Urbanism News
Friday, February 23, 2007
|
Lock 'em up and throw 'em the key: Will Alsop's Creative Prison. I was talking to a designer type who'd been to see Will Alsop's "Creative Prison" exhibition. Good haircut, good clothes, a general air of youthful right-on-ness about him. You'd have him down as the target audience for such an exercise: the concerned liberal seeker of solutions to society's problems. Except that he wasn't. I asked what he thought of the show. He pondered for a moment. "Trouble is," he replied, "It started to bring out the Daily Mail reader in me." |
|
Stern and the City The architect and historian completes his epic five-volume survey of the Big Apple. |
|
History vs. Homogeneity in New Orleans Housing Fight In this hard-pressed city a proposal by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish four public housing complexes has touched a raw nerve. The demolition, which would affect more than 4,500 housing units, represents for some the plight of a poor, black underclass displaced by Hurricane Katrina and struggling to return. It also represents the problems that faced the city even before the hurricane: poverty, crime and racial divisions. |
|
Truth Vs. Advertising: The Banana Republic Architect Ads The Banana Republic ad with the architects—it's everywhere! And it raised some questions for us. So we asked an architect—we'll call him Frankie Lloyd—who works at "a large firm downtown with an eccentric, megalomaniac starchitect at the helm" how the ad stacked up to his reality. The answers may surprise you! |
|
Environmental design needs recession-proofing now Can the current fashion for green building survive an economic downturn? |
|
I want to build a neighbourhood in Prague similar to Broadway in New York Serge Borenstein, a Belgian who lives in the Czech Republic, could pride himself on being called “Mr Karlín”. He has already invested tens of billions crowns in changing the Prague district. |
|
Beijing manners 'getting better' The manners of people in Beijing have improved following a campaign to end anti-social behaviour ahead of next year's Olympics, researchers have said. |
|
China to eradicate queue-jumping China has launched a campaign to try to eradicate queue-jumping in the capital ahead of the Olympic games in Beijing next year. The campaign was launched under the slogan: "It's civilised to queue, it's glorious to be polite." |
Thursday, February 22, 2007
|
China Makeover (get your fireworks supersized) Luckily China invented gunpowder back in the old days… |
|
Green Towers In The Park: Seoul Commune 2026 There are green towers and then there are green towers. Subtitled “Rethinking Towers In The Park,” the Seoul Commune 2026 project by Mass Studies is just sheer genius. Aside from its futuristic green aesthetic, the concept is an investigation into the viability of future sustainable community structures in dense metropolitan areas. The organically-shaped towers take the classic architectural idea of towers in the park, and literally turn the park into the towers themselves, offering a cheeky yet profoundly sustainable and forward-thinking solution to community development. |
|
Green jitters grow on blue planet Al Gore bad for your mental health? Think about it. The message of environmental destruction being delivered by Gore – and a host of others in recent months – is proving too much to handle for some who feel helpless controlling the forces of nature. |
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
|
Carbon-free living: China's green leap forward The world's largest building project is a revolutionary eco-city of electric cars and zero emissions near Shanghai. |
|
Swedish Town Uproots to Save Itself From Disaster For someone whose city is on its way to being swallowed up by the earth, Vice Mayor Hans Swedell is a man of unbridled optimism. |
|
Coming soon to a Broward park near you -- advertising signs Tomorrow's public parks may be brought to you by your favorite snack, health food or athletic shoe company. |
|
Four downtown visions Finalists in the competition to remake Toronto's iconic square take a green, respectful – maybe too respectful – approach. |
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
|
Urban Retreat Motor City hosts a probing look at boomtowns in the bust of times. |
|
Edouard François: urban chameleon The Parisian architect mixes architecture with ecology: a fashionable fifty-year-old with a diverse background and designer of the offbeat Tower Flower in Paris |
|
The battle for Paris The squatter art scene in the French capital is so big it's on the tourist trail. But now the riot police are moving in. |
|
Solving the Public Health Crisis with Smarter City Planning Former California Health Officer Dr. Richard Jackson describes the threat of obesity and how the built environment can provide the remedy. |
Sunday, February 18, 2007
|
Toronto's green blueprint When it comes to the environment, cities are where the action is. Fed up with the dithering of national governments on climate change and other threats, hundreds of municipalities around the world are taking matters into their own hands. Since half the world's people now live in urban areas, these efforts could have a powerful impact. |
|
Vancouver city planners seeing green
Rule-breaking condo developments lauded for promoting new eco-density initiative. |
|
Locations Motivate Older Walkers The benefits of walking and being active are well-known, especially for older people, but what kind of neighborhood gets seniors going? It's not necessarily one with lots of walking trails or parks. What matters, researchers found, are the destinations like restaurants, grocery stores and even bars that are within a half-mile of your home. |
|
A long way to a latte Four years on, residents of Hercules' New Urbanist neighborhoods are still driving to the mall. |
|
Rethinking suburbia Modern suburbia has been with us for more than half a century. So why do we only discuss it with irony, condescension and stale myths? |
Friday, February 16, 2007
|
Roofs Paved with Green Now that past Next Generation winner Joe Hagerman has teamed up with Rafael Vińoly Architects, students in the Bronx are reaping the benefits. |
|
Restoring the Real New Orleans How do we save the Crescent City? Re-create the unique building culture that spawned it. |
|
Drop in the Bucket The number of housing initiatives currently under way in New Orleans is impresssive, but without active federal involvement they fall well short of the urgent need. |
|
Flawed Exports As the East modernizes, Western architects need to evaluate what they build in lands and cultures different from their own. |
|
Should China Ban Foreign Companies From Competitions? There is growing discontent with some of the most iconic projects in China, especially the grand projects in Beijing. The new opera for example, an “eggshell” directly adjacent to Tiananmen Square conceived by French architect Paul Andreu, provokes criticism of “un-chineseness” as well as of total lack of contextual respect. Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV building, an experiment in both construction and form, though expensively marketed in China and much talked about in the architecture world, has sparked formal concerns mostly among locals. |
|
NY students imagine city plan after global warming While the world's top scientists recently warned governments to take urgent action on global warming, a small group of Brooklyn students have designed their own plan for living with climate change. The students look ahead 50 years to how rising seas caused from global warming might flood the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood of Dumbo, in a small exhibit called "Dumbo Under Water" on display at a Brooklyn gallery this month. |
|
Challenging Urbanism How should the rapid changes in 21st-century society influence the methods of urban planners? How can planners promote sustainable development in light of population shifts from traditional city centers? |
|
Podcast - Disaster Planning For The Carless Society We present a summary of the National Conference on Disaster Planning for the Carless Society, an event held recently to examine the planning issues facing people without access to cars. The event placed a special emphasis on discussing the importance and the complexities of providing effective evacuation plans and implementation strategies for the carless in our society. |
|
Climate of hope: US cities lead the way Seattle mayor Greg Nickels is hopeful that the US will soon join the global effort to tackle climate change. Building on comments he made in the BBC News website's Have Your Say pages, Mr Nickels says more than 400 US mayors are committed to curbing emissions - something the White House has so far refused to do. |
|
The Next Wave Of People Power Steve Burkholder , the mayor of Lakewood, Colorado, couldn’t figure it out. Lakewood’s local government had won all sorts of awards for good management, and surveys showed that residents thought he was doing a great job, yet the city budget was going into the red because proposals for sales tax increases (the main source of city revenue in Colorado) had been voted down nine times in the last 30 years. “If people value the services we provide,” wondered Burkholder, “why won’t they give us the revenue we need to provide them?” Lakewood seemed to be the utopia nobody wanted to pay for. Then Burkholder got an answer. At a public meeting, someone in the audience piped up and said, “Look, we know you’re working hard for us, but what we’ve got here is a parent-child relationship between the government and the people. What we need is an adult-adult relationship.” |
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
|
Redesigning the Power Vertical Goethe’s timeworn description of architecture as “frozen music” has come to be supplanted more and more by an equally overworked reference to architecture as “frozen economy.” Russia’s post-Soviet experience bears out this more cynical moniker. The hectic, volatile decade of the 1990s spawned eclectic fashions and shoddy construction. The almost penitential regard for the past has now given way to brash and unapologetic modernist designs. |
|
Shanghai Rising China struggles to build a livable city inside a world-class business capital. |
|
Think tank predicts LA-style sprawl Dublin will soon have a footprint the same size as Los Angeles with less than a quarter of its population, a planning think tank said today. |
|
Why are they destroying our 100-year-old allotments to make way for the 'Green Olympics'? "We have to hand over a vacated site by July," says the London Development Agency spokesman strictly. This sounds rather brutish to me. I go a bit Fotherington- Thomas. "But it's 100 years old," I say, thinking of fruit, flowers, butterflies, rivers and community cohesion. |
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
|
A Town Revived, a Villain Redeemed Erich Von Stroheim was billed in his acting days as “The man you love to hate.” For the last 30 years, Robert Moses has been cast in that same role, as the villain responsible for everything that went wrong with New York. Even those newly arrived to the city knew enough to boo when his name came up at dinner parties. Moses (1888-1981) lived a long time, and his impact on the physical character of New York City was greater than that of any other individual in its history. |
|
Great buildings look good, feel right, too
The American Institute of Architects, the trade association for the people who shape our cities and our lives, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, it engaged a polling firm to ask average Americans to pick their 150 favorite buildings. Nor surprisingly, the buildings beloved by people aren't necessarily the same ones most admired by architects. |
|
If urban vision keeps being trampled, get used to mediocrity Someday I am going to write a book titled "Blinkered: When Bad Things Happen to Good Ideas." It would trace the way narrow agendas can thwart the broader public interest, how imaginative design gets nibbled to death by conventional thinking and how aversion to change inhibits neighborhood renewal. |
Monday, February 12, 2007
|
Logo Cities An International Symposium on Signage, Branding, and Lettering in Public Space. |
|
Desire grows for streetcars Urged by mayors and advocacy groups, US cities and towns are examining the possibility of returning the forgotten vehicles to their streets. |
|
Sustainability: Planning's Redemption or Curse? Sustainability is often defined as a balance of the three E's: the environment, the economy, and social equity. But as planners embrace the concept, the sustainability "balance" heavily favors one E: the economy. Michael Gunder warns that planners risk sacrificing the environment and social equity in the name of sustainable economic development. |
|
City fights for its right to dance You'd never know New York used to be the murder capital of the United States. The city is so different from its bad old days that legislators have to busy themselves by micro-nannying its citizens. Cigarettes and trans fats are already famously banned. And last week the Brooklyn-based state senator Carl Kruger was ridiculed in newspapers from the Bronx to Beijing for floating the notion of making it illegal to listen to an MP3 player or operate a Blackberry-like device while crossing the street. |
Friday, February 9, 2007
|
Excellent Olympic Speed Dating for London Architects London Architectural practices are being offered the opportunity of a “hot date” with the people responsible for the 2012 Olympic infrastructure on 15 February. So if they fail to achieve their Valentine’s Day ambitions, they have a chance to woo the ODA, LOCOG, Design for London and other major commissioning bodies. |
|
Ringing the changes The organisers of the London 2012 Olympics have promised that the games will be the most sustainable ever. But are their much publicised green goals really as ambitious as they sound? |
|
Such Cheek! Those Were the Days, Architects If you are revolted by today’s slick and fashion-obsessed architecture scene, hurry over to “Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines” at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. You’ll feel even worse. |
|
Future Planners The planning system has been reborn – what roles will planners be playing, and what tools will they need, to maximise the democratic potential of the planning system? |
|
Not enough parking space in Beijing Beijing lacks 400,000 parking spaces, Zhao Fengtong, vice mayor of the Beijing Municipal government, said on Thursday. |
|
The Jane Jacobs Medal Created by Rockefeller The Rockefeller Foundation will announce today the creation of a $200,000 award, called the Jane Jacobs Medal, to recognize individuals who have made a significant contribution to thinking about urban design, specifically in New York City. |
|
Rethinking Suburbia Neighborhoods that once held the suburban dreams of many have become havens for crime and the all-too-familiar problems of the inner city. |
|
London as it could be
In 1986, the British architect Richard Rogers "put forward a series of visionary, but not impractical, proposals for transforming a large area of central London." |
|
Car drivers 'risking skin cancer' Drivers who spend a lot of time behind the wheel increase their risk of skin cancer, US work suggests. |
Thursday, February 8, 2007
|
LEED-ND Pilot Launches New rating system shifts focus to sustainable development in green urban neighborhoods. |
|
Fast Cities They're 15 up-and-coming hubs for creative workers--places that draw people who are talented, tech savvy, and tolerant. Meet the home of your next big opportunity. |
|
Intrepid armchair explorers Google Earth is packed with things that its creators never intended. Paper maps are a cartographer's rendering of the world, whereas digital versions in Google Earth, Google Maps and Microsoft's Live Search Maps are more like sophisticated collages — moments captured by cameras on satellites and airplanes, seamlessly blended to create a digital world. |
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
|
Scholars to consider the shrinking of cities Scholars gather at UC Berkeley this week to ponder a trend much-studied in Europe but little-discussed in the United States: the shrinking city. |
|
Plan NYC 2030 When Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a plan for New York City in the year 2030, he said it was needed because the city will be getting much bigger, the infrastructure will be getting older, and the environment will be at risk. Plan NYC 2030 (or, the way the Office of the Mayor actually writes it, plaNYC) is based on the prediction that in the coming decades there will be a million new residents requiring some 265,000 new housing units. |
|
2012 Olympic master plan revealed Organisers of London's 2012 Olympics have submitted one of the biggest planning applications in European history. |
|
New York may ban iPods while crossing street New Yorkers who blithely cross the street listening to an iPod or talking on a cell phone could soon face a $100 fine. |
|
Rethinking the legacy of Robert Moses For a generation, the standard view of Robert Moses has been that he transformed New York but didn’t really make it better. This view was shaped by Robert Caro’s epic biography “The Power Broker”—published in 1974 and in print ever since. |
|
Sustainable Zoning: A New Imperative The devastating consequences of climate change, the many risks inherent in over-reliance on fossil fuels, a wasteful global food system, an increasingly inactive and obese population, and the ongoing destruction of natural habitat—to name just my top five-- are emerging crises to which single, uncoordinated, and incremental solutions will be woefully inadequate. |
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
|
An urban success story - Octavia Boulevard an asset to post-Central Freeway area In the 15 months since it opened, San Francisco's Octavia Boulevard has been hailed as a model for other cities. It has been honored at the local and national level, including an award last month from the American Planning Association. But here's the real measure of success: The thoroughfare that replaced the elevated Central Freeway feels like it belongs. It's not perfect, but it keeps cars moving while making the neighborhood around it a better place to be. |
|
High-Rise Architect Sails Proudly in Mainstream Costas Kondylis certainly doesn’t look like a troublemaker. In jacket and tie, with slicked-back silver hair, he comes across as a successful architect enjoying the fruits of his 40-year experience in New York — which he is. But he also happens to be the designer of some of the city’s most polarizing projects, including Donald Trump’s various towers, the Plaza Hotel’s renovation and four residential towers in the far West 40s that some architecture aficionados dismiss as dull blots on the skyline. |
|
Bhatia Describes His New Urban Design Plans for India As cofounder of Hotmail Corporation, Sabeer Bhatia helped revolutionize communication. Now he’s tackling communities. The web-based email veteran is building a new city in India from scratch around a model he hopes will attract young, highly skilled workers seeking a stimulating community to live in, and high-tech companies seeking to employ them. The new community will be known as Nano City after the technology Bhatia believes will help drive India’s growing economy, he told students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business during a January 23 talk sponsored by the school’s Global Management Program. |
|
From Old Air Base to Residential Amenity Ken Smith, a landscape architect based in Manhattan, is known for projects like the tiny terrace he designed on Sutton Place, where he was limited to “planting” plastic flowers in pipes mounted on a brick wall. But every two weeks or so, he flies to Southern California, where he is designing a park that is the size of about a million Manhattan terraces — 1,347 acres. |
|
Rediscovering an Old Problem Traffic is in the news again, with revived calls by a perplexed public for an expanded mass transit system, more selective planning, less development, free-range freeways and the purging of any politician and bureaucrat who thinks otherwise and drives a Hummer.
This latest outpouring of comments and complaints filtered by the Los Angeles Times was prompted by its peripatetic columnist Steve Lopez expressing concern over the increasing congestion clogging our highways, byways and freeways, and its effect on the local lifestyle. |
|
Old Shopping Malls Require Much More Than Cosmetic Surgery At the University of Maryland a few years ago, an architecture student undertook an unusual master's thesis project: the functional and aesthetic redesign of a strip shopping area in suburban Maryland. The goal was to transform a low-density, auto-dominated, formless agglomeration of buildings, roads and parking lots into a more attractive, denser, pedestrian-friendly spot with housing and work space, as well as shopping. |
|
Raising the Bar on Green Design To truly champion green design, firms must address both the quantifiable and the holistic benefits. |
|
A Tall Order for the D.C. Office Market Skyscrapers in Washington? Well, not quite. But Christopher B. Leinberger, a land-use expert at the Brookings Institution, last week brought up the prospect of raising the height limit on buildings in the District. He didn't specify a height but encouraged community leaders, planners and developers to at least entertain the idea. |
|
Rotterdam 2007 City of Architecture Opens Since January 1, 2007, the Erasmus Bridge has been illuminated by purple floodlights to mark the start of the Year of Architecture in Rotterdam. On Wednesday 17 January Mayor Ivo Opstelten presented the programme. What can we expect from and in Rotterdam this year? |
Monday, February 5, 2007
|
Moses vs. Jacobs plays again Over the next few months, though Jane Jacobs has not yet been dead a year, the reputation of her arch-nemesis Robert Moses is getting a hearty spit polish. Three simultaneous museum exhibitions now under way, gathered under the title Robert Moses and the Modern City and curated by the Columbia University architectural historian Hillary Ballon, seek to re-evaluate and rehabilitate Moses, praising him for his unparalleled achievements. |
|
Can our city's lands be reborn? Landscape architects are crowding into Toronto to redraw the lakeside and 'heal' toxic industrial lands. |
|
Seattle exerts a little peer pressure
There are ways to achieve medium-density downtown living other than with Vancouver's relentless formula of skinny condo towers on townhouse bases. |
|
Aging Areas Around Cities Push Suburban Renewal In recent years, newer U.S. suburbs have flourished and big cities have lured business and residents back downtown. Caught in the middle are older suburbs, many in the Midwest where economic growth has been particularly slow. Their plight has attracted the interest of scholars and even earned them a name: inner-ring or first suburbs, as compared with the outer-ring suburbs or exurbs where developers can in many cases build from scratch. |
|
Keeping it Real British cities have become very clever at designing beautiful buildings that people actually want. |
Thursday, February 1, 2007
|
In Wake of Paris Riots, Public Housing Authorities Build More, Better Projects If last year’s riots Paris riots were horrific, they weren’t surprising. The banlieue, suburbs like St. Denis, Poissy, and Clichy-sous-Bois, are pockets of concentrated immigrant poverty and faceless, block-style building long regarded as tinderboxes for trouble. |
|
Tales of the Self-Sufficient City Somewhere at the intersection of New Urbanism, DIY culture, and the resurgence of gardening for self-sustenance, an active and growing community of artist-maker-activists is redefining urban survivalism. While their work addresses our tenuous food security and the threats of catastrophic climate change, it's not a fear-driven movement. Rather, the best of these "new survivalists" are embracing radical self-sufficiency because it fuels their creativity, arms them with a sense of personal empowerment, and strengthens their communities. |
|
France's banlieues: year of the locust As France prepared to mark the anniversary of the riots that spread through its impoverished suburbs in October-November 2005, officials were braced for the worst. "Most of the conditions that led to collective violence one year ago... are still in place", an intelligence report warned in mid-October 2006, referring to the twenty-one nights of spreading turmoil, when more than 9,000 cars were burned and almost 3,000 people arrested. |
|
Car is just about ready to take wing Rafi Yoeli has an unconventional solution to saving people from burning high-rises or rescuing soldiers trapped behind enemy lines: a flying car. Yoeli already has gotten a rudimentary vehicle off the ground - about three feet - and hopes to see a marketable version of his X-Hawk flying car by 2010. |
|
A Vision in the Desert Planned for a 670-acre cultural district in Abu Dhabi: Above, from left, a Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry, a classical museum by Jean Nouvel, a performing arts center by Zaha Hadid, a maritime museum by Tadao Ando. Also envisioned are a national museum and 19 arts pavilions bordering a canal. |
|
Suspicious Devices in Boston Turn Out to Be Ad Campaign for Cartoon Boston temporarily closed parts of bridges, subway stations, an Interstate highway and even part of the Charles River on Wednesday after the authorities found what the police described as suspicious devices at nine places. But the devices, which included circuit boards, turned out to be part of a marketing campaign by Turner Broadcasting to advertise a cartoon television show, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” |
|
Futuristic architecture In the 1980s, postmodernism reigned supreme in the worlds of art and architecture. Postmodernist architecture, of course, was a reaction to the minimalist modern architecture of the 1950s and '60s. But, whereas the Michael Graveses and Robert Venturis of the world were busily designing whimsically overwrought buildings as a reaction to the excessively boring buildings that preceded them, architects in Britain such as Norman Foster and Richard Rogers were busy trying to rescue the modern movement from the dust bin of history. |
|
Thinking outside the cocoon Honda's new Advanced Design Center, in Pasadena, is a kind of architectural version of a concept car. Designed by George Yu, a 42-year-old Los Angeles architect, it holds desk space for 10 of Honda's top car designers, along with a conference room and a small, sleek kitchen along one wall. |
|
Mau has designs on Chicago Massive Change was the name of Bruce Mau's controversial museum show about new frontiers in the creative world and how design is shaping human destiny. Now Toronto's design guru is planning a massive change of a more personal nature. He's heading for Chicago, the Star has learned, where his firm Bruce Mau Design will open an office before the end of June. |
|
Tribes — The First and Forever Form The latest in a string of efforts to develop a theoretical framework about social evolution, based on how people develop their societies by using four forms of organization — tribes, hierarchical institutions, markets, and networks — this installment focuses on the tribal form. The tribal form was the first to emerge and mature, beginning thousands of years ago. Its main dynamic is kinship, which gives people a distinct sense of identity and belonging-the basic elements of culture, as manifested still today in matters ranging from nationalism to fan clubs. |
|
Now, this is a fantasy island
Yesterday, Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, toured a hotel ballroom full of architectural models and officially unveiled the concept designs for the Saadiyat Island cultural district -- museums, art galleries, pavilions and a performing-arts centre that will become the world's largest cultural project ever. |
[Archives]
Search entries: