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on a Zoom call with Wanyu He, an architect based in Shenzhen, China, and the founder of XKool, an artificial intelligence company determined to revolutionise the architecture industry. She freezes the dancing blocks and zooms in, revealing a layout of hotel rooms that fidget and reorder themselves as the building swells and contracts. Corridors switch sides, furniture dances to and fro. Another click and an invisible world of pipes and wires appears, a matrix of services bending and splicing in mesmerising unison, the location of lighting, plug sockets and switches automatically optimised. One further click and the construction drawings pop up, along with a cost breakdown and components list. The entire plan is ready to be sent to the factory to be built.

I applaud He on what seems to be an impressive theoretical exercise: a 500-room hotel complex designed in minutes with the help of AI. But she looks confused. “Oh,” she says casually, “that’s already been built! It took four and a half months from start to finish.”

AI is already being deployed to shape the real world – with far-reaching consequences.

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“Each building can only be in the place that it is located,”

“That place involves the climate, the topography, the history, the culture, and the landscape, including the sky and the stars. Yet you don’t have to be from that place to experience it, to feel uplifted, or feel at peace, or feel emotional, or feel good.” Put differently, RCR Arquitectes stands in as a metaphor for appreciating otherness in the world.

The brilliance of the Bubble idea, as designed by the New York-based architecture firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is that it would cost less than one-tenth of the projected cost of the Gehry wing at the Corcoran, yet would have an outsized impact on architectural thinking in Washington. Koshalek and his architects have finessed one of this city’s hardest design challenges: How to make something new, in the center of the city, but in such a way that no permanent violence is done to the historic character of the Mall and its environs.

The Bubble would also bring innovative temporary architecture — one of the most intellectually exciting currents in contemporary architectural thinking — to the District. It would enliven the generally moribund civic space of the Mall, and demonstrate something that is now seriously in question: that Washington has developed progressive instincts when it comes to architecture, design and culture.

Since he arrived in 2009, Koshalek has rigorously addressed the most obvious and fundamental question of any art museum today: How to break out of the institutional bunker, and into a larger dialogue with the city and the country at large?

Policy framework: What does our energy transition aim to achieve? The top level of the target architecture consists of the policy framework for the restructuring of our energy supply: cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2020, phasing out nuclear energy by 2022, and safeguarding energy security and competitiveness.

European art history began with early mobile anthropomorphic carvings in the Paleolithic era, as well as cave paintings reflecting the natural world. Europe took a distinct turn from other regions with the rise of the Greek empire, and Greek classical art and architecture influenced later European art for centuries. The Christian church influenced much of medieval art until the Renaissance, when a revival in classical ideas turned artistic attention to humanistic themes.

From 1100 onward, Gothic architecture experiments with innovations to construct wider, taller buildings in stone. This results in innovations such as the pointed arch and flying buttresses, as architects compete across Europe to build ever-taller cathedrals. Gothic painting develops later, as artists focus on religious scenes painted on panels or frescoes.

Around 1563, the Council of Trent adopts a propagandistic stance in which art is to stimulate the public's interest and faith in the Roman Catholic church. This is partially in response to the Renaissance and its subsequent developments, such as the Reformation.

Massive prehistoric stone structures found in desert landscapes from Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan have baffled archaeologists for decades. Each can stretch for up to a few miles, and resembles a kite with tail strings in overall shape.Recent studies have built a consensus that the so-called desert kites were used to trap and kill wild animal herds. But how ancient hunters conceived — and perceived — these grandiose structures has remained a mystery. The kites, in their entirety, are “only visible from the air,” said Rémy Crassard, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research. “Even with our modern ways of envisaging our landscape, it’s still difficult for us archaeologists, scientists, scholars to make a proper map.”

Dr. Crassard and his colleagues were overjoyed in 2015 when they found two stone monoliths with precise depictions of nearby desert kites in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Engraved between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, these representations are by far the oldest known to-scale architectural plans recorded in human history, the team reported on Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. They also highlight how carefully planned the desert kites may have been by the ancient peoples who relied on them.

the ever-expanding number of houses the size of Hyatt resorts rising in the most expensive precincts of Los Angeles

“Twenty-thousand-square-foot homes have become teardowns for people who want to build 70-, 80-, and 90,000-square-foot homes,” Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz said. So long, megamansion. Say hello to the gigamansion.

Why are people building houses the size of shopping malls? Because they can. “Why do you see a yacht 500 feet long when you could easily have the same fun in one half the size?”

What's your first and last name? Your education and work experience? Do you have recommendations? And are you willing to be a suicide attacker or would you prefer to be a fighter for ISIS?

Germany's interior minister said he believes data in the documents -- described by European media as the names and personal data of tens of thousands of possible ISIS recruits -- could allow authorities to prosecute people who joined ISIS and then returned to their home countries.

If they did not hear from him, they would know that he is dead."

"The problem's not solved because of this accord, but make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," the president said late Saturday in a speech from the White House's Cabinet Room. "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."

But who benefits from the new "architecture" the accord creates? And what will the deal cost for others?

On its face, the plan agreed to on Saturday affects just about every nation. It requires countries to limit the rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. It also sets an even more ambitious goal to slow the warming further -- down to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. (In the years since global industrialization, the world's temperature has already risen 1 degree Celsius.)

As Europe entered the period known as the High Middle Ages, the church became the universal and unifying institution.

system of guilds perpetuated the Christian and medieval spirit of economic life,

Strong popes, notably Gregory VII , worked for a reinvigorated Europe guided by a centralized church, a goal virtually realized under Innocent III .

ENTERING the Worcester Art Museum, the first thing a visitor sees is a sixth-century late Roman mosaic, more than 20 feet square, set into the floor of the entrance hall.

This spectacular and brutal scene paved the floor of a private house in Antioch, founded in 300 B.C. and one of the great cities of the classical world. Today ancient Antioch lies beneath the modern Turkish city of Antakya, near the Syrian border at the northeast elbow of the Mediterranean. The mosaic, along with other equally stunning and tantalizing glimmers of an almost mythical place, arrived in Worcester nearly 60 years ago.

Four silver-gilt tyches on display -- female deities personifying the good fortune of a particular city -- representing Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch attest to Antioch's status. Sculptures, mosaics, jewelry and intriguing inscriptions, most of them from the second to the sixth centuries A.D., bring to life a complex metropolis that thrived in an era whose economic, political and spiritual circumstances were in many ways similar to our own.

In 2023, Jeep rolled out a new edition of its popular four-wheel-drive SUV. For the first time since the company introduced the car in 1986, air conditioning wasn’t an option, it was a must. This appears to be the end of an era: “The last car in the U.S. without standard air conditioning,” read the headline of an article in the automotive press, “finally gives up the fight against refrigerant.”

Summers now last longer — well past the autumnal equinox in many places — and as hot weather spreads to more clement regions, schools must consider the effects on learning without air conditioning. A 2020 study predicted that if temperatures in the contiguous United States rise as predicted, by 2050 students will learn on average 10 percent less each year. The effects are cumulative, and students without AC in their schools, who often live in cooler regions of the country, are the most vulnerable.

More fundamentally, air conditioning is evolving rapidly from an appliance that adds comfort and convenience to an ever-present life-support system. I

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers.

He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Altman can still remember where he was the first time he saw GPT-4 write complex computer code, an ability for which it was not explicitly designed. “It was like, ‘Here we are,’ ”

KYIV, Ukraine — Just days after Russian troops retreated from the suburbs surrounding Kyiv, Yuriy Savchuk, director of a World War II museum in the city, joined the police and prosecutors who were investigating the full extent of the suffering inflicted there by enemy soldiers.

Over the next month, Mr. Savchuk and his colleagues meticulously documented what they saw, taking more than 3,000 photographs.

The sign, and everything else in the basement, was taken from a bomb shelter in a Kyiv suburb, Hostomel, the site of an airport that Russian soldiers tried to take in the first days of the war.

I agree with Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that the current nihilist extremism of the current Republican Party is “the central problem in American life.”

And yet I find the chances of getting reform from within close to impossible, given how far they’ve now gone over the edge. And this is a tragedy not just for America, but for the GOP itself.

Here, for example, was a man whose family life would make him a cult hero if he were a Republican, but who has been demonized as an alien threat to America from the get-go. Here’s a Democrat who adopted Heritage Foundation ideas for healthcare exchanges. Here’s a Democrat who has actually cut Medicare. His stimulus was one-third tax cuts. Domestic energy production has soared under Obama, even as record numbers of illegal immigrants have been deported. There were and are so many ways in which the GOP could have used Obama for their own advantage – both strategically and culturally. But they refused to, opting instead for visceral, dumb, self-defeating short-term tactical political advantage. All tactics and emotion; no strategy and reason.

electric cars are currently a bit greener than gasoline cars — per mile. Driving one hundred miles in a Nissan Altima results in the emission of 90.5 pounds of greenhouse gases. Driving the same distance in an all-electric Nissan Leaf emits 63.6 pounds of greenhouse gases — a significant improvement. But while the Altima driver pays 14 cents a mile for fuel, the Leaf driver pays less than 3 cents per mile, and this difference, thanks to the law of supply and demand, causes the Leaf driver to drive more.

What do you expect when you put people in cars they feel good (or at least less guilty) about driving, which are also cheap to buy and run? Naturally, they drive them more. So much more, in fact, that they obliterate energy gains made by increased fuel efficiency.

The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles per gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging … The critical energy drain in a typical American suburb is not the Hummer in the driveway; it’s everything else the Hummer makes possible — the oversized houses and irrigated yards, the network of new feeder roads and residential streets, the costly and inefficient outward expansion of the power grid, the duplicated stores and schools, the two-hour solo commutes.

The politicians’ consensus is that health care reform shouldn’t alter or disrupt the way the majority of Americans get their insurance today

The policy consensus, though, is that the status quo is actually the problem, and that it deserves to be threatened, undermined and replaced as expeditiously as possible. Wonks of the left and right disagree on what that replacement should look like. But they’re united in regarding employer-provided coverage as an unsustainable relic: a burden on businesses, a source of perverse incentives for the health care market and an obstacle to more efficient, affordable and universal coverage.

Obamacare has an unwieldy, Frankenstein’s monster quality in part because the law is trying to serve both consensuses at once. The core of the bill, the subsidies for the uninsured and the exchanges where they can purchase plans, is designed to offer a center-left alternative to the existing system. But much of the surrounding architecture is designed to prop up existing arrangements — and in the process, protect Obama from exactly the kind of criticisms he once leveled against McCain.

The big secret of the Obama administration’s approach to national security, which neither party has had a strong incentive to admit, is that the president’s first-term policies have mostly been a continuation of policies put in place during George W. Bush’s second term, when the Cheneyite maximalism of the immediate post-9/11 era was tempered by a dose of pragmatism.

the president has mostly governed – sometimes by choice, sometimes out of necessity – as a steward of the powers Bush successfully claimed and the war-on-terror architecture that he established. What’s more, in his presidency’s biggest decisions about the use of force abroad – the Afghan surge, the Libya intervention, the escalated drone campaign (and the “kill list” that accompanies it), the green light on the raid to get Bin Laden – Obama has almost always erred on the side of hawkishness and expanded executive authority.

An acknowledgment of consensus is always better than a bogus disagreement, and Romney’s decision to play up his areas of concord with the president didn’t just serve the cause of reassuring swing voters worried by his sometimes hyper-hawkish rhetoric: It served the cause of truth as well.