Brasilia was the aspiration of three people: a visionary politician, Juscelino Kubitschek, who dreamed of building a new capital from nothing in the heart of his country; an architect, Oscar Niemeyer, who never put down his pencil and was so afraid of flying that he often drove for three days to reach the site; and Lucio Costa, an enlightened urbanist, who possessed not only futurist sensibilities but also a profound knowledge of his country.
Popularity: 48% [?]
Australia circa 2050, population 35 million, climate change induced rising sea levels have flooded the Gold Coast resort region, apartment blocks are now used to grow food and people commute in monorail pods above the sea.
Popularity: 62% [?]
Mumbai’s muddled streets are too packed to walk through, so India’s commercial capital has come up with a solution. Uplift the masses—not in some fuzzy metaphysical way, but on “skywalks” made of steel.
Popularity: 34% [?]
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% [?]
If you’ve ever been to Cleveland, you know the downtown area is a forbidding, pedestrian desert. The main public space, Public Square, is no better–it’s a wind-scarred, 10-acre expanse flanked by skyscrapers. But that could all change, thanks to a series of brilliant redesigns proposed by James Corner Field Operations, the firm best known as the landscape designers who did much of the heavy lifting for New York’s superb High Line Park.
Popularity: 37% [?]
Digital screens now line the walls of nearly every airport terminal, restaurant, convenience store, bar and waiting room in America. They have popped up in gas stations, taxis, schools and even on public buses. They wrap the exterior of L.A. Live and other major commercial complexes. And increasingly they rest in our palms, in the form of the iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smart phones that many of us rely on, like Dante following Virgil, as we walk or ride through the city.
Popularity: 29% [?]
The reclaimed land of West Kowloon has been transformed into a mock archeaological site, but the line between faux and actual is hard to draw.
Popularity: 17% [?]
It is an architect’s vision of 2070: rising sea levels rapidly swallowing up swathes of Australia’s eastern seaboard.
As the price of land that can be developed soars to astronomical levels, the city witnesses a mass migration to the underwater city of ”Siph” – a metropolis of floating pods powered by ocean currents.
Popularity: 33% [?]
For half a century, a dark tunnel of crumbling concrete encased more than three miles of a placid stream bisecting this bustling city.
The waterway had been a centerpiece of Seoul since a king of the Choson Dynasty selected the new capital 600 years ago, enticed by the graceful meandering of the stream and its 23 tributaries. But in the industrial era after the Korean War, the stream, by then a rank open sewer, was entombed by pavement and forgotten beneath a lacework of elevated expressways as the city’s population swelled toward 10 million.
Today, after a $384 million recovery project, the stream, called Cheonggyecheon, is liberated from its dank sheath and burbles between reedy banks. Picnickers cool their bare feet in its filtered water, and carp swim in its tranquil pools.
Popularity: 74% [?]
Gensler’s winning design, co-created with 4240 Architecture, transforms Chicago’s abandoned Bloomingdale rail line into a three mile long greenhouse and hydrogen generator that provides 10 acres of farm land year round, powers city schools, and creates a beacon for the city.
Popularity: 44% [?]