Urbanism News
Friday, March 31, 2006
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Woodward's Takes Shape: 'Nothing like it in North America' What surprised the city planners was that what they considered major issues for the area: namely historical context and less density, were viewed differently by the community who welcomed higher densities as a way to bring enough people into the area to support the shops and services that were needed locally. |
Thursday, March 30, 2006
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DynamiCity - Tactics for a Changing Metropolis It takes more than buildings to make a city. This fact is demonstrated by a new group of architects from Spain, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands. They feel buildings are too sluggish and cities too fast. They develop new methods to intervene in the city's dynamics. |
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Slum Like It Not In the world's slums, the worst of poverty and environmental degradation collide. |
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A road by any other name Naming streets in Chicago can be a politically perilous and often circuitous route. |
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Residence of reversible destiny in Tokyo A colourful apartment has recently appeared in a prominent location in Mitaka, Tokyo. This creative work by architects Shusaku Arakawa + Madeline Gins is structured by many spheres, cylinders and cubes stacked up like bricks. The interior is designed so that people can experience body-activating slopes and bumps, a contrary condition to the world trend of structure. |
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The oil is going, the oil is going! Today's Paul Reveres of "peak oil" aren't waiting for Washington to save us from apocalypse. They're already planting gardens and drafting city plans for the days when oil is gone. |
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
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Who Is Killing New Orleans? Afew blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness. |
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Spring brings cycling back to life in Canada Part of welcoming warmer weather across the country involves getting the bicycle out of the garage and going for a ride through the neighbourhood. |
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Studio/Gang Designing Chicago Skyscraper Chicago-based Studio/Gang/Architects has released its initial designs for Aqua, an 83-story residential and hotel tower just south of the Chicago River. The building will be located in the city's new 28-acre Lakeshore East Development, south of the Chicago River and east of the Loop. |
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SOM Wins Design Competition for Sustainable Skyscraper in China Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP has won an international competition in China to design one of the most environmentally-sustainable buildings in the world, the Chicago-based architecture and engineering firm announced today. |
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Village is Clutching at Straw Eco-friendly, inexpensive homes for locals otherwise priced out of the market? |
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Design Intelligence – Speaks & Co in Delft In Belgium the words of Robert Somol during the Projective Landscape conference would probably have caused a minor political earthquake. But unfortunately the conference took place at the TU in Delft, and that turned out to be the perfect place to reel off catch-phrases of all sorts about the status of design in what they tell us is a post-critical, post-ideological, post-political, post-historical, post-urban and post-capitalist world. |
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Shanghai's western veneer doesn't hide its Asian soul In an awkward moment at a recent book launch for Building Shanghai, co-author Edward Denison was asked: "Is this an Asian city?" |
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For a living harbour, you can't beat a grubby port Everyone looked pretty depressed at the East Darling Harbour competition announcement the other day. The Premier, the minister, even the normally unsinkable Chris Johnson; the entire official party looked grey. It wasn't just the suits. And it wasn't just having to sidle in through Stumpy, the Opera House's new smoking den, now filled with tables and chairs like some public-service canteen. |
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New shape of Mississauga Everyone's heard of the Bilbao Effect, but what about the Mississauga Effect? |
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
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Parking Management: Innovative Solutions To Vehicle Parking Problems Donald Shoup's 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking, introduced many city planning enthusiasts to the complexities and importance of planning for automobile parking. Although often taken for granted, the details of parking regulations can actually have wide-ranging impacts on city life, from reducing traffic and pollution to increasing local revenues. |
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Best cities for an oil crisis Dense metropolitan areas with low sprawl dominate Top 10 list compiled by SustainLane. |
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King's Cross is getting a facelift. Here's mud in your eye. The conventional response of planners is to try to sweep the dark underbelly of the city away. To do that is to risk the collateral damage that will destroy the very qualities that make a city work,. |
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Artist risks ire of regulators over theme park satire Martucket Eyeland would be a congestion-free version of Ol' Cape Cod, with its centerpiece the ''Too Cheap to Meter Energy Park'' and its nuclear power plant, ''Meltdown Mall.'' |
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Trying to Solve the Parking Puzzle The explosive growth of Down-town Los Angeles over the past five years hints at the future. Already developments sprout wherever they can, luring exurbanites with the amenities of city living. The buzz of 21st century Los Angeles promises the completion of stalled rail lines, the start of new ones and, finally, a public grasping of mass transit. |
Saturday, March 25, 2006
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Master Architect Of the Fallen Arch Images of destruction are regular fare, whether from Hollywood or the nightly news. But there is nothing like a Piranesi etching to convey the collapse of civilization. |
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Suburbia Explored at the Katonah Museum of Art's 'I Love the Burbs' The suburbs have always — well, nearly always — been with us. In the sixth century B.C., rich urbanites retreated to the quiet, unspoiled outskirts of Babylon. Americans have taken the concept somewhat further; today more of us live in what the writer Michael Pollan has called Burbopolis than in urban centers, and issues like gardening, barbecues and Little League have been replaced by McMansions, highways and slums. |
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Save our boring 'burbs Suburbia has been sitting out the dance of late, the nice girl overlooked in favour of the wild charms of the countryside and the wantonness of the inner city. Urban and rural regeneration have flourished as policymakers ignore areas we have come to regard as indelibly naff. This week, however, the think-tank Demos will launch a "save the suburbs" campaign, seeking to revitalise pleasantville by re-embracing the traditional pastimes of the 'burbs: car-washing, Tupperware parties, communal gardens and the Women's Institute. |
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Maximum cities London, Paris and New York are dying – the 21st century belongs to the fertile chaos of the third-world metropolis. |
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Risk-taking architect has to sell firm in fall from grace One of Britain's most celebrated architects, Will Alsop, was forced to sell his business yesterday after being refused work in Britain because of what he claims is an increasing aversion to risk-taking. |
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Strangers on a Train Overheard conversations can be fascinating, but more often than not they are just annoying chatterboxes. |
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Healthy, wealthy and wise Inc. 'Sustainability' used to be just for hippies. In America, it's now big business. |
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The Street Samaritans A diverse group of volunteers armed with bicycles, stethoscopes, and altruism established a medical miracle in the back wards of New Orleans. |
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Foster Redeveloping Island in St. Petersburg, Russia The plan aims to create a flexible cultural quarter to bolster a languishing part of the city. Perhaps Foster's most forceful intervention entails the addition of eight bridges across the canals surrounding the island. |
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Sustainable Design Can Save More Than the Environment Today just about all architects put sustainability near the top of the list of project design goals. Sustainability is on practically every conference agenda related to design, planning, construction and real estate development. But what does it mean to create sustainable architecture? |
Friday, March 24, 2006
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Condo with 'air-showers' offers relief to hay fever sufferers Hay fever sufferers hoping for relief are focusing their attention on a condominium complex equipped with an "air-shower" system designed to remove pollen and dust. |
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Where Have All the Supermarkets Gone? Once you could find them every few blocks or so in prime neighborhoods of Manhattan, but these days the local chain supermarket seems to be heading the way of the five-and-dime. Among the latest casualties is a D'Agostino market on University Place near Union Square, which is closing after two decades in that location. |
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Our precious urban prairies pay for themselves in peace and quiet City parks are pearls beyond price - but that hasn't stopped mayors and ministers turning them into cash cows. |
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Chicago Builders Ride Next ‘Supertall’ Wave Developers in the Windy City have their eyes set on luxury residences climbing over 1,000 ft. |
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The writing on the wall The biggest loser of the Commonwealth games, says graffiti artist Banksy, is Melbourne's street art scene - and London could be next for the whitewash. |
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Beyond Bilbao New York MOMA show of new and recent projects examines flowering of architecture in Spain after Franco. |
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Reviving Chicago's Bungalow Neighborhoods In the heart of Chicago, a business professor and an architect teamed up to preserve—and improve— historic neighborhoods. |
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A 25˘ Pedestrian Rest Stop, but Wait, It's a Model The door to the stainless-steel box slides open, and one of New York City's more closely guarded secrets is revealed — a self-cleaning pay toilet that will soon be coming to city streets. |
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Foster wins deal for a vertical city Moscow's mayor has endorsed plans to build a tower, 600 metres high, designed by the British architect Lord Foster of Thames Bank. It is expected to be the tallest in Europe when it is completed in 2010. |
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Culture Clash All across Europe, the controversial construction of new mosques is raising questions about aesthetics and assimilation, faith and tolerance—and liberal democracy itself. |
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Sustainable Design Can Save More Than the Environment Today just about all architects put sustainability near the top of the list of project design goals. Sustainability is on practically every conference agenda related to design, planning, construction and real estate development. But what does it mean to create sustainable architecture? |
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New Book Breaks the Code (That's the Zoning Code) "The multivolume Zoning Resolution is like hieroglyphics, known only to the priests of zoning," said Prof. Ross Sandler, director of the Center for New York City Law at the New York Law School in Manhattan. "Opening the Zoning Handbook is like discovering the Rosetta Stone." |
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Suburban Escape : The Art of California Sprawl Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl will be the first comprehensive look at a unique genre of suburban art created in California since 1950. |
Thursday, March 23, 2006
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Canton firm's alternative to oil: Plug in to a tree Scientifically speaking, it was a pretty strange scene: In 20-degree weather late last month, a handful of academics were hammering nails into a tree near MIT's Cambridge campus and attaching wires to them. On the other end of those wires was a small sword of copper driven about 2 feet into the frozen earth. In between was a potential revolution in green energy. |
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
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Revising The Suburbs A new wave of scholars challenges common assumptions about sprawl and urban growth. |
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McDonald's announces burgers on bicycles McDonald's India (North) has announced a new delivery system - `McDelivery on Bicycles', an initiative restricted to the area of Chandni Chowk in the Capital. |
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
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Mutant Bike Gangs of New York Tall-bike clubs live free, ride high, and don't want your stinking logo. |
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Japanese architect Mitsuru Hamada wins 2006 Steedman Fellowship This year's competition focused on design of an approximately 1,500-square-meter pavilion-observatory that would integrate architecture, technology and the experience of nature. Proposals were judged for originality, concision and relevance to the contemporary cultural context. |
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Modernism: the idea that just won't go away The British reviled modernism at first, now it's part of the fabric of our nation. The largest ever survey of the movement suggests the defining aesthetic of the 20th century may be just as influential in the 21st. |
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David Maisel David Maisel has a “fascination with the undoing of the landscape.” He has become most widely known for his aerial work, which includes extended studies of North American mines, clear-cut forests, urban sprawl, evaporation ponds and other peripheral industries of the Great Salt Lake. |
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Foster reveals Eurogate design Foster and Partners have launched concept designs for Eurogate, a new zero-emission, sustainable building that offers flexible office, hotel and/or conferencing facilities. Zero emmision harbour is last phase of masterplan. |
Monday, March 20, 2006
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Landscaper Waiting For Career-Defining Lawn Landscaper Kevin Larson announced Monday that, while he has enjoyed working as part of ensemble crews on smaller, low-budget projects, he is looking for a breakout lawn that will place him in the top tier of Columbia's lawn-care industry. |
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Giving the 'burbs a city look Developers plan to take tall buildings and urban streetscapes to a suburb near you. |
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The New Residential Vernacular For years New Yorkers were much more likely to work in glass towers than live in them. No more. |
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McMakeover The room is subdued, its booths and overstuffed chairs upholstered in earthy beige or brown faux leather or other fabrics and separated by partitions topped by curved, silver-colored railings. Welcome to Ronald McDonald's lounge. |
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Putting It Together
In the past 25 years we've identified some pieces of the sustainability puzzle. It's time to find the rest and make the picture clear. |
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The Theater of the Street, the Subject of the Photograph IN 1999 Philip-Lorca diCorcia set up his camera on a tripod in Times Square, attached strobe lights to scaffolding across the street and, in the time-honored tradition of street photography, took a random series of pictures of strangers passing under his lights. The project continued for two years, culminating in an exhibition of photographs called "Heads" at Pace/MacGill Gallery in Chelsea. "Mr. diCorcia's pictures remind us, among other things, that we are each our own little universe of secrets, and vulnerable," Michael Kimmelman wrote, reviewing the show in The New York Times. "Good art makes you see the world differently, at least for a while, and after seeing Mr. diCorcia's new 'Heads,' for the next few hours you won't pass another person on the street in the same absent way." But not everyone was impressed. When Erno Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew and retired diamond merchant from Union City, N.J., saw his picture last year in the exhibition catalog, he called his lawyer. And then he sued Mr. diCorcia and Pace for exhibiting and publishing the portrait without permission and profiting from it financially. |
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Black Like Me Living in New Orleans--post-Katrina--gives the author a new appreciation for exile and neglect. |
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The World's Tallest Buildings - America's latest Outsourcing As American's weath flows to China, India and the Middle East via enormous trade deficits that leave ever increasing amounts of U.S. investment and debt in foreign hands, can the ebbing of American power and prestige be far behind? For better or worse, in this monetarized, post industrial age, the skyscraper has replaced the factory as the more Bloomboerg Tower, New York Citypotent symbol of national clout, and in the race to top, the United States is beginning to be left in the dust. |
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Ballpark figures Sports economists agree that cities--and taxpayers--get close to nothing from spending public money on sports teams. What they haven't figured out is why we're still doing it. |
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New York City Eco-Friendly? Ben Jervey’s The Big Green Apple is more than talk; it’s all about action. Specifically, focusing on small, simple efforts to aid our shared future. For America to realize that “eco-friendly living” doesn’t have to be painful or overtly inconvenient, and can actually save money (and lives) could be a bigger breakthrough than cold fusion. |
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Homecity Is it possible to create an entire city from the houses in which one has lived throughout one's life – a home city in the most literal sense? This is exactly what the contemporary Danish artist Morten Strćde (b. 1956) has done in his total installation HOMECITY. |
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Building the future of design Today's young architects are gutsy and inventive -- generating new ways of building with daring shapes and fresh approaches to traditional materials. So why is it that their best ideas so rarely make the leap from blueprints to bricks and mortar? |
Sunday, March 19, 2006
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Where Did All the Children Go? In San Francisco and other big cities, costs drive out middle-class families. |
Saturday, March 18, 2006
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The Way We Live Now SPRAWL. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say most critics. Browsing through a university library catalog recently, I found over 20 books on sprawl published since just 2000. Nearly every one of them takes a dim view of the subject, their titles oozing with doom, outrage, dismay, or some combination thereof: Road to Ruin: An Introduction to Sprawl and How to Cure It; Up Against the Sprawl; City Limits: Putting the Brakes on Sprawl; Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health and Money; and It's a Sprawl World After All: The Human Cost of Unplanned Growth--and Visions of a Better Future. |
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In Epoch of Man, Earth Takes a Beating "The whole world is going too fast," an Inuit hunter from Banks Island in the Northwest Territories in Canada told the journalist Elizabeth Kolbert at a bar during a global-warming symposium. A few years before, he and his neighbors had started seeing robins, birds they had no name for. |
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Bloat-O-Meter
Your neighbors think it's ugly. You think it's hot. They say it's a McMansion. You say it's not. |
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Japan homeless become unwitting architects Like many Zen-inspired buildings, Okawara's home is a monument to simplicity. The size of a large tool shed, the wooden building blends seamlessly with the surrounding park. His door opens to a full view of Tokyo's Tama River. Okawara is not your typical architect: He's homeless. But the elegant austerity of his home and thousands of others like it has turned Japan's most destitute into unwitting purveyors of an emerging art form that's catching the eye of international connoisseurs. |
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Public space and social demarcations What makes a public space privatized? Margaret Crawford reveals that the designs of most malls attempt to "create essentially a fantasy urbanism devoid of the city's negative aspects: weather, traffic, and poor people". |
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Bloom to Grow Community gardening provides education, enrichment and eggplants all in one plot. |
Friday, March 17, 2006
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Crazy cycle lanes BBC news asked readers for photos of bizarre bike lanes and got some good ones. |
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Environmental Commitment From Make Architects Extends To All Areas Of Office Life Including Transport. As well as aiming to be (as far as we know) the only carbon neutral architect's office in the UK, they are also committed to flying as little as possible (he estimated 10 flights in total for the last 2 years) and NEVER take taxis, opting instead for public transport. |
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Academic turns city into a social experiment Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job of Colombian National University. A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for another big challenge and found it: to be in charge of, as he describes it, "a 6.5 million person classroom." |
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Solving the problems of the world People often ask Jared Diamond to name the single greatest danger we face as a society — energy depletion, deforestation, pollution, overpopulation. Is there one problem we can lick and then relax? |
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Welcome to the house of fun Wit in architecture is tough to pull off. Architecture clashes uneasily with rat-a-tat oneliners. By the time a “witty” building is complete, its in-built epigrams, so clever on the drawing board, can make you squirm. |
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Beyond the Roads Join Chairman Amorello on a virtual tour of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway (aka "the Big Dig"). |
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A swiftly crumbling planet Doomsayer Mike Davis offers a new reason to panic: Earth is turning into a giant slum. |
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Orange County evolving into urban myth With a population of 3 million people spread out over 34 towns, Orange County isn't exactly the middle of nowhere. So where is everyone? |
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Moscow to get Green Giant Foster and Partners unveil world's tallest naturally ventilated building. |
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Neighborhoods of 'numbing sameness' When it comes to architecture, Chicago is second city to no one. That's why, when we get it wrong, the error is so glaring. There are two basic categories of architectural mistakes: beautiful things torn down and ugly things put up. |
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
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Back to the drawing board Can an architect floor 'em as the next 'Bachelor?' NYC gals say no. |
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She still rocks, one way or another If Deborah Harry was going to join a revolution these days, it would probably involve urban planning - such as saving the rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side from itself. |
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Curveballs Are In Play After the Bilbao Guggenheim, architects are taking ever wilder trips into the light fantastic, |
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I-75 expansion calls for 23 lanes in Cobb It's wider than an aircraft carrier. Far wider than the carving on Stone Mountain. Wider than the White House stretched end to end, twice. It's the planned I-75, all 23 lanes, coming soon to Cobb County. As currently conceived it's 388 feet across, wider than a football field is long. |
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Invisible city Chongqing is the fastest-growing urban centre on the planet. Its population is already bigger than that of Peru or Iraq, with half a million more arriving every year in search of a better life. And yet so frequently is this story repeated in China, that outside the country its name barely registers. |
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State Sowing Seeds for a Future L.A. Landmark It will take a nationwide search to create a world class park at a nondescript Los Angeles lot. That's what state officials have decided as they ponder what to do with 32 acres east of Chinatown that they intend to turn into the future Los Angeles Historic Park. |
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For Now, L.A. River Walk Best Done by Chopper Good news for my shoes: During an hourlong helicopter ride over the Los Angeles River the other day, not a single city engineer got airsick. Nor did I. The chopper trip was provided by the city of Los Angeles for staff and consultants hired as part of an effort to restore the imprisoned L.A. River. |
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
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Cities not designed well for health For Dr. Richard Jackson, an international expert on the relationship between health and urban design, one photo captured perfectly a modern paradox. At a luncheon Monday in San Mateo before a sold-out audience of more than 230 community leaders and activists, Jackson showed on a large screen a shot of an escalator lifting people to a fitness gym. |
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Mysterious Skin Herzog and de Meuron’s otherworldly stadium in Munich. |
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Waltropolis: City In A Box Reyner Banham now seems premature in declaring the megastructure dead in the early 1970s. Here, theboxtank (Emily Andersen, Geoff DeOld and Corey Hoelker), a collaborative blog about big-box urbanism and retail, considers the latent architectural possibilities of the now global phenomenon of space enclosing industrially clad megasheds - the potential of which was never underestimated by Cedric Price or Martin Pawley. |
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End of the Runway: New Homes Are Rising As many cities continue to sprawl, especially in the West, airports that once seemed far-flung and isolated are suddenly in the middle of the action. The suburbs and exurbs have simply grown out to meet them, making airport land especially appealing to developers who are always on the lookout for new places to build. |
Monday, March 13, 2006
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Seeing Factories as Essential Parts The shape of modern American cities may be changing as urban planners weigh the conflicting merits of housing versus industry. |
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Shantytowns as a New Suburban Ideal Teddy Cruz has been shuttling between suburban San Diego and the shantytowns of Tijuana for more than a decade now. From anthropologists to urban planners eager for an insider's view, visitors pepper him endlessly with requests for tours. |
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Divine inspiration It's the vital ingredient of creativity, but what exactly is this thing called inspiration? Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips seeks its source while diverse artists from all fields reveal how the muse strikes them ... from poet Andrew Motion and his 'ritual pencil' to architect Will Alsop and a good claret. |
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You Call This a Loft? They started out as bohemian art spaces in low-rent places. Now they're crafty conversions and bold new construction—and they aren't cheap anymore. |
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Architect crafts 'bold' park plan Influential Denver volunteers seeking an exciting vision to revitalize historic Civic Center dared famed architect Daniel Libeskind to dream up something that said: "Wow!" But when Libeskind, who designed the new wing of the Denver Art Museum, presented his conceptual sketches and a model in early February, members of the Civic Center Conservancy said: "Whoa!" |
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Conspicuous Consumption Shapes New Tokyo Skyline From his lofty perch inside Roppongi Hills -- the city within a city he built into the ultimate playground for Japan's mega-rich -- real estate magnate Minoru Mori reigns as the king of luxury in the world's largest metropolis. |
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Communities see potential on the waterfront Ambitious pushes to make the best use of waterfront -- in many cases, prime real estate that often has been overlooked or neglected -- are playing out elsewhere as communities are awakening to their shorelines as natural development opportunities. |
Sunday, March 12, 2006
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Suburbia: Alienation, Stress And Turmoil Invade The Promised Land
Immigrants can suffer in silence within walls of suburbs. Isolated lifestyle can become a recipe for depression, resentment -- even death. |
Friday, March 10, 2006
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The Long Emergency A five-week video exploration with author. lecturer, and de facto cultural historian James Howard Kunstler. |
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Land Rush Inner cities are becoming hot places to live. Does government have any business telling developers to keep out? |
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The Big Thaw Voters may be coming around to the idea that government needs their money to keep public works up to speed. |
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Just a Rail Hub? Or a New Sort of Compass for Europe? After 10 years of work and $850 million, the project — Berlin's new main train station, probably the only new central station to be built from scratch in Europe in a century or so — is scheduled to be completed and to open for business, just in time for the beginning of the World Cup soccer tournament here in June. |
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Flights of fancy Angelenos might see the city as a concrete jungle, but to nearly 500 species of birds and those who watch them, it's a rustic aviary. |
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Why Grass Really Is Always Greener on the Other Side A couple of years ago, a homeowner in Seattle decided to take extreme action against the moles that had turned his lawn into a complex network of raised grassy veins. He poured gasoline into the mole holes, tossed a match and incinerated his yard. Many of the approximately 60 million Americans with lawns can understand the feeling. A well-tended yard is not only personal territory, to be defended unto death, but also a work of art. Like a painting, it has form and color. Like a child, it is alive. No wonder feelings run high, and the lawn, as a canvas for personal expression, engages the suburban American male at the deepest possible level. Americans like Jerry Tucker, who turned his yard into a replica of the 12th hole at Augusta National Golf Club. |
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Pyramid power versus urban sprawl: The battle lines are forming in Egypt From the balconies of the opulent villas springing up at the edge of Cairo's Al-Ahram district, many residents have a good view of the three pyramids. As more of the country's rich and powerful move away from increasingly crowded Cairo, more residential developments are coming up at a furious rate. |
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Modernist architecture: utopias in the sky Owen Hatherley argues that modernist architecture was born out of socialist revolution, and the left should reclaim its pioneering spirit. |
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Prototype condo a step on the road to 'utopia' As rising energy prices show a social conscience can pay off, more builders are jumping on the eco-bandwagon. |
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Using smarts to find parking Urban planners estimate as much as 80 percent of traffic on some city streets comes from frustrated motorists cruising around in search of a place to park. Within a few years, it will be common to reserve a parking space online before leaving home. |
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Cosmic and Theatrical Hendrik Wijdeveld is presented as a man of the cosmos in the exhibition 'Plan The Impossible' at the NAi. He was an isolated romantic who opposed the city as a machine for production and consumption and who returned to elementary systems found in the universe and in nature. An agreeable subject, since it's wonderful to see how chaos is eliminated with simple models and all-in-one diagrams. |
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
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Selling the Air Above On an island where there is often nowhere to build but up, the air in Manhattan can get pretty pricey. Air-rights deals, or the sale of unused development rights from one property owner to another, are generally considered the business of big-time developers. But in cheek-by-jowl Manhattan, homeowners, small-building owners and co-op boards can often find themselves involved, too. While potentially lucrative, such deals are complex and can even raise ethical quandaries for property owners. |
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The Active Edge Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Brooklyn Bridge Park seems destined to become New York's third great urban landscape. |
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Shape of our cities Last year on Counterpoint we talked to Richard Florida, the American academic who believes that what he calls the creative class holds the key to the growth of our cities. His views have had some influence, and when he was in Australia he did a presentation to government. But not everyone agrees. One of Florida’s most trenchant critics has been Joel Kotkin, an expert on cities who recently published a book called The City: a global history. Kotkin lives in Los Angeles, he’s a senior fellow with the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank, and this week he’s visiting Australia on a tour to offer to offer government and planners his own insights into the future of our biggest cities. |
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Park sought to tame Minneapolis' urban jungle United Health Corp. CEO Dr. William McGuire is offering to build a $5 million park just east of the new riverfront Guthrie Theater as part of a personal effort to preserve a leafy urban reputation. |
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Charge to drive in downtown S.F. seems more viable The success in Stockholm of a program to charge drivers fees for heading into the highly congested heart of the city could bode well for a similar proposal in San Francisco, according to officials. |
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
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Wal-Mart tries vertical floor plan The most revolutionary part of the Wal-Mart store here is found at the top of the escalator: a second floor. Over the past couple of decades, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has made its sprawling single-story stores the most feared force in retailing. But as the company tries to penetrate urban areas that have lofty land prices and entrenched antidevelopment movements, it's increasingly building up, not out. |
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One million bicycles to be distributed in South Africa Transport Minister Jeff Radebe gave cyclists the green light as he opened the Velo Mondial 2006 in Cape Town on Monday, with new pledges to prioritise and fund non-motorised transport. |
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Battle for the 'Burbs Interview with Bruce Katz the resident expert on housing at the Brookings Institution. |
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Home Sweet Debt Every night, like millions of other homeowners, I lock the doors, turn off the lights, peer out the windows to check for burglars and go to bed inside my money. It's all around me, in the walls and ceilings, under the floors and spread across the yard. Some nights, when I'm lying very still, I imagine that I can even feel it growing. That faint vibration in the foundation? That subtle rumbling in the Sheetrock? It's not a small earthquake; it's equity accumulating in the cozy three-bedroom portfolio I call home. |
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When the sky was the limit Chicago prides itself on being America's architectural capital - so why were so many of its greatest buildings the work of Europeans? |
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The Suburban Solution McMansion from the front, top, modest apartment building from the back. |
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Working Toward a New Understanding of Zoning Urban design thinking and practice have greatly advanced over the past 30 years. Unfortunately, conventional zoning, the crude but all-powerful regulatory tool shaping cities, has changed little. Given the need to transform land-use planning and development, why is it so difficult to transform conventional zoning? |
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Our city, our duty Ther are enough homeless people in Los Angeles to fill the Kodak Theatre, home of tonight's Academy Awards ceremony, 26 times over. For one night, Los Angeles is the capital of glamour and style, but it is the capital of homelessness every day of the year. |
Monday, March 6, 2006
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Pizza Magnate Seeks Catholic-Governed Town If Domino's Pizza founder Thomas S. Monaghan has his way, a new town being built in Florida will be governed according to strict Roman Catholic principles, with no place to get an abortion, pornography or birth control. |
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Child obesity levels expected to soar by 2010 "When we looked at the overweight it was astonishing to see that nearly half of children in both North and South America could be overweight in just four years time." |
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Public Housing Conditions Can Contribute to Obesity eople living in urban public housing have few places to get a healthy meal and less-than-ideal facilities for exercise, according to a new study done in Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo. “There were strikingly few healthful food resources located on the property or within a short walk of the majority of the housing developments,” said study co-author Rebecca Lee of the University of Houston. |
Saturday, March 4, 2006
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It's all good at the new Plaza You don't expect to find one of San Francisco's most humane new buildings at the corner of Sixth and Howard streets, right in the squalid heart of Skid Row. |
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Psycho Path 'craziest' road in US A street in the US state of Michigan has won the dubious honour of being chosen as the most bizarrely named of more than 2,500 entries. |
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Sydney an 'urban junkyard' Sydney is an urban junkyard, relying on the natural beauty of its harbour and its Opera House to make it one of the world's great cities, according to former prime minister Paul Keating. |
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Spanish Fly How did modern architecture in Spain get so good? |
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Olé! Shopping Malls Sprint to Mexico The gleaming new Wal-Mart Supercenter in this far-flung suburb of Mexico City may be the only Wal-Mart anywhere built on the former site of a bullring. |
Friday, March 3, 2006
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Bah Hummer Indie rockers reject big money from the king of gas guzzlers. |
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The Work of Architecture in the Age of Commodification Over the past three decades, international monopoly capital has increasingly challenged the authority of the nation-state, which still ostensibly embodies the democratic precepts of the free world. In this weakening of sovereignty, dating back to the revocation of the postwar Bretton Woods agreement, we have reason to believe that the last politically independent nation-state will be France, for France remains a state where the public Intellectual plays a part in the country's political life. |
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Pliny Fisk's Sustainable Methodology For the last three years Pliny Fisk, a professor at Texas A & M University, and his wife Gail Vittori--two pioneers of the sustainability movement--have lived in the experimental Solar Decathlon House, an 800 square foot solar-powered home built by their students in 2002. But for the last three decades they've dedicated their lives to investigating and promoting sustainable building methodologies, in part, by founding the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a not-for-profit research center in Austin, Texas. Among the scores of projects aimed at fostering a more symbiotic relationship between architecture and the natural environment that the duo have undertaken, the most recent are documented below. |
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Public Image, Unlimited Discussions that examine a park user's expectations can help designers surpass their own vision. |
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Hong Kong 1, New York 0 If you judge the greatness of a city solely by the swiftness and ease of the ride in from the airport, New York is a cow town compared to Hong Kong. |
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Returning to Its Roots With a new block-size park by Herbert Dreiseitl, Portland restores a piece of its natural environment. |
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Greenscaping Brooklyn's Waterfront An ambitious project could create landscaped spaces that would enable travel along the area's currently inaccessible 14 mile-long waterfront. |
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The Ephemeral City On the gusty day before winter's first snow, New York commuters could be forgiven for dreaming of vacations to warmer climes. If they happened to pick up one of 300 travel brochures distributed on the Manhattan-bound F train that morning, these Brooklyn residents might have been tempted by a destination boasting average winter temperatures of 84 degrees. They would no doubt have been further intrigued to learn that this island city's leading industries are winemaking and bookbinding, and that it features a Vegetation Museum, the world's largest flea market, "Pools of Certitude," and a natural feature known as the Subterranean Honey Baths. |
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A Dream of Dubai Half fantasy, half reality, Dubai is re-writing the book on urbanism. |
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In Land of Freeways, Mass Transit Makes Nary a Dent It was an inglorious start: Cars, as if making a point, kept crashing into the new slate gray, bullet-shaped express buses that planners hope maybe, just maybe, will help nudge people out of their cars and onto mass transit. |
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UN Studio - Urban Icon UN Studio proposes a twenty-first-century library for a Newer Orleans. "Our vision is to understand the building as a tool for reestablishing a balanced ecology between culture and commerce, neighborhoods and larger units," the designers say, putting forward a complex structure that attempts to reconcile the many dichotomies of the pre-Katrina city. |
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MVRDV - Community MVRDV HAS TAKEN a drawing made by a girl in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as the psychological blueprint for a new school to be located in a blighted downtown neighborhood wiped out in the deluge. "She drew this hill with people walking up to the top, escaping from the flood," the architects write. |
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A Newer Orleans Artforum invited several prominent thinkers to contribute essays on subjects they considered of unique importance to our cultural moment, architect and historian Denise Scott Brown seized on a matter still fresh in the collective conscious: the rebuilding of New Orleans. "Even by the criteria of realism," she observed of the staggering task, "we will have to be visionary." |
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Institute without Boundaries By 2030, we will need to build 96,000 homes a day to give people shelter. Be part of the world house project. |
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
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Architects meet in Rotterdam on New Orleans A rebuilt New Orleans might contain dikes thick enough to double as parks and a futuristic zigzag-shaped building with hanging gardens to symbolize the city's rebirth after Hurricane Katrina. |
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No more bleak houses A visionary development aims to regenerate one of Manchester's most run-down areas. |
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Green Design as Great Design: The Architecture of Sustainability A design competition and conference seek to merge technical ingenuity and compelling design. |
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Making Our Cities Fuel-efficient Compact community design can save as much gas as a well-designed car engine. |
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Can Urban Design Make You Fat? Up until now, obesity research has focused on ways to change individual behavior but with obesity rates continuing to climb, researchers are now turning their efforts to the built environment and the interventions that might be effective in fighting the epidemic. |
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Asleep at the Wheel Confessions of a suburban homeless guy. |
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Sustainable Car Parks Examining the patchwork of surface parking lots in Downtown Los Angeles Veenu Jayaram saw an opportunity for intervention realizing that these parking lots occupy much of the land in the Central Business District, yet are only utilized for limited hours, and for the limited purpose of temporary vehicle storage. |
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Building a vision for growth in Md. Can a thousand or so adult Marylanders playing with Legos save the state from more suburban sprawl? |
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