Architecture

Architect and educator Karen Van Lengen encourages us to listen more carefully to the richness of our aural environment and explains why architects should design with sound in mind.

Sociologist Colin Jerolmack explains how the inescapable pigeon can help us understand the broader systems — natural, physical, and cultural — that build our experience of the urban environment.

Maria Aiolova of Terreform ONE discusses the design group's ONE Prize, an annual design and science award that this year focused on how cities can adapt to future challenges of extreme weather, yielding winning proposals that address coastal conditions from Staten Island to Tokyo to Sumatra.

Adam Greenfield critiques the prevailing definition of the "smart city" and calls for an alternative vision that understands and responds to the messy realities of human existence.

Farzana Gandhi, Anusha Venkataraman, and Gabriela Alvarez explain the motivations behind and the design for a mobile health and wellness unit, sharing how the project can use a community's traditions to help solve some contemporary challenges.

In advance of The Architectural League's Beaux Arts Ball on September 28th at the 69th Regiment Armory, we take a look back at the civic and social role of National Guard armories in the American city.

In a recent design studio set in the context of the public housing system, Andrew Bernheimer and David Leven challenged Parsons students to confront the environmental, social, municipal, and architectural demands of creating housing in New York City.

From 2009-2011, Vishaan Chakrabarti wrote a series of opinion pieces here on Urban Omnibus arguing that urban density can be the answer to many of the nation's most pressing contemporary issues. He has since expanded...