"Hello, my name is Mister Glasses, and I'm an architect." The lonely struggle of the designer of the McKinny Factory Home and the Duluth Sanitarium. (Thanks to John Cantwell.) [MB] […]

Peak Water: Peter Gleick, founder of the San Francisco-based Pacific Institute, gave a recent talk at the World Affairs Council, "From Peak Oil to Peak Water," on the looming crisis of diminishing access to safe water and the critical role of conservation — a major challenge for urban policy and design. How bad will it get? Read Rebecca Solnit […]

Chris Mottalini has been photographing the demolition of homes designed by Paul Rudolph. This collection (follow the link for "after you left, they took it apart") is a beautiful record of the lack of appreciation for midcentury modernism. (Thanks to Nate Huyler.) [JSC] […]

An I.Q. Test for aficionados of modernist furniture: Donald Judd, or Cheap Furniture? [LW] […]

The biggest social network on the web — that’s Facebook, by the way — is getting ready to unveil a location sharing service of its own, according to a report Tuesday. Citing unnamed sources, The New York Times’ Bits blog says there will be two components, “a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users [...] […]

Google has announced a new geocoding web service app authors can use to better plot locations on a map. The new Google Geocoding Web Service includes some enhanced capabilities that not only make it possible for app developers to provide more accurate and granular locations in their apps, but it also lets them increase the performance [...] […]

Browsing the web on one of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers is like taking a step backwards in time. It’s clunky and has only limited support for web standards, and bare-bones JavaScript capabilities. But now Amazon may be looking to add browser engineers to the Kindle team, according to the job listings on the company’s website. A job posting [...] […]

We’re giving away a pair of passes to Google I/O today. A little over a week ago, we kicked off our contest, encouraging you to send us any HTML5 web apps or Google Chrome browser extensions you’ve built. Alternatively, we asked you to tell us how you’d describe a web app to your grandmother. We got [...] […]