One of the foundational documents in our country’s history of car-centric street design is what’s known as the Green Book. These engineering guidelines, which have been published in various editions by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) since the 1930s, are only “green” if you’re looking at the cover.
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A few hours after the public launch of the Active Design Guidelines here in New York, President Obama gave his first State of the Union Address. In an aside which drew the evening’s loudest applause, the President took a moment to acknowledge the First Lady’s new public health campaign to fight the epidemic of childhood obesity. Was it coincidence that the city chose this date to launch the guidelines? Probably not. Just as other municipalities and regions in this country have looked to New York in the past for answers on issues of zoning and historic preservation, for example, New York City is poised to lead in this new initiative as well. And as the debate about how to provide better, more efficient healthcare continues, perhaps designers here in New York City have an answer; a prescription that requires no doctor and no insurance coverage – just a livable, efficient, sustainable city.
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Imagine visiting a city where the populace steadfastly refused to wear sweaters or coats despite a cold climate. You might tell your friends incredulous stories about how much people complain about being cold while ignoring an obvious solution. You might take pictures of the enormous three-story space heaters the city placed along its waterfront to let people enjoy the outdoors, and marvel at the ugliness and environmental waste of the practice. Why would the residents of this city endure such painful conditions at such cost to their city and their planet while ignoring such a simple alternative?
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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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So these cities of the future are still made of concrete, but also of transient slivers of silicon and amorphous clouds of wireless activity. Atoms and bits. The great promise of informatics – or whatever we end up calling it – is that the fabric of the city is once again malleable, responsive and can adapt through learning from layered patterns of behaviour. Perhaps we don’t call it informatics, but architecture and engineering, just a new form of both crafts. Yet these developments pose radical changes, from the point of view of skills, processes, business models and purpose, and Ratti and his crew of collaborators are indicating one possible future for our work. He concludes by tentatively suggesting, “It’s almost redefining, I believe, what being an architect is.”
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In the late 1960s, a tall and ungainly Englishman named Peter Reyner Banham brought his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion. It helped that, as a visiting architecture professor (Banham was teaching at USC), he was given some pretty fancy digs: He stayed in Greene & Greene’s Gamble house in Pasadena, one of the most beautiful and romantic houses in America. So Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what he went looking for, and the way he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the way the intellectual world — and then the wider world — perceived the city.
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When real-world and computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time, you have reached augmented reality (AR). Combining live video imagery with computer-generated graphics, motion-tracking and other data, Layar promises a mobile web where users can walk down a city street and receive real time demographic information, histories of buildings, and block-by-block news. and More…
Popularity: 39% [?]