Amidst the bleak outlook of American retail, the restaurant and hospitality industry has fared pretty well. Sure, in many respects, restaurants are a subcategory within retail, but compared to a clothing boutique or a bookstore, the business model uses different benchmarks for success, a widely different employment structure, and a different means of handling its
The transformation of Washington DC’s Navy Yard over the last fifteen years has been astonishing, and though I cannot account for it from firsthand experience, I don’t need to: a quick trip using the archive tool with Google Street View will show how much development has taken place since 2007, when Google first introduced the
In an older part of town at the center of the industrial heartland, it’s no surprise when we stumble upon an aging eyesore of a commercial building.It’s hard to imagine this brittle old man has been put to work at all in the last quarter century. Not only does he appear to be missing a
Carefully thought-out infrastructure—the type we actually notice because it’s so smartly conceived—is a rarity. But why? Sure, we might hold certain examples in high esteem; the Hoover Dam or Brooklyn Bridge are among the first that come to mind. But hundreds of millions of tons of civic infrastructure get dedicated, upgraded, or repaired every year,
A railing on a sidewalk may seem like a humble installation, in the context of the vast strip mall that surrounds it. And it is. But it does seem odd, almost random, based on the environment. Why does this twelve-foot stretch of sidewalk need two railings when nothing around it has them? A view from
Amidst the bleak outlook of American retail, the restaurant and hospitality industry has fared pretty well. Sure, in many respects, restaurants are a subcategory within retail, but compared to a clothing boutique or
The transformation of Washington DC’s Navy Yard over the last fifteen years has been astonishing, and though I cannot account for it from firsthand experience, I don’t need to: a quick trip using
In an older part of town at the center of the industrial heartland, it’s no surprise when we stumble upon an aging eyesore of a commercial building.It’s hard to imagine this brittle old
Carefully thought-out infrastructure—the type we actually notice because it’s so smartly conceived—is a rarity. But why? Sure, we might hold certain examples in high esteem; the Hoover Dam or Brooklyn Bridge are among
A railing on a sidewalk may seem like a humble installation, in the context of the vast strip mall that surrounds it. And it is. But it does seem odd, almost random, based