Walking through parts of New York can feel like walking through a tunnel. The city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds — typically blue scaffolding holding up green plywood to protect pedestrians from construction overhead — corral people into cramped, dark spaces wherever development or building repairs are underway. There are about 6,000 of these sheds throughout the city.
Popularity: 42% [?]
Over the last twenty years, theory and practice in planning and urban design have been dominated by the search for sustainable development patterns. Fueled by growing public outcry over issues of environmental protection, energy conservation, agricultural preservation, urban sprawl, roadside aesthetics and highway gridlock, sustainability
has become the banner around which the forces for change in the way we develop our cities and suburbs are rallying. Perhaps the most powerful of these forces — certainly the most vocal — has been the New Urbanists, whose revival of the traditional village prototype is being enthusiastically adopted as a model of sustainable development.
Popularity: 29% [?]
CityLAB, an urban design think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, took on the challenge of design-inspired infrastructure earlier this year with the creation of WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture. [3] Inspired by the Works Projects Administration of the 1930s — the largest and most effective of the agencies created by the Roosevelt administration — WPA 2.0 has so far included a global design competition, a multidisciplinary symposium and (coming in February) a web exhibition.
Popularity: 32% [?]
Architecture bookshops are full of publications about fantastic architects, spectacular streets and extraordinary cities. Alex Lehnerer made a book about the regulations that shaped these cities, produced the streets, and guided the architects. Grand Urban Rules celebrates regulations as the ultimate instruments in shaping cities.
Popularity: 19% [?]
For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.
Popularity: 16% [?]
The designers of Tate Modern and Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium have produced not a new cultural behemoth but a strange sculptural structure, reviving the idea of the car park as a figure in the city. A stack of raw, sharply chamfered concrete layers is prised apart by wedge-shaped columns, which wind into each other and draw the eye into the slightly sinister shadows against the vivid blue of the Florida sky. It is almost shocking.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Daniel L. Vasella, the chief executive of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, was standing at the center of his imposing new corporate campus this fall, describing the lengths he went to in order to realize his architectural vision. “I made them move the border crossing,” he said pointing toward France. “It interfered with our plans. I put 100,000,000 Swiss francs on the table and said: ‘Move it over there. Tear down these silos and cranes.’ ”
Popularity: 30% [?]
Commercial real estate is dominated by financial professionals, not hustlers looking for a quick flip. So why is the market about to melt down?
Popularity: 19% [?]
www.stuckincustoms.com
Economists have argued that individuals choose locations that maximize their economic position and broad utility. Sociologists have found that social networks and social interactions shape our satisfaction with our communities. Research, across various social science fields, finds that beauty has a significant effect on various economic and social outcomes. Our research uses a large survey sample of individuals across US locations to examine the effects of beauty and aesthetics on community satisfaction.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Doug Farr is an architect and planner who wrote the book Sustainable Design: Urban Design with Nature. In this talk, Farr discusses how LEED certification of buildings can only do so much since it doesn’t take into account how buildings are integrated sustainably with its surroundings. He argues that we need to think differently about we organize our cities – more densely in more compact, complete, and walkable neighborhoods – to design sustainability into the way we live. The video is an hour and 20 minutes long, but may be worth it for the ideas and case studies presented about planning and architecture design.
Popularity: 46% [?]