Urbanism News
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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A Clean, Well-Lit Space ... 21st-century museum buildings are more than repositories of art; they also function as centres of urban activity and symbols of cultural regeneration. |
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High rise, high hopes New architectural firm REX's design for riverfront cultural center in Louisville. |
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Eight Inc. Wins the Architectural Record Katrina Design Competition: High-Density on the High-Ground The Eight Inc. design for a sustainable high-density 160-unit housing community on a high-ground site by the Mississippi River took into consideration the architectural vernacular, geography, culture, heritage and infrastructure of New Orleans. Tim Kobe, founding principal, shared the Eight Inc. approach "We felt a strong responsibility in helping craft the reconstruction of New Orleans by tapping into the vibrancy of the culture. We want to rekindle the unique and diverse spirit of the city and inspire re-growth in a culturally and environmentally sustainable way." |
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Building the (New) New York This is Tomorrowland—a new city, a city larger than San Francisco, built on top of the city we know. In ten years, New York City will be transformed in ways we can only guess at. But in the pages that follow, you will explore our best guess, based on the plans, the dreams, the cornerstones, and the rising steel in nine city neighborhoods, spread over all five boroughs. In 2016, we won’t be able to be so parochial anymore—one Times Square isn’t going to be enough to fulfill the entertainment needs of that bigger, younger, more diverse population, and you’ll be talking about the lights on 125th Street. Fresh Kills will be three times the size of Central Park. If you imagine the city as a play—every neighborhood has a role—a lot of understudies are finally going to be called onstage. |
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Buenos Aires Diary Argentina is about to industrialise the process of waste-disposal treatment. The problem of waste disposal is being tackled ambitiously, and the aim is 0% waste in 2017! In March Caro Isern, Iris de Kievith and Jan Jongert organised the ‘reciclan’ workshop. Together with Argentinean designers and waste specialists, they looked for ways to turn common local waste products into building materials. |
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Sweeping downtown revitalization plan unveiled In a sweeping downtown revitalization plan being unveiled this morning, the Hyatt Regency New Orleans Hotel and the New Orleans Shopping Center will be turned into a modern 20-acre multi-use National Jazz Center and park buttressed by public office buildings. |
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Sensors: Living off scraps of energy Professor Zhong Lin Wang at the Georgia Institute of Technology has devised a sensor that can harvest mechanical energy and convert it into electricity. Embedded in the boot of a soldier, for instance, the sensor could conceivably gather energy when its wearer walks and use that energy to charge batteries for a radio or flashlight, for example. Similarly, blood flow from the heart could generate energy for an implanted medical device. |
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Exporting Pollution We send it to Europe; they send it to Asia. But what happens when China starts sending more our way? |
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Where are the Olympic building plans heading? There is a growing scepticism in this country about architecture for the public. Britain's official bodies have taken to viewing ambitious projects with a mix of indifference and deep suspicion, most recently in the way that they have set about delivering the massive construction programme for the London Olympics. |
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Miami Is All About Its Celebrity Architects Just when it seemed that the traditional Miami aesthetic had made a national comeback — with Art Deco, Art Moderne and space-age-style motifs re-entering the vocabulary of so many developers — a new chapter has opened for this city's architecture. |
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Automobile Association boosts Bike Month by offering free roadside assistance to cyclists Cyclists won't need to fret over flat tires, broken chains or other mechanical woes during "Bike Month," this June. The British Columbia Automobile Association (BCAA) is offering free roadside assistance for cyclists - member or not - who have broken down, and need help getting to work, school or home. |
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How Millennium Park created a unique nexus of culture
It was designed as a lush urban park, a star-lit concert space, a grassy art gallery dotted with high-toned creations, but Millennium Park has become something more. |
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The Greener Guys Americans are increasingly recognizing that the effects of carbon emissions on global warming are a serious problem, but there are no rules in the United States regulating heat-trapping gases comparable to those that most other developed countries have adopted under the Kyoto Protocol. Some United States businesses, though, are responding for a variety of reasons anyway: to satisfy customers or shareholders who worry about the environment, to improve their public image or to drive down their energy costs. In addition, some states and local authorities have stepped in to try to curb their contributions to global warming. |
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Observation on 'Architecture of Density' With limited space and expanding populations, today's cities are getting more crammed and compact each day. The struggle to fit into a city's density - by adjusting oneself into a tight apartment space or squirming for comfort in the cramped subway train every morning - is a mere daily routine to common observers. But with a unique perspective, artist Michael Wolf makes art out of this "common" density. |
Monday, May 29, 2006
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Who Can Afford to Live in New York City? Is it possible to satisfy the need for affordable housing in New York City? Usually housing is considered unaffordable if it costs a household more than 30 percent of its income. With that definition, about 1.1 million of the 3 million households (36.7 percent) are living in housing that is not affordable to them. In fact, over 600,000 (19.9 percent) spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. |
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Cyclists of the city unite! Growing up in a small town in the Netherlands, Astrid de Vries was always on her bike — it was a way of life. "Almost everyone cycled to school as children," she recalls. "I rode a half hour each way." |
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Shifting Gears As more Angelenos ditch their cars, the city is opening bike lanes, companies are holding cycling seminars and federal officials are pushing for tax incentives. |
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Reclaiming the heart of the city Urban planning theories are meaningless without citizens involved in their community. |
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Bicycles take over Lake Shore Drive Thousands of bicyclists took over Chicago's Lake Shore Drive early Sunday morning in the annual Bike the Drive event. The road reopened to traffic at 10 a.m. "It's not just what you see but also what you hear. You see a wonderful view of the skyline of the lake in the morning. You hear the sound of the click, click pedaling. You hear the waves. What you don t hear is the cars. Fantastic," said Rob Sadowsky, Chicagoland Bicycle Fed.. |
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A family of 4 — but no car The Petersons are a family of four from Issaquah. They like to hike, go to the movies, watch "American Idol." A regular suburban bunch. Minus the SUV. Minus any car, for that matter. The Petersons don't drive. They haven't since 1987. No one in the family has a driver's license. At 17 and 20 years old, the Peterson kids have never been behind the wheel. |
Sunday, May 28, 2006
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Who Can Afford to Live in New York City? Is it possible to satisfy the need for affordable housing in New York City? Usually housing is considered unaffordable if it costs a household more than 30 percent of its income. With that definition, about 1.1 million of the 3 million households (36.7 percent) are living in housing that is not affordable to them. In fact, over 600,000 (19.9 percent) spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. |
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Who Can Afford to Live in New York City? Is it possible to satisfy the need for affordable housing in New York City? Usually housing is considered unaffordable if it costs a household more than 30 percent of its income. With that definition, about 1.1 million of the 3 million households (36.7 percent) are living in housing that is not affordable to them. In fact, over 600,000 (19.9 percent) spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. |
Saturday, May 27, 2006
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Who Can Afford to Live in New York City? Is it possible to satisfy the need for affordable housing in New York City? Usually housing is considered unaffordable if it costs a household more than 30 percent of its income. With that definition, about 1.1 million of the 3 million households (36.7 percent) are living in housing that is not affordable to them. In fact, over 600,000 (19.9 percent) spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. |
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Who Can Afford to Live in New York City? Is it possible to satisfy the need for affordable housing in New York City? Usually housing is considered unaffordable if it costs a household more than 30 percent of its income. With that definition, about 1.1 million of the 3 million households (36.7 percent) are living in housing that is not affordable to them. In fact, over 600,000 (19.9 percent) spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. |
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The height of fame At the beginning and again at the end of this evocative meditation on the world's most famous skyscraper, Mark Kingwell recalls the 2001 destruction of New York's World Trade Center, and the consequences of that terrible event for our imagination of the city. "New attention was paid to the classic skyscrapers of Manhattan; and so the otherwise impregnable fact of New York walking, that one must not look up, seemed for a time suspended, bracketed by desire and yearning. . . . [T]he skyscrapers of Manhattan suddenly appeared at once more real and more fragile, vulnerable fingers stretching skyward in hope but all too susceptible to being broken." |
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Montreal by design Its grand UNESCO title doesn't mean much, but the city's fine architects remember that God is in the details. |
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Baghdad, USA Roadside bombs. Hostile insurgents. 1,200 extras in Arab dress. Welcome to Louisiana and the Army camp known as the Box, where the violence is fake but the fear is for real. |
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The cities of dreadful night At some point during the first half of this century, more than half the world's population will be living in cities. That will be a watershed moment in human history. By then, a tight network of so-called alpha city-regions will completely dominate the global economy, functioning as command and control centres for capital, professional services, media and culture. Their collective clout already far exceeds that of the G-8. |
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The cities of dreadful night At some point during the first half of this century, more than half the world's population will be living in cities. That will be a watershed moment in human history. By then, a tight network of so-called alpha city-regions will completely dominate the global economy, functioning as command and control centres for capital, professional services, media and culture. Their collective clout already far exceeds that of the G-8. |
Friday, May 26, 2006
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The 21st-century commune It's a sunny day in Roberts Creek, and Kurt Grimm is helping landscape the new common house. He takes off his gloves to shake hands, then heads to a conical pile of fresh topsoil and sits down on the dirt. An associate professor of earth and ocean sciences at the University of British Columbia, Mr. Grimm doesn't miss a beat when asked what drew him to Roberts Creek Cohousing (RCC). "Climate change and ecosystem collapse are a symptom of a deeper social problem," he says, squinting into the sun. "The highly individuated lifestyle we're leading is driving the problem. It's the huge-footprint lifestyle of the wealthy north, and we moved here to get away from it, toward authentic rather than material fulfilment." |
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City of sound Goethe famously called architecture "frozen music," but in the upcoming SoundaXis festival, the two forms melt one into the other and go shimmying out into the life of the city. The festival, June 1-11, is the brainchild of a coalition of new-music groups, with an ear to Toronto's cultural megabuild. |
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Charging up the stairs Reading this, your body at rest is emitting about 100 watts into the environment. If you're sitting in an open plan office, count the number of surrounding colleagues and you don't need to be a maths genius to appreciate the possibilities of tapping into all that wasted energy. |
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S.F. planners have high hopes for new center of downtown Thirty-five years after the Transamerica Pyramid became the peak that defines San Francisco's skyline, city officials said Thursday that they want to push even higher -- making room for what could be the tallest tower west of Chicago. |
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Cruz Finding New Solutions for Border Living San Diego architect Teddy Cruz, and his firm Estudio Teddy Cruz, have been working along the Mexican border for years. Cruz’s newest design is for two affordable housing and community center schemes for immigrants in the border town of San Ysidro, California. The plan was developed with non-profit community center, Casa Familiar, whose client base is mostly Spanish-speaking. |
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The Rise of the Aerotropolis Airports are no longer simply places where airplanes land and passengers and cargo transit. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is a case in point. About 58,000 people are daily employed on the airport grounds. Its passenger terminal—containing an expansive mix of shopping, dining, and entertainment arcades—doubles as a suburban mall that is accessible both to air travelers and the general public. Amsterdam residents regularly shop and relax in the airport’s public section, especially on Sundays and at night when most city stores are closed. |
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Coalition imagines livable city in 2100: open spaces and a 'green infrastructure' Ideas emerging from a two-day Seattle forum in February on developing a new legacy of "green infrastructure" range from restoring shorelines to reclaiming areas leveled by earthquakes to pursuing urban agriculture projects enabling neighborhoods to grow food. |
Thursday, May 25, 2006
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Grimshaw Designing New York Street Furniture The New York City Department of Transportation recently signed a contract ordering thousands of bus shelters, newsstands, and public toilets designed by Grimshaw Industrial Design, a division of London-based Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, produced for the Spanish company, Cemusa. The deal has been approved by the city, and is expected to get final approval from New York’s comptroller in a matter of weeks. |
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Laps of Luxury Backyard swimming pools aren't as simple as they used to be. They're extravagant, eccentric, at times epic in scale. And is that really an aquarium underwater? |
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Llewelyn Davies Yeang win competition for major transportation route in Istanbul A dramatic masterplan bridging East and West has been unveiled. The plan includes a major transportation route which links the waterfronts of Istanbul to the Asian side of Turkey. The project includes the creation of a 2 kilometre continuous ecological corridor (with eco bridges) which in addition serves as a new urban park for the city. |
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Interview with Mike Davis: Part 2 This is the final part of a two-part interview with Mike Davis, author, sociologist, and urban theorist, recorded upon the publication of his book, Planet of Slums. |
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
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Contempt for the hometown "Los Angeles … has never recovered from the inferiority complex that its movies nourished," Pauline Kael once wrote. James Sanders uses Kael's quote in "Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies," a persuasive demonstration that film artists created a magical New York City on studio lots in Hollywood, Burbank and Culver City, inspired, at least in part, by the disdain and contempt they felt for the city in which they worked and lived. The real Los Angeles was no match for their mythic Manhattan. |
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Engineering Conflict Painting and sculpture still have the power to make people intemperately angry, as former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's outrage over Chris Ofili's distinctive ways with elephant dung and canvas vividly demonstrated not so long ago. But after a century or more of twisting the bourgeoisie by the tail, the cultural shock tactics of visual artists are subject to the inevitability of diminishing returns. Architecture, on the other hand, is a subject that is fraught with genuine conflict, and it seems to have acquired an extraordinary capacity to make all kinds of people extremely angry about issues that range from the most intensely personal to the most diffusely political. Architecture causes neighbors to go to war over tear-downs or allows a wronged spouse to expunge the memory of an ex-husband from a former family home. |
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A condo fit for a . . . car? The idea of buying a parking space is nothing new in crowded urban areas. But a parking space may be exposed to the elements, or next to a rowdy family's hulking sport utility vehicle. That's why some enthusiasts with money to burn are turning to car condos, where their vehicles will be stored in individual, weatherproof, air-conditioned garages with 24-hour security and concierge services. Three car condo developments are scheduled to open in south Florida by the end of 2007, and developers say they've already sold between 20 and 30 per cent of the condos available. |
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
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Shifting Gears As more Angelenos ditch their cars, the city is opening bike lanes, companies are holding cycling seminars and federal officials are pushing for tax incentives. |
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So Tall: International High-Rise Prize 2006 Goes to Barcelona's Torre Agbar by Jean Nouvel Spain’s star continues to rise in the architectural firmament with the announcement on May 16 of the winner of the second International High-Rise Prize: the striking 142-meter-high Torre Agbar, headquarters for the Catalan metropolis’s water utility, Aigües de Barcelona/Sociedad General de Aguas de Barcelona SA (known as Agbar), designed by Paris-based Ateliers Jean Nouvel. |
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Could Seattle do without its elevated highway? The idea, dismissed for years by many as impractical, is being more seriously considered in some circles as officials ponder the gigantic cost of replacing the aging, earthquake-damaged structure that has loomed above the city's waterfront for 53 years. |
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After Nature The world's most dangerous architect has his say. |
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Interview with Mike Davis: Part 1 The future, to put it non-judgementally, will be interesting indeed. |
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Group hears Great Park designer's vision Ken Smith, master designer for the planned Orange County Great Park, was asked Wednesday how he would like his contribution to be remembered years from now. "I think that people should love the park," he replied. "It's as simple as that." |
Sunday, May 21, 2006
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Safety Concern over Shanghai's Skyscrapers Amazing to tourists, the increasing number of modern skyscrapers in Shanghai is the pride of its citizens. However, recently, concerns have been raised about the strong and thus damaging winds that are result from the dense population of skyscrapers so central to the metropolis. |
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Eurotecture invades Manhattan I'm in a European cultural building. That's obvious. The little details give it away: the delicate white-painted steelwork, the way the slender handrails are bolted directly into the glass walls of the lifts, the confident juxtaposition of new with old. Were are we? Zurich? London? Neither. Look up and out of this great library and museum, and you see the pinnacle of the Empire State Building. We are, as the Morgan Library's Italian architect, Renzo Piano, puts it evocatively, "swimming in Manhattan". |
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Touch the Sky It's so James Bond: a darkening Berlin skyline, the Spree River sparkling below, a roof-garden path through wind-bent tulips to your car parked in the sky, right on your terrace. |
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Shopping in style: Built to please Cookie-cutter retail look is giving way to modern design. |
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The Right to Walk Yes, we are whiners, but then again there is so much to whine about in our fragmented, auto-obsessed Downtown where, I'm afraid, walking is still looked upon through the windshields of cars as déclassé. |
Friday, May 19, 2006
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Living in a dream Residents moving in to the BedZed development believed they would be at the forefront of an eco-friendly existence - then things started to go wrong. |
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Holy Subdivision! I do think that the preoccupation with evangelical religion has, to some degree, been a substitute for the destruction of public life in general, which has followed the destruction of public space. And the thing that's ironic and sort of paradoxical about it is that the whole Christian Fundamentalist sector employs the methods of big box chain retail in order to do their thing...." |
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Designing a House to Save a Tree If Margarita McGrath and Scott Oliver had simply cut down the tree, they would have had room to build a large house — large, at least by New York standards. But they couldn't do it. |
Thursday, May 18, 2006
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Architects Are a Lagging Indicator for Sustainable Design Even after receiving a master's degree in architecture at Miami University of Ohio, with a thesis on sustainable building in communities, Vicki Anderson felt she needed more training if she wanted to design environmentally responsible buildings. |
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Putting Environmentalism on the Urban Map Yes, there are sweeping views of the Hudson River, 35 acres of parkland and waterfront promenades. But what gets James Cavanaugh especially jazzed about Battery Park City is the reclaimed toilet water, processed by a waste-treatment plant in the basement of an apartment building at 20 River Terrace. In fact, Mr. Cavanaugh, the president and chief executive of the Battery Park City Authority, has tasted it. |
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Triplet Towers Three architects conjure up three new skyscrapers for trade center. |
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To Revitalize a City, Try Spreading Some Mulch In many ways, Chicago's current fortunes are all about mulch. It's everywhere. Bark mulch is spread in neat circles around the city's trees; roughly 30,000 new trees are planted annually. Darker leaf mulch fills planters along State, Dearborn, Michigan and the other major thoroughfares now blooming in spring colors. |
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Have a look around you. See anything different? The landscape is forever changing in little ways, from traffic circles to anti-skateboard clips. You didn't see them much a decade ago, but now they're part of the landscape. |
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Chicago's lots
Appropriating three to eight changes to the current Chicago Zoning would gain numerous benefits. |
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
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How Sprawl Got a Bad Name There is overwhelming evidence that urban sprawl has been beneficial for many people. Year after year, the vast majority of Americans respond to batteries of polls by saying that they are quite happy with where they live, whether it is a city, suburb, or elsewhere. Most objective indicators about American urban life are positive. We are more affluent than ever; home ownership is up; life spans are up; pollution is down; crime in most cities has declined. Even where sprawl has created negative consequences, it has not precipitated any crisis. |
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Connecting The Dots On High Gas Prices A friend of mine switched jobs recently, from a big employer in an office park off Boston's second beltway, to offices downtown. Before, he had a two-hour roundtrip commute driving alone in his car; now he walks to the train station in Boston's Roslindale section and rides 10 minutes, just enough time to read the Wall Street Journal, he says. With the shorter commute he's had more time to be active in the neighborhood, where the storefronts on Washington Street are getting makeovers one after the other, and new restaurants seem to open every few months. He marvels at the prices at the local gas station just like everybody else in Boston – but joyfully, he's not filling the tank once a week anymore. More like once a month, if that. |
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More Americans biking to work to cut down on gasoline usage Fed up with sitting in traffic and paying more than $50 to fill his tank, Scott Morrison ditched his gas-guzzling pickup and started biking to work. Rain or shine, Morrison now bikes the six miles from his home in Fairfield, about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco, to the packaging plant where he works as a machine operator. Six months after switching to two wheels, he feels more relaxed and healthier, having lost nearly 50 pounds. |
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
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'We're not building a park, we're growing a park' Leave it to Ken Smith to find beauty in an old ammunition bunker. The landscape architect could barely contain his enthusiasm as he jumped up on the big grass-covered mound and surveyed the flat expanse beyond it. |
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What should we do with buildings which no longer serve their original purpose? In their five-point plan to rescue much-loved landmarks across the British Isles, alternative use for the buildings is treated as a desperate last measure. |
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"Live" with Witold Rybczynski Witold Rybczynski was interviewed for TAE in Philadelphia by art and architecture critic Catesby Leigh. |
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'Skinny streets' movement winning wider acceptance If you think the highest and best use of a street is to move as many cars as fast as possible, shrinking the pavement probably seems counterintuitive, if not downright loony. |
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Suburbia will survive a gas crunch Predictions of the demise of suburbia, choked to death by high gasoline prices, may be greatly exaggerated. |
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What's up with parkour? Disciples trying to protect mandate of free-running sport Parkour fans resist the lure of commercialization. |
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Better Community Design Improves Health Millions of Americans thought they could find the good life by moving to the suburbs and relying on their automobiles as their primary mode of transportation. However, the planners of our transportation system didn't think about the urban sprawl and reliance on the automobile would lead to a decline in air quality and a less physically active population, both of which impacts health: e.g., cardiovascular diseases, obesity, asthma, and depression. |
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Condo Development With a new residential project by Dirk Denison, Chicago is getting yet another lesson in sustainability. |
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The Breaking of Michael Arad When the then-34-year-old architect won the ground-zero-memorial competition, he looked like the Maya Lin of 9/11—a bright, shining star out of nowhere who would build a breathtaking new landmark. Two years later, all we’ve got is a pile of dirt, a price estimate nearing $1 billion, and a nasty, behind-the-scenes war of wills. |
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Early life in big yards key to health South Australian children with big backyards are less likely to be overweight and inactive than those with small courtyards, a study has found. |
Saturday, May 13, 2006
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OneSmallProject The forthcoming book OneSmallProject is inspired by living conditions in the working class neighborhoods of Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Colombo, Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Mumbai, New Orleans, St. Petersburg, and Singapore.
One billion leftover people--typically called squatters, self-builders, slum dwellers, informal settlers, or displaced persons (it's a big category)--claim leftover spaces in cities and live in unauthorized dwellings made of scavenged, leftover materials. If you know even one of the one billion, you've been touched by her or his life, even if briefly and reluctantly. |
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Toronto Harbour of our dreams The eclectic finalists in a $20 million international design competition took refuge in no safe harbourfronts. |
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Toronto Harbour of our dreams The eclectic finalists in a $20 million international design competition took refuge in no safe harbourfronts. |
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Designers float visions of waterfront to the public Five finalists have been selected in a competition to improve public access to the Toronto waterfront, including creation of a continuous promenade from one end of the inner harbour to the other. |
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New Urbanism sweeps Britain: from Seaside to Sherford. Any development with Prince Charles' name attached to it is bound to stir comment. And this one is a biggie: an entirely new town to be built over the green fields of the Sherford Valley outside Plymouth in Devon. Over the next 20-25 years, some 4,500 new homes of all kinds will be built, along with schools, shops, businesses, hospital and health clinics and its own fast bus link to the city. So is this Poundbury Mark Two - a scaled-up version of the Prince's famous throwback new model suburb of Poundbury outside Dorchester? Is he becoming chief planner to New Albion? |
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Gehry, Olin unveil progress on Atlantic Yards design On May 11, the most recent plans for Forest City Ratner Companies’ $3.5 billion, 8.7 million square-foot Atlantic Yards project were unveiled at a press conference in the Atlantic Terminal Shopping Center, another Ratner development located adjacent to the future development. At the preview, Frank Gehry, the project’s architect, and Laurie Olin, principal of the landscape firm Olin Partnership, presented the most recent designs of the site, whose mixed-use program remains largely unchanged. |
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New Design for Atlantic Yards Presented From across the room, the new plastic-and-wood model of Brooklyn's proposed Atlantic Yards project — unveiled by the developer Forest City Ratner at a news conference today — looked a lot like the old one sitting a few feet away: A 22-acre swathe of glass, brick and metal towers that will loom over the surrounding neighborhoods and forever alter the borough's otherwise sparse skyline. |
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Unlikely guru has reporter's eye, poet's heart Kunstler acknowledges in his books that he's no expert in urban design, has no formal training as an architect, hasn't taken higher degrees in planning. What he brings to the subject is a reporter's eye for detail, a poet's ability to discern the connections between the apparently unconnected and the talent -- to borrow the phrase from William Butler Yeats -- to "cast a cold eye on life, on death" and yet to write about it with passionate insight and a consuming zeal for the welfare of people caught up in events beyond their ken. |
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Sir Norman Foster: a brilliant couturier to dress Moscow However daring his projects might be, Sir Norman cherishes the past, and makes it a point to preserve, or revive, the environment of old. |
Thursday, May 11, 2006
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‘I love the vitality of this high-rise city’ The Richard Rogers Partnership, it was an-nounced last week, is to design one of the remaining towers on the World Trade Center site. I went to talk to Lord Rogers in his sun-filled, hollowed-out, hybrid high-tech/historic Chelsea home. He leans back slightly, almost awkwardly, in his Le Corbusier chunky chair, as if to sigh: “Where do we start?” Good question, even if he only implies it. This is quite a moment for the 72-year-old architect, who has been for so long one of Britain’s most diligent and articulate cultural figures. |
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A tragic tale of a nation that drowned in greed and neglect There was a time, or so we'll tell our great-grandchildren, as seawater laps the steps of the town hall, when being Australian was a point of pride. When Australianness stood for honesty, optimism and a fair go; for sand between the toes, a twinkle in the eye and one up authority. Two-up, even. For a lean, larrikin ingenuity in solving problems, and in getting going when the going got tough. When things did get tough, in the early 21st century, there was a fleeting chance for us to signify, to show leadership, imagination and courage. There we sat, at the far, balmy end of the world, with vast resources, limitless space, a glorious climate and relatively few mouths to feed. We were educated, healthy and remarkably rich. All of this we could have used as a force for good. A force for survival. Instead, we chose to get richer, fatter and smugger. We had resources to burn and, my, we burnt them. What a fire it was. We let our fauna drift into extinction and our indigenes into indigence. Instead of harvesting wind, wave, hot-rock or sun energy, which we had in sparkling abundance, we sold our forests for toilet tissue, our rivers for cotton-farming, our space for radioactive waste, our military for oil. |
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Behind Closed Doors Along the Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway outside Moscow, a riotous jumble of mansions poke out from above the high fences: the gabled mansards of French châteaux, the pointed tops of Gothic castle towers and baroque dormer windows—all built a decade ago by a generation of Russians who had plenty of money but a deficit of taste. Venture a little farther afield, however, and you'll see something altogether more harmonious: new, gated developments like Benelux, where northern European-style cottages nestle among landscaped paths and newly planted mature trees, and Knazhiye Ozero, where discreet, chaletlike mansions surround a small lake. For up-and-coming Moscow millionaires, over-the-top mini-estates are out; understated, self-contained, luxury communities are in. |
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Building boom in the Far East The ever changing landscape of Shanghai, China. |
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
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Livingstone plans 1,000-home eco-estate The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, set out plans today to build Britain's biggest eco-development in east London, modelled on a sustainable city being planned in China. The London scheme will involve at least 1,000 homes, which will be powered entirely by renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic panels, wind turbines and the burning of waste. |
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Life, but not not as we know it Zero emissions, village-style car-free neighbourhoods - and no landfill. A new settlement on the Yangtze will show the world that China wants to help save the planet after all. |
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Looks Brilliant on Paper. But Who, Exactly, Is Going to Make It? As art with high production values has become increasingly common, the role of the artist has evolved into something closer to that of a film director who supervises a large crew of specialists to realize his or her vision. But there's a difference: in filmmaking, each individual — from cinematographer to key grip — is acknowledged, if only for a few seconds when the final credits roll. In the art business, there are no established conventions for crediting the people who transform artists' ideas into well-made objects. And some art workers may just prefer it that way. |
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Why suburbs will never have tall trees Drive through the outer suburbs of Toronto, and chances are you'll find a familiar scene, one replicated across the continent. Behind the signs announcing a new subdivision, monstrous tractors and earth-moving equipment will be chugging across the landscape, preparing what might have been a farmer's field for a sea of houses. Off to one side, there'll be a giant pile of earth — all of the topsoil that had been scraped away and set aside so the machines could grade the site for drainage, sewers and roads. Then the houses duly go up, some of that topsoil gets put back for the lawns, and in come the happy new homeowners dreaming of a green and leafy suburb to be. There's just one snag: It may be decades before the place will begin to support the kind of trees the homeowners want. |
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More cities using personal parking meters What may be the ultimate in parking convenience, the "personal meter" is starting to catch on in more major cities. |
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The plight of the orphan space Abandoned, they need our help. It's finally coming. |
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Coyote Adorable Coyotes are big news when they appear in Manhattan, as one did in March and another in 1999, both times advancing all the way to Central Park. As posses of police officers and park rangers give chase and television helicopters hover in the sky, wildlife authorities try to explain how a coyote could have made its way into the heart of Gotham. |
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Going down in the world You've sold up and moved on - only to find your new neighbourhood engulfed by crime, noise, vomit, fried chicken, fumes and some cruelly misspelt graffiti. |
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For Migrants and the Poor, Tents Must Count as Homes The Arc de Triomphe, the towers of Notre Dame and, now, pup tents for the poor. There is new architecture springing up along the streets of this stately city, a counterpoint to the stone monuments and Beaux-Arts apartment buildings for which the French capital is known. |
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Building Recognition The star system spurred insatiable global demand for serious architecture. Only the next generation can satisfy it now. |
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City of Dreams Last month Paulo Mendes Da Rocha, 78, won architecture's highest accolade, the Pritzker prize. The Brazilian is famed for gravity-defying slabs of raw concrete and steel, sweeping belvederes and delicate restorations of colonial buildings. |
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Doom and Demography What is perhaps most remarkable about the incessant stream of dire—and consistently wrong—predictions of global demographic overshoot is the public’s apparently insatiable demand for it. Unlike the villagers in the fable about the boy who cried wolf, educated American consumers always seem to have the time, the money, and the credulity to pay to hear one more time that we are just about to run out of everything, thanks to population growth. |
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Neighbourhoods can be Transformed by Well-Designed Car Parking Well-designed car parking can help create more attractive and safer communities. The way housebuilders arrange car spaces can affect the lives of residents and has a significant impact on the public environment. |
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What we miss when we look to the Big Stars The Chronicle's former architecture critic, who died in January, would scoff at the notion that his primary job was to survey the aesthetic and theoretical design scene. Instead of talking about the need to spread the word about good architects, he would have urged us to smack the heads of bad ones. |
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The Influentials: Architecture & Design All roads in New York architecture lead to the High Line, the greenest, hippest, most-watched urban transformation in the city—one and a half elevated miles of concrete planks, mini-meadows, and sundecks. The park won’t open until summer 2008, but it has already had a stunning impact on the adjacent blocks, where a forest of 27 new residential towers, hotels, offices, and museums, is rising. |
Monday, May 8, 2006
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First sprouts of a vertical cityscape L.A.'s top architects say three- and four-story complexes could provide the answer to the mayor's call for more housing. |
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Finally, Tokyo tries to protect its skyline Which comes first when trying to create an attractive city -- landmark preservation or urban development? Tokyo, with its mix of the historic and commercial, is now trying to tackle this tough question. |
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The Third School A tipping point isn’t something you’d normally want to associate with a skyscraper, but that may be what Jeanne Gang’s Aqua, an 82-story residential project at Columbus Drive and Lake, turns out to be. For almost a decade megatowers have been rising downtown like weeds, and the developers have been using classic skyline views to market what in every other respect is mediocrity on a grotesque scale. |
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Microsoft's Plan to Map the World in Real Time Researchers are working on a system that allows sensors to track information and create up-to-date, searchable online maps. |
Sunday, May 7, 2006
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Americans Head Out Beyond the Exurbs The new destinations are precisely the places, like Archer County, that have been undervalued — whether by industry or agriculture or mass leisure or urban flight. They are the places where you can still get something that feels like a good life, without the salary of a chief executive. |
Saturday, May 6, 2006
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Building Brands How architects market themselves. |
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Branching out Welcome to the Idea Store, London's answer to the fusty old public library--and maybe America's too. |
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West Sacramento plan stirs imagination Development plans for the waterfront on the west bank of the Sacramento River raise expectations. |
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An environmental Utopia China hopes to be the good guy with its car-free, pedestrian friendly, ecologically sensitive, energy-producing, new city on the Yangtze, Dongtan. |
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Mike Davis: Planet Of Slums In City of Quartz, the radical historian Mike Davis established himself as the Raymond Chandler of urban geography. With a cinematic gaze that evoked the shadows and duplicities of film noir, he mapped the grotesque inequalities and dirty politics of greater Los Angeles. |
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My Life Above Pottery Barn Forget tract homes and gated living. The new American dream is a condo right inside the mall. |
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In the chaos of Iraq, one project is on target: a giant US embassy The question puzzles and enrages a city: how is it that the Americans cannot keep the electricity running in Baghdad for more than a couple of hours a day, yet still manage to build themselves the biggest embassy on Earth? |
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Gehry's Grand Strides It was never-say-never time inside the swooping spaces of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, where Frank Gehry was on hand for the first public viewing of models of the $1.8 billion Grand Avenue project, with the Related Cos. as the developer, in downtown Los Angeles. |
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Public Housing in Private Hands Ingolf Rossberg is the mayor of this majestic eastern German city. But watching him stride around his ballroom-size office, wreathed in smoke from his cigarillo, one could mistake him for a European real estate tycoon. Yet he is that after a fashion. Mr. Rossberg reached a deal in March to sell Dresden's entire stock of 48,000 city-owned apartments to an American private equity firm, the Fortress Investment Group, for $1.2 billion. In a single stroke, Dresden wiped out its burdensome public debt. |
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In Rome, modernity makes a comeback Critics say archaeologists have gone too far in blocking development in the city's centre. This weekend brings a significant exception. |
Friday, May 5, 2006
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Social housing gets stylish How on earth does anyone get on the housing ladder in London these days - particularly the people we need to have living among us such as doctors, nurses, teachers? You can find one very elegant answer to this conundrum near Old Street on the City/Hoxton fringes. There, the highly-regarded Peabody Trust has built an exemplary apartment complex aimed at - well, everyone, really. |
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MIT issues call to arms on energy The Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a preliminary report on Wednesday that calls for technology development and government policies to avert a "perfect storm" forming around energy. |
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Passive Survivability: A New Design Criterion for Buildings If storms are becoming more intense and more common, and if our energy distribution systems or energy supplies are becoming more vulnerable, shouldn’t we be designing our buildings to be able to function—at least minimally to provide basic livability—in the event of power outages or interruptions in fuel or water supply? Shouldn’t passive survivability, we asked ourselves, be a basic design criterion of buildings in this day and age? |
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WTO and OECD could define bicycles as “environmentally preferable products” This would mean bikes would be free of tariffs, making them cheaper to buy and so, in theory, bought by more people leading to more cycling, and less auto-congestion. This possibility has “gone largely unnoticed by the international bicycling community,” said Matt Sholler, director of development & communications at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy of New York. |
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Fixing urban decay Richard Baron plans to demonstrate in Baltimore his belief that poor areas can be refashioned to work. |
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City throws a garden party filled with small lots and big ideas What happens when big-name landscape architects -- the grand thinkers who design millionaires' estates and college campuses and dream up entire park systems -- have to work in a space the size of a bungalow back yard? |
Thursday, May 4, 2006
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Slum Cities: A Shifting World Every year, millions of people around the world are leaving the countryside for cities, hoping to find a better life. But most end up in slums. In fact, the United Nations estimates that by the year 2020, 40% of the population will be slum-dwellers. |
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
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Pragmatic Experimentation: An interview with Cameron Sinclair Nearly drowned out by the strains of Dookie-era Green Day and the Barenaked Ladies, three of us were at the table trying to talk: me; my brother Peter, a green designer and founder of Vivus Architecture; and the British-born founder of Architecture for Humanity, Cameron Sinclair. |
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
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Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York TIME passes. Jane Jacobs, the great lover of cities who stared down Robert Moses' bulldozers and saved many of New York's most precious neighborhoods, died last week at 89. It is a loss for those who value urban life. But her death may also give us permission to move on, to let go of the obsessive belief that Ms. Jacobs held the answer to every evil that faces the contemporary city. |
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Suburbs Want Downtowns of Their Own The latest thing in suburban development is something very old: city living. For a variety of reasons, a handful of suburban areas around Minneapolis-St. Paul have begun ambitious plans to create town centers, with pedestrian friendly sidewalks, condos, restaurants and shops. If it looks like a city, well, it is supposed to. |
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WTO Negotiations Open Possibility of Defining Bicycles as Environmental Goods Organizations promoting bicycle use at the international level may have a new avenue to do so -- through the liberalization of trade in bicycles, bicycle parts and components, and bicycle accessories that could result from the World Trade Organization's (WTO) current negotiations on environmental goods and services. |
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Dubai to get Dh100b tourism and leisure complex A Dubai company will build the world's longest hotel strip as part of a Dh100 billion tourist and leisure resort in the city, its developers said yesterday. |
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Riding a Bicycle Can Save the World “We think its time there was an interstate bike system,” Sayer said. “We want an official one, so people can follow signs across the country.” |
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What Jane Jacobs Really Saw Politicians and planners would do well to commemorate Jacobs by revisiting her work. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned planners, you can't "create" a vibrant city or neighborhood. The best cities and neighborhoods just happen, and the best thing we can do is to step out of the way of innovators and entrepreneurs.
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Monday, May 1, 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. |
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The Big Gig MVRDV and a whole clutch of Dutch creatives – including experts in graffiti and graphics – get together for the design equivalent of a compilation album at De Effenaar. |
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Happiness per hectare If housing density was defined by rooms rather than dwellings per hectare, it could have huge implications for development. Rather than cramming couples into tiny boxes, we could create city places that would draw families back from the suburbs. |
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Super eco-Montreal Montreal likely qualifies as the most eco-friendly, environmentally responsible city in the country, fostering Canada's largest residential development on a former brownfield site (1,200 units) and transforming a huge garbage landfill into a genuinely world-class circus arts village, natural park and vast methane gas energy source. |
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Godmother of the American City Jane Jacobs, one of urban planning's most influential critics, died this morning in Toronto. The American-born Canadian writer, best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), an attack on postwar modernist urban renewal policies in the U.S., and a celebration of city neighborhoods, taught us how to look at cities and how they should work--from the design of streets and parks to the importance of diverse mixed-use streetscapes, full of small businesses and pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly traffic. Jacobs talked extensively with Metropolis contributor James Howard Kunstler at her kitchen table in Toronto on September 6, 2000. |
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Moscow's building boom leaves little room for history Built in the late 1920s, the Narkomfin apartment building was designed as the perfect environment for new Soviet Man. A monument to the utopian communist ideals that spilled forth after the Bolshevik revolution, the six-story complex behind the US Embassy was a place where bourgeois decadence was expected to give way to collective existence. Today this decaying, forgotten masterpiece of modernist architecture faces two possible futures: collapse, or conversion into a hotel. |
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Drive Less? Politicians Won't Ask. Republicans and Democrats rail against oil companies for the high price of gasoline -- but they don't dare suggest we change our ways. |
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The building blocks of a boy's life When Observer architecture critic Deyan Sudjic returned to Belgrade for the first time in 25 years, he confronted issues of identity and culture that had haunted him since childhood. |
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