Urbanism News
Thursday, February 28, 2008
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Wayback Machine 1932: How Long Will Our Cities Last? This Modern Mechanix article from 1932 makes interesting reading. It concludes that the infrastructure of gas, water and fuel is too complex, and that cities will become increasingly unhealthy. |
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HL23 - Condos at 515 West 23rd Street Who said the credit crunch would stem the flow of design driven condo development? Here we take a look at Neil Denari's HL23 where the message is as clear as glass: architecture marches on, at least near Manhattan's much anticipated High Line Park anyway. |
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How Does Our Gardening Grow? Green thumbs are proliferating from an unexpected source. In a world going green, the under-35s have taken it upon themselves to make positive use of their natural surroundings. |
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Save Robin Hood Gardens British post-war heritage threatened by demolition. After the Pimlico School in Westminster (London), it’s now the turn of Robin Hood Gardens. |
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Plaza in Peru may be the America's oldest urban site The circular structure at the ruins of Sechin Bajo is about 5,500 years old, archaeologists report. |
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
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Let Skywalks Reign The last time I was in New York, I was on foot and grateful for sidewalk sheds. I understand why New Yorkers don't like them: It's dingy under scaffolds. With some 3,300 of them around Manhattan alone, wooden tunnels get tedious. But it was raining, my head was wet, my shoes were sodden, and I was wishing the sheds could cover crosswalks, too. |
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Architecture: Walkable, pleasant, urbane, hot The world’s tallest tower already stands at 158 storeys. It isn’t finished yet and its designers haven’t revealed its final height for fear of being gazumped. Yet already another tower has been announced, which will, we are assured be even taller. |
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America's 50 Greenest Cities Want to see a model for successful and rapid environmental action? Don't look to the federal government—check out your own town. Here, our list of the 50 communities that are leading the way. Does yours make the cut? |
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Hot High Line Park Brings Breakthrough Condo by Denari Manhattan's west Chelsea, where meatpacking plants once sat next to leather bars and prostitutes trolled under an elevated rail line, is now the city's hottest real-estate market and a laboratory for new architecture. |
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
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Speed dating for architects and developers Why CABE organised a speed-dating night in central London to introduce architects struggling to find developers. |
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The un-eco eco-towns The government has entered into a pact with developers - and our countryside is suffering. |
Monday, February 25, 2008
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L.A. officials do a 180 in traffic planning In the 1950s, planners proposed freeways as a solution to congested city roads. Today, they're looking at Olympic and Pico boulevards as an alternative to the clogged Santa Monica Freeway. |
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Obesity more dangerous than terrorism: experts World governments focus too much on fighting terrorism while obesity and other "lifestyle diseases" are killing millions more people, an international conference heard Monday. |
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Government seeks UK's first 'cycling city' The government today launched a £47m quest to establish a British "cycling city" that would get more people on to two wheels, and cut congestion and pollution. The winning metropolis will join London, which has already announced a £400m cycling and walking programme, in launching a series of initiatives including new cycle routes and training schemes. |
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Simulated Environments for Animals These are some plans for a new zoological park in Vincennes, France, designed by Paris architects Beckmann N'Thepe. The project is noteworthy for, among other things, its use of what could be called simulated geology. |
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Housing and ageing The government has published its strategy on housing for England's ageing society.
It is concerned by England's ageing population, in particular by the fact nearly half of all new households are accounted for by older households. |
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All the world's a playground Whether he's designing £100m flats or creating affordable housing for all, Richard Rogers has just one mission: to make everyone's life more enjoyable. |
Saturday, February 23, 2008
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‘WHAT IF NYC?’ Competition Winners Announced “What if….” The two-word phrase can imply both fear and anxiety as well as big ideas and hopeful possibility. And that was the idea behind the What if New York City? international Design Competition for Post-Disaster Provisional Housing. |
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The Architect’s New Clothes The winning entry in a recent architectural competition came with this self-description: “Project Concept: In the contemporary world with its abundance of visual experience... an exposition piece of architecture will only be attractive insofar as it can offer perceptual sensations attainable only through direct, unmediated exposure to out-of-the-ordinary, singular stimuli.” If we translate that into plain English, it summarizes the central idea of today’s so-called starchitects: to attract attention, you have to do something that is different—and weird. |
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Simon Jenkins blasts 'devil' architects, but Prasad has the last word… Architects were blamed for most of the evil in the world by a ranting Simon Jenkins at the Royal Town Planning Institute annual lecture last night. |
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Architect will test high-density proposals for suburban living Richard MacCormac, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Hawkins Brown and Baca are to create the UK’s first “eco-suburb”, in a challenge to the government’s eco-towns policy. |
Friday, February 22, 2008
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Do Cities Have Expiration Dates? A conversation with architects Qingyun Ma and Thom Mayne Given the fact that inhabitable spaces on the earth's surface are limited, there is a growing discussion about how cities should be built or transformed to accommodate the needs of future generations. In a lively give-and-take, Qingyun Ma, dean of the University of Southern California's School of Architecture, and Thom Mayne, the winner of the 2005 Pritzker Prize and founder of the Santa Monica-based Morphosis, challenge the conventional wisdom of what passes for urban living in Los Angeles. |
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A Private Matter in the Backyard I wanted to build a cottage in our backyard. The problem was my wife. I had to do it before she noticed. |
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10 urbanisms In the GSD Winter 07 magazine, is a short article - list really - of an ongoing research project conducted by Joan Busquets. The research attempts to classify the various types of urban and architectural interventions that are taking place in our cities today. |
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Carbon Neutral U In the age of global warming, the greening of the American college campus is a largely grassroots effort driven by students, faculty, and in-house staff dedicated to sustainable thinking. |
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Project Runway
A recent landscape design competition sought to rethink the Vatnsmýri airport grounds in Reykjavík, Iceland, putting those old runways to use, for instance, as new urban park space. The entries to the competition are quite interesting, in fact, so I've posted some of them, below, focusing on one particular project at the end of this post (so please scroll down if you've already read about this competition). |
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London's most stylish accessory- the bicycle Columbia Road in East London, famous for its flower market and quirky boutiques became a catwalk for cycle style at London Fashion Week's most unique event. |
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Chinese cities adopt low carbon initiative Chinese cities Shanghai and Baoding have joined a new WWF initiative promoting low carbon development in China’s urban areas. The Low Carbon City Initiative will focus on increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, renewable energy and manufacturing more efficient products. WWF aims to break the link between rapid economic growth and increasing carbon emissions. |
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The Next Slum? Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading. |
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Gen Xers get credit for rise of walkable urbanism It's basically being driven by the Gen Xers, and I'm sure the Gen Xers will be happy to hear this, it's finally not the baby boomers doing something. The Gen Xers were brought up on 'Friends', 'Seinfeld', and an image of urbanism that was different than their parents and grandparents and they saw walkable urbanism as a very exciting, safe way to live their lives. |
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Cities Step Up Tree Plantings Increasingly, trees are the new must-have for American cities. Some prodded by environmental awareness, some by regulatory edict, they're stepping up tree plantings in hopes of improving air quality, reducing energy consumption and easing storm water flows. |
Thursday, February 21, 2008
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The Thrill is Gone Searching for the lost soul of Times Square amid the Jumbotrons and theme restaurants. |
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Who's Been Densified, Who Hasn't It's time for 'equal density.' Vancouver's Westside should absorb its share. |
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17 Extreme Houseboats and Houseboat Designs: From Luxury Habitats to Humble Floating Homes Ever dream of sailing off into the sunset in your very own houseboat? Some of these are dreamy but completely out of reach while others you may be able to afford but wouldn’t want for the world. This collection spans the extremes of design and brute-force ingenuity: from the obscenely luxurious to the absurdly simple. |
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Eco-homes: There will be floods As sea levels rise, will we still dream of homes by the coast? |
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Whose Vision of a Future City Will Prevail? Whoever is elected president in the year 2108 might be taking up residence in a White House surrounded by fields of heirloom tomatoes—at least, that’s how Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners (BBB) envisions the future appearance of Washington, D.C., in a scheme that calls for farmland to replace pavement along Pennsylvania Avenue and other thoroughfares. |
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Do You Really Want to be the Best? Cities see both benefits and drawbacks to being ranked a top place to live. |
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
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Treating Cancer with Landscape Architecture An Associated Press article published by The New York Times a couple of months ago told us that the Elysian and Silver Lake, “two reservoirs that supply drinking water” to sections of Los Angeles, were found to contain “high levels of the carcinogen bromate.” When alerted, the city's Department of Water and Power took them both out of service and announced that beginning early this year, they would drain, clean and refill the reservoirs, a process that could last until the summer. |
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Signal Failure For decades, traffic engineer Hans Monderman had a hair-raising way of showing off his handiwork to anyone who took the trouble to visit his native northern Dutch province of Friesland. He would walk backward, arms folded, into the flow of traffic, and without horn-honking or expletives, drivers would slow or stop to let him safely cross to the other side. |
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A Caribbean Corner of Brooklyn, Fighting to Survive Inside the red brick shoe box that is the Moore Street Retail Market lies a tiny patch of Latin America. The stalls of this Brooklyn public market on the edge of Williamsburg explode with Caribbean colors and sounds, as local shoppers buy everything from yams and peppers to maracas and mystic potions. What they can’t buy is time. After winning a one-year reprieve from their landlord — the City of New York — the market’s 13 merchants may find themselves forced out by June if the city moves forward with a plan to demolish the building and replace it with housing. Although the merchants have been offered buyouts and the option of relocating their shops to a strip of storefronts in a public housing development, they want to stay put. |
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Steven Holl to Design Three Mixed-Use Projects in China Steven Holl Architects, a New York-based firm, has been selected to design three mixed-use projects in China. The Linked Hybrid project in Beijing is scheduled to open in the late Spring/early Summer of 2008, the Vanke Center in Shenzhen is currently under construction and the Chengdu Project is scheduled to open in late 2010. |
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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The Walkability Revival Will more people who can afford suburban privacy be attracted to the noise and bustle of the urban street? |
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3XN Transforms a Brown Site into a Green One A brownfield in Norway will be going green, literally, thanks to a new master plan that calls for a rolling green roof to shelter a cultural center. The Danish architecture firm 3XN beat out Henning Larsen Architects, Niels Torp, L2 Arkitekter, and IN’BY LPO Arlitektur and Design in an invited competition to redevelop a former industrial waterfront known as Nedre Malmø, in the town of Mandal. |
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Zipcar Makes the Leap The car-sharing darling makes its play for the mainstream by emphasizing economics and lifestyle over environmental impact. |
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3XN Transforms a Brown Site into a Green One A brownfield in Norway will be going green, literally, thanks to a new master plan that calls for a rolling green roof to shelter a cultural center. The Danish architecture firm 3XN beat out Henning Larsen Architects, Niels Torp, L2 Arkitekter, and IN’BY LPO Arlitektur and Design in an invited competition to redevelop a former industrial waterfront known as Nedre Malmø, in the town of Mandal. |
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Ground-up City. Play as a Design Tool Ground-up City places the playground high on the agenda as an urban design challenge. It also shows how specifying a generic, academic model for a particular situation can lead to a practically applicable design resource. |
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Hyperlocalizing Hydrology in the Post-Industrial Urban Landscape Last year, Kevin Robert Perry won an ASLA Professional Award for a truly innovative stormwater management system he designed for the city of Portland, Oregon. Referred to as the “first of its kind anywhere,” Perry's project replaced the city's combined storm/sewer pipe system with a landscaped curb extension carved out of a portion of the street's parking zone. |
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Suburbia: The Natural Evolution of Development?
Is suburban growth really a product of the natural progression of human development, and if not, could a a different growth pattern better meet our desires and reduce our impact the climate? |
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Shortlist of architects for New Street Six of the world's most successful modern architects have been shortlisted to help turn the £600 million redevelopment of New Street Station into a landmark gateway to Birmingham. |
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Princeton unveils most comprehensive campus plan in its history For more than two years, a team of architects, landscape architects and planners at Princeton University has labored to strike a perfect balance between the old and the new. They have balanced between centuries of tradition and plans for innovative new spaces where architects can continue to design buildings that are both of their time and timeless. |
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Learning From Tijuana: Hudson, N.Y., Considers Different Housing Model If you doubt that the derelict shantytowns of Tijuana could work as a template for redevelopment in a quaint, upscale town in the Hudson River Valley, you’re probably underestimating Teddy Cruz. |
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The Endless City Q&A After a tiny bit of prodding, the folks at Phaidon sent over a review copy of the recently released book The Endless City, edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, and containing essays by the likes of Saskia Sassen, Enrique Peñalosa, and the indefatigable Rem Koolhaas. Where will feature a review of the book soon, but first, another treat from Phaidon; the editors were asked a series of questions. The following is a selection of the highlights from the record of this Q&A. |
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Megastructure Reloaded Archigram’s Plug-in City, Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon and Yona Friedman’s La Ville spatiale rank among the incunabula of the 1960s. Combining visionary architecture, pop culture, art, and situationist rebellion, they became known far beyond the narrow confines of urban planning. |
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Can Stand-Alone Malls Survive? The stand-alone mall isn't dead. It's just dysfunctional. That was one of the sentiments expressed at an Urban Land Institute panel that tackled the question, “Can stand-alone malls survive?” The question was posed Thursday, during ULI's annual Reinventing Retail conference at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. |
Monday, February 18, 2008
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Foreclosures lead to another problem: suburban blight Empty homes attract criminals and squatters, but communities are fighting back. |
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Londoners may moan – but the world wants to copy it The most controversial transport policy in modern times reached its fifth anniversary today with its architects claiming that the congestion charge has helped London become the only major city in the world to see a real shift away from private cars to public transport, cycling and walking. |
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Property development: Grand plans Developers are constantly building new homes to keep pace with demand. But we rarely pay attention to properties' aesthetics. Crispin Kelly did, bought a plot of land and hired a team of experts to show what can be done. Here, we follow his progress. |
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City's two-wheel transformation London is likely to become one of the most cycle-friendly places in the world, with a series of two-wheeler superhighways cutting a swath through traffic and congestion. Plans for the super-cycleways will be unveiled next week as part of an initiative to stimulate a 400% increase in the number of people pedalling round the capital by 2025. |
Saturday, February 16, 2008
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My City = My Body - Biological Interactions with and in the City My City = My Body is part of ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our environment. |
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Car-Rental Companies Learn to Share Zipcar Inc., the car-sharing leader, soon may really have to start sharing. Enterprise Rent-A-Car Co., the U.S.'s largest rental-car company by revenue, is launching a car-sharing service in St. Louis Feb. 12. The program, called WeCar, started last month on the campus of Washington University, but this part of the initiative will be downtown and available to the general public. The move is the latest sign that major car-rental companies, which have been dipping their toes in the car-sharing and hourly rental waters, are about to dive in. |
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Has Earth entered a new epoch? What geologists think. The Anthropocene epoch would mark the period when humans became the predominant force over the Earth's environment. |
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Reimagining Cities Cities are now home to half of the world's 6.6 billion humans. By 2030, nearly 5 billion people will live in cities. This special issue explores the enormous implications of the mass embrace of city life. News articles offer a look at how cities are tackling specific problems, a set of Reviews and Perspectives examines trends and demographics arising from the urban transformation. |
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The most organised shanty town on earth Pre-2001, the residents of dignity village in portland, oregon, were part of a mobile ‘tent city’ founded by 8 local homeless people desperate to find some kind of semi-permanent shelter. |
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Choosing a Place to Live Why it's as important as picking a spouse. |
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Amsterdam Subcity Will the city of Amsterdam soon build "a labyrinth city" beneath its canals? |
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Residents face Games park 'tax' after 2012 Thousands of residents and businesses will be forced to pay an Olympic "tax" to locate in the Games park, the Evening Standard has learned. |
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Disney Revives 'House of the Future' Millions of Disneyland visitors will soon get to retrace the thoughts of others who lined up a half-century ago to see a home packed with mind-blowing gadgets expected in the future. |
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The new feminine face of architecture Architecture is being feminised. Amanda Levete of Future Systems discusses soft swoops, flowing loops, and why hard-edged modernism is so over. |
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My Home: Will Alsop - not all the mod cons The architect Will Alsop is renowned for dazzling colours and bold shapes– yet his own lair is surprisingly soft around the edges. Here he explains why. |
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Smart ideas on our condo future In the worlds of real estate and architecture, it is nearly always mistaken to extrapolate the future from the trembling present, especially in nervous times like these. Looking at Vancouver's forest of construction cranes and current frenzy for luxe, deluxe and ultra-luxe, it is easy to make a very wrong guess on where our condo scene will be in a few years. |
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Welcome to the (zero-carbon) Good Life HTA Architects and Barratt Homes have given the world a glimpse into the future by revealing computer-generated images of the UK's first zero-carbon community. |
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Behold, the tiny, beguiling future I have seen the future of Las Vegas and it smells good. You can walk right into it. It’s surprisingly close, just behind New York-New York and the Monte Carlo. |
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Metro Madrid Nice video ad for Metro Madrid. |
Thursday, February 14, 2008
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Pint-Sized Parks Make Safer Streets and Cleaner Rivers It rained yesterday, sending stormwater streaming down New York City streets and through sewer grates. The runoff mixed with wastewater in the system and overloaded treatment facilities, causing raw sewage to spill into the city's waterways. |
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Cities of Will If a camel is a horse built by a committee, then most cities are camels: ungainly creatures that have evolved over many centuries. But a precious few are thoroughbreds, having sprung, Athena-like, from the mind of one man. |
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Help! I'm a prisoner in a big suburban house! Please, somebody, get me out of this fancy enclave of McMansions and SUVs! |
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Taking Measure Of The Coming Megacity's Impact If you are reading this, chances are that you live in a city -- one, perhaps, on its way to becoming a megacity with a population that exceeds 10 million or more. If not, you and most of the world's population soon will be, according to global population demographics projections. What shape could these future cities take and how will their populations meet environmental and resource challenges? |
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Architecture and Sex Are sex and architecture related? Are some buildings "male" and others "female"? Yes, of course, some architects are male and some are female. But what of the buildings? |
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3'-By-4' Plot Of Green Space Rejuvenates Neighborhood Notorious for its abandoned buildings, industrial warehouses, and gray, dilapidated roads, Detroit's Warrendale neighborhood was miraculously revitalized this week by the installation of a single, three-by-four-foot plot of green space. |
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Transit-Oriented Design: An Evolution from Societal Convenience to Environmental Solution The goal of TOD developments is to create vibrant, livable communities centered on public transportation systems. They also impact land’s usefulness and vitality: developers are building such multi-housing sites in urban areas on once vacant (often brownfield) land. These developments provide but one solution to dependence on the world oil markets and global warming by reducing the need to drive, thereby decreasing pollution levels caused by burning fossil fuels and carbon emissions. |
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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The street as platform The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye. |
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Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You The problem with suburbs, many environmentalists say, is not an issue of light bulbs. In the end, the very things that make suburban life attractive — the lush lawns, spacious houses and three-car garages — also disproportionally contribute to global warming. Suburban life, these environmentalists argue, is simply not sustainable. |
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Gamescape: Create a City while Playing a Game Gamescape is an interesting concept - the players in game movements are translated into 3d floorplans. As gameplay progresses levels are added and over time structures develop which in turn build into cityscapes that can subsequently be downloaded and imported into Google Earth. |
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Rise of the Carbon-Neutral City Several ambitious plans around the world envision green cities, but such projects raise as many questions as they promise to answer. |
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London to Triple Daily Traffic Charge on Polluting Cars, SUVs London Mayor Ken Livingstone will triple the city's daily congestion charge to 25 pounds ($49) for the most-polluting cars and sport utility vehicles, in a bid to improve air quality. |
Monday, February 11, 2008
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Why the price of 'peak oil' is famine Vulnerable regions of the world face the risk of famine over the next three years as rising energy costs spill over into a food crunch, according to US investment bank Goldman Sachs. |
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Designs on the Public: The Private Lives of New York's Public Spaces The term public space immediately brings to mind many images and ideas, but what tends to characterize it is its stance opposite private space. Be it in terms of ownership or freedoms, this traditional dialectic that describes some place as being one or the other is slowly eroding, as qualities of each infiltrates the other and as laws chip away at the definitions of each. This fascinating and timely book focuses on public space in the American city where its existence is not only exploited to the fullest, but also defended to the utmost. |
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£1bn ‘city beneath a city’ planned for Amsterdam Lack of space and high land prices drive engineers to plan 1 million m2 project under canals. Engineer Strukton, architect Zwarts & Jansma and the Delft university of technology have drafted a proposal for a 1 million m2 six-level underground development to provide retail, leisure and parking facilities. |
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Recyling Urbanism What is the culture of recycling? For most of us on this site, it means sorting our trash, buying less stuff, and reading labels with the same care that we check out price tags. At a recent lecture for the UCI Design Alliance, I learned about the communities of collectos in huge cities like Sao Paolo, Brazil, who are using trash in order to build new social and economic possibilities for themselves and their cities. |
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The City as Factory Elizabeth Currid is cooler than you. Perhaps the only urban planner ever to conduct fieldwork in stilettos, Currid slips past velvet ropes to argue in The Warhol Economy that New York City's bounty resides not in the office tower but rather in the street, where art and creativity propel the city's economy and distinguish it from the overgrown office parks that pass for American cities in the postindustrial age. |
Saturday, February 9, 2008
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The density debate needs to be reinvigorated Copenhagen demands a fifty-fifty split of work and living spaces in its redeveloped zones, and putting both close together makes the walking and biking city so much easier, reducing costly transit investments. |
Friday, February 8, 2008
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An Updated Monastic Quadrangle Is Residence Hall of the Future Four young architects who cleverly updated the monastic quadrangle beat out teams from well-known architecture firms to win the second round of a competition to design the ideal college residence hall for the 21st century. |
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British practice BACA beats the Dutch in their own waters London-based practice BACA has won a 20 million euro (£15 million) project to design flood-resistant homes in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, seeing off a host of Dutch hopefuls. |
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Herzog & de Meuron Face Opposition in Hong Kong Hong Kong is a jungle of high-rise buildings, so it may come as a surprise that architects and preservationists there are objecting to plans for a tall tower designed by Herzog & de Meuron. |
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In Many Communities, It’s Not Easy Going Green This urban suburb of Washington seems well-prepared for a leading role in the green revolution embraced by hundreds of the nation’s cities, counties and towns. |
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The Happy City From Paris to Bogotá, urban spaces are undergoing a radical transformation with one thing in mind: your well-being. |
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Betting a Farm Would Work in Queens One can only imagine how the judges reacted when the architects walked in lugging the kind of hulking concrete-pouring cardboard tubes used at construction sites filled with flowering heads of cabbage. |
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Urban ecology: taking measure of the coming megacity's impact If you are reading this, chances are that you live in a city – one, perhaps, on its way to becoming a megacity with a population that exceeds 10 million or more. If not, you and most of the world’s population soon will be, according to global population demographics projections. What shape could these future cities take and how will their populations meet environmental and resource challenges" An article, “Global Change and the Ecology of Cities,” published in the journal Science on Feb. 8, 2008, by Arizona State University ecologist Nancy Grimm and her colleagues, addresses these questions. |
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
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DARPA Wants Supercharged Spy Cams The Pentagon has a whole array of tools to snoop on its enemies. But those darn "Military Threats in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) use deceptive techniques to deny discovery by reconnaissance and surveillance sensors," a Defense Department document bemoans. So DARPA, the military's way-out research arm, has a slew of new programs to beef up its spy sensors. |
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Remixing Rotterdam Last summer, I became aware of the work of Frank Dresmé, a Netherlands based designer and illustrator. Dresmé's thesis, Project 360°, was a series of elaborate psychogeographic illustrations documenting specific routes through Amsterdam. These drawings were complex assemblages of architectural photography, illustrations of signage and street furniture and subjective annotation. |
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Make way for foot traffic Brisbane's rebirth as a walking, cycling and public transport city of European heritage and Australian sub-tropical charm is only just beginning. |
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Zen and the art of contemporary urban design In the muted exuberance of the streets, the delicate screenery of our ryokan, or inn, even the young mother taking three smartly uniformed under-fives to the temple school by bike, there is a palpable thoughtfulness. Not just politeness, which suggests a kind of fraud. More a zennish mindfulness, a concentrated energy beneath the calm. |
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Prince Charles is right: skyscrapers are getting taller and madder. And we don't want any more of them Last week, in a speech given at St James's Palace, Prince Charles moaned to architects, developers and heritage activists about the coming "rash" of "carbuncle" skyscrapers that will wreck skylines in London, Bath and Edinburgh. And he's right: the big nob architects are getting out of hand. |
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High and mighty Cities never stay still. The destruction of large parts of London in the second world war allowed a new urbanism - not all of it good by any means - to take place. The rise of London to become perhaps the world's finance capital was accompanied by a realisation that a denser city of mixed use is environmentally more responsible than spreading out into green-belt areas and beyond. All these pressures make our urban environment more vibrant. |
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Send in the Clowns I’ve felt the city and its possibilities open up to me, along with a newfound sense, arriving unexpectedly, that on a bicycle, the end of the world as we know it doesn’t really look so bad. |
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7 Abandoned Wonders of the Former Soviet Union: Deserted Cities, Buildings, Bases and More There are amazing abandonments in America but the former Soviet Union has some of the most interesting, unique and strange abandoned buildings. The complex political, military and social history of the country has led to everything from almost-finished buildings abandoned before actual use and entire abandoned cities to chilling gulags in which tens of millions of prisoners met their end. |
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City sues man for canceling trash service A man who claims to have reduced his waste to nearly nothing out of concern for the environment now faces a lawsuit from San Carlos for canceling his garbage-collection service. |
Monday, February 4, 2008
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Art Company, Inc. The history that once defined Pittsburgh and the questions that nearly every Rust Belt city currently faces. |
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The case for better buildings Why do so many new buildings look as if nobody - not the owner, not the architect, not the builder - has poured any love or pride into them? They're aloof, they're oversized, and they're so under-designed they look like the carton the real building came in. |
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KCAP to shake up 2012 legacy Dutch firm Kees Christiaanse Architects (KCAP) has been drafted in to join Allies and Morrison and partner EDAW on the Olympic Park Legacy masterplan in order to 'ask questions' of its co-designers. |
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Can businesses prosper from the "new urbanism"?
Town planners are increasingly committed to building environmentally sustainable urban neighbourhoods and businesses have a critical role to play in their development |
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There Goes the Neighborhood In exurbs and fringe cities, the mortage crisis is having a domino effect |
Sunday, February 3, 2008
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Speaking of Place The Wisdom of Communities "A person is smart. People are dumb," Tommy Lee Jones says in the comedy classic Men in Black. Jones' take is a short and sweet expression of a familiar idea: when people get together in a group, they become more stupid than they were apart. As a result, although we often pay lip service to the idea of collaborative decision-making and the importance of listening to different voices, organizations and communities often assume that the best decisions will emerge from the judgment of a single leader or a small collection of decision-makers. But while this assumption may seem sensible to anyone who’s had to suffer through a mind-numbing office meeting, it’s actually a mistake. If you want to solve a complicated problem, or make a good decision, the best thing you can do is to cast a wide net and to incorporate the judgments of many people, rather than just a few. Crowds of people, it turns out, are not dumb. Much of the time, in fact, they turn out to be brilliant. |
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Architecture 3.0 or Architecture is there to be destroyed ‘He’s not showing any buildings,’ whispered the person next to me a little too smugly. After all, Willem-Jan Neutelings had shown during the Architecture 2.0 symposium that you can talk architecture without showing buildings. |
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The Walkability Revival Will more people who can afford suburban privacy be attracted to the noise and bustle of the urban street? |
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Lingerie sends panting drivers on road to ruin
Rubber-necking male motorists are being blamed for causing a spate of crashes and near misses outside a designer lingerie shop. |
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The future 'jewel' of Toronto's waterfront John Campbell, chief executive of Waterfront Toronto, has taken a wrong turn in the vast field of mud that is the West Don Lands, an area from Cherry Street to the Don River, between Eastern Avenue and the Canadian National Railway tracks. His silver Acura is heading into tracks too rutted for a sedan. With guidance from a worker, Mr. Campbell backs up, and we are soon back on the gravel trail that leads through this 32-hectare development site. |
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America's Most Miserable Cities Imagine living in a city with the country's highest rate for violent crime and the second-highest unemployment rate. As an added kicker you need more Superfund dollars allocated to your city to clean up contaminated toxic waste sites than just about any other metro. |
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The Genius of the Development Industrial-Complex You may ask: How do you reduce greenhouse gases by growing the population? Who knows--who cares! The people will come, we're told. Is there no way to stop them? Won't mustard gas work? The people are coming! And it is a good thing. So we are told. We must grow--build more houses, shopping centers, retail strips, malls, towers, and, not least, sports arenas to watch grown men chase after leather balls. The consensus trance that all growth, always, everywhere is good is of course insane and comic at once and has been the bane of civilization since men laid mortar in the agglomerations of cities. Because rationally one must ask: Will New York really be a better place to live with another million people added into it? Of course not. |
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Man Jailed For Creating Crosswalk, Vows More Whitney Stump didn't like watching drivers ignore the stop signs at the intersection outside his home, so he asked the city to paint crosswalks there. When the city said no, he made one himself. |
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Urban Design and Snow Removal So, what building designs tend to correlate with quick & effective sidewalk snow removal? The taller, the better, it seems. |
Saturday, February 2, 2008
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City of opportunity that's going nowhere Global business is waking up to Mexico's potential, but traffic gridlocks are blighting the dream. |
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Culture and the city Introducing a new series investigating the connections between ‘culture and urban regeneration’ and to pose the question can the arts improve social cohesion? |
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Towns seek cash per crash from out-of-town drivers In the tiny village of New Richmond, Ohio, most people who get involved in car accidents are from somewhere else. |
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How cash, clout transform Chicago neighborhoods The real zoning code in Chicago is unwritten, but developers know it well: Changes in zoning go hand in hand with contributions to aldermanic campaigns. |
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The Preservation Predicament Conservation organizations that work to preserve biologically rich landscapes are confronting a painful realization: In an era of climate change, many of their efforts may be insufficient or beside the point. |
Friday, February 1, 2008
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Building the world's new eco-cities: enough theory, time for action. We are getting close, tantalisingly close, to the Holy Grail of human habitation. Since the future for all of us is urban - more, bigger, taller, denser cities - the challenge is this: can we make those cities self-sustaining - able to generate all their own carbon-neutral power, harvest and conserve all their water, produce good food efficiently, recycle all their own waste, all in all have a neutral or even beneficial impact on the global environment? Can the 21st century city be the salvation of the planet, relieving pressure on natural resources as environmentalist James Lovelock has suggested? The good news is that it can be. The bad news is that we're not quite there yet. However, it's just a matter of time. Oh, and money. |
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