Urbanism News
Sunday, April 30, 2006
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The Wasteland In some of the great cities of Europe—Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels—tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. |
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The Wasteland In some of the great cities of Europe—Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels—tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. |
Saturday, April 29, 2006
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The Wasteland In some of the great cities of Europe—Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels—tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. |
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New Orleans' Dutch treat What better way to meet the Dutch than with a lecture by the Netherlands' most famous architect, Rem Koolhaas? |
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Onward and Upward: Architects Envision New Orleans Rising From the Waters In a child's eyes, rebuilding New Orleans couldn't be simpler. Put the city on a hill. |
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Future life Dongtan, which lies in the mouth of the Yangtze Delta, will generate 100% of it energy from renewable sources, have wind farms in central public places and have a public transport system which will include solar-powered water taxis. The first phase of the development is expected to be finished in 2010. |
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How Does Your City Grow? A View Of Urban Sprawl From Outer Space Recent urban development in Los Angeles is less scattered than recent development in Boston. Miami is America’s most compact big city and Pittsburgh is most sprawling. |
Thursday, April 27, 2006
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The Politics of Oil: The Discourse Must Change We, the citizens of the US and the world, must move our attention to this the issue of energy more than any other. We must hold our representative governments accountable for having an open and honest debate on the subject. Simply put, we must learn more about where our energy comes from. |
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Building Utopolis Building Utopolis presents a collection of miniature buildings made from LEGO bricks. From 1997 until today follow the expansion and changing layouts of this model city. |
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Taking Back the Streets: P (LOT) For those who believe that streets are for people as well as cars, here is the ultimate hybrid: a tent that looks like a car. |
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Park and write A homeless woman in London has been living in a car since last summer. But by writing a blog she has put herself in touch with an international audience. |
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
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Los Angeles With a Downtown? Gehry's Vision It isn't easy to create a real downtown district, vibrant and intense, in a city as sprawling and diffuse as Los Angeles, Frank Gehry admits. But that's what he has set out to do with his design for Grand Avenue, unveiled in preliminary form yesterday. |
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Dawn of the prefab condo Unassuming Surrey may seem an unlikely place for an architectural revolution, but the city will soon be home to a new high-rise condo complex that its developers say will better withstand earthquakes, fire and extreme winds — yet is half the weight of more conventional apartment buildings. |
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Survey: Does Vancouverism work elsewhere? City planners around the world are simulating Vancouverism in their projects. The city of Vancouver generated this new concept in urban city design and renewed its fading inner city by creating thin residential towers on a pedestal comprised of townhouses and stores to promote downtown street life. |
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
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Urban thinker Jane Jacobs dies Toronto-based urban critic and author Jane Jacobs died Tuesday morning. Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and most recently, Dark Age Ahead, was 89. Her powerful critiques about the urban renewal policies of North American cities have influenced thinking about urban planning for a generation. |
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Protest banners fly near new CCTV headquarters It seems not everyone is elated about the new headquarters building for China Central Television (CCTV), currently under construction at the corner of Guanghua Rd and the East Third Ring in Beijing. When completed, the Rem Koolhaas-designed skyscraper should be one of the most distinctive in Beijing. |
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High above the city, contest gives local architects chance to spread their wings Six up-and-coming architectural firms are in the running to create a sculpture garden for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. |
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The problem with most high-rises is how well they reach the street The problem with most high-rises is not how far they reach into the sky, but how well they reach the street. |
Monday, April 24, 2006
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Ole Sheeren: The man with the impossible plan Aged 35, Ole Sheeren is the brains behind the most complex building ever made. Luke Crissell meets architecture's new star. |
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I'm a city person I don't trust air I can't see! Profanity, pesticides, perverts, paranoia, parking problems, pollution ... paradise! I love living in a big city. |
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Seattle's Little Dig Replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel is expensive, time-consuming, and complicated, but let's be clear: It's nothing compared to Boston's 'Big Dig.' |
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Rough praise for our cityRough praise for our city
Manchester is singled out as world class in a new travel guide which paints a bleak picture of England and the English. |
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How to be a great city The world may boast a wealth of great cities, but we don't always think of them as such. Even the greatest struggle from time to time. They fret about seemingly insoluble problems and unachievable goals, about history passing them by. |
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VW Bicycles It seems like more and more car manufacturers are also in the bicycle business. |
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Gehry Sees His Glass Towers Transforming Downtown L.A. Architect Frank O. Gehry plans to erect a translucent, glass-curtained tower rising 47 stories above his landmark Walt Disney Concert Hall as the centerpiece of the Grand Avenue project, a bold statement that would alter downtown Los Angeles' skyline and reinforce the civic center area as a hub of cutting-edge architecture. |
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Grand, Yes, but Public Expects More When the New York developer Related Cos. hired Frank Gehry to design the $750-million first phase of its huge mixed-use project along Grand Avenue, directly across from Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, the deal immediately raised eyebrows — and more than a few architectural questions. |
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In Manhattan, an urban relic becomes a ribbon of green Back in 1996 or '97, after he started breaking into movies, the actor Edward Norton broke the law on a regular basis. He lived in the West Coast apartment building in the far West Village, a few blocks south of 14th Street, and on some evenings, if he didn't have anything else to do, he and his buddies would scamper up some scaffolding and trespass onto an old abandoned north-south rail bed a few stories above the street. |
Saturday, April 22, 2006
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Chinese architecture victim of misconceptions Although media footage coming out of China often focuses on the destruction of ancient neighbourhood buildings and the construction of bland and often ugly skyscrapers and modern buildings in their place, there is actually a renaissance of first-class architectural design occurring in this rapidly changing country. |
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We Have a Winner! Sort of ... The populi has voxed – and after only a minimum of profanity and adjudication, The Austin Chronicle proudly crowns the above Travis Heights domicile – at least we think that's what it is – as King McMansion (aka Biggest Eyesore) in our inaugural, online "Am I McMansion or Not?" contest. |
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Redefining Property Values "People of a certain typology look for a certain kind of house or respond to a certain type of theme," said Len Bogorad, managing director at Robert Charles Lesser, a marketing firm that specializes in real estate and which has conducted values-oriented surveys for Washington area clients. "It's a type of marketing that for better or worse is part of our economy, and developers are catching on." |
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A bolt from the blue, with heart So welcome to the new normal: a type of neighbourhood you have never seen before, that you don't really like -- not yet, anyway -- and where you might well go to live one day. Whatever it is, it's exciting. And now, it has a heart. |
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New York’s High Line Begins Construction On April 10, workers began construction that will result in the conversion of Manhattan’s High Line into a six-acre public park. Trains once used the abandoned rail trestle, which snakes 1.5 miles across city streets, to deliver freight to buildings on the city’s far West Side. |
Friday, April 21, 2006
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Deep Impression A massive residential and commercial complex has appeared in Omotesando, a leading fashion area in Tokyo. It shows a 250m facade along the street, and is composed of 6 floors above the ground and 6 floors below, so as not to exceed the height of the row of zelkova trees along the building and to harmonize it with the city. |
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Pitt Sponsors New Orleans Design Project The whole world wants to know about the rumors of a ''Brangelina'' wedding in Namibia, not to mention the chances that the first biological child of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie might be born in Africa next month. But all the publicity-shy actor wants to talk about is his new architecture project -- a design competition to encourage eco-friendly rebuilding in areas of New Orleans hardest hit by hurricane Katrina. |
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Urban Rebirth Cities coping with disaster offer lessons for rebuilding New York's World Trade Center site. |
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The Incredible Shrinking City When the mills shut down in the 1970s and '80s, the smokestacks and foundries that symbolized steel belt manufacturing cities gave way to factory shells and rust. First unemployed, workers then began to move away for good. Unlike former steel powerhouses, such as Pittsburgh and Allentown, that have tried to attract new industry and grow their way back to prosperity, Youngstown, Ohio, is hitching its future to a strategy of creative shrinkage. |
Thursday, April 20, 2006
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How a Glitzy Mall Developer Built Its Way Into Big Trouble Mills Corp. courted shoppers with mini golf, massages - now banks crack down. |
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Designs on reaching for the stars, not being one Heroism was rather the order of the day at this month's Royal Australian Institute of Architects conference, in an art-school black kind of way. The conference was themed The Future is Now, whatever that means; its keynote speaker ushered in by the pulsing, thrusting original of Get Off My Cloud. The congregation, black-shirted and ponytailed to a man, swooned. |
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The swelling McMansion backlash Local governments and ordinary citizens are saying 'no' to so-called Hummer houses and starter castles. Tactics include energy-consumption restrictions, petitions and outright building moratoriums. |
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Way Up and Far Out Challenging traditional notions of what tall buildings are supposed to look like, developers around the world have unveiled a flurry of new skyscraper designs in the past few months. |
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Getting There “Geographers now hate maps,” Nebenzahl said. “If you only give people a six-by-six-inch screen, how can they get a sense of where they are, or where they fit in? We’re pushing the next generation into geographic illiteracy by not giving them a sense of what world geography is.” |
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Tilting at Windmills To my eye, they are lovely: Graceful, delicate, white against green grass and a blue sky. Last summer my children and I stopped specially to watch a group of them, wheels turning in the breeze. But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than ugly. It is an aesthetic blight, a source of noise pollution, a murderer of birds and bats. |
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Blooming bicycles Cycling with a smile. |
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
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All The World... In staging large-scale participatory events, artists are creating new narratives for our cultural landscape. |
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Give us a frill Are decorative facades the start of a whole new housing trend? |
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Spatium gelatum — or maybe just a blob Forget about the box, now architects must think outside the blob. At least that's the case with Zbiginiew Oksiuta, a German-based Polish designer who has spent the last three decades exploring his idea of "biological architecture." |
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SOM aims to build a zero-energy office tower in Guangdong "We have been doing a lot of research into energy efficiency for tall buildings," says Gordon Gill, an associate partner at SOM, who worked on the proposal with partner Adrian Smith and engineer Roger Frechette. "We felt this was an ideal opportunity to showcase how a large building could be designed to utilize energy harvested from the local environment." |
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A Shopper’s Guide to Urban Catastrophe
American urban catastrophe, in other words, is everywhere. |
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Emerging Artists: No Room to Grow New York’s preeminence as a creative capital could soon be in jeopardy, as emerging artists—an essential component of the city’s cultural sector—are being priced out of the city. |
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Flying Dutchman One of the most noticeable things in other parts of the world is that decision-makers are considerably younger than the average important trustee in America. Basically you work for people here who see things as risks that are simply symptoms of progress. The people we’re dealing with in China are, on average, 35 to 43. And that makes a huge difference. What has disappeared here is perhaps an interest in experimentation. You know, you can look at the U.N. building as a radical building at the time. |
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
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Grocery Store Urbanism The competing stores in an urban area instead create a grocery shopper's empowerment zone. We make our own decisions about value, and from a multitude of choices. We have those choices because they are so convenient to us. |
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When is a city not a city? Say what you like about suburbia, sneer at it all you want, but the truth is it's here to stay. |
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Bikes Connecting Bogota and the South Bronx City residents are aiming to build an 11-mile network of bikeways and parks in an unexpected place – the South Bronx. And they’re taking as their inspiration from another city you might not immediately think of – Bogota, Colombia. |
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Plan allows entire Big Easy to be rebuilt Flood plain advisory calls for new levees for the city, but protection for outlying areas is less clear. |
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The Myth of Solid Ground In his recent book, The Myth of Solid Ground, David Ulin looks at what earthquakes might mean, from a cultural standpoint – including what scientific, or pseudo-scientific, techniques now hope to predict future seismic catastrophe. |
Monday, April 17, 2006
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The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values We find that the opening of a community garden has a statistically significant positive impact on residential properties within 1000 feet of the garden, and that the impact increases over time. We find that gardens have the greatest impact in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Higher quality gardens have the greatest positive impact. Finally, we find that the opening of a garden is associated with other changes in the neighborhood, such as increasing rates of homeownership, and thus may be serving as catalysts for economic redevelopment of the community. |
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Wal-Mart to Offer Help Near Urban Store Wal-Mart Stores, whose voracious, all-in-one retailing model has crippled thousands of competitors over the last 40 years, is turning to an unusual business plan: helping its rivals. The giant discount retailer, under assault as never before by critics, announced a wide-ranging effort today to support small business near its new urban stores, including the hardware stores, dress shops and bakeries with which it competes. |
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Hot wheels, high up Good morning, Toronto. It's sunny and minus 40 with the wind chill. Traffic is frozen on the Gardiner. There's a pile-up on the DVP. Streetcars on King West and Queen East are at a standstill. Cyclists, however, are once again enjoying a smooth, unobstructed journey into the downtown core. Riders report that visibility is clear, with speeds approaching 50 kilometres an hour in the right-hand lane. For all you high-powered money managers who like to look sharp in the a.m., the shower stall at the Yonge on/off ramp has reopened. And, yes, the city has once again stocked up on that French lavender soap that has been such a hit on Bay Street. |
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What if ..? What if we dreamt up some ambitious ideas for Toronto, and what if we implemented them, and what itf Toronto became the most innovative city in the world? |
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Hogtown the beautiful What if Toronto went back to school? What if we were to rethink the role schools play in the life of the city and reinvent them not just as places where kids learn, but also as centres of architectural excellence and civic beauty? |
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`Villages` that solve our traffic chaos Think of an elaborate Tinker Toy construction. Now, think of sky-scraping cities — carbon copies of downtown Toronto's commercial hub — dotting the region and interconnected by a sophisticated web of high-speed trains. |
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'Wind, wave - or we'll go nuclear' Buildings eat up 60 per cent of the country's electricity - that's why we have to build sustainably. |
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Yes, in your backyard Homeless centers are rarely welcomed, but smart design can soothe neighbors’ fears. |
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New York's Test Cases for Environmentally Aware Office Towers A decade ago, office towers guzzled energy as fast as they could, and "sick building syndrome" was dismissed as a hypochondriac's all-purpose excuse. Since then, however, the rise of "green" architecture has encouraged architects, developers and construction managers to consider the effect their buildings have on the health of their occupants and the environment. Today green is a buzzword, a term to which all sorts of new buildings attempt to lay claim. But does that mean people who show up to work in the morning breathe more easily? |
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$50,000 design award announced Coming on the heels of the $100,000 Marcus Prize, the $50,000 Urban Edge Award will recognize architects, landscape architects, planners or other professionals who bring "fresh, innovative and effective thinking to the realm of urban design," according to Bob Greenstreet, dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. |
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Young designers float ideas for new Navy Pier Watching talented young architects attack a big design problem such as the redevelopment of Navy Pier can be enlightening and excruciating. You love their energy and fresh ideas. But their inexperience and flashes of arrogance are enough to make you cringe. |
Thursday, April 13, 2006
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Wrong track A 5ft bike lane is good for a laugh, says Matt Seaton - but under the proposed new Highway Code, it could land cyclists in legal trouble. |
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The Helicopter Archipelag In 1964, Ron Herron of Archigram proposed a Walking City: urbanism gone ambulatory, a metropolis on the move. The Walking City, strutting along on iron stilts, was imagined as an “escape hatch from environmental conditions,” Simon Sadler writes. It was an “architecture of rescue” – a city in shining armor – “partly inspired by the tents and field hospitals of humanitarian relief efforts." |
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Up, Up, and Away The new skyscraper, in all its guises. |
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Nascar Fans Trade the R.V. for a Condo The sound of automobile traffic was deafening. Inside Jim and Muriel Dollar's two-bedroom penthouse condominium here, a party was going on, and the guests leaned in close in their theater-style leather chairs to make themselves heard, their drinks set in cup holders that occasionally vibrated ever so slightly. |
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'We're not all Frank Gehrys' Pragmatic to his core, 33-year-old visiting scholar Cameron Sinclair has drawn thousands of designers to help solve the world's most vexing problems. |
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Obesity-suburbs link debated Any way you study it, commute takes away time for healthy activity. |
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Shanghai's Boom: A Building Frenzy Wu Zigfried Zhiqiang grows animated as he clicks through a PowerPoint presentation of the Shanghai of the future, and for anyone who thinks his city is the last word on post-modernism, with its needle-spire towers and kitschy skyscrapers, he suggests that the surprises have just begun. |
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Velo-city
High-speed, all-season, pollution-free: covered bikeway tubes are the future rapid transit. |
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
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Living skins: Architecture as interface What if a sign did not simply tout new movies, sodas, and celebrity babies in one-way feeds, but instead revealed something unique about the building, its occupants, or its environment? What if the building could respond, in real time, to the movement of people, the weather, or the whims of bystanders or behind-the-scenes artists? Digital designers and architects have begun working together to move beyond the facade and give buildings a living skin. |
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Dirty Minimalism Nobody listens to architects anymore. If we scan contemporary Holland for points of departure for important design-driven transformations, we do not see a pretty picture. The government and the local councils have stopped commissioning experimental design and research, are making serious cutbacks on subsidies, and are turning more and more power over to private developers and housing corporations. The big national planning bills have withered into a wafer-thin edict turning over the responsibility for national planning to local authorities. While many corporate design firms are doing very well because of this by just building, the internationally known experimental architects who embody Holland's tradition of permanent spatial revolution are being ignored. |
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The Way We Were, the Way We Are The theory and practice of designing cities since 1956. |
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Revelations of a curb-hopper As long as transportation costs continue to increase, the ranks of bicycle-riding voters will grow. |
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Public Spaces For The People We have to get beyond the idea that the plaza is more important than the public it's for. |
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Waiting For some reason, I've come to associate pay phones with architectures of waiting. Or landscapes of waiting. The anticipation of a call, or the prank call, ticking silently but surely like a bomb counting down to an as yet unknown detonation time. |
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What Ground Zero Planners Could Learn From Barcelona Barcelona is a city that knows how to make a freeway sexy -- and it's not just dreaming. It builds seemingly before lunch every day what New York City can't seem to accomplish in a generation. |
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Elderly Woman Ticketed For Walking Too Slowly An 82-year-old woman has received a $114 ticket for taking too long to cross a street in the San Fernando Valley, Calif. |
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Car-Free Days Bring Quiet to Communities Beep beep. Vroom vroom. Thump thump. The constant cacophony of honking horns, roaring engines, and booming car stereos has helped fuel a sixfold increase in noise pollution over the past 15 years that is driving people from cities, according to advocates for peace and quiet. |
Monday, April 10, 2006
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Zurich tops expats' quality of life league Zurich provides the best quality of life for expatriate staff, according to a survey of more than 200 international cities. |
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Brazilian Wins Pritzker Prize Paulo Mendes da Rocha, a leading Brazilian modernist for nearly half a century, has been selected to receive the 2006 Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture's most prestigious international honor. He becomes the third Latin American, and second Brazilian, to win the award in its 27-year history. |
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Ocean Built Homes The seas absorb carbon dioxide from the airs. Wolf Hibertz wants to use it to build low-cost housing. |
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The hotel wonders of the world Forget low-key boutique hotels, architects are upping the ante with a new breed of mega-hotels destined to become landmarks in their own right. |
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Growing Sustainable Suburbs: An Incremental Strategy for Reconstructing Sprawl A new way of understanding the growth of urban form leads to practical suggestions for reconstructing a more sustainable suburbia. Combining theoretical results with pragmatic experience, and combining "top-down" controls with "bottom-up" processes, we offer guidelines for implementing small-scale changes that eventually lead to large-scale improvements. |
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Poor Design of Built Environment Linked to Sick Kids Across the country, children are facing serious medical problems as a result of living in unhealthy built environments because poorly designed neighborhoods and buildings, roads, and sidewalks do not foster health, according to the American Public Health Association (APHA). |
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Extreme London flood investigated Scientists have been investigating the effects of a 7m-high wave travelling up the Thames, using computer simulations. |
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Tall and cool WoHa design the Met, a 66 storey condominium project - the tallest residential building in Bangkok. |
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Why we love the gallery in the sky Cloud devotees form a society to hail the grey heavens and attack 'banal blue-sky thinking' . |
Saturday, April 8, 2006
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Mega-suburb takes shape in Utah It's a development plan that will take more than 50 years from start to finish. A string of "walkable" communities, expected eventually to house half a million people, is starting to rise on the nation's largest piece of privately owned land next to a metropolis. |
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Shanghai: Land of the rising trapezoid The wave of building construction that has swept China at an ever-increasing pace since the 1980s has become possibly the biggest building spree in history, and the radical transformation thus wrought is nowhere more obvious than in the country's most grand metropolis, Shanghai. Almost 7,000 buildings of more than 11 stories have been built in the city since 1990 (New York, by contrast, has managed a mere 5,500 in total). |
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Obesity in bricks and mortar is no fat-burban myth PHAT, as you know, is hip-hop for cool, hot or otherwise groovy. Fat, on the other hand, is distinctly uncool. And yet in architecture, as in bodies, while we admire thin, crave it even, we do fat. |
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On the waterfront A $7 billion proposal to reclaim Montreal's waterfront and reconnect the downtown core with the St. Lawrence River will be delivered to governments later this month. Some are calling it the biggest urban project here since Expo `67, the world's fair hosted by this city nearly 40 years ago. |
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Detroit Sold For Scrap Detroit, a former industrial metropolis in southeastern Michigan with a population of just under 1 million, was sold at auction Tuesday to bulk scrap dealers and smelting foundries across the United States. |
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Guidelines that make city centre a good place for children Architects were told to "design the whole environment with the safety needs of children in mind". For example, access to schools and amenities would involve providing a walking route which is free from barriers such as the need to cross a major unsignalled traffic junction, with an environment suitable for young children. |
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It grows on you The idea of green roofs was once strictly rustic. Now, the trend is setting down roots in the city. |
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Walled City, Not World City The newer centres of commerce in Shanghai and Beijing thoughtlessly replicate the highway sprawl and soulless, disjointed high-rise development of Los Angeles — a city based on artificial subdivisions of land, where people traverse vast distances between places of residence, work and play. |
Friday, April 7, 2006
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Beijing to ban drivers for blue sky Olympics Beijing plans to make full use of its authoritarian powers during the Olympics in 2008 by banning more than 2m cars to ensure that one of the world's most polluted cities will have clear skies for at least the two weeks of the games. |
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S.F. picks Google Wi-Fi team High-tech giant to pair with EarthLink to establish free wireless Internet network for everyone in the city, maybe by year's end. |
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Machines for living The modernists are known for grand architectural visions, but they were just as concerned with making daily life more efficient. |
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Urban young ride demand for bicycle innovation In the past few years, however, a class of young designers and welders emerged in countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark to address the inner-city transport needs of families and companies. Their designs are taking congested cities by storm. |
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A 'green' building rises amid Beijing smog The new structure is China's first to pass the stringent, globally recognized LEED certification. |
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Some developers moving away from generic design to lure buyers As the inventory of condominiums in San Diego County increases to nearly 1,500 active units, some developers and architects are focusing on alternative design as the selling point for new developments. |
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Shortsighted Polemics
The ideological catfights over housing threaten to marginalize all of architecture. |
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A contrarian look at the bane of urban reformers Anti-sprawl activists portrayed as alarmist, elitist and pessimistic. |
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Wal-Mart to Enter Urban Markets Wal-Mart Stores Inc. yesterday revealed plans to expand into the nation's cities, where it has encountered widespread opposition from unions and small businesses that accuse it of forcing wages down and driving out competition. |
Thursday, April 6, 2006
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Gehryland, USA
Should one architect--even the world's most famous architect--be responsible for all of the buildings in two massive developments? |
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Seventeen Projects Set High Mark for Urban Design and Development After reviewing more than 160 submission for how well they embody and advance the principles of the Charter of the New Urbanism, a jury of accomplished urbanists has selected 17 projects for New Urbanism’s highest honor, recognition as Charter Award winners. |
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Quick, catch a glimpse of Shanghai vanishing Come to Shanghai. Come to Shanghai, now! No, this is not a travel industry advertisement, nor a paid promotion of any kind. It is a warning, and those who don't heed it soon will forever miss what has made this arguably Asia's greatest city, as its leaders gird to complete a breakneck and all-but- declared bid for the title of the world's greatest. |
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Backstory: Cultural clash marks India's boom time They leave their villages by bus, by cart, or on foot, and head to Hyderabad, the capital of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. An estimated 500,000 families eke out a living working construction and raising families. In the shadow of the high-rises that they build, they live in a sprawl of tents where the smells of pungent spices and milky tea fight with the stench of urine and exhaust. |
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Grocer is a basic component for traditional neighborhood One of the toughest challenges for living in or creating a traditional neighborhood development involves one of the most mundane necessities: the grocery store. |
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Aerial Imaging Swoops Low Down Instead of just the straight-down views that distant satellites gather, a small company called Pictometry International has developed an oblique-imaging, geo-spatial system to snap vast swaths of America's varied landscape at a 40-degree angle from a few thousand feet in the air. |
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
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"Evil Can also Be Beautiful" Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas talks about Prada and politics, building in autocratic states and the allure of the ugly. |
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High-rise boom coming to Seattle? The Seattle City Council cleared the way for sweeping changes to the downtown skyline Monday, and several developers stand ready to take advantage of new rules allowing taller condo and office towers. |
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Top Global Companies Join Forces to Make 'Net-Zero' Buildings a Reality The World Business Council for Sustainable Development is forming an alliance of leading global companies to determine how buildings can be designed and constructed so that they use no energy from external power grids, are carbon neutral, and can be built and operated at fair market values. |
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New towns: can they be given a new life? When Scotland's original five new towns were planned, one key architectural feature was omitted: a backbone. Planners knew that the settlements had to have a solid transport infrastructure, well-organised housing and opportunities for commerce. What they didn't anticipate was the weight of criticism the towns would have to endure. |
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Cultural, environmental sensitivities guide Jameson House design The plan calls for a structure that will generate some of its own power, and have the city's first water recycling system in a high-rise tower. The aerodynamically shaped building is also being designed to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold standards. The shape of the building takes advantage of local winds for natural ventilation and angled to get the maximum heat and cooling from the sun and shade. |
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Frank Gehry Meets His Peers "Architects are like Italian tenors," critic Joseph Giovanni said in his introduction to a recent panel discussion with Frank Gehry, Cesar Pelli, and Thom Mayne. "Once they start talking about their buildings, they can't stop singing." |
Tuesday, April 4, 2006
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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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A lively design in living colour Reports of Will Alsop's demise have been greatly exaggerated. |
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A Force Of Nature China's top landscape architect is on a quest to bring unexpected beauty to the nation's boomtowns. |
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Harvard University Team Wins 2006 ULI Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition A plan drafted by a Harvard University team to redevelop a 100-acre former industrial site in St. Louis has been selected as the winning scheme in the fourth annual ULI (Urban Land Institute) Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition. |
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On Edge of Va. Sprawl, Labels Crumble, New Lives Thrive Although once-rural Loudoun County has for years been the icon of rapid growth, and Spotsylvania County considered the southernmost edge of sprawl, suddenly the edge seems to have jumped 30 miles or so south and east into Caroline and King George counties, which popped up right behind Loudoun on the latest top 10 list of fast-growing counties. Both are closer to Richmond than to the District. Over the years, such areas have been called exurbs and disurbs, edge counties and edgeless cities, exopoli, outtowns, penturbias, rururbias, slurbs and, curiously, net of mixed beads. Still other terms grasp at their relation to neighboring areas: archipelago economy, global network of nodes and hubs, planetary urban networks. |
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World's tallest tower in Tokyo A new radio tower is to be built in Sumida, Tokyo, adjacent to Asakusa, one of the city's main sight-seeing spots. This project has been triggered by the the shift to digital broadcasting in 2011. The new tower is planned to be about 610m tall, breaking the record of the current tallest CN tower in Toronto, Canada (553m). |
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Hey, I'm Walking Here For Jennifer Girsdansky, life in the outer reaches of suburbia has its charms. Her family's 26 acres allow her 2-year-old daughter, Sophia, plenty of room to roam and her 10-year-old son, Brandon, the chance to go sledding without leaving the property. But this car-dependent community, where parents turn into chauffeurs and neighbors cruise past one another at 40 miles an hour, can present challenges as well. Ms. Girsdansky, a 41-year-old single mother, says the neighborhood can feel a bit lonely. Lately it has even felt dangerous. |
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Keep our public parks public Have we forgotten the role of parks in our democratic society? Public parks are the best humanitarian expression of a free people. Preemptive privatization and commercialism of public parks is the "taking" of public land for private gain. |
Monday, April 3, 2006
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Heritage extremists threaten builders with sites damage Police are to investigate threats against housebuilders and demolition contractors made by Britain's first known architectural extremists who have accused them of being responsible for "beautiful buildings, full of history, being ripped apart and replaced with featureless junk". |
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Adopting a built-in respect for nature New Orleans must look back to move ahead. |
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Changing spaces: Adaptable house on horizon Our lives are forever changing; our homes, alas, can’t always keep up. |
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We don't walk, so we're running out of gas The end of cheap oil won't be so sudden. Signs are everywhere. We drive past them every day. |
Saturday, April 1, 2006
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City grows up, up without a plan The longer Philadelphia's condo craze keeps going, the bigger the skyscrapers get. |
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Turf Warrior Jim Hagedorn wants to sell you the pest-proof, no-mow, genetically engineered lawn of the future. But first he has to head off a grassroots rebellion. |
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Moscow scrambles to build offices Moscow has the lowest vacancy rate for high-end office space in Europe, and although de- velopers are racing to finish several large projects, no one expects that situ- ation to change much anytime soon. |
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Onsite Parking: The Scourge of America's Commercial Districts Mott Smith, Principal of planning and development firm Civic Enterprise Associates in Los Angeles, analyzes the urban design problems generated by gratuitous "onsite" parking requirements, which ruin street life and force property owners to use their lots inefficiently. |
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