Missed some of our articles, Tweets, and Facebook posts from the last few days? Don’t sweat it—we’ve gathered the week’s must-read stories right here. Enjoy!
Las Vegas gambles its future on sports, conventions, and lesiure
As Las Vegas recovers from the Great Recession, city and business leaders are betting that the region’s future lies in a more diverse set of recreational offerings than the ones that made the city famous. Though many of the transformative projects are still in the planning or construction phases, the signs are clear: The boom-and-bust region is moving away from a strictly gambling-focused urbanism toward one more broadly defined by indiscriminate leisure, including sports, large-scale conventions, relaxation, and even traditional mixed-use urbanism.
Louis Kahn’s architecture comes home to Philadelphia with major exhibition
Last Friday, an exhibition on the late U.S. architect Louis Isadore Kahn opened in Philadelphia, the city where he practiced during the majority of his life. Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture details the architect’s career as well as his journey to the U.S. from the former U.S.S.R. and his early forays into the design world.
What’s being done—or not—to save Manhattan’s small businesses from Amazon and big box competition
High rent, high taxes, regulations that favor owners over tenants, and plain old capitalism—the incentive for owners to seek their property’s maximum value, and the consumer’s desire to acquire goods at the lowest price—all contribute to the twin plagues of vacancy and the mall-ification (national chains displacing small, local businesses) of Manhattan. Stakeholders, though, disagree on what should be done to solve a growing crisis at street level.
Henry Urbach on curating architecture, The Glass House, and what’s next for him
The Architect’s Newspaper Editor-in-Chief William Menking sat down with Henry Urbach to discuss Urbach’s long and varied career as a dealer of architecture drawings, curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and director of the Philip Johnson Glass House.
New renderings revealed as Moynihan Train Hall reaches major construction milestone
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a construction milestone at the Penn-Farley complex, the soon-to-be bigger and (hopefully) better train station on Manhattan’s West Side. This was the last time the James A. Farley Post Office, re-christened as the Moynihan Train Hall, will be open to the public before it’s transformed into a transit hub by SOM.