Urbanism News

Urbanism News

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Many U.S. Cities Losing Battles To Preserve Their Burger Kings

Every day, 38-year-old Susan Tarsley takes a brisk walk through her tree-lined neighborhood. At each turn, she is reminded of the changes brought on by the march of progress: a TV antenna dismantled to make way for underground cable, passersby chatting on cell phones, a rusty tricycle abandoned for a Razor scooter.

But at the silent corner of Lark Street and Superior Avenue, Tarsley stops to mourn the passing of an especially treasured landmark. Her local Burger King is fading into memory. It's a sadly familiar picture in many communities: Fast-food hubs that once bustled with activity, when young and old alike gathered in plastic molded seats around gleaming yellow linoleum tables, are now boarded-up ghost restaurants. Their long-extinguished drive-through menus silently beckon to cars that will never come.

Oh Brooklyn, My Brooklyn

It's not so easy being a cheerleader for future-forward architecture when the future is right outside your window.

In the Center of It All

From their tiny balconies, the residents of Lillian Court look out over eight lanes of traffic whooshing down International Drive before it merges with three highways. Office buildings with giant corporate logos tower across the street: KPMG, International Launch Services, Bearing Point. One of the region's most luxurious malls is steps away -- if you can sprint through the traffic.

Metropolitan Dubai and the Rise of Architectural Fantasy

Fantasy embraces all forms of dreaming. In architecture, it implies a composed, projected environment that is surprising to the eye—a deliberate exercise that tests reality and triggers possibilities for the future. In a sense, all architecture is fantasy. Architectural design is always speculative, since it attempts to specify the future. More... Images...

Some cities are finding money does grow on trees

Cities are starting to treat trees less as decoration and more like public utilities now that they can calculate how much money trees save by cutting air pollution, storm runoff and energy costs.

Friday, July 29, 2005

Solar Parking

The Solar Grove's unique concept models the life process of natural trees by converting sunlight into energy without adding carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere -- while providing structures that are both shade-producing and aesthetically pleasing.

Try a foster home

What would you rather buy with Ł200,000 in Altrincham? A terraced house that needs doing up, or a Norman Foster-designed apartment in the Budenberg Haus Projekte overlooking the Bridgewater Canal?

So bad it's good: Koolhaas on Lagos

In 2002 Bregtje van der Haak, in cooperation with architect Rem Koolhaas and The Harvard Project on the City, made "Lagos/Koolhaas", a documentary on self-organization and urbanization in Nigeria. As a sequel, together with designer Silke Wawro, she developed a new project: Lagos Wide & Close, an Interactive Journey into an Exploding City. This innovative DVD contains an interactive video documentary (60'), edited from 55 hours of unused material that brings the viewer closer to the explosively growing megalopolis Lagos. With bus driver Olawole Busayo, the viewer moves through the city and has a choice of a distant ('wide') or an involved ('close') perspective, at any random moment in the documentary.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

Fragmented Places and Open Societies

Human life unfolds simultaneously in three environments, biological, built, and informational. Analytically, they can be distinguished, but in practice they are inseparable. The way we construct our houses reflects as much our bodily as our cultural determination. The relationship among these environments, however, is unstable. They mirror and penetrate each other in historically specific ways. Much of the turmoil of our present period can be understood in terms of a realignment of these three environments, driven by a profound expansion of our cultural capacities as information technology is expanding into an all-connecting internet. In the following, I will to look at how physical space is affected by this process and the challenges this poses to the future of society as an open political system.

Wal-Mart Nixes 'Singles Shopping'

Wal-Mart has ditched a program that helped single shoppers find love in the discount store's aisles.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

The Desire for Tallest Building Persists

Given the haunting image of the collapsing twin towers, it's hard for many Americans to fathom the enduring urge to build tall.

Yet now come plans for the nation's tallest skyscraper, a condominium and hotel building designed by Santiago Calatrava for Chicago's Near North lakefront. At 2,000 feet, the building, the Fordham Spire, would beat out the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower planned for ground zero.

Car Free

"Sod the streets at once. Rip up all city streets with jackhammers and use the junk-asphalt (after melting) to create a huge parking and auto-storage lot on the outskirts of town, preferably out of sight... All public movement would be by foot and a fleet of bicycles, maintained by the city police force."

--Hunter S. Thompson's platform for his run for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, 1970

Japan looks to combat effects of suburban sprawl

Japan will try to stop the building of suburban shopping centres and hospitals in hopes of halting the exodus from city centres before the population begins to shrink, officials say.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Urban Age - New York

The first stage in a cumulative sequence of conferences organized by the Cities programme of the London School of Economics, to be held in six cities across four continents, Urban Age explored the deliberately provocative proposition that New York is almost all right. Through a mix of muddle and dynamism, New York is succeeding as a city. It continually attracts new people, and creates new jobs for them.

New York Conference - February 2005. Speakers included:

David Adjaye, Peter Eisenman, Bruce Katz, Rem Koolhaas, Hashim Sarkis, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, Michael Sorkin, Deyan Sudjic, Robert Yaro, Alejandro Zaera Polo, Sharon Zukin.

Lectures and presentations online.

Streetclock

Urban interventions using street furniture.

Designing a Passing Lane for Wildlife

Paths along Interstate 90 would let animals cross safely and keep their Cascades habitat intact.

Monday, July 25, 2005

A Quick Trip to Hell(muth), A Tragedie in One Act

Scene: Two Barcelona Chairs. In the background, a debatable Poussin.

Seated, SATAN, at left, and a VISITOR, an unusually tall architect, possibly
David Childs, at right...

Exit Utopia

Exit Utopia, Architectural Provocations 1956-1976 is the title of a recently published book of projects, texts, interviews and critiques pertaining to the most important visionary projects of the 1960s and ’70s. A wonderful book!

Can an urban fortress keep city-dwellers safe?

For more than a century now, winged dragons flanking a shield have guarded each entrance to the City of London. In recent decades, this coat of arms has been reinforced with an elaborate antiterrorism apparatus known as the "ring of steel," consisting of concrete barriers, checkpoints and thousands of video cameras. City planners call the system, set up to defend against bombings by the Irish Republican Army, "fortress urbanism."

City Of the Future

Unless it keeps its citizens safe, the modern metropolis may go the way of ancient Rome.

Model city

What will London look like with another Ł100bn-worth of new buildings?

Metropolitan lines

The kind of giant city model that reduces a sprawling metropolis to a tabletop train set has exerted a continuing grip on the imagination of ambitious cities busy remaking themselves. They offer an irresistible mix of the sinister and the winsome, halfway between Stalinist instruments of propaganda and dolls' houses.

Why we are what we are

Thomas de Zengotita argues that the modern media shape people's lives in totally new ways in his haunting study, Mediated.

New Chevron advertising targets dialogue about global energy issues

Chevron Corporation has launched a new global advertising campaign to raise awareness and encourage discussion about important issues facing the energy industry, including supply and demand, the role of alternative and renewable energy sources and the promise of technology. More...

A solid plan must come first for the waterfront

Cities around the world are striking it rich on their waterfronts.

High-Rise Housing Estates

We all know them – those grey, anonymous high-rise blocks that popped up all over Europe in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Looking at them now, it is difficult to imagine the optimism and excitement that led to their construction. That optimism and excitement certainly didn’t last.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

Doubt, Delight Change

Despite his rather plummy tones which form a gentle sonic background to this small exhibition (filtering through from the little lecture film playing on a loop), Cedric Price (1934-2003) was a peculiarly un-English architect. He built virtually nothing. Even the building he is known for, the Aviary in Regent’s Park (1961), designed with Lord Snowdon, was intended to be removed once the birds became used to the setting and decided to stay on, so even that one building was, effectively, unsuccessful. Price was an intellectual, a thinker whose influence on architecture has been, indeed still is, out of all proportion to his output. He was also an enigma who, it could be argued, frittered his talent away.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Mayor Daley’s Green Crusade

The longtime Chicago mayor has vowed to make his city the greenest in the nation.

Starring Frank Gehry

By taking leading roles in billion-dollar projects in L.A. and New York, he has helped usher in the era of 'starchitects.'

Famed architect focuses on condos

Architect Daniel Libeskind has designed major museums around the world as well as the original Freedom Tower proposal at New York's ground zero.

Now the globe-hopping architect is turning his attention to high-rise housing in Sacramento.

Architecture 'a barrier to minorities'

Students from black and ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely to go into the building and architecture business than their white counterparts, according to new research carried out by Royal Holloway, University of London.

Wind farms could meet energy needs

Wind power could generate more than enough sustainable electricity to meet global energy needs, according to new research.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

New Back Alleys

The urban alley was once a ubiquitous part of the American landscape. Now many of these alleyways have fallen into disrepair or — along with the milkmen who frequented them — disappeared altogether. Over the past few years, however, this unique streetscape has staged something of a comeback.

A trashy tale well told

With proper treatment, even the story of garbage can sparkle.

The shape of things to come

Life still begins at 40 for architects. In architecture you’re still considered foetal until you are middle aged. The few examples of architectural precociousness are outnumbered by the grinding reality for most after university: designing drainpipes in some megafirm to pay off crippling debts.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

"Megalopolis" comes of age

"Megalopolis" is a mouthful of a word. But the idea behind it -- strings of major metro areas working together to plan their transportation futures and economic strategies -- might just be a secret to the United States' 21st century survival and success.

Wander Woman

An offbeat intellectual explores urban ruins, country music, Hitchcock's Vertigo—and grandma.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Wal-Mart Opens First Experimental Supercenter

“We want to make the best use of renewable and alternate sources like wind and solar energy to generate electricity to supplement the power needs of the store,” said Don Moseley, PE, Wal-Mart’s experimental projects manager. “The store at McKinney will draw its energy first from on-site resources and systems, and then from conventional utility sources as a secondary service. For example, the waste cooking oil which had been used to fry chicken will be recycled by mixing it with used automotive oil from the Tire and Lube Express to serve as fuel to heat the building.”

Sharing the results of the store’s experiments with the rest of the retail and development industry could turn low-volume, rare technologies into industry standards. Wal-Mart hopes to learn new environmental conservation best management practices and benchmarks that will serve as future design standards in the retail industry when it comes to land development and building construction.

Cities: Grand Bazaar of Architectures

'Grand' it most certainly was, and 'bazaar' too. At the 22nd UIA World Congress architecture put itself on display in grand style with a series lectures, workshops, discussions and presentations. And almost out of the blue there was another nice Declaration.

A turn for the better

Wind turbines are ugly and no one wants to live near one. Right? Wrong. The new architects of spin...

Carbuncles

Disgracefully, Britain can boast no buildings by most of the great modern architects. Where are the UK masterpieces by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe? Not on our mean-minded little islands, that's for sure.

Monday, July 18, 2005

I Cannot Yet Skin A Deer

Are you prepared for the Big Collapse? Peak Oil? Rural life? Can you pickle meat and eat bark?

Despite rise of sprawl, urbanism way of future

With no end in sight for Florida's development boom, planning officials say residents need to get used to the idea of denser living space -- and along with that the idea of public transportation.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Architecture is too Important to Leave to the Architects

A conversation with Giancarlo De Carlo.

Not Everything

I consider it unlikely that architecture and planning will match the contribution HushPuppies have made to society today, let alone approach that of the transistor or loop, until a total reappraisal of its particular expertise is self-imposed, or inflicted from outside.

-Cedric Price

Doing nothing is almost all right

Few things are as driven by maximalism as architecture. The craft stands out for its almost boundless urge to prove itself.

Eco-designs on future cities

Imagining what our cities will look like in the future has long been a favourite pastime of the Hollywood movie industry.

Ask a gathering of leading thinkers in the worlds of architecture and design, and you get a rather different picture.

The one-litre challenge

We can and should reduce our motor vehicles' fuel consumption, but the biggest challenges will be behavioural.

Curbing Parking

Local zoning laws mandate parking spaces as if empty lots were a virtue.

Market Potential: How Public Markets Breathe Life into Urban Decline

Markets make a point of providing an alternative to mainstream retail, and this is accomplished with panache by some of North America’s biggest and best-known markets, including Seattle’s Pike Place Market, Vancouver’s Granville Island Public Market and Toronto’s Saint Lawrence Market.

Surroundings / Hosannas to Moshe Safdie

A rare few documentary films about architectural heroes have managed to infiltrate the Jerusalem International Film Festival in recent years. The latest is "Moshe Safdie - The Power of Architecture," Donald Winkler's film about the Israeli-Canadian architect, which was screened on Sunday.

"The Power of Architecture" is basically a PR film for Safdie's work, arcane and boring, which even fails as entertainment.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Study: Walking on Cobblestones Is Healthy

The path to better health and lower blood pressure may be paved with cobblestones. When people over 60 walked on smooth, rounded cobblestones for just a half-hour a day over four months, they significantly lowered their blood pressure and improved their balance, a study showed.

DELETE!

Summer 2005, Neubaugasse, a Viennese shopping street – For a period of two weeks all advertising signs, slogans, pictograms, company names and logos will be covered in monochrome. Something you might have seen before in the form of two-dimensional representations or photomontage is going to be translated for the first time into three-dimensionality, into the here and now reality of Vienna’s Neubaugasse, by Christoph Steinbrener und Rainer Dempf.

Underground Typography

There are few more obviously functional forms of environmental typography than the signage in a subway or other transit system. A couple of years ago, I found myself riding the subways of New York, London, and Paris, all in the space of the same month. This gave me an unusual opportunity to compare the three systems firsthand, and to judge which was easiest to navigate.

Cycle-mania grips London

London's streets creaked and rattled with nervous new cyclists Friday after bicycle sales rocketed in the wake of bomb blasts on three underground trains and a double-decker bus.

L.A.'s Skyline to Get Gehry Touch

The architect is picked to design a skyscraper for the Grand Avenue residential and retail complex.

As solar gets smaller, its future gets brighter

Nanotechnology could turn rooftops into a sea of power-generating stations.

Pulling the Plug on Local Internet

Guess who wants to stop you from getting universal, citywide wireless cheaper than you get it now?

Bus firm takes car sharers to court

They might have been congratulated for their "green" efforts in an area of heavy air pollution.

Instead a group of French cleaning ladies who organised a car-sharing scheme to get to work are being taken to court by a coach company which accuses them of "an act of unfair and parasitical competition".

Cyberfiction and architecture

The work of British group Archigram, among others, shows that science fiction and architecture share a fascination with the future and influence each other. Will developments in science fiction spawn new tendencies in architecture?

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

A City's Traffic Plans Are Snarled by China's Car Culture

Shanghai's failure to master the challenge of the automobile reflects a mixture of forces, both economic and cultural. Enormous sums were spent on spectacular bridges, elevated highways and a brand-new subway system. But today, glance out the window of one of this city's 3,000 high-rises around 6 p.m., when snarling masses of horn-honking cars tend to congeal in gridlock, and it is hard to escape the impression that Shanghai, at least for now, is losing its bet.

Bend it like Barcelona

Barcelona has become the most confident city in the western world in terms of urban regeneration. And the city is now at the top of all scales for livability and also for attracting tourists. It was ultimately successful because it used the games as a catalyst for improving the life of the city and of the nation.

Building an Olympic vision

It's not enough to put on a memorable Games: the structures left behind should look to the future too.

The Oil Uproar That Isn't

When oil prices spiked in the early 1980's after the Iranian revolution, Jared Nedzel gave up his 1978 Pontiac Trans Am, an emblematic American muscle car, for a smaller, less extravagant Toyota Corolla. He was on his way to Cornell University to study civil engineering and he needed a more economical car.

Today, Mr. Nedzel, a 44-year-old software developer who lives near Boston, owns a Toyota 4Runner, a sport utility vehicle he bought two years ago. It gets about 17.5 miles per gallon, as much as the Trans Am did, and he uses it for his 45-minute commute to work and for driving near the beaches of Martha's Vineyard to get to his favorite fishing spots.

Site Search

I recently attended a public meeting where an elected official asked a group of planners the rhetorical question, "What is sprawl?" One planner's response was that sprawl occurred when the rural area was divided into large-acreage lots in order to build "McMansions." The official's response was, "Would you be happier if people located low-income trailers there instead?"

Official Sees New Jersey on Verge of a 'Transportation Meltdown'

In New Jersey, there are few activities in life as vital, maddening or culturally defining as the task of getting from one place to another.

There is a joke about it - "So you're from New Jersey? What Exit?"

I am, you are, we are ... mediocre

Great buildings don't just happen, and Australia seems to go out of its way to prevent them.

Where L.A. riots flared, a housing boom

Developers are turning the lots of South Los Angeles into new apartment complexes and condos.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Childhood pastimes are increasingly moving indoors

Dakota Howell, 9, went fishing in this town of 7,000 the other day with his mom, dad and little brother. "It's fun," he says, happily reeling in sunfish from Spring Lake during a fishing derby sponsored by Wal-Mart.

But, to be honest, he'd rather be doing something else: playing video games. "That was my first choice," he confides. "But mom says they rot your brain."

ASLA ANNOUNCES 2005 PROFESSIONAL AWARDS

The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has announced the recipients of its 2005 Professional Awards. This marks the inaugural year for the Residential Design Category, co-sponsored by Garden Design Magazine.

7-Eleven ramps up its downtown strategy

As 7-Eleven celebrates the Slurpee's 40th anniversary, the convenience-store chain is building on its chips-and-pop suburban success with a strategy to sell more sandwiches and fresh meals to customers downtown in major city centres.

Monday, July 11, 2005

The power and the glory

This new forum for London, opening very possibly in time to greet the 2012 Olympics, promises at long last to bring a cultural and commercial excitement and purpose to this neglected patch of the city, just as the games will bring sport, entertainment and flamboyant new architecture, engineering and design to the East End. They could be a good match for one another.

City tries fighting graffiti with graffiti

With increasing publicity and official attention, graffiti seems to be subject to massive cultural confusion. While cities and business owners call it vandalism, others respect it as edgy art. Its death knell as a subculture, however, may be its evolution into a mainstream marketing tool, with graffiti increasingly used in wallpaper and fabric design and even billboard advertising.

Friday, July 8, 2005

New York's Freedom Tower fails to live up to its lofty name

So this is what it comes down to: 20 stories of windowless fear.

Pimp my Vespa

Admit it. Even though you swore you'd never leave Black Beauty, your trusty four-tonne SUV, for scrap metal, lately your eyes have been wandering.

Was it the Vespa with its sexy curves that tempted you?

Or maybe it was that tight little package, the SmartCar, that made you look.

Thursday, July 7, 2005

Arnold Schwarzenegger: It's not a time for talk. It's a time for action

The Terminator: There's no doubt about the science. Now we must all gear our economies to take on global warming.

Cotswold utopia

A developer has gathered together some of the world’s most radical architects for a dream housing project.

The New Science of Siting Stores

Thanks to complex mapping and demographic tools, retailers can now find the perfect location in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Parks Even the Parks Dept. Won't Claim

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe says city parks are in better condition now than they have been in nearly 40 years. He added, however, that a small percentage of the parkland the city owns - including University Woods - is not conducive to being actively maintained by gardeners, and that to do so would be "a waste of money."

Wednesday, July 6, 2005

Residential Landscape, IJssel Bypass

Many modern cities and urban developments lack a relationship to their rivers. Vista landscape and urban design looks for concepts which focus on the integration of urban development, nature, water management and landscape.

Lifescape – Fresh Kills Parkland

Lifescape is both a place and a process. The place is Fresh Kills – once the world’s largest sanitary waste landfill, now to be creatively transformed into 2,200 acres of public parkland, featuring extensive and beautiful tidal marshes and creeks, over 40 miles of trails and pathways, and significant recreational, cultural and educational amenities, including a dramatic hilltop earthwork monument to honor the September 11 recovery effort undertaken at Fresh Kills.

Researchers find simpler lifestyle builds fit children

Even without gym classes and organized sports, old order Mennonite children are leaner, stronger and fitter than their counterparts in contemporary Canada, a new study suggested Tuesday. More...

Future of the West: L.A.

Los Angeles is nearly built out. The last empty bits of the metropolis are already being fitted into a titanic grid of neighborhoods that extends, except for mountains and coastline, 60 miles from south to north and from the Pacific Ocean deep into the desert.

Video landscape

The video screen has the power to turn architecture inside out. Traditionally, windows frame views of the city or landscape seen from the inside; "Facsimile" offers the interior up to the street. In that sense, video as a building material is closely related to glass. Today's ultra-clear glass, available in enormous sheets and held in place with inconspicuous steel mounts, is well-adapted to the television- fueled culture of exhibitionism.

Chariots for Hire: Dodging Cars, Pedaling Fares

As any New Yorker can tell you, you can't get a cab after 4 p.m. in midtown. Raining? Forget about it. Other people can get cabs, but you cannot.

Tuesday, July 5, 2005

The Bush Interview

An edited transcript of US President George Bush's interview on Tonight with Trevor McDonald to be broadcast on ITV1 at 8pm today.

Seeking First to Reinvent the Sports Arena, and Then Brooklyn

Frank Gehry's new design for a 21-acre corridor of high-rise towers anchored by the 19,000-seat Nets arena in Brooklyn may be the most important urban development plan proposed in New York City in decades. If it is approved, it will radically alter the Brooklyn skyline, reaffirming the borough's emergence as a legitimate cultural rival to Manhattan.

A Livable Shade of Green

Newly released data show that Portland, America's environmental laboratory, has achieved stunning reductions in carbon emissions. It has reduced emissions below the levels of 1990, the benchmark for the Kyoto accord, while booming economically.

The Mall That Would Save America

Robert Congel, a commercial real-estate developer who lives in upstate New York, has a plan to ''change the world.'' Convinced that it will ''produce more benefit for humanity than any one thing that private enterprise has ever done,'' he is raising $20 billion to make it happen. That's 12 times the yearly budget of the United Nations and more than 25 times Congel's own net worth.

Urbanism holds promise for reducing energy use

Researchers presented findings at the Congress for the New Urbanism annual conference that show substantial energy savings from higher-density urbanism — greater savings than can be achieved from the US government Energy Star program.

History of urbanism, ineptly told

Joel Kotkin's too brief, too brisk new book, "The City: A Global History," sets out to tell the history of urbanism from the beginning of time to the present. It is an impossible task.

Capital vision for new city within a city

Architects plan development in east London to house 500,000.

Futureshack to the rescue

He flunked his exams and nearly became a footballer. But Sean Godsell is now taking architecture to global disaster zones.

Obesity equals affluence in modern China

The country that was once known as the "bicycle kingdom" is quickly becoming the kingdom of the couch potatoes. Millions of urban dwellers are living a sedentary lifestyle, dominated by computers, television, the Internet, video games, DVDs and cellphones. Instead of bicycling to work, they are driving cars or riding on new subways. The traditional diet of grains and vegetables is being replaced by a Western-style diet of fatty processed foods.

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