The wildfires raging in Los Angeles are highlighting the underrated significance of the city's unique urbanism and 20th-century architecture, writes Daniel Elsea.This is a love letter to LA. In life, as in history, it takes a tragedy to appreciate something's value. This is a lesson that as an Angeleno transplant in London, I've been reflecting on these last few days.As of the latest count, 10,000 structures in my hometown have been destroyed. Each one special, whether a home, a shop, or school. Like LA at large, they hover under the radar of architectural history. These are day-to-day buildings like Altadena's Theosophical Society or the cottages of Janes Village, destroyed by fire.LA boasts the world's most important legacy of 20th-century architecture. There is the Japanese influence of the Austrian Rudolph Schindler in the 1920s house that bears his name in West Hollywood. There are the 1940s-50s Case Study Houses that dot many endangered neighbourhoods. In 1949, the designer couple Charles and Ray Eames completed the most emblematic of them in the Palisades on the northwest edge of Santa Monica.It takes a tragedy to appreciate something's valueNow a museum, the Eames House is one of the world's priceless architectural treasures. Its visible structure and lofty living room inspired a generation of architects. It was evacuated last week; rare objects removed for safekeeping. Thankfully, it has so far been spared the devastation that has befallen many of its Palisades neighbours.A particular delight is Pasadena's Bungalow Heaven, a stone's throw away from Altadena. Here, there are hundreds of craftsman homes, many over 100 years old. Small by today's Zillow-charged standards, they are nevertheless highly desirable. Pasadena is also home to The Gamble House, designed by architect brothers Greene and Greene for the family of Proctor & Gamble fame. The mansion was a refuge for the Midwestern magnates escaping the unseemly industrialisation back east.In Malibu, there is the Getty Villa; it thankfully has been spared too. Opened in the early 1970s, it was a re-creation of an ancient Roman villa unearthed in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. As a late 20th century boy, my father would often take me there. It's where an Angeleno might first encounter Europe. It remains a shrine of wonder in my mind.Read: Eames House under threat as more than 1,000 buildings destroyed in "apocalyptic" LA fireLiving in Europe today, I am sometimes told my hometown doesn't have history. That it is rootless. Where is the heritage? Our Malibu villa might be a reproduction, but it houses one of the finest collections of Europe's most ancient and prized possessions.Safety is what gave birth to Los Angeles. The 20th-century world may have been on fire, but you could find refuge in LA. So, little nirvanas took root among other peoples' oases. You could safeguard your treasures here between the sea and the mountains.They came by the thousands, the millions. Armenians, Burmese, New Englanders, Jews, Iranians, Mexicans, Salvadorians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Koreans, Filipinos, African-Americans and midwesterners. It didn't take us long before we were all Angelenos.I am sometimes told my hometown doesn't have historyWe pioneered the bungalow. We invented the drive thru. We crafted the strip mall. We built chateaux alongside temples. We sexed up main street. Yes, we embraced the automobile because we could. Our architecture is etched with this legacy.In London, my now adopted home, the legacy of fire looms large. The Great Fire of 1666 burned down most of the Square Mile, the commercial core. In the aftermath of the destruction, the starchitect of the day, Christopher Wren, dreamed up a grand plan to rebuild. He imagined grand axes and wide boulevards. It was an ordered and orthogonal vision that would have erased the messy layout of medieval London. Fortunately, the plan was never realised.The irregular streets, the tiny lanes, the totally incomprehensible grid (or absence of grid) stayed intact. Today, it remains not a city of grand gestures like Paris. Nor a city of straight avenues like New York. London stayed bent, quirky, tight. Post-fire, the intrinsic DNA remained. New buildings took the place where ones had burned. Instead of being timber framed, they were a bit taller, built of brick and stone.Read: "The scale of the damage is unfathomable" say Los Angeles architectsThe Great Fire of 1666 wouldn't be London's only major moment of destruction. Nearly 300 years later, it faced the Blitz. German bombardment destroyed so much of the same Square Mile. Again, the oddly shaped plots were left, like little leftovers, polygons of land so misshapen in the eyes of those used to the North American grid. The opposite of broad streets and big lots.People like to think London is ancient, yet 50 per cent of these buildings were built since the second world war. The twin disasters of the 17th-century fire and the 20th-century world war has produced a 21st century city of skyscrapers cohabiting with medieval churches.If a blind man from 14th century London who lived and breathed these streets were dropped into today's milieu, he would still know his way around. Because the fabric remains. The streets are the same. The scale and sense of place lives on. London has stayed London.Many LA neighbourhoods are more compact and characterful than a typical American suburbThe global stereotype of LA is that of a sprawling non-city. Yet many LA neighbourhoods are more compact and characterful than a typical American suburb. Many houses in Bungalow Heaven are around 1,000 square foot. The average size of a new home in the US at large is approaching 2,500 square foot.The exurbia of the Sun Belt cities is crass by any comparison. So, we have in Los Angeles a series of precious moments of a city which had discovered the automobile but had not yet been overcome by it.Built in the 1930s, the four-lane Pasadena Freeway is the world's oldest highway. Today, it feels fragile in comparison to the brutal eight-lane tarmacs which dominate so much of the American landscape. In this early and mid-20th century LA, there is a pre-industrial spirit, albeit one borne in a wholly industrial world full of the possibility of mass prosperity.Read: Charles and Ray Eames changed the landscape of design with "just a few chairs and a house"Designers like the Eameses and Schindler saw in LA a landscape of bounty, but they didn't overdo it. This is an LA to eulogize. In Spanish, our city's mother tongue, the longform name of LA is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Seora la Reina de los ngeles". A town built for a queen and her angels. 'Tis the ring of a gentle paradise. The heart aches for it.What of the process of rebuilding? The temptation will be to go full Wren and try something new, or to simply retreat away. To do either would be to betray the character of that Los Angeles, to forget the moment when its architecture has so far shined brightest. The craftsmanship, the polyglot design language, these are the things that make a rich architectural vernacular.Let LA re-imagine these forms for a contemporary generation. And hopefully through this tragedy better appreciate what remains, and do more to protect it. May the world also now see Los Angeles for what it has long been a precious cultural landscape.Daniel Elsea is an urbanist and design journalist, and a partner at Allies and Morrison architecture studio in London.The photo is by Jessica Christian via Unsplash.Dezeen In DepthIf you enjoy reading Dezeen's interviews, opinions and features,subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.The post "LA boasts the world's most important legacy of 20th-century architecture" appeared first on Dezeen.

As fires continue to devastate the Los Angeles area, designers are stepping up to help. UX designer and design writer Hang Xu and writer Lex Roman have created a series of livestream events, running through Friday, to raise money for those who have lost their homes in the fire."Via Hang, these events will share tips 'on how to get hired, promoted and make money as a designer from folks who usually charge top dollars to share their expertise.' Each session will be free, with a suggested donation of $25 to go to families in need affected by the fires (directly, via GoFundMe).You can sign up for the talks here.

Wireless charging didnt just free us from the tyranny of tangles, it also opened the doors to creative charger designs. Especially with the addition of magnetic force, chargers no longer needed to be stuck to walls or power outlets or even lie flat on charging beds. Of course, these still required the presence of often very conspicuous chargers that may look out of place in some situations, no matter how aesthetic they might be.Some furniture makers have started integrating wireless charging into their designs but often end up making the areas too obvious, clashing with the otherwise minimalist and luxurious design of the product. This wireless charging innovation, in contrast, is almost completely invisible, save for a very subtle and elegant halo of light enclosing the charging area. In fact, this technology can be integrated into an equally innovative and sustainable stone-like material that transforms kitchen countertops and luxurious tables into futuristic charging spaces for phones.Designer: Cosentino x FreePowerImagine going to a bar and never having to worry about your phone dying. Simply put your mobile device down in front of you and have it charge while you sip your martini and make connections with the people around you. Or how about placing your phone on the kitchen table while you prepare dinner and listen to your favorite podcast, confident that your phones battery will be full by the time youre done? All of this without a single wireless charger that stands out like a sore thumb.FreePowers technology was already making these James Bond-like scenarios a reality by integrating the wireless charging components in places youd least expect them, specifically materials like marble and stone that youd hardly expect to have embedded chargers. Its partnership with Cosentino, however, adds another twist to that dreamy technology, making it available on materials that are both luxurious and sustainable.Cosentinos Silestone, for example, is a low-silica mineral surface that uses recycled materials to reduce the amount of crystallized silica used. Dekton, on the other hand, mimics the appearance and texture of porcelain while using carbon-neutral materials that also help improve its durability and scratch resistance. Both materials are also produced using sustainable processes that dont sacrifice the planets health in the name of luxury.The collaboration between FreePower and Cosentino opens a new avenue for integrating convenient wireless charging spaces into luxurious but sustainable surfaces that can be used in kitchens, bathrooms, bars, conference tables, and even desks. The only drawback to this ideal situation is that these pieces of furniture have to be custom made, as retrofitting existing counters and tabletops is not yet possible at this time.The post Marble kitchen counters and tabletops will charge your phone while you work first appeared on Yanko Design.

Internal complaints about the design and the process.

With a TikTok shutdown all but inevitable, users are dedicating their final days on the app to fictional agents of the Chinese government.

Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive, is one of several tech leaders expected to play a high-profile role in celebrating the new administration next week.

Save me from rich, white men who insist they and their kind are being discriminated against. Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, majority owner (not the founder) of SpaceX, Tesla, and numerous other leading companies, insists that DEI [Diversity, equity, and inclusion] is just another word for racism. He screams, DEI must DIE.The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination.Really? Im an older, relatively well-off, straight white man, and I know darn well that I owe a lot of my success to the fact that, except for my age, everything in the US economy has been set up to benefit me.In baseball terms, I started the game on first base. Black men have to get a hit to get on base. Black women step to home plate for their at-bat with two strikes against them.Musk and his ilk? He grew up with a millionaire, emerald-mine-owning father in South Africa and started on third base.It used to be worse in this country. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, while the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 laid the groundwork for equal employment opportunities and non-discrimination in the workplace.The laws were one thing. Making it a workplace reality was another.Over the next few decades, dedicated diversity professionals began emerging within organizations, often holding titles like Chief Diversity Officer. As businesses became more diverse, companies also started recognizing that diversity is good for business.While DEI is also about basic fairness, it turns out that businesses that adopt it tend to do better than their rivals. Dont believe me? How aboutGoldman Sachs would you believe it?The global investment banking giant decidednot to take companies public without diverse board representationin 2000. The financial powerhouse did so because evidence showed that companies with diverse boards outperformed those with all-male boards. Specifically, Goldman Sachs noted that companies with at least one woman on their board performed significantly better in their IPOs than those without women. Since then, the company has increased its minimum number of women board members to two. The company has also continued tosupport black women business ownersfor solid business reasons, not warm fuzzy feelings.This is nothing new. In 2012, the global management companyMcKinseyfoundthat US companies with diverse boards had a 95% higher return on equity.Get the picture? DEI helps businesses do well, and the results are right there in the balance sheets.Facts, even accounting facts, count for little asAmerican technology leaders bow to Donald Trump. For some, like Musk and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, its all about rising to power on the right-wing wave. For others, its simply about preserving their billions. Preserving the gains of blacks, gays, older workers whoever is not on their priority list.So,Amazon has halted some of its DEI programs,Meta is killing them, andMicrosoft has quietly shuttered its DEI efforts. While this trend has become more obvious since Donald J. Trump won the 2024 election, its been coming for a while now.Google and Meta have both shut their doors to diverse employeessince 2023.That year, theSupreme Courts Trump-friendly majority struck down affirmative action in college admissions. That decision prompted Republican activists and some state attorneys general to target corporate DEI initiatives as discriminatory. Given a choice between fighting a political battle and quietly shutting down their diversity efforts, all too many businesses have folded their DEI tents.Others, such as Meta where Zuck is suffering from a middle-aged crisis with his gold chain, newly curled hair, and sudden weird fascination with masculine energy appear to be on their way to getting rid of their existing diverse workforce. He says he wants to move out low performers faster. I expect the upcoming 5% cut to come mostly from people of color, older workers, and LGBTQ+ staffers.You get the picture.What it all comes down to is that if youre not a straight white guy, the job market is going to become a lot harder for you. As for companies? Theyll suffer as well. I fear, though, that were stuck with this trend until cold, hard financial facts convince corporate leadership that right-wing politics leads to poor business decisions.

Meta has released a new AI model that can translate speech from 101 different languages. It represents a step toward real-time, simultaneous interpretation, where words are translated as soon as they come out of someones mouth.Typically, translation models for speech use a multistep approach. First they translate speech into text. Then they translate that text into text in another language. Finally, that translated text is turned into speech in the new language. This method can be inefficient, and at each step, errors and mistranslations can creep in. But Metas new model, called SeamlessM4T, enables more direct translation from speech in one language to speech in another. The model is described in a paper published today in Nature.Seamless can translate text with 23% more accuracy than the top existing models. And although another model, Googles AudioPaLM, can technically translate more languages113 of them, versus 101 for Seamlessit can translate them only into English. SeamlessM4T can translate into 36 other languages.The key is a process called parallel data mining, which finds instances when the sound in a video or audio matches a subtitle in another language from crawled web data. The model learned to associate those sounds in one language with the matching pieces of text in another. This opened up a whole new trove of examples of translations for their model.Meta has done a great job having a breadth of different things they support, like text-to-speech, speech-to-text, even automatic speech recognition, says Chetan Jaiswal, a professor of computer science at Quinnipiac University, who was not involved in the research. The mere number of languages they are supporting is a tremendous achievement.Human translators are still a vital part of the translation process, the researchers say in the paper, because they can grapple with diverse cultural contexts and make sure the same meaning is conveyed from one language into another. This step is important, says Lynne Bowker of the University of Ottawas School of Translation & Interpretation, who didnt work on Seamless. Languages are a reflection of cultures, and cultures have their own ways of knowing things, she says.When it comes to applications like medicine or law, machine translations need to be thoroughly checked by a human, she says. If not, misunderstandings can result. For example, when Google Translate was used to translate public health information about the covid-19 vaccine from the Virginia Department of Health in January 2021, it translated not mandatory in English into not necessary in Spanish, changing the whole meaning of the message.AI models have much more examples to train on in some languages than others. This means current speech-to-speech models may be able to translate a language like Greek into English, where there may be many examples, but cannot translate from Swahili to Greek. The team behind Seamless aimed to solve this problem by pre-training the model on millions of hours of spoken audio in different languages. This pre-training allowed it to recognize general patterns in language, making it easier to process less widely spoken languages because it already had some baseline for what spoken language is supposed to sound like.The system is open-source, which the researchers hope will encourage others to build upon its current capabilities. But some are skeptical of how useful it may be compared with available alternatives. Googles translation model is not as open-source as Seamless, but its way more responsive and fast, and it doesnt cost anything as an academic, says Jaiswal.The most exciting thing about Metas system is that it points to the possibility of instant interpretation across languages in the not-too-distant futurelike the Babel fish in Douglas Adams cult novel The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. SeamlessM4T is faster than existing models but still not instant. That said, Meta claims to have a newer version of Seamless thats as fast as human interpreters.While having this kind of delayed translation is okay and useful, I think simultaneous translation will be even more useful, says Kenny Zhu, director of the Arlington Computational Linguistics Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, who is not affiliated with the new research.

Every Mac mini (Late 2024) is on sale, with exclusive coupon savings in effect on the high-end M4 Pro model equipped with 24GB of memory and 2TB of storage. Plus, get three years of AppleCare for $79.Save on Apple's newest Mac mini release with coupon.Discounted M4 Mac mini prices start at $569 this Wednesday, but we're especially pleased to see inventory begin to appear on M4 Pro models.This particular M4 Pro configuration equipped with 24GB of memory and 2TB of storage is $100 off with promo code APINSIDER at Adorama and at press time, it's expected to ship soon directly from Apple's distribution channel. The same APINSIDER discount code also takes $20 off optional AppleCare, dropping the 3-year extended protection plan to $79. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

A new grant of $558,232 from the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation will go towards the restoration of the historic Matthewis Persen House Museum in Kingston, New York. What is considered to be one of Americas oldest existing residential structures was first constructed by Dutch colonists in 1661 and survived the British Armys burning of the town during the Revolutionary War prior to its turn as a site of refuge for escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad. Preservationists will replace its wood shingle roof and make other exterior repairs to preserve the buildings "historic character." (h/t Hyperallergic)