

BIG just announced its first project in South America. It is a 33 storey residential building in Quito, Ecuador. When completed, it will be the tallest building in the city. The developer is Uribe and Schwarzkopf.
Here are a couple of other images:


BIG just announced its first project in South America. It is a 33 storey residential building in Quito, Ecuador. When completed, it will be the tallest building in the city. The developer is Uribe and Schwarzkopf.
Here are a couple of other images:


BIG just announced its first project in South America. It is a 33 storey residential building in Quito, Ecuador. When completed, it will be the tallest building in the city. The developer is Uribe and Schwarzkopf.
Here are a couple of other images:


The building is made up of “concrete boxes” that, when rotated, create terraces for the apartments. On one corner of the building the apartments are “through-units”, meaning they have two exposures. In this case, it is north and south.
While different, we are starting to see some similarities across BIG’s projects, which isn’t meant as a criticism. I am thinking of Telus Sky, Vancouver House, and even KING Toronto.
They are, at least partially, about expressing the individual apartments and creating opportunities for outdoor spaces. This also serves to break down the overall scale of the building.
What do you think of the project?
Images: BIG

Each year, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are tasked with designing and then physically building a new single-family house in an economically depressed neighborhood. Sometimes, like this year, the house may have multiple dwelling units.
I have always thought that this is a great exercise both from a pedagogical standpoint and from a positive impact standpoint. Young architecture students get to experience designing and building something from scratch, and lower-income families get a new house. I toured one of the completed houses in New Haven back in, I think, 2005.
This building project, which was started in 1967, is fairly unique among architecture schools, though others have replicated the model. When I was living in the US, I spent a few weekends working on homes for Rebuilding Together Philadelphia. But the scope was fairly limited. It was nothing like this.
I think more schools should do this. And I also wonder if there aren’t permutations of this model that could live outside of the university context.
Image: Yale
According to a recent study in the New York Times, the average age of a first-time mother in Manhattan is 31.1 years old. In San Francisco County, the number is nearly 32. And in the US as a whole, it was 26.3 in 2016.
This is what the national distribution looked like in 1980:

And this is what it looked like in 2016:

Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest factor influencing the age of a first-time mother is education. Becoming educated and building a career takes time. First-time mothers tend to be older in big cities (particularly on the coasts) compared to rural areas.
The concern that researchers have with all of this is that it is symptomatic of growing inequality. Scrolling over the NY Times’ map, it would appear that there’s nearly a 10 year gap between the coasts and many parts of the country.
On the one hand you have people who are finishing high school and having kids fairly soon after. And on the other hand, you have people going to college, establishing their career, and waiting, in some cases a decade, to have kids.
This is significant because it can create a virtuous circle (excerpt from article):
“A college degree is increasingly essential to earning a middle-class wage, and older parents have more years to earn money to invest in violin lessons, math tutoring and college savings accounts — all of which can set children on very different paths.”
Unequal childhoods can lead to unequal outcomes.
Images: New York Times


The building is made up of “concrete boxes” that, when rotated, create terraces for the apartments. On one corner of the building the apartments are “through-units”, meaning they have two exposures. In this case, it is north and south.
While different, we are starting to see some similarities across BIG’s projects, which isn’t meant as a criticism. I am thinking of Telus Sky, Vancouver House, and even KING Toronto.
They are, at least partially, about expressing the individual apartments and creating opportunities for outdoor spaces. This also serves to break down the overall scale of the building.
What do you think of the project?
Images: BIG

Each year, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are tasked with designing and then physically building a new single-family house in an economically depressed neighborhood. Sometimes, like this year, the house may have multiple dwelling units.
I have always thought that this is a great exercise both from a pedagogical standpoint and from a positive impact standpoint. Young architecture students get to experience designing and building something from scratch, and lower-income families get a new house. I toured one of the completed houses in New Haven back in, I think, 2005.
This building project, which was started in 1967, is fairly unique among architecture schools, though others have replicated the model. When I was living in the US, I spent a few weekends working on homes for Rebuilding Together Philadelphia. But the scope was fairly limited. It was nothing like this.
I think more schools should do this. And I also wonder if there aren’t permutations of this model that could live outside of the university context.
Image: Yale
According to a recent study in the New York Times, the average age of a first-time mother in Manhattan is 31.1 years old. In San Francisco County, the number is nearly 32. And in the US as a whole, it was 26.3 in 2016.
This is what the national distribution looked like in 1980:

And this is what it looked like in 2016:

Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest factor influencing the age of a first-time mother is education. Becoming educated and building a career takes time. First-time mothers tend to be older in big cities (particularly on the coasts) compared to rural areas.
The concern that researchers have with all of this is that it is symptomatic of growing inequality. Scrolling over the NY Times’ map, it would appear that there’s nearly a 10 year gap between the coasts and many parts of the country.
On the one hand you have people who are finishing high school and having kids fairly soon after. And on the other hand, you have people going to college, establishing their career, and waiting, in some cases a decade, to have kids.
This is significant because it can create a virtuous circle (excerpt from article):
“A college degree is increasingly essential to earning a middle-class wage, and older parents have more years to earn money to invest in violin lessons, math tutoring and college savings accounts — all of which can set children on very different paths.”
Unequal childhoods can lead to unequal outcomes.
Images: New York Times
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