Month: June 2016

In Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City, we are introduced to a cavalcade of nefarious characters. Manaugh interviews burglars, ex-burglars, cops, ex-cops/burglars, and others to map a built environment that the average person never sees and, he contends, the average architect never considers. In his Oculus Book Talk at the Center for Architecture on 05.09.16, he maintained that the reason he wrote the book was to illuminate (but not celebrate, we find, at the end of the text) a spatial imagination and sensitivity to the built environment in a population other than the trained architect. This intent leads the reader through a dizzying number of anecdotes to support this notion. We fly through L.A. with an Air Support Division officer who debunks the 1990s paranoia of author Mike Davis by showing that there are no numbers on rooftops that tag every quadrant of the city. While the LAPD has “suggested” that this would help with security, the “space police” have yet to execute this strategy. Manaugh takes the readers to Locksport events, the lock-picking Olympics, and, most interestingly, interviews a Roman historian who specializes in early Roman home invasion. Continue reading “Oculus Book Review: A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh”

The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up was a key figure at the Center for Architecture on 05.31.16. Throughout “Connecting Research and Age-Friendly Design,” panelists and audience members referenced Peter Pan as a figure who is often present in how we design buildings and communities, as well as in how we think about ourselves. Though we would all like to believe we will never grow old, we cannot continue to design and build spaces that do not support an aging population. AARP New York Associate State Director Bill Armbruster led off his presentation by saying that he lives in a “Peter Pan house” – one that was not built with aging occupants in mind. The evening’s panelists offered their thoughts on how architects, planners, and designers can push for more inclusive physical and social environments that will accommodate our aging population. Continue reading “Connecting Research and Age-Friendly Design”