Urbanism News
Saturday, February 28, 2004
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Architect's homecoming American architect Ieoh Ming Pei is putting his name on the blueprint of not just another project in his native homeland but in the very backyard of where his family once lived. |
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Book Chain Taps Underserved Neighborhoods Borders Books and Music is tapping into one of the retail industry's few remaining new frontiers - underserved urban neighborhoods - with stores in Detroit and Chicago. |
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Guerrilla Retailing Here today, gone tomorrow is a familiar concept in fashion retail. |
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On the Back Lot, New York 90210 For all the surprises the Southern California landscape has to offer, few are as unexpected, or surreal, as the sizable chunks of New York rising among the palms on the back lots of Hollywood. These massive scenic reconstructions, half a dozen in all, each covering several acres, are built close to full scale, with 50-foot facades and full-width streets. They are as walkable as any real city. |
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The kindness of strangers? Diversity makes people anti-social. That is not as catastrophic as it sounds. |
Friday, February 27, 2004
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City from Scratch The New York–based architectural firm Gans and Jelacic has developed disaster-relief housing that is more than temporary shelter. The structures also attempt to accommodate the long-term hopes and dreams of displaced people. |
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Inside Out Wins Competition to Design Park in Milan, Italy A prestigious international competition for a new urban park in the centre of Milan held by the City Council has been won by 48 year old Dutch landscape and interior designer Petra Blaisse’s Amsterdam-based practice Inside Out. |
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Eastern waterfront awash in hope Revitalization envisions 6,000 homes and commercial space on now-derelict lands. |
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The regeneration game The extraordinary development will include municipal buildings as architectural wonders, a state-of-the-art green field park and, at its heart, the Città della Moda e del design - Fashion City. |
Thursday, February 26, 2004
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Giant 'slug' vies to be star of east It may look like a giant slug, but a futuristic power station designed to run on anything from wood chippings and chicken droppings to household waste, could be a striking new landmark in the east of England. |
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If you live here, you're out of context Architects and planners often make it a point to stress the importance of context; in other words, the need to make sure a new building fits comfortably alongside older neighbors. |
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Hong Kong's vertical villages an inspiration Hong Kong isn't so much a city as a condition. Dense, concentrated, commercial and vertiginously vertical, it represents hyper-urbanism raised to gravity-defying heights |
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San Diego reinvents itself - and gentrifies
Urban renewal projects have brought a flurry of new development - and criticism, as many argue that gentrification and diversity are incompatible. |
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Housing solution could be down the city's alleys Somewhere on the road to a better Toronto, the city's many laneways will have to become part of the trip. |
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
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A new way to view London: from a toilet Usable bathroom exhibit boasts one-way mirrored walls. |
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Fiets & Stal Holland is a land of the bicycle. Every Dutch person has at least one "fiets", and a good third of city-dwellers cycle regularly every day. There is therefore no scarcity of bike garages and guarded parking lots - but no-one often thinks about how they are designed. One of the few exceptions up to now is the temporary bicycle parking facility by VMX Architects, which has been calmly floating in the harbor basin in front of Amsterdam's main railway station since 2001. |
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Keith Sonnier He is known as a specialist for art on architecture. The installations of Keith Sonnier, who has now been labeled a neon artist, focus intensively on the surrounding architecture. |
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Shanghai may relent on bicycle ban Labeled bike-haters in a nation of cyclists, bureaucrats in China's largest city now appear to be backpedaling. |
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
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The name game As oak, bay, pheasant and other geographic or horticultural names become increasingly prosaic, more builders are looking to abstract, street names. In many cases, the name is designed to be attention-grabbing and evocative of a certain kind of lifestyle -- real or imagined. How about "Liquid Sugar Drive"? |
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Final Elephant masterplan agreed Southwark Council's executive met on Thursday night to agree the final masterplan for the £1.5 billion, 11-year regeneration of a 170-acre site at the Elephant & Castle. |
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Growth experts push new zoning to spark aesthetic renaissance For nearly 60 years, Americans have eagerly traded their Main Streets, front porches and walkable old neighborhoods for lookalike suburban homes, multi-car garages and colossal freeway shopping centers with acres of parking. |
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Overlooked at home, architect makes it big overseas Shigeru Ban, who designed temporary housing units made of paper for people who lost their homes in the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, is perhaps better known internationally than at home. |
Monday, February 23, 2004
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Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.
· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war |
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Making an old viaduct viable again One possible use for the stone structure: An elevated park with fine views of the city. |
Sunday, February 22, 2004
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Learning About the Brain Could Put Method Into Architecture's Madness Architects are finally hooking up with neuroscientists to explore how the human brain experiences architecture, and why. |
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Designs to keep the enemies at the gate Whatever it has done for global peace and equality, the United Nations is an undoubted architectural trendsetter. Its International Style 1950s headquarters in Manhattan, with its sleek monolithic exteriors and soaring, open interiors helped establish a US beachhead for postwar modernism. Now plans for extensive renovations and the addition of a new administrative building, to be designed by Fumihiko Maki, have once again put the UN at the forefront of design - this time the struggle to reconcile security features with aesthetics and openness.
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New development to rise beside Canary Wharf London's Canary Wharf could have a dramatic new neighbour under plans for a £2bn redevelopment of nearby Wood Wharf announced yesterday. |
Saturday, February 21, 2004
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The cars that ate Melbourne It is a sunny afternoon in 1950 and two boys are walking home from primary school in Essendon. Look, says Maurice, pointing to a spanking new Chevrolet ute with cream duco and chromium grille coming down Buckley Street. But Graeme, the other boy, is even more excited. "It's Dad!" he yells. "Dad's got a new car!" |
Friday, February 20, 2004
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The regeneration game In the fallout from the 1992 recession, few shed a tear as Britain's loadsamoney property magnates went to the wall. But with the government now inviting private developers to take the lead in the revival of our inner cities, today's loft converters are reclaiming the high ground - as our urban saviours. |
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Triplexes help keep city vibrant "It has never dawned on us to move to the suburbs," muses Mr. Deschambault, a retired city employee, and an architect himself. "We love it here not only because this is the house I grew up in, but because of the neighbourhood around us. We are close to everything."
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Lights, Camera, Design, Action! The UK's newest TV makeover program is tackling something more complicated than someone's wardrobe or living room. Kester Ratternbury goes behind the scenes for the made-for-TV revitalization of an entire town. |
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Town House Invites the Outside In When Andrew Rasiej mows his lawn next summer, he won't be in his backyard. He will be on the roof of his four-story town house on Leroy Street in Greenwich Village. Mr. Rasiej, 45, has 18 inches of topsoil on his 800 square-foot roof. |
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A chip off the old box The government is planning an unprecedented number of new homes over the next decade, so the crucial question is: can we build good-looking housing on such a massive scale? |
Thursday, February 19, 2004
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Housing High and Low Spanish architect Roberto Pérez-Guerras has worked on a diversity of projects since the mid-1970s. He describes his design process as "fueled by the objective of creative imagination as a cultural evolution" and by "the attempt to obtain spaces for cohabitation out of sites whose value has not been realized." Here to illustrate these guiding principles are two very different residential complexes by the firm of Pérez-Guerras.
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New Nieuw Crooswijk No fewer than 1800 of the 2100 dwellings in the Rotterdam district of Nieuw Crooswijk are scheduled for demolition. The 'concept urban master plan' designed by West 8 was recently presented. |
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
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"Traffic Density" - What Does That Mean?
Traffic density refers to the number of people who travel over each length of line or guideway, on average, during some interval. |
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Buried treasure It was a cunning plan: hide a car plant on an English country estate. And who thought of it? The Germans. |
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Congestion charging sweeps the world A rash of cities round the globe is set to travel the same road as London. |
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
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'Eden Project' - for Norfolk As well as a “greenhouse for the future”, an education and visitors' centre, a restaurant and a floating farmers' market, at the heart of the imaginative project - dubbed the Star in the East - is a renewable-energy power station. [Via] |
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The World at Ears' Length Idea for a sci-fi horror flick: New York is invaded by zombielike robots. They ghost along the sidewalks, oblivious of pedestrians, and have frequent near misses with taxis and cyclists, causing chaos. They carry a secret weapon — no bigger than a deck of cards — that can render humans invisible. The only sign they are not quite human themselves: two white wires that run from their ears into their clothes, just below the neckline, as distinctive as the bolts in the Frankenstein monster's neck. |
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Space Invaders The Big Box juggernaut. |
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Tempest brewing over Stonehenge tunnel plan The British government wants to bore a $450-million highway tunnel under Stonehenge, and the pagans are not pleased.
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Beijingers critical of urban landscaping The Beijing Youth Daily attracted many telephone calls from readers when on February 2 it published an article entitled "Do Artificial Flowers and Landscape Features Beautify Cities or Are They Superfluo". The article had criticized the artificial landscaping features appearing along the streets and lanes of the capital and its readers agreed. |
Monday, February 16, 2004
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Architect's talk draws big crowd Wow! An estimated 470 people showed up Monday evening in Mitchell Hall at the Denver Botanic Gardens, overwhelming the 300 seats and the facility's parking, all for an architectural lecture. |
Sunday, February 15, 2004
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Metaphors Rise in Harlem Sky Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor," the new architecture show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, cannot be recommended for those who are keen to avoid the topic of identity politics and their role in cultural enterprise. But then, neither can New York. |
Saturday, February 14, 2004
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Driving to Fat City Want to lose six ugly pounds, reduce sprawl and make sidewalks our most important product? Put aside your Safari, park your Defender, trade in your Explorer for walking shoes. Now that's Phat City. |
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Design matters: we all recall the layout, smell and colour of our first school Pupils and teachers alike may well agree that their schools, especially structures dating from the 1960s and 1970s, were designed by men and women who had presumably failed woodwork, chemistry and even art. White hot in summer, Kelvin-cold in winter, these were no-frills, short-lived machines for learning in. |
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£5bn for radical renewal of English schools The biggest and most ambitious school rebuilding programme since Victorian times was unveiled by the government yesterday, spearheaded by a series of radical designs by some of Britain's top architects. |
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Mayor unveils plan for greater London City to be reorganised to create homes and jobs for 800,000 more people. |
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How to make street corner come alive If nothing else, the new building on a forlorn stretch of Shattuck Avenue in North Oakland would be startling simply because you don't expect to see a cafe offering organic coffee and tarot card readings across the street from a muffler shop. |
Friday, February 13, 2004
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Solar power hits suburbia To watch the meter running backward - in essence, selling electricity back to the utility - was a novelty in suburban New Jersey in fall 2001. |
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Driven mad by car-crazy Americans Tell an American the distance to Inverness from Selkirk and they would be happy to drive there for a pint of coffee. |
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Driven mad by car-crazy Americans Tell an American the distance to Inverness from Selkirk and they would be happy to drive there for a pint of coffee. |
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Junkiehotel Utrecht - BAR BAR Architecten has converted a historic building on Maliebaan in Utrecht into a hotel for drug addicts. A stack of ivy-covered service modules structures the spatial organisation of the complex. |
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Archigram, the original Blobmeister This fantastic, hovering blob will be Archigram's revenge for its many earlier disappointments, for competition-winning schemes that were never realised. |
Thursday, February 12, 2004
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Crosswalk protest ignites driver fury "I would suggest you don't cross at this crosswalk," the officer said, according to witnesses. |
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MVRDV's Flightforum The business park FlightForum in Eindhoven (NL) designed by MVRDV, is almost complete. The design by MVRDV focuses on the building regulations for the plots and on the organisation and lightening of the streets that meander through the terrain. |
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New Housing New York Competition Winners The “New Housing New York” design ideas competition was launched to generate new ideas in affordable and sustainable housing design for housing production in the city. |
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Wales can be proud of its slate armadillo Can architecture help build a nation? If so, what image does a nation, particularly an emerging or newly independent nation, wish to portray through its public buildings? |
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Mayor plans 12 more giant skyscrapers Plans for a dozen giant skyscrapers on the scale of Canary Wharf are included in a 20-year strategy for London to be published today by the capital's mayor, Ken Livingstone. [Via] |
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Architect Fumihiko Maki, designer of the Sam Fox Arts Center, selected to build a new United Nation's headquarters
A renowned Japanese architect, Fumihiko Maki, has been chosen to design a new United Nations building on the site of the Robert Moses Park on 42nd Street. |
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City Lights There are more than three hundred thousand street lights in operation in the city today, and—this will be news even to most locals—some thirty-five to forty models, with names like Bishop’s Crook, Lyre, Reverse Scroll, and Davit Pole. |
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
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Pigeons reveal map-reading secret Pigeons have developed "human-like" navigating skills . Homing pigeons are finding their way around Britain by following roads and railways, zoologists claim. |
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Whetting the Olympic Dream New York City's Olympic bid committee, NYC 2012, has made some great design decisions including the choosing of finalists for its Olympic Village. However, as the very powerful private organization prepares to make its final push, Andrew Yang asks, How much does the city really need the Olympics? |
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Shigeru Ban Architects Wins Competition To Build New Pompidou Centre in Metz, France The Tokyo firm Shigeru Ban Architects in association with Jean de Gastines of Paris and Gumuchdjian Architects of London has won the design competition to build the new Euro Pompidou Centre in the city of Metz 3 1/2 hours east of Paris. Commemorating the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the new facility is scheduled to open in 2007. |
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
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What makes a city thrive? "A wise old man once told me, if you're looking for someone to have sex with, you live in the city; if you've got someone to have sex with, you live in the suburbs. Sometimes I think it may be as simple as that." |
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New generation is right on track Transit villages appeal to home buyers who are willing to sacrifice square footage to be closer to rail stations. |
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Like 'Stamford in Midtown': Shoppers Pack the New Mall "It's like a mecca for everything," Ms. Perdomo said, strolling arm-in-arm with her friend, Sarah Ladmer, a 19-year-old cocktail waitress. |
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False Creek in the Arabian desert Except for the dome-like fins on the towers, Dubai Marina is a virtual clone of Vancouver's famous waterfront community. |
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Something in the Air It's easy to imagine how Hollywood would script it. One or two plucky souls stand up at a town meeting and vow to fight. The plant's owner, a ruthless multibillion-dollar corporation, strikes back with everything its high-priced attorneys can devise, or worse. Someone has to die. And finally, good (or just possibly evil) prevails.
But that's not what happened. Instead, it was something quite undramatic, or at least uncinematic: in a series of town meetings in the spring of 2002, lawyers presented an offer from American Electric Power to buy the whole town of Cheshire for $20 million. |
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Design contest may hint at Strip's future Beyond the bustle of the Strip District's busy marketplace of fresh fish, wholesale vegetables, discount clothing and handmade pottery lies a sea of paved parking lots dividing shoppers and tourists from the Allegheny River. |
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For a McHappy ending: No new drive-throughs We deserve a break today. |
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UIC Students Take Top Sustainable Design Honors With Bamboo Plan Three inventive graduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs won an environmental design contest with a plan to grow stands of bamboo on urban brownfield sites to leech pollutants from contaminated soil. |
Monday, February 9, 2004
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Structured ideas of free thinker The Neuenationalgalerie in Berlin, Modernist architect Mies van der Rohe's masterpiece of the late 1960s, makes most exhibitions fold up and die. Few can survive the penetrating stare of the outside world through the glass-walled structure. |
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Melbourne ranked world's top city Melbourne has retained its position as the best city in the world to call home. |
Saturday, February 7, 2004
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In Vienna, Austria, The Fireman Lives Next Door Firefighters and policemen became heroes to the nation on 9/11, but most of those who lost their lives in the World Trade Center lived on Long Island they couldn't afford Manhattan. |
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A Portrait of a Neighborhood Is Now Just a Click Away Want to know how many vacant lots are in your neighborhood? How steep the rent increases have been? The rate of mortgage foreclosures? How many people live in "linguistic isolation" (bureaucratese for "non-English speakers'')? |
Friday, February 6, 2004
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A parking lot effect? Do massive asphalt and concrete "urban heat islands" like Houston or Atlanta really help ratchet up the global thermostat? What about huge tracts of farmland like those that span the Midwest? |
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City Hall Seeking Brand-New Avenue Between 10th, 11th Lost in the brouhaha over the Jets stadium and the Bloomberg administration’s plan for a revitalized West Side is a broad swath of privately owned buildings in the 30’s and 40’s that the city wants to demolish to make room for a broad, park-like boulevard. |
Thursday, February 5, 2004
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The mouse and the house Building a new kind of architecture Cameron Sinclair uses e-mail to rally a fast-growing network of designers to address the plight of refugees and homeless worldwide. |
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Shrinking City Syndrome A Decade ago, the prevailing wisdom was that cities grow, sprawling ever wider. As the world population hit six billion, experts warned of explosive overcrowding in the megacities of the developing world. Shrinking cities were considered an anomaly, the result of isolated economic upheaval or traumatic political events. "Smart growth" became a rallying cry. |
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Where the (Faux) Grass Is Greener A pilot program in Anaheim is testing the water savings of synthetic lawns. Five homeowners get to put away the mower. |
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Smog-busting paint soaks up noxious gases A paint that soaks up some of the most noxious gases from vehicle exhausts will goes on sale in Europe in March. Its makers hope it will give architects and town planners a new weapon in the fight against pollution. |
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The Curse of Sprawl Urban planners have returned to a belief in mixed-function cities too late. Suburban sprawl has become the defining feature of the globalised city, creating societies of segregated strangers, where only consumer patterns, rather than communities, unite people. On the one hand we have work-oriented and cosmopolitan professionals and on the other hand we have locals, bound to the location. |
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Dances with Building This story sounds like something out of an old Fred Astaire movie, and why not? Just looking at the Eller Theatre, designed by Gould Evans Associates in Phoenix, makes you want to tap your feet. The finely proportioned rectangular glass volume that hosts the dance studios seems to pirouette above a lush green lawn. |
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Street Life Over the last fifteen years, the idea that urban living fosters community has come back; architects and planners want to create urban density and sociologists have at last learned that human reality cannot merely be a social construct; it has to be a physical one too. |
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Euroscapes What are the physical consequences of the gradual disappearance of Europe's internal borders? |
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New central library is not by the book From the outside, Seattle's new central library looks nothing like the soldier-straight buildings around it. |
Wednesday, February 4, 2004
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Design personality MCA/Denver emphasizes people ahead of style to select architect for its new site. |
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Actually, that was my gherkin... When Norman Foster's right-hand man walked out after 30 years it wasn't just a question of who got the CDs. Deyan Sudjic on the personal and professional fallout of architectural divorces. |
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WGBH looks to wrap new headquarters in digital skin Is it a billboard? Is it architecture? Is it art? Who can say? Is this the world we're headed for? Will we even know anymore when we're in the real world and when we're in a media simulation? Will that cease to be a meaningful distinction? |
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Down by the Riverside World-class architects are bringing high design and higher prices to an industrial-strength swath along the Hudson, west of the Village and north of Tribeca. Is lower Manhattan ready for a megadose of Eurostyle? |
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Forward thinking for Heritage site It's an ambitious vision. Turn an old, abandoned mall surrounded by a huge expanse of asphalt into a livable community, complete with green spaces, courtyards, shops, restaurants and easy transit access. |
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Franchise industry finds a new home It's not just for pizzas and fast food anymore. Franchising has come to the new-home market. |
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Is it just a facade? Replacing everything but the front of an old building may seem to serve history, but often it creates a shallow hybrid. |
Tuesday, February 3, 2004
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Bird on a Wire With his presentation of a transit hub design so breathtaking that the audience demanded a curtain call, Santiago Calatrava threw down a glove to the assembled politicians - Gov. Pataki chief among them - demanding that his impassioned, inspired vision for a true public space be built with equal passion and determination. |
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Ground Zero Finally Grows Up This is more like it. The World Trade Center PATH Terminal by Santiago Calatrava, the renowned Spanish architect and engineer, is what we should have at ground zero. Not modified suburban malls with water fountains, but a major cultural contribution to our city. |
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Calif. Lawmaker Promotes Feng Shui A legislator wants California's building codes to accommodate the ancient Chinese tradition of feng shui, which says buildings should be located and designed in ways that create harmonious energy flow. |
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A New Wrinkle in Urban Renewal Lancaster and Palmdale, far from trying to attract young hipsters, look to seniors to help revive their downtowns. |
Monday, February 2, 2004
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Colorado Takes Strides to Polish Thin and Fit Image Everyone here has buns of steel and rock-hard abs laced across the zero-fat body of a vegan marathon runner. Everyone hikes and bikes and has climbed Pikes Peak. |
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New tsar to reclaim city for pedestrians 150 years ago, they created a beautiful city, but it was not ready for the population and motor car. |
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Suburban developments try to accommodate density The study last week showing that first-time Bay Area home buyers need six-figure incomes to even think about the deed drove home a huge point: Unless regional growth patterns change, this will be a society of extremely weary commuters from the Central Valley. |
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Detroit's face-lift falls short for '06 Super Bowl Casino hotels, Book restoration unlikely; few lofts materialize. |
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