Urbanism News
Thursday, June 30, 2005
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Heritage watchdog plans campaign to save British suburbs English Heritage, the agency usually associated with protecting ancient monuments, medieval churches or stately homes, is to turn its attention to the backdrop for numerous TV sitcoms - suburbia. |
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New-generation motorway architecture The Utrecht architecture café organised an excursion on June 4 to two of the city's most prominent new projects: the motorway buildings by Kas Oosterhuis and Fons Verheijen in Leidsche Rijn. |
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A Tower of Impregnability, the Sort Politicians Love The darkness at ground zero just got a little darker. If there are people still clinging to the expectation that the Freedom Tower will become a monument to the highest American ideals, the current design should finally shake them out of that delusion. Somber, oppressive and clumsily conceived, the project suggests a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness. It is exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world. |
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Going With the Flow Long before she tackled the memorial fountain to Princess Diana -- or it tackled her -- landscape designer Kathryn Gustafson was on the trajectory that would bring her here. |
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Faulty towers If buildings have feelings, Gateshead multi-storey car park must be hurting. It was once the symbol of the town, the spot where Michael Caine threw an enemy to his death in the gangster film Get Carter. Now the council wants it demolished, describing it as "extremely unpopular" and in "very poor" condition. It is, many locals will tell you, an eyesore - dirty, dingy and full of druggies. |
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The beast that came to tea It definitely crouches. In a slightly malevolent way, too. Like a medieval Stealth bomber armoured in dark, stained chainmail, or like a beast, rangey and muscular, with hooves and spikey scales, “poised,” says the press release, “with an arched back and taut skin, ready to pounce”, to gobble Kensington Gardens’ innocent Frisbee throwers and picnic eaters and the Serpentine Gallery itself in one terrifying bite. Jeepers. |
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Urban design that's smart, practical Visitacion complex shows how to add new homes to old cities. |
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The rising stars of British architecture. Or are they? In architecture, you are young if you are under 50, an infant if you are under 40, and a babe in arms if you are under 30. It takes seven years to get trained as an architect, and after that you have to start learning how to build things, which is something they don't seem to teach much. So when an architecture exhibition called "40 under 40" surfaces at the V&A, be aware that these are people barely getting into their stride. Architects have a habit of staying preternaturally youthful. It's Nature's way of telling them they're in it for the long haul. |
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Growing pains of Beijing architecture The city of Beijing wakes from a short slumber. It shakes off yesterday's dust and immediately braces for impact. |
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
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New Design to Be Unveiled Today for Freedom Tower With one eye on terrorism and another on what has already been lost to terrorists, New York officials will unveil a redesigned Freedom Tower today whose height and proportion, centered antenna and cut-away corners, tall lobbies and pinstripe facade would evoke - both deliberately and coincidentally - the sky-piercing twins it is meant to replace. |
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New library is defining Seattle's urban vitality Not many public libraries subject their patrons to a weirding-out, but not many public buildings of any kind are as complex as this one. It imposes a learning curve. "I think it takes several visits to learn how to navigate it," says library director Jill Jean. Reference manager Craig Kyte agrees, and has noticed that "young people seem to adapt the fastest." |
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Vancouver Council rejects Wal-Mart A munitions factory with a windmill is still a munitions factory... |
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A bird's-eye view, high above the city The first urban peregrine nest in Toronto was discovered 10 years ago on a ledge just below the roof at 18 King St. E. Since then, the foundation's volunteers have watched the avian amateurs drop down smokestacks, wedge themselves between tree branches and wander across some of the city's busiest sidewalks and intersections. |
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
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Making the Brutal F.D.R. Unsentimentally Humane Few people reminisce longingly about the New York waterfront of the 1970's, with its decrepit piers, graffiti-covered warehouses and tetchy drag queens. But you can say this for it: it had a gritty integrity. The typical riverfront developments of today, with their traditional lampposts and quaint park benches, drip with nostalgia for a city that never was. They have all the charm of an open-air suburban mall. |
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Huge benefits from quality urban design Less crime, greater safety, healthier local economies, vitality in the streets and better health are some of the significant benefits of quality urban design. |
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Futuristic Dubai presents an architect's paradise Wealthy Gulf Arab investors have only to snap their fingers and someone in Dubai's burgeoning community of Western-trained architects will design the impossible — or the unthinkable. |
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World's most expensive cities It's hard to make New Yorkers feel good about the absurd amounts of money required to live comfortably in Gotham. But a survey out this week might at least make them feel a little better. |
Monday, June 27, 2005
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Time to rethink 'star-chitecture' Washington has squashed two museum additions by internationally celebrated architects in the past few weeks. First, it was the Frank Gehry wing at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. |
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Affordable housing is no holiday camp Back in March, Wang Li, a 35-year-old college teacher in Beijing, pitched a tent and lived in it for more than 50 days. But Wang wasn't on a holiday camping trip. She was waiting for a chance to buy an affordable house. |
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It Has No Spirit Sitting at a Borders Bookstore in Marlton , New Jersey —suburban nation USA —I overheard a couple talking about the banality of living in the ‘burbs. The young woman talked about the traffic, the generic houses, and the destruction to the wooded areas that not long ago made up the landscape where “we are sitting.” She summed up her point by stating: “It has no spirit.” |
Saturday, June 25, 2005
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Time for Drastic Changes in Tall Buildings? Experts Disagree Yesterday, a federal agency released a 10,000-page draft final report on the collapse of the World Trade Center, including a set of recommendations for fundamental changes in the next generation of skyscrapers, and for emergency response. Having been struck twice, New York City has already passed Local Law 26, which anticipates and surpasses many of the federal recommendations. But faced with opposition from the real estate industry, the city has not required wider staircases. |
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Under a Bridge, and on Top of the World For decades, nobody wanted the space except the skateboarders. Underneath the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, a set of brick ramps buttress an off ramp and the bridge itself. Skaters called them the Brooklyn Banks, and for years came from all around the world to skate there. |
Friday, June 24, 2005
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Are architects venal, vacuous and ego-driven? In Belgium the phrase “espèce d’architecte” is a grave insult. Deyan Sudjic has, for more than a quarter of a century, written about architecture, edited architectural magazines (Blueprint, Domus), curated architectural exhibitions. He has been Synthetic Modernism’s dogged laureate. He has been notably sympathetic towards the institutionalised avant-garde of the architectural establishment. Which is what makes his book, The Edifice Complex, all the more astonishing. |
Thursday, June 23, 2005
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West 8 wins Jubilee Gardens contest West 8 is announced as the winning design team picked to turn the hotly debated Jubilee Gardens in central London into a world-class park. The four-way contest saw West 8 selected ahead of EDAW, Gross Max and Thomas Heatherwick. [More...] |
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Looking without seeing: The Tourist Gaze The conference Mare Nostrum was held at the NAI on May 28 to coincide with the exhibition of the same name at Las Palmas, mounted as part of the second International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. The central theme of Mare Nostrum (Latin for 'our sea') is the explosive growth in mass tourism along the world's coasts. |
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Twilight Becomes Night A documentary film project that pays tribute to the small, family-owned shops and workshops which are slowly disappearing from the streets of Manhattan. |
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Prisoners to design own jail The architect Will Alsop is helping a group of prisoners to design their own jail. |
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Building his own creature feature An experimental architect's latest project is more snake than structure. |
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
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Car-loving Parisians facing a painful breakup Nothing quite says "Paris" in the hearts of dreamers like cozy apartments overlooking lush gardens with trickling fountains, or lazy conversations conducted while sipping coffee in outdoor cafes along the Seine. |
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Born to be 'green' Danny Seo calls himself an "eco-stylist," trying to teach people how to be eco-friendly, while not losing flair. |
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Snooze Snooze contends — reasonably, I think — that for a long time architects have tended toward one of two approaches to mass culture: either that of the reformer, the idealist and utopian who knows "what is good" and is eager to use that knowledge to improve the world, or, more recently, that of the pragmatist, the practical "surfer on the swell of the age," who is content to "take things as they are." |
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
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Global cities, global paradigms European and U.K. cities, usually good at preserving heritage properties, have also become adept at turning stagnating waterfronts into models of sparkling urban regeneration. |
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'We're not arrogant, we're confident. But it's a fine line ...' Ove Arup created an architectural firm that is as much a belief system as it is a cutting-edge company. |
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Redefining the rowhouse Tim McDonald and his merry band of architectural pranksters have moved north to Fishtown, and they've taken their guerrilla design-and-build tactics with them. Only this time, Philadelphia's most free-spirited architects are behaving like serious housing developers. Their latest project merges high ideals with high style, and combines the two in a way that is likely to appeal to both the aspiring bobo and the 9-to-5 cubicle serf. |
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When a Neighborhood Fell, and Barely Made a Sound In 1966, a swath of Lower Manhattan faced a demolition job of staggering magnitude. Over the next year, whole streets were slated to disappear, and did, along with the cast-iron "Bartleby the Scrivener"-era buildings that lined them, housing printing lofts and importers, tanneries and produce stalls. More than 24 city blocks would be razed to allow for a wave of development that included an access ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, the expansion of Pace University, and office buildings, shops and housing. |
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Straddling the fences From pickets to stockades, they say plenty about people and their property. |
Monday, June 20, 2005
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Paris: Lessons from Abroad Mayor Bertrand Delanoë's aggressive campaign to reclaim city streets for people is a political winner. |
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Going Places 21 great places that show how transportation can enliven a community. |
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Streets Are People Places I have a favorite saying about transportation: "If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places." It sounds obvious, but when I make this point to audiences around the country, it's a real eye-opener. They love it. |
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Kids and nature One evening when my boys were younger, Matthew, then 10, looked at me from across a restaurant table and said quite seriously, "Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?" I asked what he meant. "Well, you're always talking about your woods and tree houses, and how you used to ride that horse down near the swamp." At first, I thought he was irritated with me. I had, in fact, been telling him what it was like to use string and pieces of liver to catch crawdads in a creek, something I'd be hard-pressed to find a child doing these days. Like many parents, I do tend to romanticize my own childhood -- and, I fear, too readily discount my children's experiences of play and adventure. But my son was serious; he felt he had missed out on something important. He was right. Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. |
Saturday, June 18, 2005
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Flight of fancy Cedric Price had no time for style or materials, and his best designs were never built - but he was a true visionary, says architect Will Alsop. |
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Urban centers slow to turn green Putting housing where people work, play is challenge. |
Friday, June 17, 2005
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Herzog & de Meuron Propose Castle in The Sky for Hamburg
Star Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have upended typical Hamburg bureaucracy by taking their proposal for a new concert hall straight to the people, rather than the bureaucrats. |
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Yellow cabs ready for a re-design New York has a future, and that future has to include taxicabs a little sexier than the dowdy Crown Vic. |
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The rise and rise of the skyscraper CNN talks to Freedom Tower architect Daniel Libeskind about a high-rise building boom. |
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Post These Bills Posters are the city. For community groups, musicians, activists, small businesses, and hell, even people who’ve lost their cat, they’re often the only way to get a message out. |
Thursday, June 16, 2005
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Where the Highway Ends
San Francisco's new boulevard is part thoroughfare, part pathway, and part park. |
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Brownstone That Has Eight Lives to Go Call it the little brownstone that could. Or, at least, the little brownstone that dashed the Whitney Museum's hopes of creating a grand new entrance to its planned addition designed by Renzo Piano. |
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U.S. Cities Urged to Adopt 'Congestion Tax' The mayor of London told dozens of world mayors that they could unclog city streets and fight global warming by charging hefty fees for driving in congested areas of their communities. |
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
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Octavia Boulevard rolls along Oakland firm wins competition for design of housing in area. |
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Shiny museums are not enough There's no point building beautiful new art galleries if they can't buy the works they need. |
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
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Lessons to be learned from London's mayor What Livingston has done in five years as mayor is embrace the notion that growth and architecture can serve larger social goals. Let developers thrust towers into the sky. Let new housing spill through a revered old city. But do so in a way that makes society and the urban fabric -- the world we live in -- stronger as a result. |
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Designer urges emphasis on 'healthier buildings' Britain's buildings and public spaces are encouraging obesity and public health problems, according to the government's chief architecture adviser who has demanded that new developments be designed to improve the nation's fitness. |
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The Art of Street Talk Next time you're walking down a city sidewalk, look out for the internet. It's all around you -- and not just in the phone lines and cables running under the streets or in the airborne Wi-Fi streams. In recent months, several services have sprung up to allow a communion between the real world and the internet, with cell phones acting as the medium. |
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Year of Creativity celebrates Toronto "The Year of Creativity" — what a marvellous notion! As if every year weren't the year of creativity in a town as alive and vibrant as Toronto.... |
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Let us create green cities, says Annan The signing ceremony on World Environment Day in the ornate rotunda at City Hall committed more than 50 of the world's largest cities to "build an ecologically sustainable, economically dynamic, and socially equitable future for our urban citizens", organisers said. |
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Mayors Choose Seattle as America's Most Liveable City Seattle has been declared the most liveable large city in the United States at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting now underway in Chicago. Seattle won top honors in the category for cities over 100,000. Trenton, New Jersey was chosen as the most liveable small city. |
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The estate we're in Grand Designs Live proved one thing: that the British idea of what a house should be is a disaster. |
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Toll Roads Tackle Traffic Interstate 15 running north from San Diego is more than a ribbon of asphalt carrying up to 295,000 vehicles a day. It's a glimpse at the future -- a highway that combines traditionally free lanes with toll lanes to give drivers an option when the traffic gets bad. It is, at once, a solution for easing the worst traffic congestion, raising money for cash-starved roads and a big step toward bringing more timesaving, high-technology tools to daily driving. |
Monday, June 13, 2005
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Tijuana: Mother of Invention Positioned at the edge of what is rapidly becoming the worlds largest gated community, Tijuana is itself the result of improvisational and even illicit acts. Out of this environment emerges an architecture of necessity, assembled of garage doors and car tires, combining elements of Modernism with the decorative motifs of the Mexican movement. |
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Raise the rafters Lloyd's of London, the Gherkin and St Bart's Hospital seem unlikely concert venues. But great music and great buildings belong together, says Jonathan Glancey |
Saturday, June 11, 2005
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The 10 most expensive places to drive California might have the most expensive gas, but cities in the South rate as the priciest places to drive, thanks to high commute costs brought on by suburban sprawl. |
Friday, June 10, 2005
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Japan Squeezes to Get the Most of Costly Fuel Surging oil prices and growing concerns about meeting targets to cut greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels have revived efforts around the world to improve energy efficiency. But perhaps nowhere is the interest greater than here in Japan. From 1973 to today, Japan's industrial sector nearly tripled its output, but kept its energy consumption roughly flat. To produce the same industrial output as Japan, China consumes 11.5 times the energy. |
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Serra reshapes space and time
A virtual Richard Serra museum opens Wednesday within the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim here: a permanent installation of more giant bent steel sculptures. Even if you know Serra's other recent work (over the past decade, he has made more than a dozen "Torqued Ellipses," "Double Torqued Ellipses," "Torqued Spirals" and so on), you won't quite grasp the eloquence of what he has done now without seeing it. |
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Park and ride 'is ruining rural land' Too many sites built on green belt, say environmentalists. |
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The secret to a thriving city is not what you may think When city officials contact urban expert Joel Kotkin for guidance on how to attract people to their locales, they often ask about things that make him cringe. Instead of improving schools or infrastructure, they want to construct performing arts centers and pump up cultural offerings to lure the artsy and the hip. |
Thursday, June 9, 2005
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The beige standard There are 10 million colors visible to the human eye, but only a tiny fraction are visible on homes in many communities. |
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Tap link to water, architect advises Seattle When urban-design guru Jan Gehl looks at Seattle, he sees a thriving city with world-class potential, held back by unfriendly streetscapes, the Alaskan Way Viaduct and view-blocking stockpiles of shipping containers. |
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
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Is Gentrification Really A Threat? Should the social virtues of urbanism and new investment in cities get washed out in the hue and cry over gentrification? |
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GSD students win tsunami design award A group of students at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) have won a competition to design permanent housing for survivors of the December 2004 tsunami disaster. |
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Public given chance to see future of Liverpool's past THE public will today be given a first chance to view the new vision for Liverpool's historic Pier Head, an ultra modern museum. |
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Planning and Its Disconnects In the wake of Chicago's biggest construction boom since the 1920's, a look at the resulting buildings raises a fundamental question: Can planning be a means to better architecture? |
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
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Beyond Criticism For a long while now mainstream architectural journalism has been mostly synonymous with architectural criticism — with reviews of significant buildings. But you don't have to browse through too many Arts or Entertainment or Weekend sections to see that critiques of buildings are an odd, uneasy fit amid all the reviews of movies and plays and TV shows, of music and dance and literature — of arts that are easily accessible and (often) widely distributed, arts that you can affordably experience simply by visiting a local theater or gallery, buying a book or CD, or tuning in HBO. |
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Buildings with hats What completes the well-dress skyscraper's look? A proper topper. |
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Building 'Suburban' Luxury in the Sky In the last few years, Manhattanites of means have grown accustomed to having the world's most famous architects furiously catering to their every whim, trying to lure them to apartments that seem to break price records with each new building |
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A mall for St Paul's Mr Nouvel said: "The design of One New Change is about enriching the City with a new sort of modernity, one that reaches beyond itself to speak, to contemplate and to reveal the diverse character of its surroundings. It is a contemporary building which will set up a dialogue with St Paul's and the neighbouring buildings. |
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Dream machines “CHINA has begun to enter the age of mass car consumption. This is a great and historic advance.” So proclaimed the state-run news agency, Xinhua, last year. Environmentalists may feel a twinge of fear at this burgeoning romance with motoring. But a rapid social and economic transformation is under way in urban China, and the car is steering it. |
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The New Mainstream “The future,” Rainer Maria Rilke once observed, “enters into us to transform us even before it happens.” |
Monday, June 6, 2005
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Cosmopolitan Living on South Axis In response to the constant demand for high-quality office space, Amsterdam has embarked on an ambitious and prestigious project called the Zuidas (South Axis), a new city centre that is to become the top business location in the Dutch capital city. |
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The Architect of a Different Kind of Organization Joshua Prince-Ramus isn't just creating buildings. In a field obsessed with celebrity, he's putting the work -- and his workers -- first. |
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Mayors in summit agree to greener, cleaner cities The five-day U.N. World Environment Conference, ended here Sunday, saw mayors of some of the largest cities around the world signing a series of accords pledging to improve urban conditions, especially taking their cities on a greener, cleaner and healthier development path. |
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Designs of the times
Champions of rival schools of architecture are ready to swap blows. |
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Wake up and smell the coffee, wi-fi users Coffee shops across the US are finding that offering free wireless internet access to customers is leaving a bitter taste. “There are times when 90 per cent of the people in here are surfing the internet,” says Jen Strongin, co-owner of the Victrola Coffee & Art cafe in Seattle. “It has really changed the atmosphere.” |
Sunday, June 5, 2005
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Douglas Coupland has a plan: Let's live in Legoland The artist and writer has assembled from children's building kits a metropolis of his own imagination. |
Friday, June 3, 2005
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Extreme Makeover: Neighborhood Edition
You can grow a great community—anywhere. It doesn’t take TV producers. It just takes |
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Five Ways to a Great Place For 30 years, the Project for Public Spaces has worked with cities and neighborhoods to help create places that attract people—places where people young and old, rich and poor encounter one another, enjoy their surroundings, and experience being part of a community. What makes these places work? |
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Cities For All: An Interview with Angela Glover Blackwell Sprawl overruns open space, jams up roads, degrades air quality, and leaves center cities without jobs and services. Policies that fight sprawl, says Angela Glover Blackwell, could bring new life to cities and inner-ring suburbs, diversify our neighborhoods, and save the environment. |
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The New City Beautiful It can happen in your town: Streetscapes blooming with wildflowers, industrial waterfronts transformed into parks, and creeks once again dancing with salmon. A green urban renaissance is growing. |
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Planning Sustainable Cities Sustainable planning now is largely making up for a lack of past planning. |
Thursday, June 2, 2005
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Polders - The Scene of Land and Water The rectilinear Dutch landscape of polders (reclaimed land) with its characteristic locks, dikes, windmills, farms and cows is instantly recognizable. This rational landscape is unique, but also fragile. The Netherlands has more than three thousand polders, which have undergone various spatial developments over the years. They will continue to change as a result of pressures from urban and rural factors. But how? |
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Mongolians test alien idea: Privatizing the land Before the freewheeling 1960s, before Mao led China to revolution in 1949 and before the Soviets took control of this country in 1921, Mongolia was already one giant commune. |
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Mapping Fat Traps for Kids When obesity researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were looking to prevent obesity among schoolchildren, they turned to an unexpected group of experts: mapmakers. The university's Cartographic Modeling Laboratory got to work, drawing maps of the neighborhoods around five Philadelphia elementary schools. What resulted were not ordinary street maps. Rather, they were maps showing "food opportunities." |
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The Fear Factor The fallacies of making Ground Zero more "secure." |
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If a green utopia on Treasure Island sounds far-fetched, dreamers have a plan Right now, San Francisco has a rare chance to do something that's historic and audacious: create the world's first green urban neighborhood on our very own Treasure Island. |
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The Race to Win the 2012 Olympics 300 events. 11,000 athletes. 500,000 spectators. 16 days. But there's one Olympic competition you can't buy tickets for: the race to become the host city for the 2012 summer games. In early July, the International Olympic Committee will choose from among five finalists: New York, Paris, London, Moscow, and Madrid. As part of the bidding process, each city commits to a multibillion-dollar face-lift that includes the latest advances in architecture, communication, transportation, and energy conservation. Here are the highlights of how they plan to bring home the gold. |
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
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Die Die SUVs Please Die You hear that? That cheering and rejoicing and heavy exhausted sighing? Why, it's coming from the massively fatigued Prius-happy enviro-green set and it's all about the fact that sales of huge bloated oil-belchin' SUVs are in a major free-fall, down nearly 20 percent for the year and dropping faster than Jenna Bush can slam a bottle of Cuervo. |
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Tech will cause a real estate crash Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen predicts that more people will live in rural settings, with technology enabling them to do almost anything they like, be it work or play, without leaving their homes. |
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Just My Imagination Most utopias, as Russell Jacoby recognizes in his absorbing new study, Picture Imperfect, are odorless, antiseptic places, intolerably streamlined and sensible, in which the natives chat for hours about the splendid efficiency of their sanitary arrangements. |
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Buildings that lift the spirit CNN talks to architectural luminary Will Alsop about modern architecture's expanding horizons. |
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Sustainable Urbanism Tops the Agenda as World Environment Day Comes to the U.S. As sustainable design champions put the pedal to the scrap metal, they've got their eye on the distant prize - sustainable urbanism. They want your buy-in. They want it now. |
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Building a sustainable future Two trends will affect global practice over the next two decades: the need to pursue sustainable patterns of development; and the opportunities presented by developing economies. |
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East River Waterfront Redevelopment Phase II Designs Revealed Today In partnership with the City, State, and local community, the SHoP/Richard Rogers/Ken Smith design team has produced an ambitious plan to provide public access to the waterfront for the first time in decades, improve the urban design of the area, and add new community amenities. Incorporating revisions based on feedback from public meetings held last year, the latest plan revealed today detail improvements on ten foundation projects along the East River Waterfront. |
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LucasWorlds: Urban Planning and Design in the Star Wars Epic What does the architecture of the Star Wars universe represent? |
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