A megaproject by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), 670 Mesquit, has officially been greenlit in L.A.’s Arts District. The tiered four-building complex will stack 895 residential units, a school, a hotel, offices, and even a public park. (Dezeen)

Frank Lloyd Wright’s final residential commission is getting its own TV series. The Last Wright, which will soon be available on HBO Max, follows the construction of RiverRock House, built 66 years after his death. The show captures the challenges of building a Usonian house today, with builders asking “what would Frank do?” at every step. (Architectural Digest)

A white-only, straight-only homesteading community called Return to the Land has cropped up in rural Arkansas. Citing a narrow housing law exemption and emboldened by the current political climate, the founders are testing the limits of fair housing protections with a compound that feels part white nationalist cult, part prepper fantasy. (The New York Times)

New York City just opened its first “deliverista hub,” turning an old newsstand near City Hall into a rest and charging station for the city’s 80,000 app-based delivery workers. It lacks bathrooms and probably won’t go far alone: As e-bikes crowd plazas and battery theft surges, the real challenge is building public infrastructure that treats delivery drivers as essential, not invisible. (Streetsblog NYC)

At the intersection of Purchase Street and Congress Street in downtown Boston is a lime-green-colored metal object covered in bolts and rivets. To the casual observer, it’s just another fixture of Boston’s urban landscape, but for those who remember the city during the second half of the 20th century, this pylon is one of the last surviving elements of one of the city’s most infamous and reviled transportation projects. 

Completed in 1959, the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway was designed to accommodate Boston’s growing population and postwar car boom. Although intended to help alleviate congestion and ease commutes into the city, it soon found itself having the opposite effect. In order to build the expressway, around 20,000 residents had to be displaced, and hundreds of historic buildings were destroyed. As the years went by, public works projects designed to complement the expressway were canceled. In addition to the heavy traffic, the expressway itself had flaws and shortcomings, such as no breakdown lanes, severe curves, and no room to merge or slow down to exit. The problems associated with the expressway earned it nicknames such as “The Distressway,” “the world’s longest parking lot,” and “the other Green Monster.”

During the construction of the Big Dig, much of the Central Artery in the city was rerouted and moved underground into the newly constructed O’Neill Tunnel. The expressway was finally demolished in 2003 and replaced with the Rose Kennedy Greenway linear park. Today, all that remains of the expressway are the Dewey Square Pylon and support beam Bent 38 near Quincy Market. As the final remnants of the highway fade into history, the memorial serves as a symbol of Boston’s complicated transportation history and the impact it’s had on the local community. It’s also a testament to the labor of countless men and women who strived over the years to improve the city’s infrastructure.