Urbanism News
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
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Building great cities cited as way to help nature Environmentalists need to realize that the best way to protect natural resources is to focus on building great cities, a leading proponent of "new urbanism" said during a speech Tuesday at the College of Charleston. |
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
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How Park Improvements Affect Community Real Estate Values Investing capital funds in parks can generate significant economic returns in the form of increased property values, but New York City is not making the most of this opportunity, according to a study released at the Great Parks, Great Cities conference, an international urban parks conference held in New York City last month. |
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Breaking Away from Rush Hour Bike commuting is healthy -- and dirt-cheap. |
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Sprawl costs billions, Sierra says Report finds long-term costs outweigh short-term benefits. |
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Vegas Hotel Owner Planning to Recreate 'The Strip' on Foreign Soil The owner and operator of The Venetian Casino Resort in Las Vegas, is planning to spend up to $10-billion to recreate "The Strip" in Cotai, Macao, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. |
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Wanted: `Sense of place' When urban sociologist Robert Lang visits Broward County, he is often reminded of the Flintstones. |
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Glass Walls to Bunkers: The New Look of U.S. Embassies The new American Embassy in Kenya, which opened this spring, strives mightily not to be a bunker. It is surrounded by a four-story metal lattice, a kind of abstract trellis that masks its bulk even as it filters the East African sun. The building is a taut white carton, with razor-sharp details and dark windows so flush with the wall that they might have been painted on. |
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Roppongi Hills sets new urban standard Three months after the opening of Roppongi Hills in Minato Ward, Tokyo, on April 25, the popularity of the fashionable complex, created in the nation's biggest private sector urban redevelopment project, seems undiminished. Roppongi Hills makes a model city of the 21st century. |
Monday, July 28, 2003
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Planned suburbia: Is it right for you? Mike Doyle hates planned communities, but it seems the 23-year-old Hawaiian shirt salesman cannot escape them. He grew up in one and attended high school in another. Most days he works within the Irvine Ranch master plan – perhaps the nation’s premier planned community, encompassing about one-sixth of Orange County. |
Sunday, July 27, 2003
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West Kowloon Reclamation — Part Two This is a continuation of an article begun last week about a competition held in Hong Kong to develop ideas for a master plan for the West Kowloon Reclamation site. |
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Proposals for the High Line As the well publicized redevelopment process for the World Trade Center site in New York City evolves, real-estate profit motives are once again dulling what many had hoped would be a design showcase for the world's brightest architectural imaginations. Meanwhile, on Manhattan's West Side, just north of the World Trade Center site, another site is inspiring imaginative rescue scenarios. |
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H-H-HSL, a cult exhibition about leftovers
On show until August 3 in Rotterdam’s Groothandelsgebouw is the exhibition ‘A Design For Places Left Over After Planning’. Anyone expecting to find a mouthful of exquisite sushi or Mediterranean anti-pasta among all these leftovers is in for a disappointment. What they will find is a veritable hodgepodge of dazzling designs for works of art along the route of the future High-Speed Rail link (HSL). |
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Dutch Void in Berlin
DS Landscape Architects made its first design for Tilla Durieux Park in 1995. The park, located next to Potsdamer Platz in the reconstructed centre of Berlin, has just been officially opened. |
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Tokyo Garden
Late last year the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT), Japan’s largest university of technology, held a competition to design the central courtyard of the main campus building. The competition was won by two Dutch architects, Jarrik Ouburg and Mark Veldman. |
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Stadthaus - Ostfildern, Germany Recipient of the European Union of Contemporary Architecture's Emerging Architect Special Mention award for 2003 is the Stadthaus in Ostfildern, Germany by J. Mayer H. Architekten of Berlin. The mixed-use building is located in Scharnhauser Park, housing municipal offices, a public library, art gallery, classrooms, and sports facilities, among other public spaces. Unification of these multiple uses happens in a simple boxy volume, with interest achieved through the use of artificial light, both internally and externally, among other means. |
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Is this the best preservation can do? Parts of Italy are becoming tourist parks.
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Stepping Out Combining teaching and practice, history and material innovation, Toshiko Mori emerges as an architect and educator. |
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Gehry seafront towers to dominate Brighton Frank Gehry, the Californian architect who gave Bilbao the titanium tsunami known as the Guggenheim Museum, is poised to overwhelm the city of Brighton and Hove's seafront with a £30m development resembling a chunk of Canary Wharf after a tactical nuclear strike. |
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Relax. Don't Do It. Frank Gehry's words of advice to a roomful of Columbia shapemakers. |
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A mob scene just made for being there The latest big thing from the Internet: Creating a crowd on a moment's notice for no particular reason. It's a hit in New York, and the practice is starting to get around. |
Friday, July 25, 2003
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Dreaming Between the Grooves in a Futuristic Bubble It looked like the midsection of a giant centipede, or a discreet little spaceship, or possibly the natural habitat of Tinky Winky and his Teletubby pals. But the thought that consumed my 6-year-old daughter, Alice, and me as we prepared to spend the night in the futuristic bubble of a house that loomed in front of us was practical rather than aesthetic. Where would we go to the bathroom? |
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Building on the immigrant experience A design for affordable housing is inspired by the do-it-yourself spirit of newcomers who constructed their own dwellings. |
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
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The architect's creed collapses into hyper-talk at Green Square Is there no end to it? Could Sydney's supply of ravening apartmentivores - empty-nesters, lifestylers, same-sexers, omni-sexers, yuppies, dippies and dinks - actually be infinite? |
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Sweet Shelter What place could be more agreeable than the great American porch? |
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Restoration Joe's Vanity, thy name is hardware. |
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A cultural cul-de-sac The Prince of Wales's vision of a 'proper' English village is about to mark its 10th anniversary. We revisit the artificially created idyll that is Poundbury - and encounter disturbing political echoes among the traditional values of rural Dorset. |
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Round the ragged rocks In Greek myth, the Labyrinth was a place of horror. In Northumberland, it's fun. |
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Building on greed Decisions on urban design and regenerating tube sites should not be left to property developers. |
Monday, July 21, 2003
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Up in the Air Before downtown preservationists set their sights on it, the High Line was an abandoned elevated freight track on Manhattan's West Side. Now, planners say its fate is. |
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The Manhattan Waterfront Greenway -- A Thin Green Line When the Manhattan waterfront greenway opens in just a few weeks Mayor Michael Bloomberg will have achieved what 25 years of planners and policymakers could not: a nearly continuous waterfront esplanade for walkers, cyclists, joggers, skaters, birdwatchers and many others in the world's most famous borough. |
Friday, July 18, 2003
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Holland Ave. The 'Holland Avenue' exhibition presented in the NAI's Gallery 3 displays the propositions for the design of the A13 motorway by twelve international architecture schools. This makes the project unique, because, until now, architects have had virtually no hand in designing infrastructure. |
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Guggenheim may open in Taiwan The Guggenheim Foundation, one of the world's biggest cultural brands, is proposing a possible gallery complex for Taiwan to join its string of international sites. |
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Must-See Berlin Is a Work in Progress Stand anywhere in Berlin and watch history unfold around you. |
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dominique perrault Inteview on designboom |
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Last Stop for Long-Haul Containers Developers take note: nesting nomads could be a trend to track. |
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Shanghai Puts up a Fight to Stop Sinking Wei Zixin and his colleagues at the Shanghai Geological Survey Institute and staff from the municipal land-management bureau worked round the clock when there was a cave-in at the construction site of a local cross-river subway tunnel early this month. |
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Museum for masses mooted in Taichung "Culture is a good business," said Jason Hu (ŒÓŽu‹), Taichung mayor, explaining why he proposed and strongly supports the establishment of NT$6-billion Guggenheim Museum in Taichung at a press conference earlier in the week. |
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Lifting The Veil As the beautifully restored Central Park celebrates its 150th anniversary, join us in taking a peek at its fabulous fabrications.
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Revive and protect When regenerating an area we must not forget what the people who live there value most. |
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Wind Powers Brit Energy and Jobs Britain is pushing ahead with a huge expansion of offshore wind farms which could supply green power to more than 3 million households and create 20,000 new jobs, the government said Monday. |
Thursday, July 17, 2003
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What it means to be an urban environmentalist Recently I had a disagreement with an old friend. I'm on the Sound Transit Board and am a big supporter of light rail. My friend lives near the planned light rail station at Columbia City. He and some of his neighbors are upset that light rail is coming and that it is tied to the proposals to increase housing density near the station. |
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West Kowloon Reclamation Competition By staging an open competition for the West Kowloon Reclamation master plan, Hong Kong has finally moved into line with a method that is widely adopted worldwide for selecting architects for major civic design projects. |
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City reveals architects who will compete for bridge work Vying for the chance to make a highly visible design statement on Chicago's lakefront, 23 architects, including Chicago's Helmut Jahn and Britain's Richard Rogers, have submitted plans to the city's design competition for five pedestrian bridges along the shoreline. |
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
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Plans for Guggenheim in Taichung unveiled Design includes oscillating sections; museum to be built next to new opera house, city hall. |
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Russia's Risky Opera in a Cocoon Dominique Perrault designed an annex to St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater that allows the structure to be unobtrusive as it "settles into the city's historic silhouette." |
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
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Mean Streets, Mannered Streets: Charleston
The street is a stage; watch the actors strut! |
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Lost in Space A Soho exhibition of Zaha Hadid’s work reveals an architect who is shaking up the way we experience architecture. |
Monday, July 14, 2003
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Japan's answer to Warhol, Takashi Murakami sells bags, explores meaning of art He's called Japan's Andy Warhol, and that suits pop artist Takashi Murakami just fine. |
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Power To The People Affordable and user-friendly technology could provide an exciting new platform for discussing planning and development issues. |
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form + function = faculty squared Cambridge has managed to fuse science with style. It's a work of genius.
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Plenty of space to park When you look at this map, it's just shocking. It should be very clear that downtown doesn't have a parking problem, it has a planning problem.
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Saturday, July 12, 2003
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'Starchitect' to redesign Barnsley with a laser halo A Yorkshire mining town which is reinventing itself as a Tuscan hill village is planning to spring a second surprise for Christmas: a pulsating laser halo reflected on the clouds which occasionally drift above. |
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God's architect on road to sainthood They call him God's architect, though he is renowned for leaving his most important creation less than half finished. |
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James Turrell's bold Skyspace installation is a shrine to light
Viewed from the outside, the Skyspace is a bold architectural statement. From the inside, it's a contemplative haven, a retreat for all seasons with a retractable roof. |
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A model village
What does a Victorian chocolate factory in Birmingham have to do with the thorny problem of Wales's less popular neighbourhoods and falling housing estates? |
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Out in the Garden, a Reputation Blooms I Knew when he cited Dr. Seuss as one of his inspirations that he was the man. |
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The thinking person's garden
What happens when you unleash an international posse of landscape architects on an idyllic microclimate in Quebec? |
Thursday, July 10, 2003
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For a Shaper of Landscapes, a Cliffhanger Once optimistic beacons of urban rejuvenation — "memorable, intense, passionate rather than pretty" as he once put it — a growing number of the austere, sculptural Halprin landscapes of the 60's and 70's are suffering from neglect and abandonment and are considered by some critics to be dated modernist eyesores out of step with their cities. |
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Steel appeal Frank Gehry talks about his new band shell that's taking shape and turning heads in Millennium Park. |
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Boulevards plan for London A radical redesign of London could see some of its busiest streets transformed into Parisian-style boulevards. |
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The 'Garden of Eden' is in England? The Eden Project has transformed an ugly clay pit near the Cornish town of St. Austell into a plant paradise that boasts the biggest greenhouses in the world. |
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Rain Gardens Treat Stormwater Runoff Larry Crawford would like to flush terms like "gully washer" and "mudslide" from our collective memories, replacing them with "bio-retention" or "rain garden." |
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All the panache of Jabba the Hut The architecture of the downtown concert centre and Grande Bibliothèque is ugly by design. |
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Adam's ruin Garden folly revealed as great architect's design. |
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
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Once beloved shopping malls are evolving Once the darling of the retail industry, the beloved shopping mall is approaching dinosaur status as developers look toward smaller formats to satisfy shoppers' tastes. |
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Revamped Trafalgar Square returns to public domain Foster and Partners' makeover of Trafalgar Square was formally opened by London mayor Ken Livingstone on Wednesday. But rest assured, there were no steel-and-glass gherkins to rival Nelson's column. This is as polite a makeover as the most nervous English Heritage official could have asked for.
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Opera House Mariinsky II A great opera should be an emblematic building that is visible in the city. The golden envelope is the symbol of all the great monuments of St. Petersburg. |
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Passenger Terminal & Urban Plan The international competition for the 23,000 square meters urban plan called for a Cruise Ship Passenger Terminal for the Hurtigruta ships, a hotel, a congress center, a bus station and the Amundsen Park. The winning design by Space Group, Oslo was done in collaboration with London based engineers Ove Arup & Partners and West 8 Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, Rotterdam. |
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Danish Jewish Museum The unique context in which the Danish Jewish Museum will find its new home represents a deep historical legacy. |
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Beijing Olympics National Swimming Centre Conceptual Designs Short-listed Models of the three conceptual designs for the National Swimming Centre that has been selected by an evaluation committee will be on show to solicit public opinions. |
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Reno opens striking new art museum With its single black staircase and a breathtaking rooftop sculpture garden, Nevada's "biggest little city" has a renovated art museum that takes the town a step beyond the gaming industry. |
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Giant printer goes on show Two Swiss students have created what could be the largest portable ink jet printer in the world. |
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Lessons from Lotusland The message is that you can think of the city primarily as something that can be designed, and not just the result of the economics of the moment, or the politics of the day. |
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British designs to puzzle Chinese The sugar-pink double bathroom, by the architecture collective FAT, is one of a series of room interiors created by young British designers for a British Council exhibition which opens in China in September. The show should come with a health warning to the Chinese: do not necessarily feel obliged to try this at home. |
Monday, July 7, 2003
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Malls: Death of an American icon
The shopping mall is headed the way of the drive-in movie and the eight-track. What's replacing it? |
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London's secret gardens I don't think I was meant to live in a densely populated city. At this time of year I yearn to take my morning coffee outside, walk barefoot on the grass in my pyjamas, eat my breakfast in the sun. |
Saturday, July 5, 2003
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Denver Development Shows Urban Growth Can Be Green Not so long ago, Denver and its seemingly uncontrollable sprawl gobbled up the meadows and foothills of the Rockies. Nowadays, city residents have changed their minds about 'burbs that attack like the blob. New Urbanism is the city's new chic, with the old Stapleton Airport being redeveloped and countless smaller projects sprouting up on infill sites. Highlands' Garden Village (HGV), Denver's latest planned neighborhood, continues the trend, showing that even more can be done with a model of controlled growth. |
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Change Is Good Whether he's shaking up tired office furnishings or pushing a radical design theory called Massive Change, Bruce Mau is unafraid to tangle with the status quo. |
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Orchestre symphonique de Montréal On first account the building looks like a big almost monolithic square block. However, closer look reveals that the functions are identifiable by incision in the building and that each facade has it's own character reflecting the identity of the street. |
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Urban Beach Since 1998, P.S.1 Museum in Queens, New York, has hosted an architectural/music collaboration in its "V"-shaped courtyard, and this year Tom Wiscombe of Emergent LA is the winner of the Young Architects Program that opened July 29. With a budget of only $60,000, the design creates an "urban beach" that will be a venue for the summer music program, Warm Up, as well as a space for socializing and relaxing. |
Friday, July 4, 2003
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Can Vertical Retail Succeed in New York? Every attempt at vertical retail in Manhattan has failed. New Yorkers are spontaneous, and they like to run in and out very fast. |
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Theater That Uses the City as a Stage From the top of One Times Square, where the ball drops on New Year's Eve, to the Chrysler Building to the Roosevelt Island tramway, Deborah Warner had scouted locations since October. The search was not for a film but for an environment in which to place a site-specific performance installation called "The Angel Project." That project, which Ms. Warner regards, quite simply, as "a walk," is the theatrical feature of Lincoln Center Festival 2003, which starts next week. |
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No War For Oil? Forget about it in sprawl-dominant culture. |
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Grow up Andrés Duany rode through Kentlands recently, admiring it as a parent admires a child. |
Thursday, July 3, 2003
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Roll Call in Central Park Six people were clustered around a tree in Central Park yesterday, enraptured by a fungus, when Jeffrey James Keyes happened by. He stopped and observed the group's behavior, making no sudden movements. The mushroom enthusiasts continued chatting and gesturing excitedly. They ignored him completely. |
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Enhancing Sustainability Through 'Nature's Services' In providing services required by urban dwellers, today's cities, by and large, have opted for engineering rather than ecologically based systems. For example, in order to deal with increased stormwater runoff, cities typically build more storm drains rather than increase permeable surfaces to enhance groundwater recharge, which would reduce the amount of polluted stormwater discharged into the ocean. The nature's services concept, which explores ecological alternatives to engineering systems, is an emerging new paradigm for planning and retrofitting cities as well as an energy-conserving design approach to construction. |
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Seoul digs up a highway to expose its dynastic roots In the midst of a frayed district of clothing shops and textile companies, beneath a stretch of elevated highway, Seoul metropolitan planners began Tuesday to expose a stream that disappeared from view and almost from memory a generation ago. |
Tuesday, July 1, 2003
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From eyesore to icon: rebirth of the council tower blocks Architects' makeover sends high rise flats 'not fit for human beings' up the property market ladder. |
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