Humor

Liisa Ecola reviews “If/Then”, a new musical that follows the personal and professional paths chosen by professional planners. There's a good chance this will be the first Broadway musical to feature a heroine who has a PhD in city planning.

November 13, 2013 - DC.Streetsblog

Images of a new apartment development in Qingdao, Shandong province have caused a stir on the Internet in recent weeks. The reason? Builders painted dozens of fake windows along the high-rise buildings' facades. Who were they trying to fool?

November 8, 2013 - Business Insider

Subway conductors, especially in New York, can be a gruff lot. And not without reason: they have a serious and essential job to do in very public, often stressful, conditions. To show their appreciation, two riders devised a way to make them smile.

November 1, 2013 - Gawker

Apparently ghost towns aren't only found in America's Old West and at former nuclear test sites. Lifestyle website Thrillist has collected seven of the world's creepiest ghost towns.

October 31, 2013 - Thrillist

In honor of Halloween, the Geographic Information System (GIS) software company ESRI has mapped the locations of more than 200 of the top-rated horror films of all-time.

October 31, 2013 - ESRI

Haunted houses are benign. If you want real evil, suggests Keith Eggener, look to the sentient houses in fiction and film that are "born bad". From Poe to Siddons, he explores examples of "architecture gone terribly wrong".

October 31, 2013 - Places

Jonathan Hull, a 37-year-old graphic designer from Salt Lake City, has assembled an horrific catalog of America's "demonic, hellish, and Satan-flavored" appellations.

October 31, 2013 - The Atlantic Cities

Could a 1,300-mile bike path along the length of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline quell the concerns of environmentalists? A "tongue-in-cheek" design put forth by SWA group doesn't appear to have won admirers on either side of the debate.

October 31, 2013 - Bloomberg

Once again, the fine people at the real estate web portal Zillow have assembled their top 20 cities for trick-or-treating. This year they've gone one step further and identified the top 5 neighborhoods in each city for enterprising candy collectors.

October 31, 2013 - Zillow

No doubt, a few angry fingers were wagged in Xi'an, Shaanxi province after a superblock of apartments was built where an eight-lane highway was supposed to go. The solution: just build the highway though it.

October 25, 2013 - The Daily Mail

Some cities see citations as the best way to improve bike safety; others focus on educational classes. But in Boston, a crew of rapping puppets encourage riders to "Put Your Helmet On".

October 18, 2013 - The Atlantic Cities

They're used to designing homes and vanity projects for dictators and developers, but have the world's leading architects ever designed for a doll?

October 11, 2013 - The Guardian

Who needs four years of costly undergraduate education in History (sorry Mom & Dad) when you can just consult John B. Sparks' "Histomap" of 1931. Writing in Slate's "The Vault" blog, Rebecca Onion looks at the 5-foot-long guide to world history.

October 4, 2013 - Slate

When the infamous real estate and development board game was created, it took the streets of Atlantic City, NJ as the inspiration for its property names. In a photo tour through the city, Nick Carr notes how these streets appear today.

October 1, 2013 - Scouting New York

What do an upside-down White House, a toilet-shaped museum, and a planetarium shaped like Saturn and its rings have in common? All can be found in futurist website io9's collection of the world's most extreme buildings.

September 27, 2013 - io9

Though the Wall Street Journal's editorial board and Victoria's Secret Angels are unlikely to ride one, Citi Bikes have attracted a wide swath of New Yorkers. Apparently this also includes the city's ample supply of weirdos.

September 20, 2013 - Grist

If American politicans and bureaucrats had favored public transit or pedestrians as aggressively as they favored cars in the 20th century, public policy would be very different indeed.

September 8, 2013 - Michael Lewyn

Satirical newspaper The Onion has released the results of a nationwide poll to determine what the country's residents associate with the word "America". Rather than apple pie, the flag, or baseball, the resounding choice was a strip mall parking lot.

August 30, 2013 - The Onion

If you love the transportation-related puns you've been subjected to over repeated viewings of Cars, Cars 2, and, now, Planes with your children, you're going to be excited to hear about what Disney is working on now.

August 23, 2013 - Funny Or Die

In a 1957 book, author Selden Rodman collected conversations with 35 of America's preeminent artists and architects. The interviews with Frank Lloyd Wright are a font of choice quotes on topics from Le Corbusier to NYC's density.

August 22, 2013 - Brain Pickings