Urbanism News
Friday, July 30, 2004
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Electric cars that pay So, you're thinking of buying one of those gas-electric hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius or Honda Insight. They're trendy, conserve fuel, and reduce pollution. But to really go "green," some entrepreneurs and academics say, you should try a Volkswagen Jetta. |
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How the West Was Done At Greenwich Village, a preview of Manhattan's Hudson River Park.
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Tomb Trouble: Nimby Strikes at Woodlawn The real estate heiress and boldface prima donna, is suing the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx for $150 million and planning to disinter and relocate the body of her dear departed husband, Harry. The late Mr. Helmsley must be moved from the family mausoleum at the historic burial ground, the suit says, because of the ruination of the "open view, serenity and tranquillity."
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Remaking Tracks Four plans would transform the High Line, an overgrown vestige of the city's industrial past, into a vibrant swath of its future. |
Thursday, July 29, 2004
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Time services and tools to help people's flexible lifestyles Increasingly, people live and work with a new set of habits regarding time-using the mobile phone to quickly schedule or change appointments, for example. However, aside from the phone, few tools or services exist that support this new way of life, especially interactions with public or private services. Fluidtime supports flexible planning by providing people with personalised, accurate time-based information directly from the real-time databases of the services they are seeking. |
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Crimes against nature Tangled undergrowth encourages lewd behaviour; low branches obscure the view of CCTV cameras; and conkers can give you a nasty bump on the head. These are some of the reasons why local councils have started pruning and sanitising our parks - a campaign that is erasing the last outposts of wilderness in our cities. |
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Camp for Oppositional Architecture in Berlin
There is an obvious lack of awareness today, among the public and architects, about the importance of opposition in architecture and architectural criticism. Critical approaches and critical theory are hard to find. In fact, they have no chance within the daily working routine in architectural practice, and little chance within the academic world. |
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Literally Green Facades "Facade greening" is essentially the use of a living — and therefore self-regenerating — cladding system for buildings in which climbing plants, or in some cases trained shrubs, cover the surface of a building.
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Virtual Worlds Meet the Real One Starting with the premise that functional urban design has many parallels to good game design, students studied urban renewal by creating computer games at Eyebeam's seventh annual Digital Day Camp, or DDC, a summer program that teams students with computer professionals.
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T.O. tops in parking fees Toronto is one of the most expensive cities in North America to park your car, an international survey concludes, and experts say it will only get more expensive as condominium development snaps up vacant lots. |
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The trouble with icons I am suspicious of architecture which makes pompous claims for itself. I think a design that sets out with the conscious intention of being Iconic is unworthy. And, I think a pre-requisite of a good design is one which contributes to its context. |
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Car fights road rage by turning red with anger Japanese inventors believe they have the answer to road rage: a car that expresses emotions.
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Wednesday, July 28, 2004
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New Boomtowns Change Path of China's Growth cranes peek out from behind skyscrapers in every direction, wheeling and nodding in a slow-motion ballet as crews work around the clock to fill in an already crowded skyline.
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Chicago Lures Commuters Into Cycling
A new state-of-the-art bike storage has just opened in a downtown Chicago park. It has already begun getting many commuters onto bicycles now that they have a secure place to store their wheels. |
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Traditional Zoning Can't Meet the Challenge of Modern Development Judging from the aesthetic dysfunction in much of what we have built, form-based codes are long overdue. |
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
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Slow-Growth Region Filling Up Fast Ventura County, known for development limits, is adding residents quicker than L.A. and Orange counties. |
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Before Steven Spielberg, there was Michelangelo Special effects aren't an invention of the modern age. |
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The fattest city
"Fat City" is an old-time expression suggesting the best of all possible worlds, but it's also the name of a new documentary on the Trio cable channel that examines what's been called a fat epidemic in Houston -- which has in turn been called "America's fattest city." |
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Motorola center in city by design Which one of these is different from the others? London. Bejing. Seoul. Libertyville. |
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Unbound, by tradition The eyes of the nation will be on the FleetCenter this week. Any idea what neighborhood it’s in? Thanks to maps with fuzzy boundaries, most Bostonians don’t know either. |
Monday, July 26, 2004
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World-renowned architect's Sundial Bridge hopes to be new landmark It is seemingly impossible in design, a decade in the making, two years behind schedule and eight times as expensive as originally proposed. |
Sunday, July 25, 2004
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Baby Steps on the Road to Pedestrian-Friendly Streets One balmy summer night last month, I walked down the middle of Mont Royal Avenue, unmolested by Montreal’s notoriously crazy drivers. The avenue, closed for a street fair, was cool, peaceful and fun. So why can’t we keep the cars out of the street all the time? |
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My car's bigger than yours They're big, thirsty and deadly to pedestrians. Ken Livingstone calls their owners 'idiots' and wants them to pay double the London congestion charge. But sales are soaring, so what is it about SUVs that so many drivers love? |
Saturday, July 24, 2004
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The Ali G of urban planning With his bombastic, cartoon-like designs, media darling wants to make cities playful . |
Friday, July 23, 2004
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Vanilla Not a Favorite Flavor of Generation X Home Buyers Gen Xers “find suburbia homogenous and uninteresting.” They are individualists who are looking for charm and character in their housing, and there is “extreme disillusionment with the bland, vanilla suburbs.” |
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Palm trees, petanque and a pool take over Paris as summer "beach" opens Paris's most popular summer attraction -- an artificial "beach" packed with sand, palm trees, lounge chairs and free family activities -- opened along the Seine river, delighting city residents and tourists alike for the third year running.
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Put town on the map Will Alsop - the Middlehaven dream-maker - believes the £500m project will put Middlesbrough firmly on the world's architectural map.
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Thursday, July 22, 2004
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High Line forum packed tighter than a subway car If the overflow crowd at the Center for Architecture’s forum on the High Line last week is any indication, future visitors to the elevated park between the Gansevoort Market and the Javits Convention Center will barely fit on the 30-ft. width of the old rail viaduct. |
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In California, 'Garage Mahals' Are Not Just for Cars Mr. Barnes's 1,700-square-foot garage is an airy contiguous room more than a third the size of his 4,800-square-foot custom home, leaving plenty of space for five cars, five motorcycles and his colossal go-cart. "If I had it to do again, I'd do 12 — I'd go double-deep," he said, standing on the gleaming light green epoxy finish that covers the garage's cement floor. Just down the street in Mr. Barnes's gated community of Brimhall Classics, Dennis Bernard also has shelter for six vehicles. Mr. Bernard, owner of a meat distribution company, has three separate two-car garages attached to his $750,000 brick abode: one for his son Brandon, one for his wife, Janice, and one for him. His garages' many amenities include carpeting, cable TV, speakers wired to the home stereo system and a bathroom.
"I've always liked garages and I don't think you can have enough of them," Mr. Bernard said. |
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V&A has extension grant refused Plans to build the Daniel Libeskind-designed "crumpled" construction in the museum's outside courtyard had faced strong criticism. |
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
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Alice Coles Of Bayview “It was like a dream. The people dreamed real big,” says Lockwood. “Especially when you're poor, you dream the biggest dream you want. Buy the land across the street, and build over there.” |
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Misssing the Train Instead of believing that economic prosperity must come at the expense of the environment, and that the preferred road to recovery only involves endless construction of more highways, the Sierra Club believes there is a better way. |
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China shelves office tower China has shelved plans to build a $600 million office tower in Beijing as part of the government's efforts to cool the overheating economy. |
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Liverpool scraps plans for Cloud Spiralling cost and design change end ambitious waterfront project. |
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Controversial building takes design awards In a historic first, the state's top two architecture prizes have been awarded to one building, the controversial Aurora Place development in the centre of Sydney. |
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House of Games More agony, please. We're champions. Agon -- the ancient Greek conception of contest -- has been lately much on our minds. |
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
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Cities put shackles on chain stores The backlash against chain or "formula" stores of any size is fueling regulations to stop national chains from moving into the heart of urban shopping districts. |
Monday, July 19, 2004
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Please miss, can I have a detention? Is this the Great Court at the British Museum? Can it be the entrance to some grand new European art gallery? No. This is the assembly hall of Kingsdale school in Dulwich, south-east London. |
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Is Long Island losing appeal? Study shows that many are giving up the high mortgages in the suburbs for the high-paced city life. |
Saturday, July 17, 2004
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Take Two Memorials and Call Me in the Morning My generation is obsessed with hip-hop songs that mercilessly sample riffs from the 70s and sneakers from any decade but this one. So, the past is not just a commodity for baby boomers. Our accoutrements seem to be how we remind ourselves that we remember; our monumental discourse says that we must not forget the things we told ourselves after the event that we would never forget. |
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New Life and New Mission for a 1964 World's Fair Relic Philip Johnson's steel and concrete fantasia in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, designed as the New York State Pavilion for the 1964-65 World's Fair, has been crumbling for decades. Now it is finally getting some attention. |
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For some it's coffee; for others it's class
"You are officially a neighborhood when you get a Starbucks," said Hairston, who fought to bring one to South Shore even as residents of affluent neighborhoods bemoaned the spread of the chain coffeehouses. |
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High rise in the city "Sex and architecture are the oldest professions in the world," says architect Rinat Berckovitch, who launched the first issue of Archisex last week. |
Friday, July 16, 2004
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Skyscraping Around the Urban World Get out your old Pan Am flight bags. London is calling. So are Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Chicago, Mexico City, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai and other fabled ports of the urban imagination. But if that itinerary is too strenuous, do you think you could possibly manage a trip to Queens? |
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Architects offer 'visions' for High Line Four teams of architects unveiled preliminary designs yesterday for transforming the rusted High Line rail viaduct in Chelsea into a "park of the future." |
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Shiny and new
Chicago dedicates $475 million Millennium Park today. |
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Cities, states try to lure young professionals At 27, Kristin Gebben made a decision that cut against the flow: She packed up the life she'd started building in Seattle and moved back to her native Michigan. The lure was Saugatuck, a quaint artists' haven near the shores of Lake Michigan, where she now takes early morning strolls with her yellow lab pup named Pete. It's one of a few cities that Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm is counting on to bring more young people to the state -- stopping up the brain drain that's a common worry around the country. |
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Softening a City With Grit and Grass Kathryn Gustafson, the American-born landscape architect known for her sculptured parks and lively waterworks, was embraced by France, Britain and the Netherlands before her native country recognized her bold, minimalist sensibility.
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Global action is needed to make transport sustainable, says study Global cooperation to limit the adverse social and environmental impact of motor vehicles, complemented by further technology advances, is needed to fulfill transport's vital role in the development of modern society, according to a report released today by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).
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Squalor everywhere, but still this is a neighborhood
In huts of mud and tin, surrounded by filth and thugs, millions hang on in Africa's swelling slums. |
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Cyclist wins rush-hour challenge Foundation aims to highlight city's quality of life.
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A standard by which to judge a city's beauty Mies still has a thing or two to teach us. |
Thursday, July 15, 2004
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New Orleans sees interest in streetcars For the first time in almost half a century, the city that inspired "A Streetcar Named Desire" once again desires streetcars. |
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Ruavista I firmly believe that one can learn much and distract oneself with all the details from our daily environment which, because of tiredness, lack of time or from force of habit, pass unnoticed.
The street is rich of these details. It's a permanent field of discoveries and experiments. It's the place of the unforeseen and of the mixture. It's a superposition in time and space of personal life stories. It's a crazy density of images, sounds and smells. |
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Urban outfitters One will get cafes and plazas. The other will have a pop centre and a 'Megabioscoop'. |
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US concrete 'would cover Ohio' If all the concrete structures in America's 48 contiguous states were added up, they would cover a space almost as big as Ohio, researchers say. |
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
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For many low-income workers, high gasoline prices take a toll Denise Quenneville drives 30 miles each way to her $7-an-hour job as a cashier at a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop here. With this year's surge in gas prices, she's paying $23 every couple of days to fill up her car, up from about $19 a year ago. |
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Embracing openness Rem Koolhaas' firm takes a more informal, horizontal approach to the Beverly Hills Prada than it did in New York. |
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Malls thrust under a microscope Retail anthropologist observes shoppers in their natural habitat and tells stores how to sell more effectively. |
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Big square deal: new architecture at the Tower of London by Stanton Williams. The new buildings, while rejecting any historicist pastiche, are content to be background players. Step back a few yards from the square and the silver-grey pavilions all but dematerialize. This is selfless architecture. |
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Modernizing jackhammers tear at heart of old Moscow Experts plead with Putin as hundreds of buildings from czarist period are being demolished. |
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
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Eggs and the city Urban dwellers across the land are being encouraged to get in touch with nature by keeping hens in their back gardens. But does it make sense - and what do the chickens think about it? |
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Vancouver joining push for rooftop oases among cityscape canyons New convention centre to boast a meadow on top -- the largest green roof in country. |
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Province targets sprawl Ontario has unveiled an ambitious plan to end urban sprawl in southern Ontario by restricting growth to 26 urban areas over the next 30 years. |
Monday, July 12, 2004
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Look at me! They're bold, sophisticated and impossible to ignore. But are 'landmark' buildings ruining our cities? |
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Swapping ideas on greening the city
Revitalising parks is theme of international seminar in London. |
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In Search of New Power Source, City Looks Underwater They look like underwater windmills. And in late August, when six of them are dropped into the rapid currents of the East River alongside Roosevelt Island, these giant "tidal turbines" will begin harvesting about 150 kilowatts of electricity.
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Form Follows Inspiration Architects have long thought themselves to be in the business of glorification — think of how one's eyes are directed skyward in the Pantheon in Rome, of the soaring spires and stained glass of Gothic cathedrals. This tradition endured, and even profited by, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The grand 16th-century houses of Palladio and his British and American followers were clearly designed to make a case for their owners' best sides. |
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Elevated Visions Yhe High Line is an abandoned 1.5-mile stretch of overgrown railroad viaduct that runs from the Meatpacking district to Hell's Kitchen — and straight into the imaginations of a growing number of New Yorkers who see it as proof that, even in an urban jungle, the forces of nature are still at work.
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Friday, July 9, 2004
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Winy Maas, principal · architect · urbanist Give Winy Maas ruled paper, and he will write the other way. While people still are getting the initials mixed up, the works of MVRDV leave footprints in the minds of politicians, economists, scientists – and fellow architects.
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Gas stations become grocery stores in ´food deserts´ William Laste thinks nothing of driving more than 400 miles roundtrip to buy groceries, or of supplementing his shopping with fiddlehead ferns and dandelion greens gathered in fields near his home. |
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Great big green monster mansions Environmentally correct housing has never been more popular. But even the most eco-friendly home may do more harm than good when it is super-sized. |
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Big-Box breakdown Impact? What impact? The City's slothful retail strategy. |
Thursday, July 8, 2004
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Common ground As mayor of Milwaukee, John Norquist made his name as America's boldest practitioner of urban regeneration. He dislikes motor cars, shopping malls and surburban sprawl. |
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
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Shame on You! Breaking down the Bilbao: A graphic look at why Frank Gehry's buildings fail as public spaces. |
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Mixing with the Kool Crowd Have architecture critics forgotten how to judge public spaces? PPS presents a plan to remind them how it's done. |
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Pluses, minuses for Providence -- Trying to be hip won't save cities A half-century ago, many urbanists, including the late Lewis Mumford, believed that the inexorable shift to the suburbs was transforming cities into discarded parcels of "a disordered and disintegrating urban mass." Yet today, cities seem in many ways not to be disintegrating; rather, they are widely believed to be enjoying a revival of considerable proportions. |
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
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Quick - hit the 'breaks' In a mad-dash 24/7 world, a few people are resisting the rush, moving slowly amid the rat race. |
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Detroit Region Moves to Improve and Rebuild City from Within
After five decades of building highways and suburban cul-de-sacs and losing the urban middle class to the increasingly expensive but also increasingly clogged and troubled outer areas, writes Michigan Land Use Institute deputy director and journalist Keith Schneider, many people in Detroit and its suburbs ''have looked hard at this uncivilized civilization'' and moved in their own ways to bring the city back, among them Corktown Citizens District Council administrator, engineer and writer Kelli Kavanaugh. |
Monday, July 5, 2004
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People are waking up to advantages of city life
When it's time to pack up and move not everyone heads for the 'burbs. The reinvigoration of America's major cities is luring plenty of people to the apartment/condo life |
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Sundays in Kensington: Cars out, revellers abound "They shouldn't open the streets back up; there's no sense for cars in the market at all," said Jenkins, sipping coffee and lounging with friends a few feet from his second-floor apartment. |
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Americans are changing routes, leaving earlier for work and avoiding...
But they're not getting out of their cars. |
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Gang envisions folding stadium
Imagine a sports stadium that accommodates thousands of fans for an event, then folds up and disappears. |
Sunday, July 4, 2004
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Archigram Archigram is supposed to be about a kind of 1960s grooviness: loon pants, lava lamps, men with moustaches and birds in miniskirts. In a blur of Cow Gum, scissors, and airbrush, Archigram whipped up an architectural storm against the grey backdrop of 1950s English architecture – a loose idealism made out of machines and gadgets. |
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Life's not a beach. Plan for London-on-sea runs into sand There will be no donkey rides, naughty postcards or sticks of rock on the banks of the Thames this summer: a plan to bring a bit of the seaside to London has been stymied after Southwark council refused permission for a temporary beach to be built near Tower Bridge. |
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Higher taxes OK if they ease traffic Americans are so frustrated by traffic that more than half say they would be willing to pay higher taxes if it really would improve things. |
Thursday, July 1, 2004
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Have we got your attention?
What are so many top architects doing in a dull Dutch backwater? Stopping it from being a dull Dutch backwater, that's what. |
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A Sound-Art Project that Reconfigures Central Park “It’s loud here, isn’t it?” the voice asks.
Yes, you think, it certainly is. The bench you occupy, at the small plaza where Sixth Avenue runs into Central Park, is as much of the city as it is of the park. Sirens are bearing down on you from the east, up in your left ear, as though the ambulances and fire trucks might run you down. Startled, you turn to look—but there’s not an emergency vehicle in sight, just Central Park South’s endless stream of yellow cabs and delivery vans, a few horse carriages waiting patiently at the curb for a midmorning fare. Ah, this is the performance, you realize, turning down the volume on the audio headset you’ve been given. The sound of rain, the passing clop of horse hooves, a marching band’s blare—any of it could be happening at this moment, but isn’t. |
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