Built Environment: The Latest Architecture and News

The fragility—and temporal beauty—of neon has captivated audiences since the early 1900s. First shown commercially by French engineer Georges Claude at the 1910 Paris Motor Show, neon spread rapidly, achieving broad popularity in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s. Mid-century America saw it everywhere: from the casinos of the Las Vegas Strip to roadside motor inns along Route 66 and the spectacle of Times Square. By the latter half of the century, however, many signs were scrapped or left to decay, and numerous municipalities restricted neon as visually garish or power-hungry—despite the technology's comparatively modest energy use. In the U.S., renewed interest in neon arguably didn't meaningfully return until the early 2000s.

In Hong Kong, by contrast, neon was embraced with unusual enthusiasm at a time when it began to lose popularity elsewhere. Even as installation slowed in recent decades—largely due to updated ordinances requiring removal of overhanging signs whose support structures failed to meet safety standards—the city's affinity for neon never fully disappeared.

+ 16

What does optimism feel like in cities that can no longer rely on perfection as their ultimate ambition? Across the world, urban environments bear the weight of overlapping pressures: climate volatility, spatial inequality, political fragmentation, public distrust, and chronic infrastructural disinvestment. These realities render the idea of an ideal city increasingly detached from lived experience. Yet the hope for building better systems persists. While utopian visions may seem like an escape from the growing complexities of the modern world, the greater challenge for contemporary city-making is to confront those complexities rather than avoid them.

+ 16

Videos

Urban renewal is inherently fraught—financially complex, politically exposed, stakeholder-dense, and almost guaranteed to leave someone dissatisfied. Precisely for these reasons, many cities default to inertia rather than risk the upheaval that comes with reworking entrenched urban fabrics, their residences, and their dynamics; once the "sleeping bear" is prodded, unexpected complications tend to multiply.

Miyashita Park (Miyashita Kōen), located in Shibuya, Tokyo, crystallizes this dilemma. Its current form—a layered, mixed-use complex balancing commercial activity with a publicly accessible park—emerged from years of negotiation, critique, and recalibration. The result is a distinctive example of a public-private partnership that seeks to align urban amenity, everyday leisure, and economic viability, producing a new piece of city that hosts public life while underwriting its own upkeep.

+ 24

Domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore are the city's quiet infrastructure. In Hong Kong alone, there are a total of roughly 300,000 domestic workers, serving a portion of the approximate 2.7 million households. Their care labor sustains dual-income family routines: childcare, eldercare, cooking, cleaning, and the everyday logistics that make professional life possible. Yet the people who hold this balance together remain largely invisible in policy—and, crucially, in space.

On Sundays in Hong Kong's financial district, that invisibility becomes visible. Elevated walkways and podium forecourts—underused on weekends—turn into ad-hoc commons. With cardboard mats, small tents, towels, food and water, and a music speaker or two, domestic workers assemble places to sit, rest, and socialize. These improvised rooms in the city are often their only chance to exercise spatial agency—something they rarely have in the homes they maintain or in formal public infrastructure. In the absence of sanctioned, serviced places for rest, quieter bridges and passages become practical stand-ins.

+ 17

Historically—like other cultural forms—architecture has been documented, shared, and promoted primarily through print. Books, journals, and magazines carried the discipline's arguments and images, and because architectural practice relies so heavily on visual communication, printed journals created a bridge between academic publications and commercial magazines. Through the postwar decades, beautifully produced volumes curated a collective point of view, signaling what the field broadly considered discussion-worthy or exemplary.

Across major cultural centers, a handful of publications shaped this discourse: Their perspectives were typically sophisticated, professional, and carefully edited—distilling an unruly global output into a small constellation of remarkable projects. The system arguably privileged certain practices and geographies, but it also amplified architecture for wider audiences. Buildings began to lodge in public imagination; cultural travel—journeys taken expressly to experience architecture—moved from rarity toward ritual.

+ 4

Architecture's design process has always been shaped by the tools at hand. We once drew with pen and ink on fragile sheets, copied by blueprint and guarded against smudges and tears; then Mylar arrived, making revisions and preservation easier and nudging drawings toward a leaner, more deliberate economy of lines. Computer-aided drafting followed, speeding coordination and changing how we think about scale and precision. Today, AI adds another layer—gathering information in seconds and spinning images on command—promising new efficiencies while raising fresh questions about authorship and craft. What we make, and how we make it, has evolved with each tool; the history of our methods is the history of our ideas.

Beginning in the post-war era, Mylar (developed in the 1950s) eased drawing reproduction and hastened the shift from blueprint to whiteprint processes. Before Mylar, simply preserving drawings—keeping an idea intact, legible, and undamaged—was a significant task. Post-war design priorities often leaned toward efficiency, simplicity, and an industrial minimalism aligned with reconstruction needs. The tools reinforced this: architectural work remained predominantly hand-drawn, where every line took time to lay down and even more time to erase. That labour sharpened the economy of drawing; each stroke had to earn its place.

+ 10