What If an Entire City Could Be Housed Under One Roof? It seemed until recently that Dubai was going to continue forever its quest to build taller, faster, better buildings. But the Matrix Gateway Complex, by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, while certainly no small project, seems to take a different tack. “I appreciate the sort of restraint of this, the notion of making a kind of interior world that might have potential for a new kind of experience. It’s not simply about making some sort of icon on the skyline,” said juror Stan Allen. The massive 180-meter (590-foot) cube is built on an 18-meter (59-foot) supergrid, with steel frame structures clustered around, and hung from, five vertical cores. Accessible via a roadway that passes through the center of the building, a helipad, and a boat dock, the cube has a hotel with conference facilities, retail and office space, residences, a museum, a school, and a prayer hall—all of the major elements of a small city.
A crusading minister has built a forested Utopia for the itinerant and destitute. But is a social experiment what they’re looking for, or just a place to live?
The camp looks something like the scene of an extended hunting trip, but it is in fact a homeless encampment—possibly the largest in the tri-state area, not that any governmental body has bothered to keep track. Some call it Cedar Bridge, after the nearest paved road.
On a quiet inlet of the Queens waterfront, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed putting up athletes for the 2012 Olympics, land is being cleared for a series of parks that will be the front lawn for a large midpriced housing development.
Hunters Point South, to be built where the East River meets the Newtown Creek, kicked into gear in late December with the arrival of bulldozers. The 30-acre project, beginning with park and open space design, will eventually include 5,000 apartments and a ferry landing, said Joshua Wallack, who is managing the project for Robert C. Lieber, the deputy mayor for economic development.
Dubai just opened the ultimate trophy building — the world’s tallest skyscraper, which soars a neck-craning 2,717 feet into the air — but just try getting there from the airport.
Your polite, epaulette-wearing cabdriver screeches down a 12-lane highway and — with the tower in plain sight — he goes miles past it, leading you to wonder whether he’s lost his way or is ripping you off. Only when he finally reaches an interchange and then doubles back to the tower do you realize what’s going on: Dubai wins no medals for urban planning.
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.
Orenco Station, the award winning neighborhood touted as an ideal of mass-transit oriented New Urbanism, has failed to persuade a majority of its residents to use mass transit to get to work.
About two out of three Orenco residents drive to work in cars, slightly less than some other suburbs but hardly the car-free utopia many idealists expect of the transit-oriented area. Even as the neighborhood has grown closer, block by block, to the MAX light rail station named for it, the use of cars for work trips remains relatively high.
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) was recently awarded the contract to create a stunning new Central Business District in Beijing. The project will integrate into the existing downtown urban district and will improve transportation infrastructure while introducing energy-efficient buildings green public space. The plan also provides a framework for new sustainable growth that would result in eliminating 215,000 tons of CO2 per year, which is the equivalent of planting 14 million adult trees.
How can a struggling country break out of poverty if it’s trapped in a system of bad rules? Economist Paul Romer unveils a bold idea: “charter cities,” city-scale administrative zones governed by a coalition of nations. (Could Guantánamo Bay become the next Hong Kong?)
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.
