Archive for Artificial Landscapes
November 2, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Beauty, Campus Planning, Creative Cities, Economics, Landscape, Parks, Place making, Shopping Malls, Tourism
Disney has always been an easy target for urban designers and architects. Main Street USA, the main drag of its parks, can be read as a cruel joke. Its simulated urbanism and festival atmosphere may seem like a sinister, conservative knock-off of actual small-town main streets of yore, lodged deep in the American collective memory, that corporate titans like Disney helped kill with their economics of scale and squeaky-clean spectacle. Now, instead of a public realm, we have cities that are “luxury products,” meant not for the stuff of life but for endless, mindless consumer fantasy. Thanks (in part) to the influence of Disney.
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Popularity: 49% [?]
October 23, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Climate Change, EcoCities, Ecosystems, Emergence, Infrastructure, Landscape, Resilience, Urban Structure, Water
It was in 2000 that the Chinese government formulated a plan to build 400 new cities by 2020, in order to install the migration coming from the countryside towards the new urban agglomerations. This is the equivalent of 20 cities per week.
The site, located on the Qi’Ao Island, 27 square kilometer island in the north of Zhuhai, has the potential to become a gateway for Hong Kong – Shenzhen due to its strategic location and the increasing passenger flows through it. The island is threatened to become another generic Chinese urbanization that spread across farmlands. Thus the signs of scarcity of water resources, deforestation, fish farming and industrial pollution are already present.
Jorge Ayala started first with a research of new materials for the city with regards to performance and functionality. The project generated a rich base of indexes which traduce environmental, topographical and geographical parameters into a material ready to be use for the design. The spatial strategy that Ecotransitional Urbanism uses is an implementation of the relationship between the built and its context.
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Popularity: 57% [?]
October 20, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Landscape, Multi-Level Urbanism, Recreation, Tourism
So Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Rather than brood about what might have been or haggle over alternatives to the massive dose of money the city would have been given to stimulate its limping finances, it should immediately develop a bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Since the deadline is less than two weeks away and the bid committee may still be suffering from their Copenhagen hangovers, we’ll help them out.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
October 19, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Density, Ecosystems, Landscape, Multi-Level Urbanism, Parks, Pedestrians
When I was growing up in New York City, on summer weekends my family would often drive to Jones Beach, the great park that Robert Moses built on the southern shore of Long Island. It wasn’t wilderness by any stretch, but it was cool and open, more than enough to put the stifling city at a distance, if only for an afternoon. But what I remember as clearly was the drive back: Manhattan appearing out of the haze, emitting wavy lines of heat like a cartoon pie. Then being back in the thick of it, with the buzz of hundreds of thousands of air conditioners making the city itself feel like a single massive machine. The contrast was clear: the ocean air and the incredible physical presence of the water were invigorating, literally life-giving in their feeling of connectedness to broader natural processes. The city was hot, dirty, disconnected; nature was hidden.
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Popularity: 32% [?]
October 2, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Artificial Landscapes, Infrastructure, Pedestrians, Transit
When Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle in 1900, it unveiled its vision for the future of transport. Below ground, the city’s stylish new Metro made its debut, while above ground was something more avant garde. The trottoir roulant was a moving walkway that circled the fair in a 3-kilometre loop, its articulated wooden segments “gliding around like a wooden serpent with its tail in its mouth”, according to one reporter. Nearly 7 million visitors hopped on. A few even brought folding chairs, which proved useful when one woman gave birth in transit. Her child was promptly christened Trottoir Roulant Benost. A new kind of traveller had been born.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
September 30, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, EcoCities, Infrastructure, Landscape, Revitalization, Urban Structure
Greenwich Street would be the “spine” of a more accessible neighborhood the Downtown Alliance calls Greenwich South. A vision of the future for an area would include green rooftops meant to be wildlife habitats.
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Popularity: 26% [?]
September 29, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Cities from Scratch, Mobility, Multi-Level Urbanism, Visualization
The architecture of science fiction has profoundly changed urban design. When building cities of the future, our best guides may be places like comic book megalopolises Mega-City-1 or Transmet.
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Popularity: 30% [?]
September 17, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Cities from Scratch, Economics, Starchitecture
England is deserted, Australia and New Zealand have merged, and the man who bought Ireland has killed himself.
They were designed to make Dubai the envy of the world: a series of paradise islands inhabited by celebrities and the super-rich reclaimed from the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf and shaped like a map of the Earth. It was called The World.
As millions of tonnes of rock were dumped into the sea for the foundations, timely leaks suggested that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were to buy Ethiopia, Sir Richard Branson was tipped to occupy England, while Rod Stewart would border him in Scotland.
Instead it has become the world’s most expensive shipping hazard, guarded by private security in fast boats and ringed by warning buoys to keep the curious away. A development that was meant to send Dubai’s star into the firmament of First World cities has been left to the mercy of the waves and the baking winds.
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Popularity: 26% [?]
August 5, 2009 · Filed under Advertising, Artificial Landscapes, Films, Information Design, Pollution, Visualization
logorama is a short film by the french collective H5, which visualizes and explores the way that logos are increasingly embedded in our existence. after winning the kodak prix at the cannes film festival this year logorama is being screened at various international locations in the coming months.
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Popularity: 47% [?]
August 4, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Artificial Landscapes, Density, Generative Design, Master Planning, Urban Design, Urban Structure, Waterfronts
Visiondivison shared their entry for the Koivusaari Idea Competition to create a new city district on an island just outside Helsinki, Finland. The competition asked participants to organize a master plan for the island that would provide the framework for further planning. Visiondivison’s proposal, Urban Fade, is comprised of a highly efficient city grid that allows users the option of moving around the district to interact with the different areas.
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Popularity: 69% [?]
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