“Buci Bird,” Paris. To shoot his 360-degree wide-angle panoramas, photographer Brent Townshend takes between 18 and 24 frames while slowly turning around in a circle.

If you were a fish and could spin like a ballerina with your chin in the air, you might see the world the way Brent Townshend photographs it. The Bay Area-based artist has traveled the world—London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco, of course—with his fish-eye lens pointed skyward, snapping 360-degree panoramas of clouds, bridges, and towers in as many as 1,000 photos a take. “When you walk around in a cityscape, you live on a very horizontal plane, from the ground to maybe a few degrees above,” says Townshend, whose work is on view in a group show at San Francisco’s Modernbook Gallery through June 29. Shooting wide-angle, he says, “allows you to capture this wide view and put it into a single viewpoint.” Have you ever seen Grand Central like this?

“Grand Central Terminal,” New York. 

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Images courtesy of Ben Thomas

Australian photographer Ben Thomas has a talent for making us look at the world from a radically different perspective. One of the major popularizers of tilt-shift photography, Thomas experimented with perceptions of scale with his “Cityshrinker” project. Now, the same artist inverts the globe and gives it a ceiling, creating fascinating cityscapes based on the real world in his series “Accession.”

Ranging from New York and San Francisco to Tokyo, the series focuses on exterior superurban conditions. However, some of the most captivating images in the series deal with the simpler geometries of interiors and infrastructures, lending the compositions an air of Russian Constructivism. Check out more images from the series below!

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All images via

The reviews on the new SimCity have been plentiful, so there is not much one could add from a gaming perspective. There was the extremely bungled launch, when players could not access servers for at least a week. There is the always-online aspect of the game, which prevents access in internet-remote locations. And there is the not-completely-fixed AI that runs the Sims (the inhabitants of SimCity) as well of their vehicles. All of this has left many older players, who often grew up playing previous versions of SimCity, feeling betrayed.

Beyond these issues, there is a stunningly realistic simulation of complex urban issues. Which is why we thought it time to look at one previously unexplored aspect of SimCity: its architecture. The game has had a tremendous impact on the fields of architecture, design, and urbanism, from bringing young players into these professions to prompting architecture students to dream up studio projects within the simulation. Some fans have gone so far as to use the game to accurately model real-world traffic set-ups. Read more below!

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View of the expansion from Yerba Buena, across Third Street.

Back in 1995, when SFMOMA opened its granite-and-brick building in San Francisco’s South of Market district, the museum was an early cultural presence in a transitioning industrial area. “We were pioneers in this neighborhood,” museum director Neal Benezra said at Wednesday’s groundbreaking ceremony for the much-anticipated expansion by Snøhetta. Back then, Mario Botta’s fortress of patterned brick worked well on a street where there was little else to connect to.

Eighteen years later, the museum has grown—with two or three times its original collection and programming, said Benezra—and the neighborhood along with it. South of Market is now the home of Twitter and a host of other tech companies, and with the Transbay Transit Center going up in its back yard, SFMOMA is not one to miss out on the neighborhood’s latest growth spurt. The expansion includes a 10-story tower in rippling lightweight concrete tucked behind the Botta building, along with new pedestrian entrances from alleyways and a 50-foot-tall green wall on a neighboring parking garage. When the building opens in early 2016, the museum will double its current exhibition capacity and add 41,000 square feet of unticketed public space.

After remarks from Benezra, board chair Charles Schwab, and Mayor Ed Lee, Snøhetta principal Craig Dykers took the stage. He described the expansion’s progress in an elaborate birthing metaphor, a process instigated by dozens of consultants engaged in architectural “polyamory.” Whatever the means, this new stepchild will make an extrovert out of the Botta building. “The museum, which was once introverted, will be open to passersby,” said Dykers. Whether the ensuing burst of silver confetti was meant to signal the beginning of labor—or some sort of giant collective archigasm—we’ll never be sure! Read more.

Photo © Drew Altizer Photography

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The New Haven, Marseille, 2013.

When the San Francisco-based artist (and avid surfer) Jay Nelson wanted a car he could sleep in for his frequent trips to the coast, he didn’t need an RV—just a new way of looking at a sedan. Nelson had acquired a rusting 1986 Honda Civic, and with the addition some plywood, fiberglass, and a set of porthole windows, he built himself a barn-style bedroom over the trunk. If Buckminster Fuller had been a beach bum, he might have arrived at a motor-pod like this. Sleeping in cars never looked so good!

Since that first rusted Honda, Nelson has unleashed his woodworking skills on a string of consumer vehicles: He’s hitched his faceted plywood domes to cars, boats and, once, a scooter. No two rigs are ever alike, but they all have a rack for a surfboard.

Now, as a newly minted artist in residence at Facebook, Nelson is working on a design for Silicon Valley’s youngest architecture snob, Mark Zuckerberg. Read more!

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Figolu, 2005–11. Photo: Jerry L. Thompson/Courtesy of Storm King Art Center

We’re closer than we’ve ever been (and now we’re even closer!) to the SFMOMA expansion, which will break ground on May 29. The official last day to appreciate the Mario Botta building’s intactness is June 2, at the close of a four-day countdown celebration with free admission for everyone.

To kick off its series of off-site programming, which must carry SFMOMA (and the rest of us) through early 2016, the museum fittingly went with something monumental. Director Neal Benezra organized a retrospective of Mark di Suvero’s large-scale steel sculptures at Crissy Field, a former airfield on the waterfront near the city’s Marina district. The show doesn’t officially open until Wednesday, but joggers and pedestrians will be forgiven for noticing the eight enormous steel assemblages hulking over their usual dog-walking routes. Read more!

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This is part of an ongoing series in which we explore critical issues facing emerging and established architects. Past stories include “Why Architecture Firms Should Use Pinterest” and “15 Tips For Starting A Firm.”

Whether you’re just starting out or have been nurturing your own practice for a few years, you struck out on your own because you wanted to do your own work, not someone else’s. But, if you’ve been following our coverage of Mark Cavagnero’s Growing a Small Firm panel discussions at AIA San Francisco, by now you’ve heard several veteran designers recommend teaming with a larger practice. “Teaming is a good way to expand the breadth of your experience,” says Paulett Taggart, principal of Paulett Taggart Architects, who spoke at the fourth installment of the AIASF series. (In addition to our recaps here, you can find video of past panels at aecKnowledge.)

So how does teaming actually work? And why would a big practice want to take on a young upstart?

When you’re a small firm, the power differential between you and the established players may seem insurmountable. But larger offices can benefit from a collaboration, too. “We’re now seeing a time where a lot of younger firms are teaming with bigger firms,” says Marc L’Italien, design principal at EHDD and another of our panelists. “Sometimes the bigger firms are carrying more of the executive role, and the younger firms are bringing some of the creative energy.” Ahem, that’s you! Read more.

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This week Snøhetta and AECOM released new renderings for the Golden State Warriors arena, a 740,000-square-foot sports complex that will rise on Piers 30–32 on the San Francisco waterfront.

Last time we checked in, the arena—which is slated to open in 2017—was but a distant gleaming orb, with few public details beyond the promise of ample open space (and water taxi service!). The updated renderings give us a few more clues about the Warriors’ new home. Read more!

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Clouds are fog that are high in the sky; fog is clouds that have descended from the stratosphere. “Scientifically, cloud and fog are the same,but conceptually, there is a big difference,” stated Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya the creator of Cloud Parking. A mystical installation on the rooftops of buildings in Linz, Austria, Cloud Parking gave people a chance to walk through depending on how you look at it, a heavy blanket of clouds and/or fog. Click through to see more!

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Edible architecture is all the rage—from cities made of gum and moldy bread. And now you can have your birthday cake and live in it too! For his latest exhibition, “Guns and Ecstasy,” mixed-media artist Scott Hove has constructed a labyrinthine mirrored cake room. The “Pentagonal Disco Infinity Chamber” only fits one person at a time, so visitors can dance under the disco ball without feeling too self-conscious.

“Guns and Ecstacy,” which opens May 2 at San Francisco’s Spoke Art, will also include Hove’s dozen or so devilishly delicious-looking assault weapons frosted and repurposed. And if you think the juxtaposition of guns and buttercream presented in a dance-party atmosphere is puzzling—well, that’s the point. Hove  constructed the chamber to offer a fantastical space where one doesn’t have to think about gun-violence, violations of freedom, or the heated debates about it all. It’s a pre-paranoia world, where the motto is “Make Cake, Not War.” Click through to see the rest of the photos!

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