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: 44% [?]
Passing through the D.C. metro area yesterday, we decided to visit two classic planned communities in the Maryland suburbs. Both were planned and built from the ground up and both contain around 2,000 households. Otherwise, they could not be more different. One was entirely created by the federal government, the other by private developers. One was born in the depth of the Great Depression, the other during boom years of the American economy. One has a current average home sale price of around $160,000, the other $800,000. One is exclusively modernist in style, the other highly traditional both in planning and architecture.
Anyone who seeks to pigeonhole planning into one ideological camp or the other may want to take a look at these two very different models. While there are certainly arguments to be made either for or against each of these, it seems pretty clear to me that they fit into different economic niches and lifestyle preferences. The overall metro area is that much richer for having both of them.
Popularity: 20% [?]
This is Los Angeles — the consummate infrastructural metropolis, famous for its networks of freeways and its dispersed, vehicle-based urbanism. This is also the departure point for The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles [ACTAR, 2008], an anthology of essays examining contemporary LA and contemporary urbanism. Today’s metropolis, as described above by volume editor Kazys Varnelis, depends upon layers of infrastructural networks — not just freeways — that connect the metropolis globally.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Utopian modernism turned on its head in Caracas, where residents have made fifty-year-old superblock housing projects into the locus of sprawling improvised settlements.
Popularity: 28% [?]
But perhaps - and here’s the upside - the city, having evolved through brutal modernism and gluggy postmodernism, is approaching its glorious collaborative apotheosis, where we can have the thrill of speed without its harshness and the buzz of being-there without its smugness.
Popularity: 38% [?]
With the property boom over, London’s planners urgently need to rethink their priorities. And that doesn’t mean looking to Prince Charles for inspiration.
Popularity: 32% [?]
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.
Popularity: 55% [?]
How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations?
Those are the questions that instantly come to mind over the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s historic Nakagin Capsule Tower.
Popularity: 21% [?]
Long overshadowed by mid-century architecture, modernist landscapes are gaining recognition, with help from the downturn.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Britain’s largest example of brutalist architecture is undergoing a multimillion-pound ‘regeneration’, overseen by English Heritage. It is in danger of losing what makes it special.
Popularity: 14% [?]