Urbanism News
Friday, June 30, 2006
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Time to Upset Our Best Laid Plans Vancouver's two planning gurus are out, and we need a new vision. |
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The Gilded Cities Club Tokyo is slipping, Moscow and Seoul are rising. What new lists of most expensive cities can (and can't) tell us about power. |
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How Population Lies True, big cities no longer draw big numbers. But that doesn't mean their power is slipping too. |
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Tailing the X-Commuter As extreme commutes go global, business follows. But who needs three cupholders? |
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The New Jungles Think wildlife loves a country setting? Turns out that many animals, birds and plants now prefer the city. |
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Unlikely Boomtowns The last half-century was the age of the megacity. The next will belong to their smaller, humbler urban relations. |
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The New Megalopolis Our focus on cities is wrong. Growth and innovation come from new urban corridors. |
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Building up the Burbs The suburbs are the world's future because most people love them, so why fight the sprawl? |
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With a Cellphone as My Guide Think of it as a divining rod for the information age. If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at. |
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Peter Eisenman to Design Two Subway Stations Peter Eisenman has been selected to design to metro stations on the slopes of Vesuvius near Naples, Italy. The famous architect will plan the refurbishment of the station at the Pompeii archeological site and the building from scratch of another nearby, reported Italian news agency ANSA. |
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A Strange Sojourn Young Frenchman Gilles Tréhin has spent more than two decades documenting the imaginary city of Urville. |
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Corridors and Clay
How can you rally neighbors to reimagine the look and feel of their surrounding streets? Two New Yorkers offer different methods. George S., a veteran of the 1980s’ East Village graffiti scene, works alone, surreptitiously dropping homemade clay figurines around town. Mark Gorton approaches municipal transportation officials to press systemic changes. In an era when cities summon starchitects to engineer magic, these men alter New York’s flow at street level. |
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Thanks a Lot! With creative planning, unsightly parking spaces can become buzzing public places. |
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Public Image, Unlimited Discussions that examine a park user’s expectations can help designers surpass their own vision. |
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Found in Translation Laying the foundation for more sensitivity within a community’s public spaces. |
Thursday, June 29, 2006
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Soon, all offices may need to have a solar power option THE Delhi Power Department has proposed making solar heating and lighting in all commercial buildings in the Capital mandatory. According to the draft proposal, the mandatory use of solar power will apply to all existing and new commercial buildings with an area of 250 sq metres and above. |
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Who Cares? The U.S. Gulf Coast is struggling to rebuild after several 2005 hurricanes destroyed countless homes, businesses, and lives. Yet as the 2006 hurricane season gets underway, much of the region is still in ruins. |
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A revolutionary garden It doesn't look like much when you pass it, this once-vacant lot in the heart of Washington's Shaw neighbourhood, an area known as a mecca of African American culture, for its high proportion of children living below the poverty line and recently, for an influx of mostly white gentrifiers fleeing insane real estate prices in the capital's leafier parts. But the community garden that could almost be mistaken for a disused car park on Seventh Street, just a short walk from a sprawling, recently-completed convention center, is quietly revolutionary. |
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Hurry up and slow down If you don't naturally see "slow" as a compliment, think again. As the slow revolution spreads, from food to lifestyle to architecture to cities, slow praise must come, though perhaps not quickly. The slow movement, founded 20 years ago by the Italian gourmand Carlo Petrini, started as a foodie fightback. Since then, it has acquired a chic eco-edge, taking in farmers' markets, biodiversity and the entire downshifting thing. |
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Cheers to the square After a contentious birth, Federation Square during the World Cup rightfully took its place as a post-modern village green. |
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Olympic Champions
Jason Prior embodies a growing trend in place making: the merging of landscape architecture and urban planning. Trained in both professions, Prior heads EDAW’s European operations out of the London office and spearheaded the planning effort behind the city’s successful bid last year for the 2012 Olympics. The scheme—seen largely as an upset—was smartly packaged, presenting the International Olympic Committee (IOC) with a less monolithic model (proposing to reduce, for example, the 80,000-seat stadium to 25,000 after the games). Locally it was sold as a tool for regenerating an industrial part of East London called the Lower Lea Valley. In an attempt to gauge community sentiment and build a case for the Olympics, Prior’s team did about 70 public consultation events in three months. Consequently the bid generated largely positive feelings in London. |
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Legs project akimbo as client rethinks designs The future of The Legs project in Abu Dhabi has been thrown into doubt after the client interested in using the architect’s design on the tower development admitted it was reconsidering its decision. |
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Are we ready for Seattle’s pivotal moment in history? With a new downtown zoning code favoring tall and slender residential towers, the city will take on 8,000 new residential units over the next four years. |
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Market regeneration As part of The major masterplan to regenerate the former mining town of Barnsley, CZWG, in liaison with Holder Mathias Architects have now been commissioned to rebuild Barnsley markets (first chartered in 1249) which comprises of 76,600 m2 retail and leisure, a market building, covered shopping streets, a cinema and bowling alley together with residential units. |
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
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The architect and the other Can architecture be democratic? Jeremy Till warns against empty gestures and sticking handwritten notes on technical drawings, and welcomes Lift's mold-breaking project to design a New Parliament. |
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Unhealthy By Design? Not If Cities Plan Liveable, Dense, Walkable Neighborhoods LA Planning Director Gail Goldberg and California Endowment head Dr. Robert Ross encourage healthy communities through smart planning. |
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Rich City - Poor City Middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing from the nation's cities, leaving only high- and low-income districts. |
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Urban branding The Boston Center for the Arts is a one-time white elephant morphing into an urban tiger. The complex was a cultural idea housed in a decrepit, deteriorating, cavernous space before the City of Boston and dedicated community leadership accomplished the restoration task. The structure has been used for a cyclorama, a colossal circular painting of the Battle of Gettysburg, a car dealership, and the Boston Flower Exchange. Today the BCA is a complex of varied buildings and exterior spaces in a single urban block in the restlessly chic South End, a hip non-profit performing and visual-arts complex. |
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The godfather of urban soul He is the designer of Poundbury, Prince Charles's 'traditional' new town - but it wasn't always this way. Leon Krier, the architect was once an enthusiastic modernist. |
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
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Learning from Daqing Daqing was founded in the early 1960s as the first of a series of industrial cities on a plain in the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang. Daqing literally means ‘great celebration’, a name that refers to the discovery of oil in this virgin territory. The oil turned China from an oil importer to an oil exporter overnight. From consumer to producer. The motto ‘Learning from Daqing’ was coined so that the city could form a model for the entire country. |
Monday, June 26, 2006
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Making cities work: Mexico City All the cliches about Mexico City are true. It is a sprawling metropolis of 19 million people, the second-largest city in the world, where 40% of the people live below the poverty line. This is a place of homeless street kids, piracy, pollution, crime, and 100,000 street vendors. At the same time, the rich live in a world of gated communities, rooftop swimming pools, and commuting by helicopter. But it is also a city that has stepped back from the brink of disaster, and wants to become more liveable. |
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Utopian Modernism in London: A Series of Drifts... London, as a centre of industry and a magnet for heritage tourists, as a vast metropolis and an obscurantist suburban sprawl, has always been about contradictions. To understand Modernism in London one has to consider a series of antagonisms. The conflict between Empiricism and Formalism as style, between the historicist and the modern, and between socialism and capitalism in this most mercantile of capitals. These oppositions and contradictions are still present in some form, so one way to look at these paradoxes could be to set up a series of oppositions--a weighing up of dreams and realities. |
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The (possible) future of New York City The year is 2030 and the city is New York. A million more people live in the five boroughs than did just 25 years earlier. The Second Avenue Subway has actually been built, which is helpful, since only the very rich can afford a car. Brooklyn is still one of the boroughs, but also enjoys an international reputation as a world-class city that rivals Manhattan. No single race or ethnic group even approaches a majority in the city. Wrinkle creams really work, and it's not unusual for twenty-somethings to have romantic relationships with people twice or even three times their age. |
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Metropolis Now Rem Koolhaas is the architect's architect. His inspirational designs are bold, daring and outrageously different. He's in demand all over the world, creating contemporary icons, refashioning entire countries - yet still finding time to conceive this year's Serpentine pavilion. |
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High density? Everybody loves good neighbours but not that much Four million homes must be built over the next 25 years - a higher number in limited space. Can architects get it right or are they desigining sardine cans? |
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Building up the Burbs The suburbs are the world's future because most people love them, so why fight the sprawl? |
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Finding green in the concrete jungle Apart from a few lower members of the animal kingdom, no-one other than human beings build cities. |
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A Slow-Road Movement? This week, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Interstate highway system, a convoy will arrive in Washington, D.C., after driving I-80 across the country. It began in San Francisco and consists of ecstatic highway engineers and road historians; automobile-club representatives eager to build more Interstate highways; a leader of the "Go RVing" campaign, which serves the nation's eight million recreational-vehicle users; a descendant of President Dwight Eisenhower, who rode in the convoy that is being commemorated, as a young army officer in 1919, when he saw firsthand how ineffective the roads were; and Andrew Firestone, a descendant of the tire magnate Harvey Firestone. |
Saturday, June 24, 2006
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Cycling moves up a gear in jammed streets The bike is back among middle-class Londoners. At dinner parties, conversation has turned from the question of whether to cycle to whether cyclists should obey the rules of the road, such as stopping at red lights, and to grumbling about the growing shortage of spaces at central London's crowded bike parking racks. |
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Building the nation Its economy shows few signs of needing one, but China is revving up what officials call a “new engine of growth” to supplement the dynamos of Shanghai and Shenzhen, the two port cities at the forefront of the country's economic transformation. A strip of industrial sprawl and barren semi-wasteland that stretches for 150km (90 miles) along the northern coast is being turned into a development zone far bigger than either Shanghai's or Shenzhen's. And its planners have been given the central government's blessing to experiment with a wide range of economic and bureaucratic reforms. |
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Bogota paves way in war against cars The automobile has put us on the road to destruction. That was the message to delegates at the United Nations World Urban Forum, which attracted 8,400 people from all parts of the globe. |
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Rich City Poor City Middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing from the nation's cities, leaving only high- and low-income districts. |
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Guerrillas in the Garden At a few minutes to 11 on a recent balmy night in East London, a black Ford crawled along the dimly lighted street. The suspicious driver rolled down his window to quiz a young woman by the curb. "What are you doing here?" he asked. The reply came quickly, cheerfully. "Gardening." |
Friday, June 23, 2006
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Contested Streets Contested Streets explores the history and culture of New York City streets from pre-automobile times to the present. This examination allows for an understanding of how the city - though the most well served by mass transit in the United States - has slowly relinquished what was a rich, multi-dimensional conception of the street as public space to a mindset that prioritizes the rapid movement of cars and trucks over all other functions. |
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Podcast - Kunstler: When Energy Demand Exceeds Supply - Impacts on Transportation and Cities On April 19th, 2006, the University of Winnipeg, Centre for Sustainable Transportation, and the Institute of Urban Studies, presented a symposium and free public lecture featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency". We bring you highlights from James Howard Kunstler's speech at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Winnipeg, Canada. |
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Architecture and morality Last year was the first time more people in the world lived in cities than in rural areas. But the boom has not come to posh downtown enclaves or middle-class neighbourhoods. It has happened in slums, where one in seven of the world’s population now live – in appalling conditions – and where one in three are expected to live by 2025. From the US to Africa, government officials are wondering how to cope. |
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Jane-washing
The danger of Jacobs's legacy lies with developers who co-opt her ideas to justify their megaprojects. |
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Main Street or main chance? Six weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, the US Gulf coast remained in a state of shock. Bodies were still being pulled from the tangled wreckage of homes flattened by the 30ft storm surge and the smell of rot and mould lingered in the air. |
Thursday, June 22, 2006
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Welcome to the urban century For better or for worse, the urban century is almost upon us. Soon, most of us will be living in cities. Should we be rending our garments in despair, or breaking out the Dom Perignon? |
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Urban 'Oasis' of clean energy lands in London A giant eco-friendly "tree" that looks like it might have landed from another planet is offering urban dwellers and visitors an escape from the heat and stress of city streets. |
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
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Parks We all know that parks are important to people. Not only do parks provide a respite from the noise and bustle of traffic and crowds in cities and towns but they also provide a stage for a whole range of social activities. |
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Uncommon Courtesy
We keep hearing about the death of civility -- but it's alive and well in a place you'd least expect. Reader's Digest Ranks 35 Cities for courtesy. |
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Save the city by developing near arterials North American cities built in the first half of the 20th century, like Vancouver, are all the same. They are streetcar cities. Neighbourhoods that we now might think of as urban were then called suburbs. Dunbar, Marpole, the Drive, Sunrise, all streetcar suburbs. As with modern suburbs, transportation was crucial. Without a way to get home, suburbs can’t exist. In those days, “suburban” residents got to and from work on the streetcar. Streetcars were never more than an eight-minute walk from home. Land that was farther away than this simply wasn’t developed. Streetcar access was so fundamental that developers most often built streetcar systems with their own funds prior to subdividing new parcels for housing. |
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Yesterday's vision of the urban future Nothing dates faster than the future. That is why architecture, the slowest of the arts, is probably the worst medium to express it. But that hasn't stopped architects trying and their futuristic fantasies have been hugely influential in our cities. This was never more so than in the early 20th century, when the modernists conceived of rational cities that would replace random street-patterns with gardens spiked with skyscrapers linked by streets in the sky. |
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City slums not just a Third World issue "They don't think these slum dwellers are human," Arputham told a meeting room packed with hundreds of attendees. "You're trying to design our lives. We will no longer take help from these lip-service people. While you are doing this, our people are growing poorer. For 30 years, the UN has been developing standards of housing, but nothing has been achieved. ... There has been increased land grab." |
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
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Viewpoints: The urban world in 2050 The projection is that in 50 years' time, two-thirds of humanity will live in cities. Six experts outline their vision of the urban world in 2050. |
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Model Homes and Model 'Families' As shoppers stepped through the front door of the largest model home, a barefoot affable man in his 30's shouted hello from the kitchen and offered juice to the buyers' children. His "wife" — slim, blonde and agreeable — pressed them to try some fresh-baked cookies. Their "children," 12 and 14, offered to show the visitors their rooms. A birthday card was propped on the mantel, and a chocolate layer cake with blown-out candles sat on the speckled granite countertop. In truth, this cheerful family of four was a group of professional actors — paid to show buyers how life could be in the house, which is one of 166 units planned by Centex Homes of Dallas. |
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A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs Having trouble with the neighbors? Put up a fence. If things go well, you hang out at the fence and talk. That's not generally the thinking for fences between nations; such barriers can't easily mask their harsh purpose. Now a fence is proposed for the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico in an effort to improve national security and stem illegal immigration. The Senate wants 370 miles of it; the House, 698. And President Bush has invited military contractors to devise a "virtual" fence that would seal the existing stopgap fencing with high-technology tools like motion sensors, drones and satellites. |
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The Destruction of Memory A society's architecture is among the most quintessential expressions of its culture. That's why those bent on genocide often target buildings first. One well-chosen target - from the twin towers to Bamiyan Buddhas - can signal a declaration of war not just against an opposing army, but an entire people or culture. |
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French 'starchitect's' debutante is a Minneapolis knockout He's big. He's bald. He wears black. And he's brilliant, a four-star impresario of space and light. |
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New London urban design unit to deliver 'world-class architecture' Mayor of London Ken Livingstone today announced plans for a new architecture and urban design unit which will support the delivery of world-class architecture and sustainable and inclusive design across London’s built environment. |
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A city's creative quotient The term "creative economy" is broad - perhaps conveniently so for the writer-consultants who peddle it - but as John Howkins, author of The Creative Economy defined it at the conference, "the creative economy is where most people spend most of their time and earn most of their money by dealing in ideas, not land, or natural resources or capital." |
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Public invited to list buildings they hate The body advising the government on architecture and urban design yesterday invited the public to nominate the buildings, streets and public places they hate. Horrors will be posted on the website of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) as part of a campaign to highlight the impact and cost of bad design. |
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The Interstate Highway System at 50 Fifty years ago from a hospital room, President Dwight Eisenhower changed America with a flick of his wrist, sending it speeding down an on-ramp toward the future of an automobile-oriented society. |
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Modernity in Rapid Motion Once littered with 'gecekondu' (Turkish squatter) settlements , Istanbul is now covered with Corbusian-style modernist housing schemes that cater to the needs of middle and higher income groups.¹ But it’s pointless to look for any utopian 'Park City' ideals behind these schemes, most of which are produced by big private developers and bear hip, commercial names such as Mashattan or Olympiakent. |
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Tackling a crisis on the streets Hundreds of delegates from around the world gathered under one Vancouver roof yesterday to swap strategies for fighting the problems of cities. |
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To survive, we have to stop dancing with dinosaurs There's no question that America is moving far too slowly toward the greener, more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable ways that a century of global turmoil, climate change and likely severe fuel emergencies clearly demands. |
Saturday, June 17, 2006
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Pedal power on the comeback trail in a car-obsessed China Bicycles are as potent a symbol of China as dragons, pandas or the Great Wall, but greater riches means the "Kingdom of Bicycles" has to fend off the challenge of a powerful invading force: millions of cars. |
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The Duty of Design Shigeru Ban is the kind of architect who could make a nice living just by building expensive museums and mountaintop homes for the well-off, with his simple but dramatic designs that combine influences from Japan and California. He does some of that. But he has become renowned, and even idolized by some, for his pioneer work in developing housing for people in disaster zones and for his innovative use of inexpensive and recyclable materials. |
Friday, June 16, 2006
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Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. There are many places in L.A. you can go to think about the city, and my own favorite has become the Los Angeles River, which looks like an outsize concrete sewer and is most famous for being forgotten. The L.A. River flows fifty-one miles through the heart of L.A. County. It is enjoying herculean efforts to revitalize it, and yet commuters who have driven over it five days a week for ten years cannot tell you where it is. Along the river, the midpoint lies roughly at the confluence with the Arroyo Seco, near Dodger Stadium downtown. L.A. was founded near here in 1781: this area offers the most reliable aboveground supply of freshwater in the L.A. basin. It’s a miserable spot now, a trash-strewn wasteland of empty lots, steel fences, and railroad tracks beneath a tangle of freeway overpasses: it looks like a Blade Runner set that a crew disassembled and then put back together wrong. It’s not the most scenic spot to visit the river but may be the finest place on the river to think about L.A. |
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Cul-de-Sacs: Suburban Dream or Dead End? Next time you take a plane flight, take a look out the window. If you're over a city, you'll see roads that form a grid connecting homes, offices and stores. But if you are flying over the suburbs, you'll see roads that look like trees. The trunks are great big feeder streets with branches splitting off. At the ends of the branches are what look like circular leaves. Those are the cul-de-sacs, the dead-end streets that have become a symbol of suburban life. Since the end of World War II, millions of cul-de-sacs have been built on the fringes of American cities. In recent years, however, the cul-de-sac has fallen out of favor with urban planners and architects. Some cities have even banned them. |
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5,000 Public Housing Units in New Orleans Are to Be Razed Federal housing officials announced on Wednesday that more than 5,000 public housing apartments for the poor were to be demolished here and replaced by developments for residents with a wider range of incomes. |
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MVRDV “How can you beat them?” asks Winy Maas of MVRDV rhetorically. He is setting out the battleground of contemporary architecture like a general plotting the response to an invasion. |
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Housing plan mixes history and high rise In a reversal of the rapacious development that has choked Spain's coastline with concrete over the past few decades, Valencia has started building a neighbourhood based around ancient market gardens and irrigation systems. Bulldozers have moved into an area of rundown farms and scrap yards that is to become Sociopolis, a "revolutionary" locality that mixes the high rise and hi-tech with traditional agriculture. |
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The List: The World’s Megacities Petty crime and pollution are common inconveniences in cities big and small. But in megacities, those with a population of 10 million or more, these and other everyday headaches can quickly become mammoth problems—putting both lives and treasure at risk. The stakes have never been higher. In 1995, the world had just 14 megacities. By 2015, there will be 21. |
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40 arrested at L.A. urban garden eviction Sheriff's deputies evicted people from an urban community garden to make room for a warehouse Tuesday, touching off a furious protest in which actress Daryl Hannah and others climbed into a walnut tree or chained themselves to concrete-filled barrels. More than 40 people were arrested. |
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New Orleans to Ottawa: After the Storm, the Brainstorming Begins Creative and effective responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita came not from where most had expected--—the U.S. government—but from the grassroots. Take Common Ground Relief, which started with $50 and three people. The group runs medical and legal clinics and four distribution centers offering food, water, and clothing. Volunteers do everything from tarping, gutting, and cleaning homes to "bioremediaton" of soil contaminated by sewage and toxins. So far, the group says, it has offered relief to 50,000 residents in four parishes. |
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Not Innovative? SOM’s Skyscraper Projects in China Tell A Different Story Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), architect of New York’s 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, is known perhaps more than any other firm for its skyscraper designs. Designs like the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Lever House in New York helped establish the U.S. as the world’s leading tall-building innovator during the latter half of the 20th century. But, as critic Nicolai Ouroussoff recently pointed out in the New York Times, the firm’s recent domestic tall building work has been more formulaic. What he didn’t mention was that the firm is still putting together groundbreaking work in China, which has become a laboratory of sorts for the firm’s experimental skyscraper design work. |
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Now you see it, now you don't Public space, as a bridge to the natural world and to redefining private space, takes center stage in post-Bilbao books. |
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The challenges facing an urban world The world is fast approaching the point where the majority of the human population will be found in urban areas. |
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A thundering cry in the urban landscape Oliver Lang and Cynthia Wilson have seen their share of bad architecture. From Germany to New York City, the primaries behind Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture (LWPAC) — who are also married, with two children — have lived in plenty of lousy apartments. "I'm so used to the deficiencies of apartment living, in Hamburg and elsewhere," says Mr. Lang, who grew up in Germany, earned a Masters in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University and is now an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. "You spend all your time making those spaces bearable. From that perspective, this project is sort of a critique of my whole life." |
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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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China should remain "kingdom of bicycles" A senior Chinese Minister has criticised the Beijing city administration for making it harder for cyclists to get around, saying the country should retain its title as the "kingdom of bicycles" at all costs. |
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Harbour plan needs daffiness weeded out The outcome of Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp.'s (TWRC) international competition to make over the harbourfront, announced earlier this month, is a decidedly mixed bag of ideas, some worth pondering, others not worth thinking much about. |
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'Obesity warrior' says neighborhoods should be redesigned to encourage walking It'll take more than public service campaigns to solve the nation's obesity problem, according to fitness experts who say neighborhoods must be designed so people can get around without their cars. |
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The Future of the American Workforce in the Global Creative Economy American economic experts and policy-makers are rightly preoccupied with the emergence of behemoths like India and China, which offer huge markets, capable workforces, and cost advantages. Unfortunately, they overlook a subtler but even more profound shift in the nature of global competition. In the past two and a half decades, this shift has taken us from the older industrial model to a new economic paradigm, where knowledge, innovation, and creativity are key. At the cutting edge of this shift is the creative sector of the economy: science and technology, art and design, culture and entertainment, and the knowledge-based professions. |
Saturday, June 10, 2006
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Crossroads project stirs international interest Eight architectural firms from around the world are finalists for a townhouse development in Ferrous Park. |
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Behind the red velvet curtain lies a culture destroyed The myth of the Land of Peach Blossoms, as told by the 4th century poet Tao Yuanming and retold by a professor of landscape at Beijing University, Kongjian Yu, recounts how a humble fisherman discovered a little mountain-ringed utopia, accessible only via a narrow cave, where everyone was happy, well-fed and compassionate. The emperors, impressed by the beauty of the peach-blossom landscape, tried to replicate it. But, seeing the landscape as mere decoration, they overlooked the deep tie between beauty and necessity, and failed. Thus landscape gardening, the ancient art of emperors, became formalised, desiccated, sterile. |
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They came from outer space Vision, vision, vision, it’s everywhere. Can’t move for it. Architects are living in one of those all-too-brief moments in which the world seems to be swimming with fat wallets — cities, Middle Eastern oil states, capitalist dictatorships — with the means and the egos to indulge in fantastical visions.Not in Britain, naturally. We prefer to get our visionary fantasies in the sale aisle at Matalan. No, it’s in China, of course, and Dubai, but also in culturally adventurous continental Europe, and even in the once architecturally cautious America, that experimentation is flourishing. |
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William McDonough: Design For Living One of William McDonough's first memories of his early childhood in Tokyo is lying in bed at night, looking up at the wooden ceiling, and listening to the sounds of carts that collected "night soil" in the city and carried it off to the farms. In the mornings, he would hear the sounds of carts delivering fresh tofu. "Out with the waste and in with the food," says the 55-year-old eco-architect and designer. "It just seems natural." |
Friday, June 9, 2006
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Vancouver - Our Cities - Planning for Sustainability Sustainability is a broad concept often associated with environmental conservation. For today's cities, the concept of sustainability extends to all areas of municipal governance: social, economic, cultural, and environmental. By applying an integrated approach to sustainability issues, cities not only can become more livable, they can also become more prosperous. |
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Indians get taste of western retail while foreign firms wait in wings Ten years ago, the most frequent visitors to Mumbai's western suburb of Malad were pink flamingos that flocked to the area's salty mudflats and mangrove forests. Today, the most obvious outsiders are coming not for the delights of Malad's seaside creek but the roadside attractions of HyperCity, India's first western-style supermarket. The bright, shiny 120,000 sq ft of shelves, aisles and electronic checkouts are familiar to anyone in the west. But they are alien to generations brought up on dingy, family-run grocers' shops and pungent food markets where prices are haggled over. |
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Dutch Firm Wins Toronto Waterfront Design Competition West 8, a Rotterdam-based urban design and architecture firm, has won a design competition to rejuvenate a 2.1-mile stretch of Toronto’s long-neglected, much-debated central waterfront along Lake Ontario. The jury’s choice was unanimous. |
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Brooklyn Waterfront Toxic park: A place where all walks of life congregate to enjoy a perfect Sunday. |
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Desert cities are living on borrowed time, UN warns The 500 million people who live in the world's desert regions can expect to find life increasingly unbearable as already high temperatures soar and the available water is used up or turns salty, according to the United Nations. |
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
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A calm voice in the cross fire over sprawl In this age of shrill catcalls that pass for public debate, I admire Anthony Flint. He's written a book about the red-hot topic of growth that thoughtfully explores all points of view. Which may be why "This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America" clocked in Monday at No. 50,610 on the Amazon sales chart. |
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Building Moscow’s Future Few subjects of public debate cause as much hand-wringing and righteous indignation as the issue of architectural preservation. Moscow today faces the intractable problem of safeguarding its architectural past in the midst of an unprecedented construction boom, when evolving tastes, profit-driven projects and the insatiable demand for space are often at odds with the measured approach required for an effective and far-sighted preservationist policy. |
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Clamoring to Come Home to New Orleans Projects Hundreds of displaced residents of public housing have for several days been returning here for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. They are armed with little more than cleaning supplies and frustration, in an effort to force the city to reopen their storm-damaged apartments. The city, saying the projects are not ready, has refused. |
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Urban Typhoon
Urban Typhoon Workshop in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo: June 26-29 We invite creative spirits from Japan and abroad to brainstorm on the present and future of Shimokitazawa, at a time when the government is planning a 26 meter-wide road cutting through its culturally vibrant streets. |
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What Detroit Can Learn From Bangalore Every week, nearly 3,700 new people from all over India—from high-tech professionals to semi-skilled service staff—vote with their feet by moving to Bangalore, the I.T. and outsourcing capital of the East. A fraction of them, as we’ll see, were driven from their homes by a land-grabbing government, but the vast majority are simply pursuing the city’s many opportunities. Even skilled expatriates from Australia, California, and Europe are returning, undeterred by Bangalore’s ubiquitous poverty, squalor, and chaos after years of life in plush, clean, and orderly surroundings. The city’s population has ballooned from just 1 million residents in 1960, giving Bangalore a 5.7 percent annual rate of growth that has made it one of the fastest-growing cities not just in India but in all of Southeast Asia. There are signs this influx is beginning to slow, due to the city’s dismal infrastructure. For now, however, it has injected new energy into a town that was once so dull that Winston Churchill compared it to a prison. |
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Book Review - 'Imagined Cities' A comparison of six 19th- and 20th-Century authors shows that the complex character of urban areas can be interpreted in ways beyond physical experience, as exemplified by the language used in fiction to chronicle the "stimuli of the city" |
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
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A Big Ugly Ethics Violation? The mayor's spoof video, produced with city resources, left out a few things. And it may have violated election law. |
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Never mind the bicycles, there's 2m autos in Beijing Monday was Beijing's first "no-car day" to combat the city’s growing pollution but traffic was still grid-locked and the grey air remained dense with exhaust fumes. What could have been a Chinese cracker of an idea turned out to be a damp squib. More than 250 000 drivers committed to leaving their car at home on one day each month, organisers said as the voluntary campaign based on a similar French programme also starting on June 5, World Environment Day. However there were few signs of any significant decrease in traffic on Monday People said they were unaware of the campaign or simply couldn't do without a vehicle. |
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Always in view In public parks and plazas, sculptures and other artworks help Milwaukee express itself. |
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Skyline for Sale There was a time when government took an interest in big urban planning projects. Mr. Ratner and Mr. Gehry are operating under a model by which the government plays only a marginal role. Bigger social concerns, like housing for mixed incomes, equal access to parks and transit, and vibrant communal spaces, which were once the public's purview, now increasingly fall to developers to address or not, as they see fit. |
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Popular 'Ed Ruscha' Mural Abruptly Painted Over Without apparent warning, an iconic mural by artist Kent Twitchell depicting fellow artist Ed Ruscha was painted over Friday, a move Twitchell described as a shock and a violation of laws protecting works of art. |
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Is Qatar the Next Dubai? FIVE times a day, the Muslim call to prayer echoes through the mazelike passageways of Souk Waqif in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Projected from slender minarets that dot Doha, a low-lying white city along the Persian Gulf, the warbling, ages-old Arabic incantation reverberates through stalls selling everything from traditional khanjar daggers to baby strollers. When it arrives, merchants in long, white gutras and checkered headdresses kneel toward Mecca and pray. Lately, however, the call to prayer has been competing with a much more modern sound, one that heralds a bold new direction for this languid city of 400,000: the sound of construction. Lots of it. |
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Brasilia: The Modern Standard City Spacious, green, convenient, putting the population in one area and the businesses in other, offering standard residential buildings and commercial facilities, and as little as possible national symbolism, this was the dominant bold view of the modern city before the WWII. In 1939, at the very last moment before the war started in Europe, New York World's Fair offered many variations of this view, some of them too bold to be taken seriously, some other ready to be built around the globe. The new modern thinking was democratic and universal; the residences that suited best the people in Europe and North America could have been applied in any other part of the world. Standardization meant affordability, and the lack of national symbolism meant that the new building technologies could be easily applied and accepted as neutral by the local population. |
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Big Northwest cities are 'most sustainable' Portland, Ore., is the big city doing the best job of making its resources sustainable for future generations to enjoy without passing on a major cost burden, a new study says. |
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One Farm Town's Drive for Energy Independence This corn and soybean and hog farming town, which pops up out of nowhere at a crossroads and disappears as fast, has only 533 residents left. As in many withering rural communities, worries here lean toward keeping the school open, persuading sons and daughters to stay and finding a role for small farms in a changed economy. But a different worry has risen here, too. |
Saturday, June 3, 2006
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Downtown Revitalization Plan for New Orleans Unveiled In a quandary over what to do with the Katrina-devastated Hyatt Regency New Orleans Hotel, Laurence Geller, CEO of Strategic Hotels, the Chicago-based owner, sought the help of Pritzker-winning architect Thom Mayne, FAIA. Instead of just rehabilitating the building, he has created plans for a $715 million, 20-acre multiuse center and park that will include a refurbished Hyatt Hotel, the National Jazz Center, a new city hall, civic courthouse, amphitheater, and residential buildings. |
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For architects, green design is in full bloom 'Tis the season, or so the media would have us believe, to be green. Al Gore is preaching the gospel of sustainability in multiplexes across the country. Elle and Vanity Fair magazines published dueling green issues this spring. And tonight, a six-part series on sustainable architecture and design — it's officially called "Design e2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious" |
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Meet your new waterfront The winner of a $20 million competition to redesign Toronto's central waterfront was announced yesterday. The blue-ribbon jury unanimously chose West 8, a Dutch-Canadian team headed by Rotterdam landscape architect Adriaan Geuze. |
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Public spaces as dance floors for travelers The Grand Foyer at Radio City Music Hall has been described as many things: a tour de force, a people's palace, even an Art Deco masterpiece. But it has not typically been described in the language of dance, as it recently was by the architect and set designer David Rockwell. The commanding room, he said, functioned as a kind of ballet master: a magnetic presence that forced people to move well and look good. |
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Vancouver's glorious green space The first time I saw Stanley Park was as a child, squeezed between suitcases in the back seat of a tiny rental Camaro that had somehow managed to trundle our entire family — including a carsick poodle-terrier — across the Rockies. My memories of that trip are mostly nauseous ones. It wasn't until many years later — while flying in a Helijet over North America's third-largest urban park — that I truly began to appreciate the spectacular beauty of this lush, 400-hectare oasis on Vancouver's western peninsula. As I looked down in awe at this majestic rain forest saturated in a purplish-pink Impressionist glow from the setting sun, I decided right then and there that I must move to this city. |
Friday, June 2, 2006
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Sprawl Outruns Arizona's Biosphere In 1991, eight researchers in dark blue Star Trek-style uniforms entered Biosphere 2 — a vast terrarium in the Arizona desert north of Tucson — hoping to spend two years inside without importing food, water or even air. The goal was to see whether the sealed environment, considered a microcosm of the Earth's, could become self-sustaining. |
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Lots of toddlers, fewer school-age kids in S.F. A curious thing is happening in San Francisco, a city struggling with declining public school enrollment: a baby boom. The city's largest and most popular mothers' club has tripled in size since 2003. Cafes are catering to toddlers with live children's music. Yoga studios reach out with kids' classes, and playgrounds across the city are getting face-lifts at the urging of parent activists. Between 2000 and 2004, there was a steady rise in the proportion of city residents who were younger than 5, U.S. census data show. Yet these mini-baby boomers are not showing up in kindergarten; instead, school enrollment is slipping, and the city's school-age population is sliding. Families are leaving the city when their children reach school age. What's driving them away? |
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Bracing for the Gateway Effect A new study says highway improvements will increase land values by up to 20 per cent. But the skeptics believe there's more to the story. |
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City Life First Look - SimCity with a Social Conscience City Life won't have you rebuilding any existing cities, but, like SimCity, it allows you to build a modern, generic, American-style metropolis from the ground up. And while many of the game's basic mechanics will seem familiar to fans of SimCity (you designate building zones for residential, commercial, and industrial construction; build power plants, hospitals, schools, and other services; and tinker with tax rates), City Life differs from SimCity in one very key way. This is a city-building game with a social conscience, which is what you might expect from a French game. |
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A new life, living in transit Thousands of recent immigrants spend much of their day on public transit, watching suburbs blur by from home to work. |
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What can we expect from the new generation of L.A. architects? The last few months have brought a flurry of honors and attention for the up-and-coming architects of Los Angeles. Of the six slots in this year’s Emerging Voices program at the Architectural League of New York, two went to L.A. firms: George Yu Architects and the duo of Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has opened a show, running through September, on the work of Hernan Diaz Alonso, who is 36. And earlier this year the architecture collaborative servo designed an elaborate installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art for a show called Dark Places that wound up generating more buzz than the exhibition itself. |
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The secret world of rooftop gardens Renowned for copious public greenery, this rain-forest city has an alter ego. Throughout downtown are enclaves of private landscapes -- visible to zeppelin pilots, perhaps, but off limits to the likes of you and me. |
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Recycling a Big Urban Navy Yard The Navy Yard, a huge commercial redevelopment area here along the waterfront where two rivers — the Delaware and the Schuylkill — converge, fits somewhere between the paradigms of a dense downtown and a sterile suburban office park. |
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'Twisted Sisters' not just another dumb box As the 21st century stops being new and gets seriously under way, it's looking increasingly as if curves, billows and twists will constitute our new millennium's signature style in residential skyscraper design. You don't have to look far to understand why. |
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Better than flying Despite the attack on the twin towers, plenty of skyscrapers are rising. They are taller and more daring than ever, but still mostly monuments to magnificence. |
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'Sketches' of Gehry without warts Veteran filmmaker Sydney Pollack opens his first documentary, "Sketches of Frank Gehry," by asking the obvious about his architect friend: "What's all the fuss about?" For those who have long wondered why this designer of crumpled metal buildings is such a big deal, you'll have to take the word of the Hollywood moguls and celebrities who gush about Mr. Gehry's genius throughout this superficial movie. |
Thursday, June 1, 2006
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Google's Globe In the fall of 2004, Google acquired Keyhole, a global satellite imaging program that offers users anything from an astronaut's view of the earth down to a bird's eye view of a taxi double-parked in a city street. But unlike some computer software that stagnates after being acquired, this product, now dubbed "Google Earth," has only become better. |
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Palpable City Palpable City explores the relationship between the abstract and concrete spaces of the city by parameterizing its spaces of representation (the space of architects and urban planners) with phenomenal space, to challenge our "lust to be a viewpoint" in understanding the urban experience. The project allows walkers to feel the spatial form of the urban grid at their location as vibro-tactile rhythms on their body. |
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Building a City Within the City of Atlanta "Make no little plans" was the sentiment espoused by the celebrated architect and city planner Daniel H. Burnham at the turn of the last century, and it seems to be making a comeback at the turn of this one. From Denver to Dallas to downtown Los Angeles, multibillion-dollar large-scale mixed-used developments are taking shape. But Atlantic Station here is Exhibit A. |
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Streets of Tokyo speak up Mating music with architecture — a driving concern at the SoundaXis festival opening today — can sometimes lead to the highly idiosyncratic results you find with the pairing of any two highly rarefied species from exotic orchids to Tom Cruise and his main squeeze of the moment. |
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If Downsview Park matters, why has nothing begun? By any standard, it was a bit of a fiasco. The star of the show, Toronto's world-famous designer Bruce Mau, was on hand to talk about "Why Downsview Park Matters," but by the time the evening was over, nothing could have seemed further from the truth. |
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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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