Apartment Choice

As a former New York City resident and incidental claustrophobic, I understand the drawbacks of urban living. And so does Ori, Inc., maker of robotic furniture that folds, slides, and shifts to accommodate small spaces . The Massachusetts- based firm boasts two intelligent, responsive systems—Ori Full and Ori Queen—on display in apartments across 10 North American cities . [embedded content] See what the adaptive appliances can do at Chicago’s MODE Logan Square Apartments ; Bridge Park in Columbus, Ohio; New York City’s The Eugene building ; and Bluesky Chinatown up in Vancouver. Ori has also partnered with real-estate developers in Harrison, NJ; Miami; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; and its hometown of Boston to showcase its high-tech designs. A full- or queen-sized bedroom can, for example, quickly transform your cramped co-op into a comfortable living room , spacious walk-in closet, or functional office, depending on your needs. Using the Ori control interface on the ...

Editor’s note: The following has been excerpted from a longer chapter featuring the Arroyo family : Maria Ayala Arroyo (46), Pedro Ayala Hernandez (55) and Guadalupe Ayala Arroyo (21). Read more oral histories like it in Chasing the Harvest by Gabriel Thompson (2017 Verso Press). Read our interview with Thompson here. Farmwork is often a family affair. Parents bring their children to labor alongside them in the fields. Workers learn about a job opening and tell their relatives, the word spreading quickly from uncle to aunt to cousin. If a crew sticks together long enough, it may find that most members are related to each other in one way or another. Such is the case for the crew of the Arroyo- Hernandez family . Maria and Pedro came to the United States in 1994, 10 days after getting married in Mexico. Their plan was to stay for a couple of years, save money, and return to Mexico to open a business. Then they had their first child, Guadalupe, and those plans changed. For more tha...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...