“We just respond creatively to what humanity pushes aside.” Today AD is in Brooklyn, New York to tour a townhouse comprising 18 shipping containers. Designers Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, founders of LOT-EK, have been using shipping containers in their work for 30 years, becoming pioneers in sustainable architecture. Comprised of 18 containers from a yard in New Jersey, this townhouse exemplifies how humble materials can be turned into something extraordinary and pave the way for a more sustainable future.

It's said that you can tell a lot about a city by its tallest building. In New York, that was once the Chrysler Building: capitalism colliding with art and hubris to reign supreme over the skyline.

The title of the city’s tallest building has of course changed hands many times since, but the Chrysler has become a landmark in the one place above all others that’s synonymous with the skyscraper. Now, it’s set to be covered up by a new generation of glass-covered office towers.

There were two explorers who first stumbled across the New York lands but can’t be credited with doing much upon their arrival. In 1524, a French-employed Italian explorer by the name of Giovanni da Verrazzano was sailing along the Atlantic when he found himself in what we know today as the New York Harbor and eventually modern-day Manhattan. He wrote of his exploration but did little more in the way of colonizing New York than that, and the same could be said for Jacques Cartier, a French explorer who made similar explorations in 1535. It wasn’t until another man, Henry Hudson under the employment of the Dutch East India Company, made his way to New York in 1609, that colonization became an intention.