Urbanism News
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
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Polishing The Relics of A Recent Past Often derided, modernist design can be remade to last. |
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Desperately Seeking Street Life It was, 8 in the evening and the corner of Fourth and Main streets was vacant, as dead if not more so than any cul-de-sac in suburbia. The only excitement in the neighborhood was a film being shot a block away between Main and Los Angeles streets, where lights were ablaze and a production crew was buzzing, and no doubt prompting protests from inconvenienced residents within earshot. |
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Modernism: the idea that just won't go away The British reviled modernism at first, now it's part of the fabric of our nation. The largest ever survey of the movement suggests the defining aesthetic of the 20th century may be just as influential in the 21st. |
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Suburban sprawl an irresistible force in US Across the United States, an unprecedented acceleration in suburban sprawl is prompting concerns about the environment, traffic, health and damage to rural communities, but opponents appear powerless to stop the process because of the economic development and profits it generates. |
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Stark warning over climate change Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases may have more serious impacts than previously believed, a major scientific report has said. |
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In Praise of Suburbs Suburbia often gets a bad rap, but government should accept that people want the picket fence ideal. |
Monday, January 30, 2006
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How the US fell out of love with its cars Tail fins and chrome grilles were once the symbols of a superpower. Now, with 36,000 jobs cut in a week and foreign vehicles filling the highways, Paul Harris in New York surveys the collapse of an industry. |
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The Scrapheap of Architectural History To realise a building, architects need to get their hands dirty. Architectural history shouldn't be afraid of dirt either, says Wouter Vanstiphout. Just describing the virgin state in which a building was once completed is to deny its meaning. |
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Ubiquitous Security Barriers Get a Fashionable Flourish They now come in a jaunty nautical style. And a somber federalist version. There's a shiny, sleek modernist type, a pueblo model -- some even fashioned into giant, pseudo golf balls. Whether made of copper or bronze, aluminum or granite, all could stop an eight-ton truck barreling into them at 50 mph. |
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Mapping out the future of transport You leave home, step into your car, turn the seat around and start working your way through your e-mail inbox, as the car drives you to work. |
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Building cachet by association When a prominent work becomes a backdrop for blouses or set decoration for soda, does commerce dishonor art or can both come out ahead? |
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Youth center began as a Safeway. Now it's a window on the world for East Oakland kids. The most inspirational thing about the architecture of Youth UpRising's new home in East Oakland is something that would be taken for granted anywhere else: the glassy front wall. |
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Environment: The revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock After Hurricane Katrina, a black Gaian joke went the rounds, couched in White House newspeak: “Successful mission against the Gulf of Mexico oilfields. Some collateral damage in New Orleans.” The widespread hunch that we’ll eventually get our comeuppance from a long-suffering nature has never been quite so precisely located, or quite that misanthropic. |
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The Disappearing Las Vegas Condos Three weeks ago, Eli Verdnikov, an engineer in Los Gatos, Calif., received a letter saying that the apartment building he planned to retire to — Icon Las Vegas — would not be built. In the envelope was a check for $73,672.81, the 10 percent deposit Mr. Verdnikov had paid, plus interest. |
Sunday, January 29, 2006
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Back to the 'burbs The trend starts here. Southern California is the test lab for a new kind of suburb where homes front parks and residents shop on foot. |
Saturday, January 28, 2006
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Window shows This morning, i first stumbled upon a Tokyo Show Window gallery (via Fuckdgaijin) then on Chinese artist Wang Qingsong 's installation across the entire run of Selfridges front shop windows. Called "Follow Me", the work employs motifs and symbols of popular culture inspired by the global appetite for shopping. (via Gravestmor < Daily Times.) So i decided to write something about some interactive shop windows i'd read about over the past few months. |
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Progress Hits Home Did we mean to trade our birthright for a wide selection of bathmats? |
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My secret love's no secret anymore I confess to being a lover of suburbia and I refuse to be ashamed of how I feel. Yes, I know that I should know better. And, yes, I know that my forbidden and unnatural suburbanist love is unsophisticated and that it can never be consummated. But that's no help. It just makes me ever more curious, ever more devoted. |
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Road rage in Toronto Amazing photos of an altercation between an autoerotic and a cyclepathic in pedestrian oriented Kensington Market. |
Friday, January 27, 2006
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Cities Make Own Weather Due to Trapped Heat, Expert Says During winter storms many city folk may praise warmer downtown temperatures for keeping the streets snow and ice free. But urbanites ought to take steps to curb this phenomenon before localized temperature differences become a global weather problem, a meteorology expert says. |
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Don't follow super-size Americans, says Prince The Prince of Wales warned the British people last night that they were in danger of becoming as obese as many Americans because they did not walk or cycle enough. |
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Moratorium on McMansions Atlanta's mayor halts tide of starter mansions recasting landscape of older intown neighborhoods. |
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South Africans driven to use bicycles About 1,2 million South African have turned to bicycles as a mode of transport because of increasing traffic jams, the City of Cape Town said Thursday. |
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Welcome to Melbourne, the world's designer city Sydney may have its Opera House, but Danish architect Joern Utzon's grand work has done nothing to nurture the local culture — which is why Melbourne, not the harbour city, has emerged as the world's design city of the moment. |
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Can a city make you fat? At the south-east corner of Thompson and West 3rd in Greenwich Village, Andrew Rundle stops and turns around. "Look," he says, pointing in all directions. "There's a grocery store on every corner." |
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Rain Gardens Soak Up Urban Storm Water Pollution Properly designed “rain gardens” can effectively trap and retain up to 99 percent of common pollutants in urban storm runoff, potentially improving water quality and promoting the conversion of some pollutants into less harmful compounds, according to new research scheduled for publication in the Feb. 15 issue of the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science and Technology. |
Thursday, January 26, 2006
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Beijing OKs electric bicycles The Chinese capital has removed the ban on electric bicycles to ease city traffic, which have become increasingly congested due to fast rising numbers of cars on the road. |
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The Rise and Fall of Civilizations If you walked up to random people on the street and asked them how the United States came to be the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth, what kinds of answers would you expect to hear? Maybe they would say it's our industriousness, our Protestant work ethic, that's made us so successful as a society. Some might point to an independent, freedom-loving spirit that grew out of our do-or-die frontier culture. Others might say it's our natural ingenuity as a "race"—“It's in our genes, man." You could also expect to hear some people say that God simply likes Americans more than He likes other people. |
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Sim cities Visualise this. Houses on one-acre plots with low tiled roofs, two car garages and picket fences, picture windows, neatly curtained, looking out on trimmed lawns — a transplanted subdivision of New Jersey, complete with rambling ranch-style homes? No. Just a private housing estate in suburban Bangalore, built as promised in the brochure, along American lines. I drove around, trying to figure out why they appeared so out-of-sync in the hot Bangalore sun. An American answer to every Indian urban situation produces this sort of misguided animated development, now found throughout India. |
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
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Urban sprawl adds pounds, pollution Residents of King County's less-walkable neighborhoods — can you say sprawl? — are more likely to be overweight, a recently completed study concludes. Another related study has found, perhaps not surprisingly, that people who live and work in those neighborhoods generate more auto-related air pollution, another potential threat to health. |
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Britain's new apartment boom: can't we do more than just add water? We all know the problem by now: city centres all over Britain are rapidly being rediscovered as places to live, but the places that get built to live in are pretty much all the same: blocks of Identikit apartments aimed squarely at the investor market. Some are a lot better than others but there's not much variation, and certainly hardly anything fit for families. Homes with gardens? Forget it, mate, get back to the suburbs. |
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Permaculture Permaculture focused on meeting basic human needs in an environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable manner, permaculture branches out from creating ecological landscapes that produce foods, to include mindful land-use and community planning. |
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Meet the vanguard of high concepts in transit The idea of personal rapid transit systems is not a new one. The concept has been traced back to at least the early 1950s, when a New York state transportation planner named Donn Fichter began research that led to his 1964 book, Individualized Automatic Transit and the City. |
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Ŕ la dualmode It's an intriguing vision, but as it is now you can't get there from here. At least not the way Francis Reynolds wants you to do it. And how he wants you to do it is through a transit concept called dualmode. The idea is that you'd have an electric-powered car that would allow you to tool around your neighborhood just as you do now. But when it came time to commute to work or make a trip of any length, you'd pull onto an automated guideway and let a computer do the driving. From Maine to California and all points in between. It's an expansive vision to say the least. |
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
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Federal Grants Bring Surveillance Cameras to Small Towns This snowy village, in the shadow of Fall Mountain and alongside the iced-over Connecticut River, is the kind of place where a little of anything usually suffices. There are just eight full-time police officers on the town's force, two chairs in the barbershop and one screen in the theater. A little of anything -- except surveillance cameras. Bellows Falls has decided it needs 16 of those. |
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'Design flaw' haunts public buildings Most of Britain’s public buildings alienate people as much as they support them, David Adjaye, one of the country’s most prominent architects has declared. |
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Ken Smith Picked to Create O.C. Park Orange County officials today picked a prominent New York landscape architect to design what will be one of the nation's largest urban parks, carved from runways of the closed El Toro Marine base. |
Monday, January 23, 2006
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A Ride Down Hysteria Lane Traffic flattens many romantic views of New York. If our streets flow and pulse, why do braking cars grate our nerves from the Palisades down to Coney Island? And a related question: why is it so hard to get around on a bike? While future planning adjustments would rectify both weaknesses, bikers remain in a precarious mess. We can begin to see how as we approach the city's great bridges. |
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6 EPA ex-chiefs urge Bush to limit carbon emissions Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, including five who served Republican presidents, said Wednesday that the Bush administration needs to act more aggressively to limit the emission of greenhouse gases linked to climate change. |
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Where's That Train? Bloggers Fill In the Blanks Like most feats of participatory social criticism, Andy Cheung's began with a dare. Mr. Cheung, a clean-cut 25-year-old computer programmer, was browsing his usual circuit of Web logs one slow December afternoon when he came across a post on Gothamist.com with a fake version of those subway posters that tell riders about service changes, track work and other night-and-weekend frustrations. In the subsequent thread of posts, one writer issued a challenge to anyone who could design a computer template for making such fake signs. That, Mr. Cheung thought, I can do. In early January, after a couple of weekends of tooling around with fonts and graphics, and with rider discontent at a peak in the wake of the holiday transit strike, he launched a sign generator at www.whereandy.com, where visitors could fill in the blanks to make an advisory sign that looked strikingly realistic. |
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All aboard the light rail to the future Sydney needs to act on a looming transport crisis before it chokes on its own growth. |
Saturday, January 21, 2006
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Living in a Box For city dwellers, the word "loft" generally evokes sprawling, spartan space and individual yet fiercely voguish style. But in Stuttgart, a pair of bright young things have created a loft with a difference. |
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Turning Asphalt to Gold With local and state governments in the United States in search of ways to increase revenue without raising taxes or issuing bonds, public-private partnerships have recently become a hot-ticket investment idea. |
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Moving Pictures – Advertising, Traffic and Cityscape There are two major factors responsible for the way contemporary cities look the way they do. One is the ever-increasing volume of traffic, and the other is the present commercial culture which manifests itself most visibly through advertising. |
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Taxi travel pollution 'highest' Taking a taxi may be a relatively luxurious form of transport - but it might also increase your exposure to common pollutants. |
Friday, January 20, 2006
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Eating the City The work of Beijing artist Song Dong explores questions of transience, perception and the ephemeral nature of existence. Or, in plainer terms, he builds model towns out of biscuits. Cities of McVities, so to speak. These sweet, crunchy, dunkable works of art take around 10 days to complete and are divided into zones: business, cultural and traditional Asian. Once a city is topped out, the hungry public are invited in to nibble on the tower blocks and munch the monorails. A sprawling conurbation is gradually reduced to rubble. Well, crumbs. |
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Environmental Aesthete The city of Shanghai, in Japanese architect Tadao Ando's eyes, is seething. "In 2005, few cities matched Shanghai in its vigor and speed of development," says the 65-year-old. "Once the city landscape was composed only of formalistic and decorative buildings along the Huangpu River. Just a few years later, this landscape has exploded into an overwhelming pattern of tall and great buildings." |
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Advocates of Wi-Fi in Cities Learn Art of Politics The idea of building citywide wireless networks from the community level was suspiciously simple back in 2000, although the plans sounded like the work of underground revolutionaries. "All of us were very idealistic, and all quite strongly opinionated," said Adam Shand, founder of Personal Telco, which had visions of such a network in Portland, Ore. |
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A Desire Named Streetcar Ah, trolleys! In 1930, 1,800 of them crisscrossed Brooklyn, traveling on a 300-mile latticework of steel track. But as city residents moved to the suburbs after World War II, the trolley infrastructure grew increasingly rundown, and tracks were pulled up and sold as scrap. New York cast itself as a progressive city, and trolleys were thought of as old-fashioned. Buses had become cheaper to run, and private automobiles more common. |
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New York Needs a "London Plan" With Mayor Michael Bloomberg's inauguration behind us, the debate now begins in earnest about the issues he will tackle in his second administration. As he considers what to do, Mayor Bloomberg would do well to consider London's example. |
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Endless Traffic: Can It End? On the third day of last month's transit strike, some New Yorkers found a silver lining in the shutdown of subways and buses. Bicycle traffic had increased by 500 percent. People got more exercise as they walked to work. And some of the emergency traffic rules -- requiring cars entering much of Manhattan to have at least four people, and restricting some avenues for emergency vehicles -- seemed to work. |
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
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Urbanism is Boring What does Richard Rogers want us to do in the public spaces he champions? In England, we are now building spaces to be “public” in. Which means, in the case of Trafalgar Square for example, an opportunity to buy a coffee from Costa and wander around with the tourists in the middle of a traffic island. Richard: try these words out for meaningful size – Place, Piazza, Boulevard, Promenade, Market Square, Playground, Platz, Park, Avenue. People aren’t going to get to know each other in a place just because you call it public. The phrase Public Space is like Public Convenience – vague, repressed, euphemistic and boring. |
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Sidewalk Critics The outlines of a multi-media, print-and-web architecture culture are still emerging, but it's not too soon to discern one of the big challenges for criticism: the Web has made the culture unprecedentedly—amazingly and impossibly—global. Architecture has been international in outlook for years, but until lately this was mainly a matter of keeping up with the foreign journals and new monographs, attending lectures and exhibits, (sometimes even) traveling. Today this manageable world-view has exploded into a superabundance of instant-access globalism at once exhilarating and exhausting. |
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Martha Schwartz’s designs for Grand Canal Square A stunning design for a major new public space - Grand Canal Square - in Dublin’s Docklands, has been unveiled by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority. At 10,000 sq metres, the Square, located at the west end of Grand Canal Dock facing on to the water, will be one of the largest paved public spaces in the city. The new Grand Canal Theatre and Le Meridien 5-star hotel will both face on to the Square as well as shops, cafés and restaurants at ground floor level. |
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FAT is a postmodernist issue: British pranksters get serious. How do you get taken seriously as an architect if you're seen as being a bit of a prankster? If the kind of buildings you design do not accord with the Establishment view of what a building should be? Particularly if your source references tend to be gleaned from popular culture rather than the usual highbrow variety? And especially if you give yourself a funny name? Such questions define the art-architecture collective known as FAT. FAT has promised much, down the years. Now, it is starting to deliver. |
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Architect draws notice Denver developer Craig Nassi has erected two large billboards around the site of his planned Aura condominium tower featuring the face of the building's designer, Daniel Libeskind.
UCDavis Health "I walked by and said, 'Who the hell is that?' " said Chuck Dalldorf, a former chief of staff to three Sacramento mayors who now works for the League of California Cities. |
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A totally tubular approach to the Highway 520 mess Smart urban areas are learning to free up scarce land and improve the environment by using innovative design for their transportation corridors. Given the right conditions, placing major roadways underwater or underground can be cheaper and better for the environment than the old, above-ground model. In particular, use of cost-effective, shallow submersible tubes can benefit taxpayers, travelers and the communities through which they travel. |
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The Gaudí effect Santiago Calatrava's stunning buildings for Valencia bear comparison with the work of another great Spanish architect. |
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Megamansions sit on housing market It's the ultimate trophy property: A 29,000-square-foot spread on Biscayne Bay with 13 bedrooms, a gun room, fingertip identity-scanners, and, for privacy from gawkers on passing boats, a machine that shrouds the backyard in mist. Yet several years after putting the home on the market, no one has offered owner Thomas Kramer anything close to his current asking price of $50 million. |
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
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Cities' enthusiasm for skywalks fades Sunlight is replacing shadows where elevated walkways spanning streets around Cincinnati's downtown square have been torn down. Similar open spaces are appearing in other cities where planners once hoped skywalks would energize their downtowns. |
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The War Against Suburbia Suburbia, the preferred way of life across the advanced capitalist world, is under an unprecedented attack -- one that seeks to replace single-family residences and shopping centers with an "anti-sprawl" model beloved of planners and environmental activists. The latest battleground is Los Angeles, which gave birth to the suburban metropolis. Many in the political, planning and media elites are itching to use the regulatory process to turn L.A. from a sprawling collection of low-rise communities into a dense, multistory metropolis on the order of New York or Chicago. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has outlined this vision, and it does not conform to the way that most Angelenos prefer to live: "This old concept that all of us are going to live in a three-bedroom home, you know this 2,500 square feet, with a big frontyard and a big backyard -- well, that's an old concept." |
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Baltimore surprised by new title: America's fittest city When an annual survey named Baltimore the fittest city in America, many Charm City residents had the same response: You gotta be kidding. Sure, people here are known for eating lots of seafood, but are crab cakes and deep-fried lake trout the staples of a healthy diet? |
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Eight Projects Receive 2006 Regional and Urban Design Honor Awards A distinguished jury selected eight projects for the 2006 AIA Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design. Among the chosen plans, several themes stand out: reviving urban areas from poor social and economic health, striving for sustainability, and engaging communities in the design process. |
Monday, January 16, 2006
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Home sweet 'death-defying' condo homes Scandal continues to swirl around erroneous -- and potentially lethal -- structural assessments of hotels and condominiums by former architect Hidetsugu Aneha. Few, however, would detract from the universally accessible, "barrier-free" design of most modern Japanese condos. Few except Shusaku Arakawa, that is. An internationally acclaimed, award-winning painter-turned-architectural-designer, Arakawa brands typical modern Japan dwellings as lifeless and inhuman -- not to mention harmful. This is, he insists, partly because they feature too many straight lines and flat planes that do not exist in nature. |
Saturday, January 14, 2006
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Architects propose a slice of Manhattan in Orlando Orlando hasn't seen anything like this before. Two of the four ultra-modern buildings planned for the downtown block across from the Orange County Courthouse would feature sides that don't align vertically. Picture building blocks stacked by a woozy toddler. Another tower resembles one building stacked atop another, with completely different facades. |
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Lessons From Shanghai Talk about densities. Walking along sidewalks is a contact sport that sweeps you along. As for design and development, it is everywhere, as an estimated 400 high-rises in various states of construction accent the city's studded skyline. (In comparison, 46 are in the planning pipeline for Downtown L.A.) While L.A. keeps holding talkfests calling for the revitalization of the Los Angeles River, Shanghai in just a dozen years has transformed what had been mostly rice paddies east of its Huanpu River downtown into a sparkling collection of residential and office developments, plazas and parks. Known as Pudong, it is now the site of the world's tallest hotel, Asia's largest shopping center and the city's new financial district, all lit up and open for business |
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Where the heart is We need to vote for the independence, for the distinctiveness, for the hands-on qualities that locally owned businesses give us with our spending in the years to come. I dread a day that is nearly already here, a day when you can wake up in any suburban area in any city in the United States and have no clue where you are: Everything looks the same. |
Friday, January 13, 2006
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New buildings need to fit in with the future, not just the past "Contextual architecture" has been a hallowed goal for a generation now, and no wonder. Who can quibble with the idea that buildings should be good neighbors and defer to the past? Right? |
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Doomsday vault to avert world famine Within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity. |
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Bikers Win One: Judge Nixes City Law on Parade Permits A judge late on Monday took a bite out of the city's efforts to rein in the monthly Critical Mass rides when he ruled that the New York City law barring people from "parading without a permit" is unconstitutional. |
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“Sprawlville” not working in cities For a long time, we’ve sprawled and developed subdivisions willy-nilly over farmland and pastures. “But people are now realizing that the gridlock, the pollution, the long commutes, the lost productivity have brought us to the point where we have to rethink what this city looks like. And we can no longer rely on single-passenger automobiles as our principal means of transportation in L.A.’s future.” |
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Going 'hybrid' with houses Last year, hybrid cars reached a turning point. Steep gas prices drove folks to the more fuel efficient part-gas, part-electric vehicles, and this year many of the automakers will offer them in their lineups. With rising energy bills shocking residents across the US, it's time to "go hybrid" with homes. |
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Urban Light As cities develop and expand over time, unique spatial configurations emerge. Places that were once the city's edge become enveloped in its fabric, and others that once had a specific use become places of confusion. But in the case of the Triple Bridge and Jamaica streetscape projects (both to be completed by the end of 2004), architecture, light and landscape work in unison to reclaim these neglected urban spaces. |
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Maxwan wins competition for a new city near Moscow The Dutch office Maxwan architects and urbanists has won an international competition for a new city of 160.000 inhabitants south-west of Moscow, Russia. |
Thursday, January 12, 2006
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A Global Look at Urban Planning Richard Burdett , guest organizer of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition for the Venice Biennale, which will open on Sept. 6, stood in his hotel room on Monday evening looking out over the dark office towers of Caracas, Venezuela, and talked about cities, the subject of his exhibition. He is visiting 18 cities that will be the subject of the architecture exhibition of the Venice Biennale this fall. Mr. Burdett's topic, which five years ago might have been a gently heated discussion among colleagues, is now a global flashpoint. Cities are terrorist targets - New York, London, Madrid. Cities are the staging grounds for riots, Paris most recently. And cities everywhere are magnets for immigration, welcome or not. According to population projections, 75 percent of all people will live in a few dozen cities by 2030. |
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Advocates say suburban growth is good There is a breed of city person, the diehard urbanist, who lives, works, eats and spends weekends in the city, and who openly detests the suburbs. Hates the way they sprawl over the once-rural landscape, cringes at the sight of houses lined up along scrubbed streets stretching to the horizon, and snickers at the very idea that people would choose to live in such a setting. |
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Young at Heart: Finding The Key Demographic Needed To Revitalize America's Inner Cities Economist Joe Cortright and Carol Coletta, host of Smart City Radio and CEO of CEOs for Cities, outline the findings of their recent report, "The Young and the Restless in a Knowledge Economy". Just how important are young people to the revitalization of our inner cities, or more precisely defined "close-in neighborhoods"? What can cities do to capitalize on demographic opportunities and stay competitive? |
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Suburbs: A cliché from hell Depictions of the suburbs offer predictable images of conformity and alienation. In its short existence, suburbia has become more a bundle of clichés and conventions than a real place. Today, a young writer looking to describe a new landscape would do well to stay clear of the subdivision and head for somewhere fresher. New York, London, Casablanca — almost anywhere has less literary baggage than the North American suburb. |
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
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Down with catastrophism As recently as a decade ago it was unusual to encounter books predicting the imminent collapse of civilisation and probable extinction of the human race. When they appeared they were outside the mainstream, specialist philosophy texts or on the extremist fringe of environmentalism. Today such works are common. The core elements of the litany are predictable: climate change, disease, terrorism, and an-out-of-control world economy. Other elements such as killer asteroids, nanotechnology or chemical pollution can be added according to taste. |
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Urban Colleges Learn to Be Good Neighbors Ten years ago, the University of Pennsylvania was under siege, its ivy towers wreathed by an abandoned industrial wasteland, filth and soaring crime. Parents feared for their children after two student homicides. The neighborhood McDonald's was nicknamed McDeath. Students were virtual prisoners on campus. |
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Nanjing going green - literally When talking about Beijing, people often think of the grey courtyard houses and alleyways, while Harbin conjures up a mental image of small yellow buildings. Perhaps in the near future, Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, will make us think of the colour green especially in Xianlin, a new city area in the east famous for its large number of colleges and universities. The main colour of buildings there will be green, according to a new plan which has become a hot topic among locals. |
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SOM Designs 'Skyscraper for a New Age' Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has designed a 69-story corporate headquarters that can produce more energy than it consumes and promises to set new standards for sustainable architecture, the Chicago-based firm announced today. |
Monday, January 9, 2006
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Taking Back the Waterfront When America's Lucasfilm Animation wanted to open its first foreign studio in 2004, a handful of countries tried to lure them. All touted their efficiency, deep labor pools and low costs, yet Singapore—a city somewhat infamous for its lack of creativity—won the contest hands down, thanks in part to an attribute entirely off the spreadsheet: trees. "You can hike above the tropical rain forest in the morning, kayak in the warm ocean waters at lunch and walk through the botanical gardens at midnight without having to be afraid you will get mugged," says Christian Kubsch, general manager of the Singapore studio. |
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Urban light pollution to be outlawed To the Australian aborigines, they represented ancestral beings watching protectively over humanity. To the ancient Aztecs, the stars were gods waging a perpetual battle to destroy the sun. For millions of Britons the stars that inspired our ancestors have been lost in an impenetrable fug of light pollution, invisible behind the orange glow of neon and sodium lighting. |
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Hikers, bikers enjoy storm-damaged Highway 9 Caltrans crews working on a storm-damaged section of Highway 9 say the highway should reopen in about three weeks, but Felton resident Ollie Wright says he'd be happy if the repairs took much longer. Wright, on a late Sunday afternoon bike ride on the scenic highway just south of Felton, was among a handful of bicyclists and pedestrians enjoying a sunny day on the empty road, with no worries about vehicle traffic. |
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Tax Breaks Drive a Philadelphia Boom After years of losing population, the downtown region, known as Center City, is booming, with developments going up and old buildings being transformed into lofts and condominiums. |
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Gas Works concerts panned at meeting Speaking at the meeting, Richard Haag, the landscape architect who designed the park, said he was angry that public access to the park would be limited. "It is morally if not legally inconsistent to deny the public access to the whole park," he said. |
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Lucid in the sky with diamonds Norman Foster has beaten New York at its own game with a tower that raises the high-rise stakes. Next stop ... Ground Zero |
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Shanghai plans eco-metropolis on its mudflats The project to transform the mouth of the Yangtse river is the world's biggest single development. Frank Kane visits Dongtan, the unspoilt wildlife sanctuary that international finance will turn into the planet's first 'eco-city'. |
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The road to gridlock Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to spend $222 billion over a decade to pay for much-needed infrastructure improvements is a visionary idea. But when it comes to the transit portion of the governor's plan, he apparently envisions a future of gridlock and cloying air pollution. |
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Charm and Risk in San Francisco As the 1906 quake centennial nears, experts say the city's distinctive architecture leaves it vulnerable in the face of another major temblor. |
Saturday, January 7, 2006
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Goodbye, Suburbs For many New York City families, January is the cruelest month. It is a time to get seriously claustrophobic in an apartment stocked with young children and the vast plastic undergrowth in which they thrive. It also a time for many to ponder the absurdity (or impossibility) of paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for private-school tuition, soon due for the coming semester. Those plotting a hasty exit to the suburbs (the space! the schools! the space!) may want to consider the experience of others who went before them, only to double back within a year. |
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Gov. to Seek New Freeway Toll Lanes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will propose today adding special toll lanes — some exclusively for trucks — to California's most congested freeways, and speeding their construction by easing environmental reviews. |
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Stockholm residents choke on new congestion charge On an overcast winter morning, traffic heading into Stockholm on the main route from the north is heavy, but it is moving -- unlike the rush-hour gridlock typical in some metropolitan centers. Yet the capital of Sweden, a country known for its vast, unspoiled natural vistas and clean air, will soon have the world's most extensive system of traffic congestion charges. |
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Outfitting a ruin Retailer Urban Outfitters is overhauling a Navy Yard workshop but saving its shabby charm. |
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New York Life Building in jeopardy "It's architectural taxidermy," says Michael Moran, vice president of Preservation Chicago, which placed New York Life on its most recent "Chicago Seven" list of endangered buildings. "It's the difference between looking at an animal and looking at the skin of a dead animal. Chicago is the birthplace of the steel-frame skyscraper, but this plan would rip out the heart and soul of the building -- its frame -- and leave behind a fake front." |
Thursday, January 5, 2006
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Drivers atone for exhaust with carbon offsets As a business and fundraising consultant, Pat Castleman drives about 1,000 miles a month. So when the Mill Valley, Calif., resident heard that she could "neutralize" the greenhouse gas pollutants emitted by her new Infiniti sedan, she jumped at the opportunity. By signing up with DriveNeutral, a nonprofit launched in October by students at the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco, Ms. Castleman was able to calculate her "climate change footprint," using simple online calculators. To neutralize that footprint, she bought greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, also known as "carbon offsets." Castleman paid $25 to compensate for about five tons of carbon emissions a year - plus a DriveNeutral decal proclaiming her vehicle's carbon-free status. |
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High petrol prices fuel pedal power Australians are turning in greater numbers than ever to cycling, with bicycles outselling cars for the sixth consecutive year. |
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Because He's More Important Halfway up the block I saw it: The biggest, most shiny, most chrome covered, most yellow, most wide and ugly Hummer I've ever seen. It had all kinds of gadgets and extra lights. It was blasting music, or perhaps just some kind of low pulsing sound so deep and loud it made the wind shield wipers rattle on nearby cars. |
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Up on the Roof With solar-powered homes a trend in Calif., environmentalists fear they're a factor in overdevelopment. |
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
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They call themselves libertarians; I think they're antisocial bastards The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation that recognises only the freedom to act. [Via] |
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New year revolutions: architecture Could 2006 be the year when the plate-glass façade is banned? |
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At 9/11 Site, No Guidelines? No Problem. Design Away How many commercial buildings will be designed at the World Trade Center site before the official World Trade Center Commercial Design Guidelines are issued? |
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Designing for Terror Glass that doesn't reduce to shards. Inclined tops on vending machines. A clear line of sight down the platform. These are examples of "environmental design" upgrades that can make subway cars, trains, and stations less tempting targets for terrorists. |
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2005 hottest year on record It is a huge and serious challenge, these figures add to the weight of evidence that climate change is real and that it's a problem that the world needs to work together to seek to solve. |
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As 'brownfields' clean up, ecologists worry The cleanup of brownfields such as the factory in Attleboro has become one of the federal government's most popular environmental programs. But as legislators have poured more than $400 million into a program that helps them deliver visible improvements to districts, some environmentalists have voiced concern that it's coming at a price: While spending on brownfields grows, the government falls further behind in cleaning up sites that carry far more health risks but fewer commercial prospects. |
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
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Robot car: streets ahead in cities of the future It is not every day that a concept car re-writes the rules of more than 100 years of motoring. In development for four years by a team of architects and engineers led by William Mitchell, former head of the school of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as part of his Smart Cities research group, a new MIT car is borne of a complete rethink of people's relationship with their cars in the ever-expanding cities of the future. |
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Group may sue over air fee Air-quality officials regulate stationary sources of pollution such as plants and factories but can't directly control tailpipe emissions, the largest source of dirty air. The new rule places fees on all projects that increase vehicular traffic, such as homes, shopping malls and schools. |
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Architect's book examines sprawl Designing With Nature, Swaback's fourth book, is a treatise on the future of urban, or rather suburban, sprawl, a mainstay of Southwestern development, which has involved him as an architect and urban planner for more than 30 years. |
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Pigs and cubic cities If humans can live in skyscrapers, why not pigs and fish? When the Dutch architect Winy Maas first proposed that 600 metre-high skyscrapers, filled with pigs, could supply most of Europe’s pork needs, he was accused of proposing “concentration camps for animals”. But why should agriculture be restricted to the countryside, and organised horizontally? Would it not be efficient, and ecologically sounder, to move food production and consumption closer together? |
Monday, January 2, 2006
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Extreme Skipping Skip into the new year with style. |
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Building a Future Without a Blueprint For most of the 20th century, the year for long-range urban planning was 2020. We called it the "perfect vision" year. Now we are asked to look forward another decade. Within the new time frame, architects will still, surely, look ahead, proclaiming the House of the Future, or the Ville Contemporaine as Le Corbusier did in the 1920s, or the New Urbanism as they do today. But their prophesies will be no more perfect than the previous ones, continuing to tell us more about their own time than about 2030, because cities rarely arise from visions. |
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New York, Once a Lure, Is Slowly Losing the Creative Set They may not have the money of the hedge fund managers who line up at bonus time at the open houses for $5 million homes, and their numbers do not equal that of health care workers. But New York City's creative sector - which includes architects, potters, filmmakers and clothing designers - has long helped fuel the city's economy because of its size and its role in drawing the wealthy to town. But relentless inflation in real estate and health care costs are endangering New York's long dominance in the creative sector, according to a new report, as artists and companies migrate to less expensive cities eager to lure them. |
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Arnhem Central Station Wins Schreudersprize 2005 The station area of Arnhem Central has been announced as the winner of the Schreudersprize for innovative, multiple use underground construction. The new station area, commissioned by the city council of Arnhem, has been designed by architectural practice UN Studio (Ben van Berkel) together with Arup (Cecil Balmond). |
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Town tries soft lights to calm violent drinkers First they tried posters, then portable toilets, then police on horseback. But now council chiefs in Wrexham have unveiled a radical alternative to quell drink-fuelled violence in their town centre: mood lighting. |
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Birthplace of a cultural revolution Gateshead and Newcastle have led the way in using the arts as a tool for urban regeneration - but it hasn't always been plain sailing. |
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Beijing OKs electric bicycles to ease traffic The Chinese capital removes ban on electric bicycles from the beginning of 2006 to ease city traffic, which becomes increasingly congested due to fast rising numbers of cars on the road. |
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A voice for silence There are only seven or eight quiet places remaining in the United States. Fewer than 10. In the entire nation. Barely more than half a dozen in all the parks, wilderness, refuges and "wild" spaces that we treasure. Fewer all the time.
Quiet is going extinct. |
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Heat From the Earth to Warm Your Hearth Although the notion of tapping the earth's heat has been around forever and the basic technology has existed for decades, the many advantages have only recently begun to win widespread attention. The big reasons are concern for the environment and, more to the point, money. Geothermal systems are becoming increasingly competitive, even for homes in which an old furnace and air-conditioning system must first be removed. |
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Car Trouble As millions of Asian citizens jubilantly embrace driving, some experts predict an enviro nightmare. |
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