Florida’s Division of Historic Resources awarded Florida Southern College (FSC) $400,000 in grants to maintain the school’s Frank Lloyd Wright buildings collection. FSC will match the money 100 percent, meaning $800,000 will be spent in the next two years to preserve the world’s largest collection of buildings designed by Wright, a collection that includes the recently-completed Usonian Faculty House. [Miami Herald]
The Guardian has launched a new website dedicated to cities, which architecture critic Oliver Wainwright describes as “an open platform for critical discussion and debate about the issues facing the world’s metropolitan centres, from the future of housing and transport, to public space and infrastructure;, from the nature of planning and governance, to energy and security – along with the forces of change that can’t always be planned for.” [The Guardian]
More news:
Wisconsin state senator Fred Risser is proposing to double the radius of the state Capitol building height limit in Madison, Wis. Risser wants to raise the buffer zone from one to two miles to ensure that vertical development does not spoil views of the building. [Wisconsin State Journal]
The Walk Score folks have created a “Transit Score,” and the top five American cities for public transit are, in order: New York, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. [Walk Score; h/t Curbed DC]
Microsoft created a “Where’s Waldo?” interactive for the Seattle art scene. [Gigapixel Artzoom]
The Independent’s Christopher Beanland on “our appetite for destruction”—”It’s strange how our attitudes to destroying art and destroying architecture are so different.” [The Independent]
Critics point out the environmental effects of the light plan proposed by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. [Chicago Sun-Times]
Closed since 2004, the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building in Washington, D.C. will not reopen this year as planned. [The Washington Post]
A California Senate committee reports that California Department of Transportation employees allegedly shushed quality concerns about parts built for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. [Bloomberg Businessweek]
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Frank Lloyd Wright chapel image by Malcolm Manners/Flickr via a Creative Commons license.
