Urbanism News
Saturday, April 30, 2005
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Go Vertical, Young Green With each passing hour in the United States, 365 acres of open space — wilderness, countryside, farmland and native habitat — disappear under the foundations of brand-new houses. Sited far from the urban centers where people do their work, every development creates a new class of people addicted to cars that pollute, lawns that suck water and air that requires conditioning. |
Friday, April 29, 2005
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Sports and the Wide World of Tomorrow In debating what the Olympics might deliver to New York, it might be worth recalling the forgotten legacy of Fishhooks McCarthy. |
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How We Learned Not To Drive Livable Places staff members leave their cars at home and opt for a smart growth lifestyle in Los Angeles. |
Thursday, April 28, 2005
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How goldfish could save Britain's cities from flooding Britain may have found a new ally in its battle against the scourge of flooding: goldfish. Water researchers have decided that artificial ponds and lakes be used to hold storm run-off waters in our cities - and goldfish are just the chaps to keep them clean. |
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Keeping Great Crowds Off Central Park's Great Lawn The city's Parks Department wants to limit gatherings on the Great Lawn in Central Park to 50,000 people, a move that would end an era in which hundreds of thousands of people turned to the park as a place to protest, or to see the pope, Pavarotti and Simon and Garfunkel, officials said yesterday. |
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Environmental Heresies Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power |
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Anyang City Plans Giant Art Park The use of public art to change a city's environment and image has become a major trend in advanced countries. |
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Suburbia fights back Half the population lives in suburbia but fewer like to admit it. |
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Location, Location, Architect As developers flood real-estate markets around the country with posh apartment buildings, they are turning to big-name architects like Mr. Libeskind to distinguish their gleaming towers from any others in town. |
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Sprawl and `Slurbs' Are the Wave of the Future When author and historian Joel Kotkin travels around the U.S. in his role as a consultant to city planners, he hears his clients repeat the same misconceptions again and again. He calls them urban legends. |
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
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Heavy Trash installs viewing platforms in front of gated communities.
"Something there is that does not love a wall…
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Starbucks puts a double shot of hometown flavor into every store Starbucks' globe-storming success is about place -- creating coffee bars that feel grounded in their neighborhoods, that lure people to hang out for a wide spectrum of reasons, and that somehow make us think "Starbucks" for refreshment or conversation instead of "Tully's" or "Ben & Jerry's." |
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Museum's artful architecture Good architecture is like good art: You can't absorb it in a glance. |
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
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Imagine That What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art. |
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In Portland, living the green American dream More young urban professionals are forgoing square footage for eco-friendly homes. |
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New Improved Brooklyn A glittering skyline, waterfront condos, new jobs, Frank Gehry buildings galore: Brooklyn is on the verge of a makeover even more extreme than you thought, re-creating itself in Manhattan’s image. What’s wrong with this picture? |
Monday, April 25, 2005
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Getting to Know the Plex There’s a type of urban housing that is more versatile than rowhouses, more human-scaled than apartment buildings and far denser than single-family homes. It’s called the plex—but unless you’ve lived in a select few cities, you’ve probably never heard of it. |
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McMansions Are Us In its March/April issue, Mother Jones magazine culled various sources including census data and industry reports to catalogue the effects of American homes' increasing size. The resulting illustration, featured with the magazine's permission on the following pages, seriously suggests that bigger isn't always better. |
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SuperShuttle Ghost of NYC The Google Ridefinder is basically an shiny, but useless, advertisement for some taxi and airport shuttles. Now public transit would be another thing... The intriguing thing for me is that Google has a source of semi-precise, semi-current information on the location of all these vehicles. The GPS traces of SuperShuttle run over the surface transport infrastructure, and in time the traces could reveal the streets. Like some of the plans for OpenStreetMap. |
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Data architecture of Manhattan The intent of "Searchscapes" is to design a tridimensional map of Manhattan using existing data from the web. The objective is to compare representations of the city’s “physical spaces” and “information spaces”. Taking the metaphor very literally, a specific address is searched on Google (ex: “1 Broadway” + “New York, NY”). SUch a search will bring mostly results that correspond to this specific location. The total number of text results is parsed and then plotted on a map of the physical space. |
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Move the United Nations Downtown The Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site is supposed to begin rising next year - and so far not a single tenant has signed on. At the same time, the United Nations desperately needs new office space in Manhattan. |
Saturday, April 23, 2005
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Shop till you dot Residents help to redesign their town centre thanks to a new software program and some stickers. |
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A Second City of a different sort In a few short steps, urban-planning student John Paul Catungal goes from a sunny city street, busy with pedestrians, to a dark, dank, back alley that smells of urine and is almost deserted. |
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One step at a time Turning the tide on the obesity epidemic is going to require a myriad lifestyle changes—and a few communities are rising to the challenge. |
Friday, April 22, 2005
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City built on sustainability The new plan, called "Solare: The Lean Linear City," was designed by Soleri for China, as the communist empire moves into a modern, consumer-driven economy. Solare means "of the sun" in Italian. |
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Homeowners With Large Vehicles Stir Debate Paul Piscopo wanted a home for his nine cars with plenty of space left over for other vehicles he might buy down the road. So, while building a house in suburban Detroit, he also put up a garage — a cavernous 6,000-square-foot structure that covers three times as much ground as his home and can hold 28 full-size pickup trucks. |
Thursday, April 21, 2005
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Building Back Alley Two Toronto architects have found a world behind the streets where new houses can be added, taking advantage of an untapped resource of city property. |
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Overly smart buildings Buildings are especially unforgiving when it comes to new, complex and interdependent technologies. |
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Death of the Dream There won't be a creative rebirth at Ground Zero after all. |
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
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The Highline New work in progress posted online. |
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In Many US Cities, the ''Outskirts'' Are Now ''In'' According to recent research from urban development experts at RTKL, a leading global planning and architecture firm, the fastest growing communities in the U.S. are "fringe" cities - i.e., cities that sit right outside major metropolitan areas. But experts at the firm say that these cities may be growing too rapidly for their own good. |
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
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Global Warning When cheap oil disappears, says James Kunstler, so will life as we know it. |
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Governing Malaysia’s tidy new capital: It’s all in the rules When Samsudin Osman, the chief administrator here, looks out his office window, he sees a broad and tidy landscaped avenue, brand-new government buildings, a large artificial lake and verdant rolling hills. |
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The Rise of the Ephemeral City In affluent parts of the world, a new kind of urban center is taking shape, catering to the nomadic rich and the restless, rootless young. |
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Designers Detail an Urban Oasis 30 Feet Up The mile-and-a-half path of concrete planks will weave among plants and wildflowers like a curvilinear boardwalk meandering through a floating garden. Some entrances will emphasize a gradual ascent from the grit and congestion of the city's streets to an oasis of pastoral calm. The 22-block stretch is to include the unexpected: an adjustable chair that can become a table or a chaise longue; a walkway flanked by a wetland with lily pads. |
Saturday, April 16, 2005
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A passion for urban life fuels Safdie's intellect In 1967, a radical young architect lent his vision of the future of urban housing to the World's Fair in Montreal. |
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Schlock Corridor A new McDonald's with a glandular problem ups the ante for kitsch architecture on Chicago's Avenue of the Absurd. |
Friday, April 15, 2005
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Wal-Mart pledges $35 million for wildlife Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, pledged Tuesday to spend $35 million compensating for wildlife habitat lost nationwide beneath its corporate “footprint.” |
Thursday, April 14, 2005
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That Fascia's Familiar ... A designer prevails in court after two architects discover a knockoff of their company's $20-million dream home. |
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
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Battle Flag of the Pedestrians Orange Banner Is the Latest Weapon in the Conflict Between Walker and Driver. |
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This New House The American Dream just keeps growing. Since 1970 the size of the average new home has ballooned by 50 percent. “Great rooms,” Viking ranges, 10-acre lots—can moats and turrets be far behind? |
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Paper Heavyweight Architect Shigeru Ban Shelters the Homeless Using an Unlikely Material. |
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Pride of Place Fred Kent has spent three decades developing a common-sense approach to streets, buildings and human sociability. |
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
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Reclaiming an industrial past All too often, landscape architects are the afterthoughts of the design world - the people brought in to plant a flower bed in a desolate site or pretty up a bad building. Michael Van Valkenburgh calls this "putting parsley around the pig." |
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The Designer Discount To the select group of common rituals that really attract people’s attention -- like stepping on the scale, enjoying a really good piece of cheese cake, spotting the tattoo that suddenly appeared over your teenage daughter’s navel -- add one more: Filling the gas tank. Thanks to steadily climbing oil prices, the latter has become particularly noteworthy, so much so that after languishing as a non-issue for years, the cost of fuel is pushing its way back onto the public agenda. |
Monday, April 11, 2005
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Homelessness increasing all over the world It's very clear from these figures on homelessness that it's a growing phenomenon worldwide. The largest numbers are in developing countries, but it's also a growing phenomenon in developed countries like the United States, where figures are quite high. |
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The Whole-House Machine In a sunny laboratory at the University of Southern California, a robotically controlled nozzle squeezes a ribbon of concrete onto a wooden plank. Every two minutes and 14 seconds, the nozzle completes a circuit, topping the previous ribbon with a fresh one. Thus a five-foot-long wall rises—a wall built without human intervention. |
Saturday, April 9, 2005
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Philadelphia expands Wi-Fi citywide The city of Philadelphia will become the largest municipal U.S. Internet "hot spot" next year under a plan to offer wireless access at about half the cost charged by commercial operators, city officials said Thursday. |
Friday, April 8, 2005
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Eco-firms see growing profits For every overfished ocean reef, every polluted bay, clear-cut forest, and degraded ecosystem on the planet, there should be someone like Keith Bowers out there fixing it up - and there soon could be. |
Thursday, April 7, 2005
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Create your own supercity Redesign the cities of the North for the chance to win the latest handheld console and a game of your choice. |
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Italy's New Wave A cadre of young architects looks to shake up the country's long-stagnant building culture. |
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In your own backyard: No roads, no conservatives Experimental community strives to become self-sustaining. |
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Weird by Design City's proposed design standards emphasize livability, walkability, and flexibility. |
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Culture of celebrity embraces pop-star architects Big news: Architects have finally made inroads where it counts -- American pop culture. |
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Global Citizens, Global Cities Across the globe, the office building is becoming less isolated, less isolating, and more adaptable. |
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Heading off Eco-Armageddon Try not to despair. Yet another report has come out predicting a dire future for Earth's ecosystems. This one, however, is hard to ignore. Some 1,300 experts from 95 countries spent more than four years trying to get a global picture of the state of the planet. |
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Housing the Future What futuristic potential to particular materials hold? Six architects undertake ambitious physical experiments in concrete, cardboard, glass, timber, steel and clay.
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National @ Docklands
Turning the tower on its side, Bligh Voller Nield’s new waterfront HQ for the national Australia bank puts amenity before status as it helps bring about workplace change. |
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Instant City Work has begun on a huge project in South Korea. KPF looks to plan and build a $25 billion town of 100,000 people--in ten years. |
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
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The Mall Goes Undercover Like insecure teenagers, malls keep changing their style. They are ripping away their roofs and drywalled corridors; adding open-air plazas, sidewalks, and street-side parking; and rechristening themselves "lifestyle centers." This new look may remind you of something: a vibrant urban street. Yet, while these new malls may appear to be public space, they're not public at all—at least if you want to do anything but shop. |
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Colleges spend big to look cool On the campus of Southern Oregon University in Ashland, the sight of cranes, excavators, and forklifts is a familiar one this academic year. |
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
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It's a Flat World, After All In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his king and queen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.' |
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Plastic utopia It's not flashy 'showpiece' project. It's not even a great work of architecture. But Dalston's Culture House is exactly what inner-city London is crying out for. |
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Goodbye to All That At the end of this month, the Plaza Hotel will close its fabled doors so that its new owner, Elad Properties, can begin the process of converting the bulk of its rooms into condominiums and renting out new stores. Although much of the plan remains hazy, the prospect of a construction crew stomping through the Plaza's ornate entrance has provoked a cascade of personal, sepia-tinted recollections among anxious New Yorkers. As with most treasured places, it is not just the architecture and décor that people so prize, but the memories that were born there. |
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Goodbye to all that? Once upon a time, we were obsessed with stately homes, but now we are more interested in preserving the concrete car park from Get Carter. Have we fallen out of love with the past? |
Saturday, April 2, 2005
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When the stencil his the road A recent arrest has put a halt to the engaging Montreal street images of 'Roadsworth,' making him a minor celebrity and raising questions of art versus vandalism |
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Cities are places built for women Brian Eno interviewed by Peter Halley in Index magazine. |
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Public Architecture Public Architecture is a new model for architectural practice. Supported by the generosity of foundation, corporate, and individuals grants and donations, Public Architecture works outside the economic constraints of conventional architectural practice, providing a stable, ongoing venue where architects can work for the public good. |
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1% Solution The 1% Solution program grew out of a realization that there are no formal mechanisms supporting or recognizing pro bono architectural work. |
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Brasilia emerges as epicenter The statue of late President Juscelino Kubitschek gazes out over the capital, looking bemused by this modernist urban expanse he decreed into existence a half century ago, seeking to move Brazil's focus inland, away from the Atlantic and into a new future. |
Friday, April 1, 2005
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The Grates: A Symphony in Turquoise New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Tuesday that the City has begun negotiations with Christo and Jeanne-Claude on another public art project for New York called "The Grates." |
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McDonald's Goes Local In an abrupt departure from current practice, the McDonald's Corporation [NYSE:MCD] announced today that its 30,000 franchises will now acquire all their produce from local farmers markets. |
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Cars, Trucks Protest Against Pedestrians Fearful of losing their long dominance of the streets, millions of autos stage massive park-ins in public spaces around the nation to protest pedestrians and alternative modes of transportation. |
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Proof and beauty Just what does it mean to prove something? |
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How Not to Develop the Far West Side In his State of the City address, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proclaimed development of Manhattan’s Far West Side crucial to New York’s economic future. |
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The Prefab Future, Practically Here The fundamental idea is a simple one, and has been around since double-wide trailers started rolling off assembly lines after World War II. By producing parts of a structure in a factory setting, efficiency is maximized and costs are significantly contained. Wall panels, roofs, exterior framing and other elements can then be shipped to a building site and built on a foundation. Just add windows, electricity, plumbing and other systems, and voilà: You've got yourself a house, for a whole lot cheaper than a stick-built home. |
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