Urbanism News
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
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The secret gardener My working-class neighborhood here in central Maine is a cozy, if somewhat time-worn, filigree of a community wedged between a freight railroad and the Penobscot River. Its history, until not so long ago, was hardscrabble: Almost all the families had a connection to the woolen mills or sawmills on an adjoining island. Days were long, the work tedious, and coming home meant only a modicum of respite before beginning the next day's labor. |
Monday, May 30, 2005
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Beijing Boom Tower Can the city withstand 15 more years of uncontrolled expansion? Can architecture even comprehend the scale of the increasing urban problem? |
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Jane Jacobs: Super villain Faster than a traffic-calmed road! Stronger than the developer's lobby! A new play dares to dream of ... |
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City in the Sky Are we turning our cities into theme parks for the very rich? This might indeed be the architectural question of the decade for most of America's ''hot'' cities, but it is a particularly trenchant issue right now for Miami. |
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The root of all evil: it's a matter of priorities People tend to love them or hate them, but trees are spiritual icons. |
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JMayors worldwide take global warming into their own hands Mayors from some of the world's biggest cities are gathering here this week to forge a set of international guidelines for sustainable urban living -- billed as a municipal version of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming that the United States never ratified. |
Sunday, May 29, 2005
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Time is ripe for urban agriculture Is America ready for a metropolitan agriculture policy? Is the time ripe to take some of the billions in subsidies now flowing to big commodity-crop operators and focus instead on sustainable farm production in and around the citistate regions where 80 percent of us live? |
Saturday, May 28, 2005
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Not a Car in the World Can a Brit survive in North America without a driver's license? |
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ronto has a Food Charter In 2001, Toronto became one of the first cities in the world to adopt a Food Charter to support the belief that "every Toronto resident should have access to an adequate supply of nutritious, affordable and culturally appropriate food." |
Friday, May 27, 2005
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Rise of the Citizen Designer
The fifteen finalists for this year's Next Generation Design Competition displayed an inspiring blend of conceptual flair and social responsibility. |
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Darwin City Waterfront What is an appropriate contemporary urban architecture for the tropics? |
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Rush hour revolution Portsmouth's new public transport system is leading the drive towards a literal information superhighway. |
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In Search of a City
A new book depicts L.A. in all its multiplicity. |
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Crude awakening The world's thirst is not sustainable as experts predict an imminent decline and fall in oil production. In this seven-day series, the Globe investigates what awaits the world as the reserves dry up. |
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Space, the new frontier Cecil Balmond, the engineer-magician of Arup, has built some peculiar things in his time, but the Casa da Musica in Porto, Portugal, is the oddest of the lot. It sits on its square like a New Age crystal, a prismatic monolith; vast, alien, slightly ominous, like a spaceship from a 1950s B-movie. You, me, Balmond and its Dutch creator, Rem Koolhaas, gawp at it with awe, just as we might have gawped at the first aeroplanes or gothic cathedrals. What the devil is it? [via] |
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For its future, Hamburg covers the waterfront The goal is to follow in the successful footsteps of waterfront redevelopment projects in the Docklands of London and the east harbor area of Amsterdam. |
Thursday, May 26, 2005
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Socially connected Hilary Cottam helps to create buildings and services that really work in the public interest - and if that means a prison with study rooms and a pool, so be it. |
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A spent force? The rise of the big retail stores could turn Britain into a nation of 'clone towns', and, say some, threaten local communities. Is it time to start the fight back? |
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Interview with Dolores Hayden Dolores Hayden is Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University. An urban historian and architect, she has written extensively about the history of American urban landscapes and the politics of design. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, was published by Pantheon Books in 2003. She is also the author of A Field Guide to Sprawl (with aerial photographs by Jim Wark, published by W.W. Norton, 2004). |
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In the Bubble What to do when the fizzy world of high-style design starts to seem too, too much? When you've grown weary of the exclamatory chatter of the shelter rags, when you've flipped idly through one too many multi-pound monograph, when you've become surfeited with the ever-expanding universe of luxe stuff and cool things? |
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Long Day's Journey Into Night "Check all of your assumptions at the door," James Howard Kunstler advises reporters before he commences an interview. "Don't assume that anything you think about the way we live today is going to be the same 10, five, even three years from now." |
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South Natomas Home Covered With Sheet Metal Residents claim neighbors bombarding them With radiation. |
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New homes 'are worse than prison' It is home to Britain's most baffling roundabout and was described in a recent bestseller as the 'arse of the world'. Now Swindon's 180,000 residents have a fresh reason to burn with civic humiliation: the town has the grimmest new housing estate in Britain. |
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
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Dirt is green When he talks about building a house out of dirt in a historic Roanoke neighborhood, architect Gregg Lewis begins to look just slightly maniacal. |
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Invisible architecture "This temporary sunshade," Jean Nouvel told the large group of students who had gathered around him, "is a beautiful example of architecture, at once transparent and opaque, and is an excellent starting point for real planning." |
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The Great Malls of China After construction workers finish plastering a replica of the Arc de Triomphe and buffing the imitation streets of Hollywood, Paris and Amsterdam, a giant new shopping theme park here will proclaim itself the world's largest shopping mall. |
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
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Libeskind redraws St. Louis skyline A long-talked-about project set to change St. Louis' skyline is now moving forward with a world-renowned architect at the drawing table. |
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Salsa Dancers and Stunt Men? Must Be a Miami Condo Project In the last month alone, you could salsa with dancers in fringed hot pants at Aqua, hear a drag queen D.J. at Cynergi or watch stunt men ricochet off a trampoline at Soleil. Nightclubs? No. Carnival acts? Not quite. These were launch parties for condominium projects, one of the stranger forms of nightlife in a city obsessed with real estate. |
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Welcome to the age of scarcity The world's thirst is not sustainable as experts predict an imminent decline and fall in oil production. |
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In Beijing, All Roads Lead to Gridlock In March, Bi Yuxi, one of Beijing's top highway administrators, was sentenced to death for taking $1.2 million in bribes and misspending $360,000 of public funds. Set aside the question of whether a similar fate shouldn't befall local bureaucrats who impede progress on Los Angeles traffic problems. For China the pressing question is: Will that nation's explosion of cars ever escape the worse-than-L.A. gridlock that keeps many all but immobile in some cities? |
Monday, May 23, 2005
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The paradox of the hedge An 8-foot-high stand of ficus is a friendlier wall, but it's still a wall. And there are more than two sides to it. |
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Overcoming the Comfort of Powerlessness If we as planners don't do better in defining ourselves, we risk being seen as irrelevant and superfluous. |
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Award-winning architects show how to embrace the challenge of cities They're not about (creating) just another pretty building. And they don't start out from a formal standpoint; they let the form emerge, with an emphasis on using less space and doing less harm to the environment. They push boundaries; they make you think. |
Saturday, May 21, 2005
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Base Plan Undercuts Sprawl Battle The Pentagon's plan to move tens of thousands of jobs from Metro-accessible urban centers to campuses outside the Capital Beltway will exacerbate the region's traffic, destabilize the real estate market and flood already crowded schools, local planners and elected leaders say. |
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Supersize moi! Normally, a new McDonald’s is as newsworthy as the repaving of a side street. But for the opening of the new McDonald’s in Chicago’s River North area in mid-April, 100 reporters came from as far as Europe and Japan, albeit as part of a concerted publicity effort . Whatever else it is, the new restaurant is more than a mere addition to the 30,000 or so other hamburger joints in the chain. |
Friday, May 20, 2005
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Cultural center a 'bridge' to WTC site Another piece in Ground Zero's rise from the ashes - the planned cultural center - came into view yesterday with a design revealing a building that seems to hover above the ground. |
Thursday, May 19, 2005
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Wind farms 'must take root in UK' Wind power must be made to work in the UK in order to combat climate change, a report by the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) has said. |
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MORPHOSIS. NYC2012 Olympic Village Our design for the Village proposes an iconic landmark and an innovative vision for a 21st -century urban environment that will lead to a redefinition of contemporary urban living. |
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
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Sibling reverie Leading architect and urban thinker Richard Rogers and his property developer brother Peter share a vision for affordable homes in Britain. |
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City calls for road plan to respect beauty City planners and architects are calling for a basic urban design plan guidelines from the Government to protect the beauty of urban streets as a major road widening project is underway. |
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The Not-So-Great Divide When the time came to sell our roomy old house in New Jersey, with its stained-glass windows and towering oaks in the front yard, two nice young couples who had heard that the "for sale" sign would soon be posted wanted to see the place. That wasn't surprising: Montclair's a hot market. |
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
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Cladding: the comeback Minimalist glass and steel exteriors are so over. Now fashionable building designers are dressing their works in the architectural equivalent of flared trousers. |
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UN threatens city with ban on tall buildings Liverpool's ambitions for a "mini-Manhattan" skyline face being thrown into jeopardy by strict United Nations rules to ban tall buildings around World Heritage sites. |
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Hitch your wagon to Estonia? America's magnet for creativity faces far-flung places on the rise. |
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Bustling Mumbai wrangles over how to define itself In the belly of this island city, the textile mills are overrun with weeds and their chimneys point at the sky like so many sooty elephant snouts. A glassy new high-rise glistens incongruously nearby. A construction crane peers over a giant crater where a mill has been demolished to make way for four luxury apartment towers. |
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Wi-Fi: free and easy London's biggest wireless hotspot went live recently, offering free Internet access for anyone with a Wi-Fi enabled device. The 'Technology Mile' is an impressive scheme, and the launch of such a large free wireless network has cast further doubt on the business case for paid Wi-Fi access, if in fact there ever was a viable one outside that of the enterprise user and other niche uses. |
Monday, May 16, 2005
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Saving the Tract House Frank Nolan, casually dressed in an olive drab polo shirt and blue jeans, occupied a white leather Brno chair set off by the room's gleaming Philippine-mahogany paneling. ''One never wants to come across as a design snob, especially as it pertains to one's neighbors,'' Nolan said gingerly. ''We know that having a good neighbor is so much more important than what color they paint their house or how they choose to landscape. But there just seems to be a great disparity between the potential that we see in this neighborhood and then what you actually do see when you drive down the street.'' |
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The City He Built It is hard to imagine a crueler fate for an urban planner than seeing his country taken over by a regime with a murderous hatred of cities. |
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The Last of the Moderns On a bright South American summer morning, the first blinding view inside Oscar Niemeyer's sun-bleached penthouse office above Copacabana Beach is of round mountains abutting the Atlantic Ocean and Coppertoned tourists in vanishingly small bathing suits. |
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Russian Icons A short walk from the Kremlin, the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture is a haunted place. |
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Slicing and Dicing the Past to Get to the Future Plans to slip a sparkling new condo tower behind vintage facades spurs debate on the nature of architectural preservation. |
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Earth Without People What was earth like before people took it over? Scientists are using ecology records and computers to map our lost landscapes. |
Saturday, May 14, 2005
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Chicago's Magic Kingdom Is Millennium Park a theme park for adults? |
Friday, May 13, 2005
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Thinking Inside the Big Box Next week, Julia Christensen will begin a cross-country drive to places no other tourist would care to notice. In her 1999 Subaru Forester, Ms. Christensen, a 28-year-old artist, will trawl the American landscape in search of big-box superstores that are now used as churches, schools, racetracks and, in one case, a museum dedicated to Spam, the canned meat. |
Thursday, May 12, 2005
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McMansions or Bash-and-Builds, Some Towns Have Had Enough These sprawling new homes have as many names as there are styles, from "trophy homes" to "monster homes" and "McMansions," "starter castles" to "plywood palaces." In North Jersey, detractors call them "bash and builds" and "bigfoots." But whatever the name, they present neighbors with a sudden expanse of towering wall to look at, blocking sunlight, altering the streetscape and even changing the character of the neighborhood. |
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Adventures in public transit Dude 1: Have you seen the art piece in front of the new arena? It looks like garbage. Dude 2: Yeah totally. Dude 1: Probably skateable though? Dude 2: Probably. Art pieces are great for that . . .. Dude 1: Yeah. You know where's cool is Barcelona. I want to live there for a few months. That's something I need to do. And there's tonnes of art pieces there that are awesome and totally skateable. |
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
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A severely hip concert hall Rem Koolhaas can be bold and exciting in his disregard for the norm. But in Portugal he may have gotten boxed in. |
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
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The ephemeral city San Francisco has lost its middle class, become a 'theme park for restaurants,' and is the playground of the nomadic rich and restless leeches living off them. |
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Dutch architects win first Marcus Prize Emerging stars in industry specialize in enlivening urban sites. |
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America's passion for burly SUV fizzles It's a Saturday morning on San Leandro's Marina Boulevard auto row, and the big SUVs have been sitting on the lots, waiting for someone to come in and start that dealer dollar dance that ends up with the customer slightly bewildered but paying a lot less for that vehicle than he thought he was going to. |
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Designing the Future In a new interview series, NEWSWEEK talks to a leading ecological architect whose goal is nothing less than eliminating waste and pollution. |
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Reconnecting young America with the natural world Can we look past the skyscrapers and subdivisions, the ribbons of freeway and container ports and gritty industries, to rediscover the enduring pattern of ancient hills and rivers and harbors, the still functional natural regions? |
Monday, May 9, 2005
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Now and Zen Trees, flowers, pavilions, water ... Expo 2005 is more like an ancient Japanese palace garden than a design showcase. |
Saturday, May 7, 2005
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End of an era for an American icon The era of the record-breaking American skyscraper is over, according to the firm of architects behind Chicago's Sears Tower, once the world's tallest building. |
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Don't Be Smart, Be Smarter Sometimes master planners miss the city right in front of them. |
Friday, May 6, 2005
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Apartment buildings with a touch of the exotic With evocative names, elaborate entries and fancy lobbies, owners tried to elevate work-a-day tenements above the norm. |
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The speedy way to capture a city Imagine if the first soldiers to enter an enemy city could map it street by street, recording every window and doorway of the urban battlefield in an accurate 3D model that could instantly be relayed to their comrades at base. |
Thursday, May 5, 2005
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Power to the People Forget the national power grid. Small communities are starting to make their own energy from clean, renewable, local sources. |
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Better science through building design Open spaces bring people, and ideas, together. |
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
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Down on Main Street A guide to living among the crack addicts, mentally ill, homeless and young-pros-on-the-go in a changing downtown. |
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The $6.66-a-Gallon Solution Car owners in the United States may grumble as the price of gasoline hovers around $2.25 a gallon. Here in Norway, home to perhaps the world's most expensive gasoline, drivers greeted higher pump prices of $6.66 a gallon with little more than a shrug. |
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More people choose to live near bus, MetroLink lines Soaring gas prices already have more people riding MetroLink and buses. So it’s not a big leap to think that more people may be looking to live closer to public transit. |
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City Is Backing Makeover for Decaying Brooklyn Waterfront City officials agreed yesterday to let developers turn the decaying north Brooklyn waterfront, with its relics of Brooklyn's industrial past, into a neighborhood of residential towers with a parklike esplanade along the East River. |
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China's chichi suburbs American-style sprawl all the rage in Beijing. |
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Commerce Joins Art to Train Yale Architects The tension was palpable on Friday as Jennifer Newsom pinned her drawings to the wall and set out her architectural models under the formidable gaze of a row of accomplished architects. Gesturing toward the curvilinear complex that she had designed for a school and fashion museum in Milan, she likened its podlike classrooms and studios to "bubble gum pulling apart." |
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Urban Sprawl and Public Health We are on a freeway to disaster. Our environment and the way we live are creating a host of problems, physical and emotional. We are spending too much time on jammed freeways and too little time walking to the store. We are overweight, anxious and neglecting our kids. And it all has to do with the way our cities and subdivisions are laid out. |
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Mimicked Main Streets, mall makeovers seek to lure shoppers Main Street never looked this good. With perfectly manicured shrubbery, plenty of free parking and no panhandlers, real estate developers have come up with a way to take the best elements of a traditional Main Street and fuse them with retail. The result: a lifestyle center. |
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
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The new industrial parks Over the last few years, Olmsted's heirs have turned the field of landscape architecture on its head, exploding conventional notions of what's considered natural, picturesque and beautiful. |
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'I want this to be the best studio in the world' How does a tiny architecture practice take on the might of Foster's? Leo Benedictus visits Make to find out. |
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Architects faking it for museum A competition to design a museum which will never be built is exercising the minds of Manchester architects. |
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Subdivisions Impose Social Divide Lately, Ivan Barry, who is 12, feels like a stranger in a strange land, which is odd, since he and his family moved to their red brick rambler on Ryan Road in Loudoun County seven years ago, before most of their neighbors arrived. |
Monday, May 2, 2005
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A 12-Step Program For Car Junkies Step One Admit that our dependence on driving alone has made the traffic on our freeways and streets unmanageable... |
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Traffic Studied Using Computer-Linked Cars Picking up doughnuts on the way to work recently, George List slid back into the driver's seat and heard a voice from the cup holder suggest an alternate route. The car wasn't talking, exactly. The voice came from a handheld computer nestled in the holder that links his car to 200 other vehicles in the area. Data from all the vehicles — where they are, how quickly they move — is being used to create snapshots of area traffic patterns. |
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Wi-Fi should be free I was sitting in a Wi-Fi cafe (Lulu Carpenter's) in Santa Cruz, California this afternoon with my husband, wondering how to create a citywide wireless broadband network that offers access free of charge to users and pays for itself (or even makes money). Suddenly it came to us: advertising (Google adsense plus Google Maps plus Local Search). |
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Detroit may turn to farming to resolve population problems This is an odd place to see a red tractor and two greenhouses, let alone a large lot being prepared for lettuce, onions, peppers and other vegetables. From one greenhouse, Samyn watches young men with cell phones do drug deals a block and a half away, near the abandoned aluminum smelter. |
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Get Your Motor Buzzin' Scooters have long hummed around the edges of New York life as either a faddish enthusiasm or a means of transport best suited to the city's small army of couriers and food deliverers. But they have never gained traction here as a tool of mass transit the way they have in European and Asian cities. But a growing number of New Yorkers are turning to scooters to alleviate some of the headaches of urban living. |
Sunday, May 1, 2005
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Affordable landscapes The growing numbers of blighted residential districts all over the world call for cost-effective ideas to upgrade public space. |
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