; 10am-6pm Tue-Sun; Porte d’Auteuil) , traces the sport’s 500-year history through paintings, sculptures and posters. Tours of the stadium take place at 11am and 3pm in English; reservations are required. Designed by Frank Gehry, the fine arts centre Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création (www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr) was under construction at the time of writing. LOUVRE & LES HALLES Louis VI created halles (markets) for merchants who converged on the city centre to sell their wares, and for over 800 years they were, in the words of Émile Zola, the ‘belly of Paris’.

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Nevertheless, there are several ways to pay homage to the master. Mapped out in a brochure (€1 or downloadable for free online) from the tourist office (Click here ), the evocative Van Gogh walking circuit of the city takes in scenes painted by the artist. Arles will soon be graced with a cultural centre designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry. The Museon Arlaten Offline map Google map is closed for renovations until 2014. Unless otherwise noted, the last entry to sights is 30 minutes prior to closing. Winter hours are shorter than those listed below; places that close at 7pm in summer usually close at 5pm in winter. Museums are free the first Sunday of the month.

You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain by Phoebe Robinson

Bottomless brunch, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, Lyft, microaggression, Rosa Parks, uber lyft

Maybe your white comrade has seen too many romantic comedies in which the black best friend exists solely to be the protagonist’s confidante, providing humorous takes on her pal’s love and work life. Or perhaps The Help isn’t On Demand anymore, but your white friend still needs to get his “You is kind, you is smart, you is important” fix, so he turns to you. Whatever the case may be, your name is not Frank Gehry, so it’s not your job to build white folk up whenever they need an ego boost. If you’re only called upon when your friend is down in the dumps or needs comic relief, then you, my friend, are like Will Smith’s character in Legend of Bagger Vance. Nothing but a mystical and ageless 1930s caddy (read: magical Negro) who appears out of nowhere to help a down-and-out golfer find his swing again and reunite with an ex-girlfriend, and then he disappears and materializes decades later to help another white person with golf.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

The high-level instrumental skill has become so well assimilated that it happens automatically.” Where visual artists are concerned, the Baroque sculptor and architect Bernini and the painter and sculptor Picasso were clearly adept at both experiential and instrumental attending, says Tellegen, as is the modern architect Frank Gehry. Choosing a literary example, he says that F. Scott Fitzgerald once admitted to “wrapping one of his romantic flings in cellophane” for later artistic use and notes that “this kind of heartless but honest professionalism is not uncommon among creative people.” Colorful artistic types are by no means the only people who excel in paying both pragmatic and experiential attention.

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

And there is a deep consensus over who did this best, at least among non-architects: If we walked down the street of any American city and asked people to name the greatest architect of the twentieth century, most would say Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, if someone provided a different answer, we’d have to assume we’ve stumbled across an actual working architect, an architectural historian, or a personal friend of Frank Gehry. Of course, most individuals in those subsets would cite Wright, too. But in order for someone to argue in favor of any architect except Wright (or even to be in a position to name three other plausible candidates), that person would almost need to be an expert in architecture. Normal humans don’t possess enough information to nominate alternative possibilities.

Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality by Melissa Bruntlett, Chris Bruntlett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, ASML, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, intermodal, Jones Act, Loma Prieta earthquake, megacity, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, safety bicycle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, starchitect, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

“We can talk about cycling being red paint, and being deliberately shocking and creating icons and branding, but that’s all take-it-or-leave-it stuff,” he argues. “You could build anything to achieve that.” Fleming identifies the danger with iconic design is that “starchitects” can’t keep repeating the same trick. Frank Gehry can’t build a Guggenheim Bilbao in every city and have the same effect. “So the purpose of Velotopia was to say, ‘Hang on, there’s actually a practical benefit here and that’s to increase connectivity in the city.’” Fleming looks for a tipping point in every region—the point when they can no longer build their way to better motorized connections.

The Perfect House: A Journey With Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio by Witold Rybczynski

A Pattern Language, financial independence, Frank Gehry, functional programming, invention of the printing press, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass, trade route

So, as architects sometimes do, he used domestic commissions to demonstrate his architectural ideas. Le Corbusier did the same thing in the 1920s when he made white-walled suburban villas outside Paris manifestoes for his new modern architecture; Robert Venturi launched his career—and postmodernism—with a complicated little house designed for his mother in Philadelphia; and Frank Gehry signaled his startling new talent with an idiosyncratic remodeling of his own house, a bungalow in Santa Monica. La Malcontenta’s great imperial portico, which would be seen by dozens of Venetians passing on the Brenta—or on the road, which was the main ground route to Padua—really was a billboard; not only for the Foscari brothers but also for Palladio’s particular vision of Roman classicism

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

Here’s one, presented exactly as typed: I’m a smoker too. I picked it up when backpacking in May. It used to be a drinking thing, but now I wake up and fuck, I want a cigarette. I sometimes wish that I worked in a Mad Men office. Have you seen the Le Corbusier exhibit at MoMA? It sounds pretty interesting. I just saw a Frank Gehry (sp?) display last week in Montreal, and how he used computer modelling to design a crazy house in Ohio. That’s the whole message—the sender was trying to pick up women who smoked and were into art. The unstudied “(sp?)” is my favorite flourish. Forty-two different women got this same message.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

Our Fashion Week spit party was sort of like a Tupperware party, except instead of buying plastic containers the guests were invited to deposit a saliva sample into one. And instead of taking place at a suburban ranch house designed by Richard Neutra, our spit party went down at the spectacular Manhattan headquarters of IAC/InterActive Corporation, designed by architect Frank Gehry.”69 Such hip parties showcasing how biology meets technology are key in spreading the meme of health extension. All the cool kids are doing it. Of course, sometimes examining DNA leads a person to find out things about his genes that cause concern, and that’s where Sergey Brin’s biggest public contribution to the meme comes in.

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

23andMe, AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, behavioural economics, business process, call centre, clean water, commoditize, computer age, Demis Hassabis, Frank Gehry, information retrieval, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, job automation, machine translation, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, thinkpad, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Tenenbaum, a youthful professor with sandy hair falling across his forehead and an easy smile, has an office in MIT’s imposing headquarters for research on brains, memory, and cognitive science. His window looks across the street at the cascading metallic curves of MIT’s Stata Center, designed by the architect Frank Gehry. Tenenbaum is focusing his research on the computational basis of human learning and trying to replicate it with machines. His goal is to come up with computers whose intelligence reaches far beyond answering questions or finding correlations in masses of data. One day, he hopes, the systems he’s working on will come up with concepts and theories, the way humans do, sometimes basing them on just a handful of observations.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

utm_term=.77032a06a277 26https://www.cnet.com/news/huawei-reportedly-sides-with-trump-on-5g-us-is-lagging-behind/ 8 THE RESISTANCE 1https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/us/letter-from-san-francisco-a-beautiful-promenade-turns-ugly-and-a-city-blushes.html 2There’s a lot to nerd out on about Apple’s campus, and if you’d like to do so, this Wired piece on it is excellent: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus/ 3https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebooks-menlo-park-campus-now-has-a-new-frank-gehry-designed-building/ 4https://www.fastcompany.com/3068889/googles-newly-approved-hq-are-the-perfect-metaphor-for-silicon-valley 5https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/01/google-submits-plans-million-sq-ft-london-hq-construction-kings-cross 6https://www.eff.org/about/staff 7$11 million in 2016–17, as its audited accounts show, but that has increased, as Cohn told me, and see https://www.eff.org/document/2016-2017-audited-financial-statement 8https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/john-perry-barlow-open-internet-champion-grateful-dead-lyricist-dies-n845781 9http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do 10https://www.eff.org/about/history 11Barlow’s full declaration can be read here (love it or loathe it, it’s certainly a fascinating document and an insight into a particular time and vision): https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence 12https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2017/index.html#FinancialsModal 13The Knight Foundation is a major US funder of journalism, technology and freedom-of-expression projects in the common interest. 14https://panopticlick.eff.org/results?

Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life by Ken Robinson, Lou Aronica

do what you love, fear of failure, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

Zimmer learned from the masters, but not the legendary classical composers. Instead, he found inspiration from the great architects. “I have a really good instinct for patterns and shapes and architecture. The things I write about and find inspiring are the works of architects like Norman Foster and Frank Gehry. I love looking at their buildings and seeing how they’ve put things together. And very often, when I look at my pieces of music—not in musical notation, obviously, but in the computer—I look at the shape, and when the shape and the patterns look right, they usually sound right. I love what Norman Foster did with the Reichstag in Berlin.

Switzerland by Damien Simonis, Sarah Johnstone, Nicola Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bank run, car-free, clean water, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, the market place, trade route, young professional

Then, pop across the German border to the Vitra Design Museum (%+49 7621 702 32 00; www.design-museum.de; Charles Eames Strasse 1, Weil am Rhein; adult/student €6.50/5, BaselCard valid; h11am-6pm Tue-Sun) for a small taste of the same. Not only is the main museum building by the Guggenheim’s creator, Frank Gehry; the surrounding factory complex of famous furniture manufacturer Vitra, comprises buildings by other cutting-edge architects such as Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid and Alvaro Siza. Exhibitions cover all aspects of interior design. The museum is a 30-minute bus ride from Claraplatz; catch bus No 55 to the Vitra stop.

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Café de L’imprimerie (%061 262 36 06; St Johanns Vorstadt 19; 2-course menus Sfr14.50-16.50; hlunch & BASEL & AARGAU BASEL & AARGAU Basel likes to boast that it has buildings by seven winners of architecture’s prestigious Pritzker Prize, unprecedented for a city this small. Four of those winners – Frank Gehry, Alvaro Siza, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid – are actually found just across the German border from Basel at the Vitra Design Museum (p239). However, some works by Herzog & de Meuron are slightly more central. The Basel-based duo is internationally renowned for designing London’s Tate Modern art gallery, the Olympic Stadium for Beijing 2008 and the Münich football arena.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Whenever Zuckerberg is working on some big speech, or an essay dictating a major change in direction for his company, he typically bounces it off a variety of people, even journalists. In this case, he was working on what he considered a personal landmark: he had been asked to give the commencement speech to Harvard’s class of 2018. Sitting in the glass-walled “Aquarium” in the center of the cavernous Frank Gehry–designed Building 21 headquarters—the Facebookers who constantly buzz past us have been trained to keep eyes forward and not stare at their famous boss while he takes meetings—he outlined his speech, which he crafted after viewing a stack of commencement addresses from other business leaders. Like those august speakers, he would address weighty topics.

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Despite Stamos’s investigation, despite Project P, Facebook still had no idea of the degree to which Vladimir Putin had played Facebook. But they would soon find out. 15 P for Propaganda ON FEBRUARY 9, 2017, Zuckerberg summoned me to the Aquarium in Building 20, the hangarlike headquarters across the street from the former Sun complex, now called the Classic campus. Designed by Frank Gehry, Building 20 was an extreme example of the just-about-to-fall-apart ethos of the blue-chip architect’s work, with exposed pipes, wires hanging from the distant ceiling, and walls that looked like temporary plywood barriers. (“He did not want it overly designed,” said Gehry of his client.) Stuck on those walls was the latest crop of posters from the Analog Research Lab, including newly silk-screened pleas to “Be the Nerd.”

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

If every building were to croon at once, nothing could be discerned from the cacophony. The second false assumption is that, in the absence of architectural restrictions, what would emerge would be a harmonious landscape of structures that looked as if they had been designed by Richard Meier or Frank Gehry. Somehow, from the perspective of the schools and the magazines, the default setting for unrestricted architecture appears to be modernism. If only this were the case! The default setting for architecture in America is not modernism but vulgarity. To confirm this assertion, the architecture magazines need only look at the advertisements that fill the pages between the masterpieces they display.

Branded Beauty by Mark Tungate

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, call centre, corporate social responsibility, double helix, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, haute couture, independent contractor, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, liberal capitalism, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, stem cell

They also provide memorable experiences that inspire brand loyalty. Imagine if every time you use a tube of Caudalie cream you remember a pampered vacation in the gently sun-warmed Bordeaux countryside, when you felt more relaxed and contented, possibly, than you had in years. The building in Rioja, designed by Frank Gehry, is essentially a giant logo, with its purple-tinted metallic curls reflecting the towering peaks in the distance. Not that Caudalie disparages more conventional marketing methods. Initially, its advertising was minimalistic and star free, focusing on grape and vine imagery. But in 2010 it recruited the Hungarian model Reka Ebergenyi as its ‘face’.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“Retro” America, however, was a place of ugly pursuits like oil and farming, a land of white supremacy where people have “chosen irrationality” along with lowbrow religions in which pudgy men bellow feral slogans at giant rallies.12 Another failing of the “Retro” areas, the billionaire charged, was that they were hostile to the spirit of enterprise, suffering from “a dearth of scientists, inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs, and captains of industry—the people who build modern economies.” Those fine people were only to be found in the “Metro” regions, places where thrived admirable institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which (Sperling wanted you to know) owned a highly creative Frank Gehry building under whose wildly zigzagging roof transpired all manner of juicy “research-focused collaboration.” THE MARX OF THE MASTER CLASS Creative buildings, creative innovation, creativity in general—who doesn’t love these things? Creativity is self-evidently good; it is beyond controversy, and in the years of the last decade it also began to seem like the defining virtue of liberalism, the quality that brought together all its different constituencies among the affluent.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Most architecture schools still promote an intellectual and artistic sensibility that has little patience for such mundane questions as whether a building will sustain pedestrian activity. This issue was the subject of a now famous exchange that took place at the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival between Frank Gehry and a prominent audience member, Fred Kent. Kent, who runs the Project for Public Spaces, pointedly asked Gehry why so many “iconic” buildings by star architects fail to give life to the streets and sidewalks around them. Gehry, who was once quoted as saying “I don’t do context,”6 claimed to be above this criticism, but Kent didn’t buy it.

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

The first story followed the firm into its new offices.18 The second, five years later, watched its retreat to a more conventional way of working.19 The agency is well known for producing Apple advertisements, including the famous 1984 Superbowl ad, which portrayed Apple as champions of individualism, and the later "Think Different" campaign. The new offices of the early nineties (in Los Angeles and New York) suggested that Chiat/Day, too, could both champion individualism and think differently. Page 71 The exterior design of the Los Angeles building (by the architect Frank Gehry) expressed the forward-looking approach directlyit resembled a pair of binoculars. But inside, it was even more unconventional. Arrangements were based on the simple principle that no one should have a room of his or her own. Instead, if they came to the office, employees could check out a laptop and a cellular phone and then look for somewhere to sit.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

Clients can be led on virtual walk-throughs and fly-throughs long before construction begins. Beyond the practical benefits, the speed and precision of CAD calculations and visualizations have given architects and engineers the chance to experiment with new forms, shapes, and materials. Buildings that once existed only in the imagination are now being built. Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project, a Seattle museum that looks like a collection of wax sculptures melting in the sun, would not exist were it not for computers. Although Gehry’s original design took the form of a physical model, fashioned from wood and cardboard, translating the model’s intricate, fluid shapes into construction plans could not be done by hand.

Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, deliberate practice, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, lifelogging, mental accounting, Neil Armstrong, patient HM, pattern recognition, Rubik’s Cube, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

Each was built in a different style, but with a similar floor plan based around a central atrium and satellite rooms. The first palace was a modernist glass cube in the manner of Philip Johnson’s Glass House; the second was a turreted Queen Anne of the type you see all over San Francisco, with lots of frilly scrollwork and ostentatious ornamentation; the third was Frank Gehry-esque, with wavy titanium walls and warped windows; the fourth was based on Thomas Jefferson’s redbrick home, Monticello; and there was nothing special about the fifth except that all the walls were painted bright blue. Each home’s kitchen would serve as the repository of an address. Each home’s den would hold a phone number.

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

Work by University of Toronto neuroscientist Oshin Vartanian has shown that exposure to curved or jagged contours in architectural interiors can change our patterns of brain activity.8 The presentation of curves produces strong activation in brain areas like the orbitofrontal cortex and cingulate cortex—areas of our brain that are associated with reward and pleasure. Jagged edges can cause increases in activity of the amygdala—an important part of our fear-detecting and response systems. In architectural terms, it may well have been the graceful curves of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao that reduced famed fellow architect Philip Johnson to tears when he first laid eyes upon the building. In contrast, the strong reactions elicited by Libeskind’s work in Toronto, notably similar to those brought about by architect I.M. Pei’s design for the new entryway to the Louvre, may have had their origin in patterns of brain responses related to our innate need to recognize fearsome environmental risks.

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, cotton gin, Frank Gehry, Grace Hopper, informal economy, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, jitney, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, rolodex, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Y2K

The mansion looked like a stiff Pacific breeze could blow it out to sea with the local whales, but it housed twenty people and had cost somewhere north of three million dollars. No local builder in Kauai was remotely skilled enough to create such a fabulous structure. They’d had to fly in hard-bitten multinational subcontractors who’d worked on the L.A. Getty Museum and that unspeakable Frank Gehry creation in Bilbao. The cost would have crippled anybody but an arty zillionaire who had spontaneous attacks of narcolepsy whenever he met an accountant. Constructing his Kauai palace had even crippled Makoto, but Makoto uncrippled rather deftly. Cost overruns never much bothered Makoto. Given enough pakalolo marijuana, the guy was the essence of indulgent good cheer.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

An accurate scale model of the wall was built in a lab in Copenhagen and tested against the worst storms in a thousand years. “Global warming and sea-level rise were all factored into this,” he said. “We really wanted to create a safe haven.” We drove over to a development called Eko Pearl Towers. The first tower to be completed was a boxy building that would make Frank Gehry weep over the sorry state of the human imagination. We parked underground, making our way through a black marble corridor to the elevator. There were security cameras everywhere. We stepped out on the nineteenth floor and toured a model condo with a leather sofa and chairs, an LG flat-screen TV, and hip-looking modern art prints on the walls.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

The selling and branding of place, and the burnishing of the image of a place (including states), becomes integral to how capitalist competition works. The production of geographical difference, building upon those given by history, culture and so-called natural advantages, is internalised within the reproduction of capitalism. Bring a signature architect to town and create something like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. This helps put that city on the map of attractors for mobile capital. If geographical differences between territories and states did not exist, then they would be created by both differential investment strategies and the quest for spatial monopoly power given by uniqueness of location and of environmental and cultural qualities.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

And even if I had been willing to pay $5,000, MIT can’t and won’t take my money, partly for reasons of sorting and selectivity and institutional prestige, but also because of pure logistics. There’s only one person who led the Human Genome Project, and the number of people who can form a group around him after class can’t ever be more than ten. — THE NEXT DAY I came back to MIT, took the campus tour, and then grabbed an above-average sushi lunch at a restaurant in the Frank Gehry–designed student center. (After years of boring buildings, the university has lately taken a hard turn toward the great architectural fantasies of the twenty-first century.) While eating, I glanced over at a young woman about twenty feet away, sitting with her elbows in front of her, talking cheerfully with two other young women on the other side of the restaurant table.

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion by Virginia Postrel

Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Dr. Strangelove, factory automation, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, hydroponic farming, indoor plumbing, job automation, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, washing machines reduced drudgery, young professional

© Boucheron International These three types of mystery—shadow, sparkle, and complexity—are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, they’re often complementary, both as styles and as metaphors. The touchstone glamour of art deco and of Hollywood’s studio-era costume and set design combined the aesthetics of shadow and sparkle. Frank Gehry’s signature buildings are simultaneously sparkling and complex. So is the sapphire-and-diamond Julia necklace Marc Newsom designed for Boucheron, based on fractal geometry. Animal prints mingle the distance (shadow) of exoticism with the complexity of biological patterns, which themselves create camouflage by emulating the play of light and shadow.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

But then the problem of the overprovision of road space goes beyond just the roads that vehicles move on. After all, 95 percent of the time, most vehicles are not moving at all. 10 FREE PARKING, DO NOT PASS GO When most people think of Los Angeles’s architecture, they probably imagine some of the city’s gems. There is Frank Gehry’s concert hall downtown, a wonderful construction of curved steel intended to look something like a ship. There is the Getty Center, high up on the hills of Brentwood, overlooking the city. There is the Bradbury Building, a late Victorian wonder of ornate iron walkways featured in the final scenes of Blade Runner.

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman

airport security, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, data science, Day of the Dead, fake news, Frank Gehry, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Googley, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Khan Academy, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, microaggression, move fast and break things, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, the High Line, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

The possibility filled me with dread, and with it came a conviction that I would have to work extra hard to pull the wool over their eyes and make it look like I knew what I was doing. * * * — I couldn’t stop gawking at my surroundings. Facebook was in the process of building a new campus designed by Frank Gehry—but I couldn’t imagine how anything could beat our tree-lined Main Street, which I’d learned was in fact modeled after Disneyland. No wonder I felt so at home in this place. I loved its multiethnic restaurants and old-timey barbershops and candy stores and soft green lawns to lie down on when you needed a break.

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

New York: Houghton Mifflin. 2 Aesthetics Bringing the Arts & Design into the Discussion of Transhumanism Natasha Vita-More “Transhumans want to elevate and extend life … let us choose to be transhumanist not only in our bodies, but also in our values … toward diversity, multiplicity … toward a more humane transhumanity …”1 Imagine a future designed by Frank Gehry that models elements of a “great logistic game” as conceived by Buckminster Fuller, within a monumental Christo installation, kinetically lit by James Turrell, scored by Philip Glass, and sung by Adele. Introduction The emergent course of technology is at once explicable and baffling. It has precipitated questions about a shifting human paradigm that remain unanswered by postmodernism.

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The argument from biocultural capital refutes the rejection of such distinctions on moral grounds, largely because decisions to undertake human enhancements constitute appeals to an aesthetic standard (which Bourdieu describes as “taste”). To elaborate, a suitable comparison might arise in the context of aesthetic appreciation more generally. Thus, the request for a moral justification for human enhancements is rather like asking what value accrues from having heard a Bob Dylan song, or having strolled around a Frank Gehry building. This is not to equate listening to music with invasive biological alterations; clearly there are important differences in terms of the commitment required to experience each. However, to the extent that each conveys a particular form of taste, they are similar. Such occurrences, along with the desire to experience them, cannot be explained via some precise moral framework of general utility.

The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, full employment, megaproject, New Urbanism, planned obsolescence, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban planning, urban renewal

Appended to a brochure they issued in 1992 (Förderverein für die Ausstellung, Die Bedeutung des Berliner Stadtschlosses für die Mitte Berlins--Eine Dokumentation [Berlin: Förderverein, 1992]) are numerous letters of support solicited from prominent German scholars and cultural figures. Also included are three letters in English, all from prominent architects. Two of these--from Frank Gehry and Michael Wilford (partner of the late James Stirling)--oppose rebuilding the old palace. in the third, the American architect Robert Venturi comes out firmly against tearing down the royal palace! 10. Joachim Fest, "Plädoyer für den Wiederaufbau des Stadtschlosses," in Das neue Berlin, ed. Michael Mönninger (Frankfurt: Insel, 1991), 118. 11.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

carbon-based life, content marketing, Frank Gehry, gentrification, intentional community, lateral thinking, machine translation, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, pattern recognition, rent stabilization

Where every table is occupied, it seems, except for one, flanked by two enormous, empty, wingback armchairs, and there, quite clearly, is the fish: a large, freestanding sculpture, its scales cut from one-pound Medaglia d'Oro coffee cans like the ones Wassily Kandmsky used, but assembled in a way that owes more to Frank Gehry. She's moving too fast to get a read on the crowd here, but is aware of a number of glances as she beelines through and seats herself in one of the wingback chairs. A waiter materializes instantly. Young and quite beautiful, white-jacketed, a white cloth folded across his arm, he looks none too happy to see her there.

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb by William Poundstone

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Herman Kahn, Jacquard loom, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, statistical model, the market place, zero-sum game

There are no obtrusive gates or fences, and the landscaping of palms and large-leafed tropicals harks back to that favored in California in the 1950s. External louvered blinds project awkwardly in front of the windows to shield them from the sun. The windows of the higher floors overlook the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier, the Frank Gehry-designed Santa Monica Place mall, the civic auditorium, aging motels with names like the Flamingo West, and seafood restaurants adorned with giant clam shells and signs of anthropomorphic lobsters in chef’s hats. Herman Kahn, one of RAND’s best-known analysts, interrupted his thinking about the unthinkable to take a midday swim in the Pacific.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It is certainly true that cities such as London and New York have grown rapidly since the early 1990s, both in population and in wealth, with a side effect being widespread housing crises. There are also a few ex-industrial cities that have managed to position themselves as “hubs” for creativity and innovation, perhaps most famously Bilbao in northern Spain, which benefited from a famous piece of iconic architecture designed by Frank Gehry. But what the gurus did not anticipate (or were never that concerned by) was how these successes would exacerbate latent cultural and economic divisions which slice many Western societies in two, especially in the English-speaking world. The rising prosperity of many urban graduates was in contrast to the slumping fortunes of many rural, ex-industrial and former mining regions.

The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky

anti-communist, borderless world, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, joint-stock company, open economy, spice trade, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Included in the five-point plan were cleaning up the pollution from the old industry, cleaning the river, separating industry from the center city, expanding the subway system and the airport, building more bridges, enhancing technology and managerial programs in the universities, building new industries . . . After looking at the city plans, the $100 million for the museum does not seem as shocking. But only number five of the city’s five-point plan mentions anything about cultural attractions. From the PNV point of view, Frank Gehry was the perfect architect for the project. In his sixties, he had become the international architect of the moment based on several major projects in the U.S. Midwest, the American Center in Paris, and an office building in Prague. He also was smitten with Basque country and expressed a personal affection for things Basque, though this was not necessarily reflected in his work.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

The building towered over its surroundings until 1908, when the Singer Building, at 165 Broadway (now demolished), surpassed it – it’s now primarily filled with expensive apartments and is being developed (with the whole lower row) into the “Retail at Park Row” shopping mall. It’s worth taking a peek (or grabbing a pricey drink) inside the grand Beekman Hotel just behind the row at 123 Nassau St, just to see its spectacular atrium – the landmarked office building, built in 1883, reopened as a posh hotel in 2016. Contrast this Gilded Age opulence with Frank Gehry’s contemporary masterpiece, looming over Park Row at 8 Spruce St; his 77-storey New York by Gehry (870ft) topped out in 2009, its rippling stainless-steel curtain wall containing nine hundred luxury rentals and a new public elementary (primary) school at its base. The Woolworth Building 233 Broadway • Tours (30min Sat 1pm; 1hr Tues, Thurs 2pm & Sat 11.30am; 1hr 30min Mon, Wed, Fri, Sat & Sun 2pm) • Tours $20 (30min), $30 (1hr), $45 (1hr 30min) • 203 966 9663, woolworthtours.com • Subway J, Z to Chambers St; R, W to City Hall; #2, #3 to Park Place; #4, #5, #6 to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall In 1913, the tallest building in the world was on the opposite side of City Hall Park: the Woolworth Building (792ft) held the title until the Chrysler Building topped it in 1929.

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Around the piers Just north of Chelsea Piers are the latest instalments in the continuation of Hudson River Park, which have added large green spaces, a carousel, art displays and a skate park to piers 62, 63 and 64. Across from the piers, at the end of 19th Street, warehouses and car parks have given way to the billowing, fluid walls of Frank Gehry’s IAC Building, one of New York’s most fanciful examples of contemporary architecture. It’s right next to Jean Nouvel’s similarly striking 100 Eleventh Avenue, a glittering patchwork of glass that holds luxury condos. More new buildings with a strong design focus have followed: 515 West 23rd Street, or HL23, an extremely close neighbour of the High Line (it hangs right over it, close enough to touch), is a slick steel-and-glass work by cutting-edge architect Neil Denari; and 200 Eleventh Avenue, at the corner of 24th Street, is designed in keeping with the area’s industrial past.

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, dematerialisation, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, off-the-grid, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, urban renewal, zero-sum game

Called Beached Houses, they were intended as artists’ housing in Jamaica. A prospective Tokyo office building designed by Peter Eisenman looked like a conventional glass-walled tower that had somehow been folded over and over again until it resembled an origami construction—a dizzying collage of multiplying facets and peculiar angles. The California architect Frank Gehry had two winners, both of them actually destined to get built. Another California architect had designed a house and gallery for an art collector in Santa Fe that consisted of two groupings of cubes within cubes within cubes; it looked like the sort of building you might get if you asked M. C. Escher to design your house.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

But look at the new buildings, some planned pre-Labour. The Walsall art gallery, the Lowry Museum, the Salt Mills in Bradford, the Sage Centre and the Baltic in Gateshead, Tate Modern and the International Slavery Museum on Albert Dock in Liverpool – most were triumphs. Run-down cities ached for the ‘Bilbao effect’ – what Frank Gehry’s spectacular Guggenheim Museum had done for that depressed industrial city in Spain. Labour bought heavily into cultural construction as an instrument of regeneration. Which helps explain the Millennium Dome. Blair shared a taste for grandiose display with the project’s Tory instigator, Michael Heseltine, who had once brought an unlikely garden festival to run-down Liverpool.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Each and every modality allows for the ability of your mind to dream the waking dream in new ways. Louis Kahn designed his buildings using vine charcoal on yellow “trash” paper. This allowed him to draw over and over the same drawing and smudge it out with the ball of his hand. This affected his designs. Frank Gehry dreams in scrawls and crushed paper, and they transform magically into reality. Each modality changes even what you can even think of. The Internet is just one big step along the way to flying through understanding and the invention of patterns. It’s a good one. Tweet Me Nice Ian Gold and Joel Gold Ian Gold: Neuroscientist; Canada Research Chair in Philosophy and Psychiatry, McGill University Joel Gold: Psychiatrist; clinical assistant professor of psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine The social changes the Internet is bringing about have changed the way the two of us think about madness.

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright, Bradley Hope

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, failed state, family office, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, Global Witness, high net worth, junk bonds, low interest rates, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Virgin Galactic

A series of red flags—from the involvement of Jho Low, to the unusual decision to obtain a guarantee from the fund of another country, to 1MDB’s willingness to overpay for the power plants—were all overlooked. In May, Tim Leissner was late for a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Singapore’s ION Orchard, a futuristic shopping center that looked as if it had been designed by an understudy of Frank Gehry. As he entered, Leissner saw that the other guests sat around a circular banquet table. The group included 1MDB executives, Jho Low, Roger Ng (the Goldman banker), as well as Yak Yew Chee of BSI and compliance officers from the Swiss bank. Leissner was annoyed to be there and told participants he could not stay for long.

The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis

A Pattern Language, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, gentrification, place-making, South China Sea, the scientific method, Wunderkammern

Afterward, if they don’t head back to gambling, they go clubbing at Tao, to check out whether the sisters at the bar are Olsen or Hilton. There used to be an art gallery at the Venetian, a branch of the Guggenheim. Designed by the prominent European architect Rem Koolhaas, it was a casket of treasures clad in corten steel. The first exhibition showcased masterpieces of impressionism. The second, curated by the enfant terrible Frank Gehry, addressed itself to the Art of the Motorcycle. The gallery is closed now. No one needs to look at art when they’re in Las Vegas. The fourteen thousand citizens of the Venetian are looked after by about the same number of servants. Silent Mexicans push cleaning trollies up and down the carpeted corridors; punchy actors read the incomprehensible menus in the restaurants; inscrutable Eurasian women deal cards and spin the wheels of fortune.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

What he didn’t say was that even humans couldn’t agree on what was and what was not hate speech. * * * — TWO years earlier, in the summer of 2016, after AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol and before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Zuckerberg sat down at a conference table inside Building 20, the new centerpiece of the company campus in Menlo Park. Designed by Frank Gehry, it was a long, flat building on steel stilts that spanned more than four hundred thirty thousand square feet, seven times the size of a football field. The roof was its own Central Park, nine acres of grass and trees and gravel walkways where Facebookers sat or strolled whenever they liked. On the inside, it was one big open space holding over two thousand eight hundred employees, and filled with desks and chairs and laptops.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

Maybe this is what the world would be like in the future—people across nations and cultures all talking about the same fun thing at the same time, with Facebook and BuzzFeed uniting them. Jonah learned that he’d misunderstood Facebook’s point of view when Chris Cox introduced him to Adam Mosseri at a party on the sprawling roof garden of the building Frank Gehry had designed for Facebook in Menlo Park. Mosseri, a tall and unusually open Facebook executive, was in charge of News Feed. His decisions could make or break publishers. “How often do you think things should go viral like the Dress?” Mosseri asked. Jonah was surprised by the question—and by the idea that the frequency of things going viral was up to Mosseri’s team.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

In September 2019, activists with loudhailers and hi-vis jackets targeted Palantir, a data-mining defence contractor co-founded by a controversial Trump-supporting tech billionaire.6 Two months later, roughly 200 Google employees and their supporters demonstrated outside of their own company’s San Francisco offices after the tech giant dismissed two employees – ironically, for organising protests against the tech giant’s own behaviour including its work on a project to build a censored search engine for China and cloud services for the fossil fuel industry.7 And after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, a group of ‘Raging Grannies’ demonstrated outside Facebook’s sprawling, Frank Gehry-designed head office in Silicon Valley, declaring that “privacy should be the default setting”. Whereas once the primary focus of privacy campaigners was on state surveillance, the role of private tech companies in our lives has become a political issue in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977. Blake, Peter. God's Own Junkyard. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. . Form Follows Fiasco. Boston : Atlantic Monthly Press, 1977. Bletter, Rosmarie Haag, van Bruggen, Coosje; Friedman, Mildred; Giovannini, Joseph; Hines, Thomas, Viladas, Pilar. The Architecture of Frank Gehry. New York: Rizzoli, 1986. Brooks, Paul. The View from Lincoln Hill: Man and the Land in a New England Town. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Browne, Ray B . , and Fishwick, Marshall (eds). Icons of America. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1978. Calthorpe, Peter; Kelbaugh, Doug; et al.

I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Ken Thompson, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Snapchat, War on Poverty

He looks up and around, casting a glance at the high ceiling. This new Staten Island court had been under construction when Eric Garner was killed. Now completed, it’s a gaudy, idiosyncratic piece of architecture, difficult to navigate but full of common space, curious angles, and sunlight. If you can imagine Frank Gehry designing a morgue, it might look something like this. Annan scrolls through his phone. Someone has sent him the mug shot of Robert Lewis Dear, the fifty-seven-year-old white lunatic who shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs a little over a month before. Dear shot five cops and killed one, but the police conspicuously forgot to beat him after capture, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed in Eric Garner’s old neighborhood.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

Craig Venter, and the publicly funded consortium, headed by Francis Collins and Erik Lander, declared a tie in their race to sequence the human genome, Venter, Collins, and Lander have been sparring over who deserves credit for the breakthrough. In reality, none of them does: the genome project was a collaboration of hundreds, if not thousands, of hard-working scientists, without whom there would be no credit to disburse. In architecture, the situation is much the same. Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, and Frank Gehry are all revered for their striking designs, but without the teams of talented engineers and legions of construction workers who enable their drawings to actually stand up, none of these architects would have ever “created” a thing. The monumental maybe is too hard to comprehend directly, and so our minds react by representing an entire enterprise or period of history with a single person or part—an icon.

This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War by David F. Krugler

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Berlin Wall, City Beautiful movement, colonial rule, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, full employment, glass ceiling, index card, launch on warning, Lewis Mumford, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, urban planning, Victor Gruen, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Like Reston, Columbia had approximately 50,000 residents by the mid1980s. Rouse actively participated in the planning and development of Columbia, and he insisted that builders and realtors abjure racial discrimination. He proudly located his company’s headquarters in the town center and commissioned architect Frank Gehry to design an exhibition building. Galleria, the shopping mall, had a glass ceiling, trees, and fountains. Columbia soon enticed people looking for a community that blended the best features of urban, suburban, and small town living. Historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom: “by the late 1960s and early 1970s, Columbia was poised as an attractive alternative to surrounding suburbs.”64 Augur and Stein could hardly have wanted more for their own imagined cluster cities.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Yet, through determination and planning, the local government was able to persuade the Guggenheim Foundation to share its collection and to launch an architectural competition attracting bids from the world’s staritects. A site was then chosen that was once Spain’s leading steelyard, the centre for the ship-building industry that moved to Asia decades ago. In the end, the LA-based architect Frank Gehry was selected, and the result was less of a building, more of a glistening tumult of curves, metal and glass. The Guggenheim, Bilbao is the architectural equivalent of Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday’. Costing over $100 million to build, it was never a project for a faint-hearted municipality.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Cities like Barcelona, Istanbul, New York and Melbourne get branded, for example, as tourist destinations or as hubs for business activities by virtue of their unique characteristics and special cultural qualities. If there are no particularly unique features to hand, then hire some famous architect, like Frank Gehry, to build a signature building (like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao) to fill the gap.6 History, culture, uniqueness and authenticity are everywhere commodified and sold to tourists, prospective entrepreneurs and corporate heads alike, yielding monopoly rents to landed interests, property developers and speculators.

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

* * * Ted Boutrous is a powerhouse attorney with Gibson Dunn, a major corporate law firm. He has a plum corner office on the fifty-fourth floor of 333 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, along the northeastern corner of the building. If he spins around in his desk chair he directly overlooks Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, the brushed metal home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Although he was born in Los Angeles, the silver-haired Boutrous was raised in Bismarck, North Dakota, his mother’s hometown. As he grew up he decided he wanted to abandon the frozen plains for blistering deserts.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

His email to Spiegel was the same kind of suggestive-without-saying-anything outreach that Systrom had received from tech giants when the Instagram app first started blowing up. Spiegel subtly played hard to get. “Thanks :) would be happy to meet—I’ll let you know when I make it up to the Bay Area,” he replied. Zuckerberg responded, saying he would just happen to be in Los Angeles soon. He had to meet Frank Gehry, the architect who was going to design another building on the Facebook campus. Could they meet near the beach? Spiegel agreed, and he and cofounder Murphy met Zuckerberg in a private apartment that Facebook rented for the occasion. Once they were together in person, Zuckerberg abandoned the flattery and went straight to threats.

The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

The government required that the power station be left in place and, without much explanation, that the site should have its own spur from the Northern Line Tube. In return developers would be allowed what became the drastic overdevelopment of the site itself. A Malaysian consortium was granted permission for 4,239 flats on the site, twice the size of the Barbican. Architects such as Norman Foster and Frank Gehry were asked to design cliff-like slab blocks divided by narrow canyons. To add to the project’s appeal to its intended investors, the main square was named Malaysia Square, and fashioned round that country’s national flower, the hibiscus. The whole was called, with heavy irony, a ‘village’. There was no pretence of the development being for Londoners, and it was launched in January 2013 by Malaysia’s ‘minister for local government’ in Kuala Lumpur, where the mayor Boris Johnson went in 2014 to help with sales.

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir by Cat Marnell

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, East Village, Frank Gehry, impulse control, Joan Didion, messenger bag, Norman Mailer, period drama, pez dispenser, Rosa Parks, Russell Brand, urban decay, walkable city, Wall-E, Zipcar

Kara would instant-message Holly her breakfast order at quarter past ten—fashion magazines start the day at ten, not nine—and Holly would IM me at my intern desk, and I’d grab Kara’s dining card and zoom down to the fourth floor. Or I guess I couldn’t really “zoom” anywhere in my stupid secondhand YSL wedges. It was more like I clip-clopped. Clip-clop clip-clop clip-clop. That is the sound of interning! If I was lucky, there would be someone interesting in the Frank Gehry–designed cafeteria, like Si Newhouse, who owned Condé Nast. He was short and old and really cute; he always rocked a gray sweatshirt over a neon-yellow polo. He’d be slowly helping himself to things at the fruit salad bar. I’d grab Kara’s smoothie and two turkey sausage links. Then clip-clop clip-clop clip-clop.

Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

Regardless of race, ethnicity, or class, a resident takes a visitor to these places to “present” the city. In today’s corporatized world, the image of a city is increasingly being influenced by giant electronic billboards, the sights and sounds of commercial streets, mega malls, and recently by signature architecture. Designed by Frank Gehry, Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, New York’s Beekman Tower, and Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario are symbols of the new urban aesthetics. These places are on view for all to see and identify with, even if they are not entered. Similarly, museums, zoos, theatres, cinemas, and music halls are symbolic unifiers of citizens, even if not all benefit from them.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Candy and Candy are an example of how the twin gilded ages—the rise of the plutocrats not just in the West but also in the emerging markets—has expanded the market for the superstars who work for them and thus driven up the prices those at the very top of their professions can command. You can see the power of globalization in the divergent careers of two North American architects born just twenty years apart. Gordon Bunshaft was born in 1909 in Buffalo, New York. Frank Gehry was born in 1929, a hundred miles to the north, in Toronto. Both had Eastern European roots—Bunshaft’s parents were Russian Jews; Gehry’s people were Polish Jews. Both went on to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor. But you have almost certainly heard of Gehry, and you probably haven’t heard of Bunshaft.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

James even suspected that the open, experimental mindset – so critical of the world as it is, so minded that things could be different – betrays in fact a fear of commitment; in his words, the eternal experimenter suffers from ‘dread of the irrevocable, which often engenders a type of character incapable of prompt and vigorous resolve’. Free of that neurosis, the maker follows a crooked path from the possible to the doable.11 The pragmatist problem of how to crystallize an open practice came home to Mitchell in a particular way. A few years after The City of Bits appeared, Mitchell, along with the architect Frank Gehry, sponsored a project seeking to design a high-tech, self-drive automobile which would be a pleasure to ride in, rather than serve just as a mechanical container; they wanted to achieve an elusive goal Mitchell called the ‘aesthetics of motion’. Pressed by me to define this phrase, he answered, ‘I don’t know yet’ – which was a Media Lab sort of answer.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

Ording’s design animations, embedded since the earliest days, sharpened by Chaudhri’s sense of style, might be one reason we’re all so hooked on our smartphones. And they did it all on basic Adobe software. “We built the entire UI using Photoshop and Director,” Chaudhri says, laughing. “It was like building a Frank Gehry piece out of aluminum foil. It was the biggest hack of all time.” Years later, they told Adobe—“They were fucking floored.” Glitches By the end of 2003, Apple still hadn’t completed its rebound into a cash-rich megacompany. And some employees were beset by standard-issue workplace woes: low pay and bad office equipment.

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar