Photo: Stefano Paltera/courtesy the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

Keeping tabs on the Solar Decathlon is a bit like watching a slow-moving golf tournament. Over two weeks, 20 college and university teams from around the world compete to see who has created the best residential prototype for a solar-powered home. The houses—installed in a Solar Village on the National Mall in D.C.—are judged on ten criteria ranging from architecture and lighting design to communications and net metering. The daily tallies are kept on a giant leaderboard as well as on the Decathlon Web site.

Last Thursday, as the competition was nearing a close, the house from Team California held the top slot after coming in first in the architecture competition. But by the end of the day, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had bumped California from first place with just one final contest to go: net metering. Each home is equipped with a meter to gauge how much energy it produces and consumes; a team gets 100 points for producing at least as much energy as their home needs and they get up to 50 points for generating a surplus that could go back to an energy grid. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Elevation drawings of a former Baltimore mill that now houses some 90 businesses, including the author’s small corner office

Last year, I spent several months working in New York and commuting back to Baltimore on the weekends. One night I sat in the audience of an event in Manhattan where the Baltimore-based firm Post Typography explained the benefit of inexpensive office rent. Freed from high overhead, the designers are able to take more personal and creative risks in their work.

In recent years, I’ve noticed more designers setting up shop in Baltimore in a variety of building types, from the archetypal Baltimore row house to the massive mills erected in the boom years of the Industrial Revolution. Read more…

Too often, it seems, we hear of publications abandoning their print runs for a Web-only presence. Lost and Found: Stories from New York inverts that trend. Here, the Internet encouraged the stories that now populate a physical book. And not just any book. At nearly 900 pages, Lost and Found is a bible of short stories, easily crowding out other volumes on the nightstand.

This is the second anthology of work that originally appeared on the Web site Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. Thomas Beller created the site in 2000 as an outlet for work after so many of the publications he contributed to shuttered (including the New York Times City section). As an afterthought, he says, he added a button that said “Tell Mr. Beller a Story.” And the stories poured in, from novices and Pulitzer Prize winners, from journalists and fiction writers. Jonathan Ames, Alicia Erian, Madison Smartt Bell, Mike Wallace—this book culls contributions from over a hundred contributors, including Beller himself. Read more…

Photo: Jeff Caldwell

Within hours of arriving in Detroit, nearly $14,000 worth of computers, iPods, cameras, and art supplies went missing from the backseat of a car. The robbery was surprisingly quick, executed in the few minutes the vehicle was left unguarded on the street. The two victims knew better than to leave valuables in plain site, yet they hadn’t quite expected the crime. Neither had they backed up their hard drives properly, so the loss was more than just monetary.

Welcome to Detroit. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

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For as long as I can remember, designers and educators in Baltimore have invoked the name of the Rural Studio. They looked south to Hale County and wondered how to adapt Mockbee’s full-immersion program for design students in an urban setting like Baltimore. The conversations were, pardon the pun, purely academic. In spite of a high number of colleges and universities in the region—with several programs in architecture, planning, and landscape design—curricula rarely called for students to venture beyond the quadrangle (save for the requisite study-abroad programs). Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Photo: Chrissy Nesbitt (detail) from A Public Space: Hopkins Plaza

It begins with six photographs. Paul Druecke asks six people to snap photos of the same urban public space. Those individuals then invite one person to do the same, and so on until 24 people have photographed the setting.

The Milwaukee-based artist began his project, A Public Space, in 2003, while living in Chicago. “Going into it, it was very experiential,” Druecke says. “I like to do a lot of walking and am fascinated with public spaces and the sense of self in relationship to the city. I wanted to create a system that gets other people to experience the place as well.” Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

John Ruppert’s Orb, on the grounds of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Ruppert’s sculpture helped earn him a prestigious Mary Sawyer’s Baker Prize this spring. All photos by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson unless otherwise noted.

When you see John Ruppert’s Orb from a distance, it looks as though a large soap bubble has floated to a landing. Draw closer and you realize that the seemingly delicate sphere is, in fact, fabricated from industrial chain link. Read more…

The whispers began early on Saturday morning. “Did you hear Herman Miller isn’t doing the show this year?” Pregnant pause. “Think it’s the economy?”

Amidst the glittering booths and the plastered-on trade-show smiles, there was a subtle but palpable  concern over the economy throughout the 2009 ICFF. “How will this year’s fair compare with years past?” everyone wondered. And the obvious answer seemed to be: not very well. Read more…

I’m making the rounds of booths specializing in bath fixtures and furniture, and the first thing I notice is … GOLD. Usually we’re awash (pun intended) in chrome, but several lines are introducing brassy finishes this year.

Sink and fixture from Kohler

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There’s lots to take in at the Italian Trade Commission’s New York Ceramic Tile Center. The sprawling booth includes samples from a number of designers. Here are a few favorites.

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