Urbanism News
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
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Reactionary San Francisco Our attachment to Victorians may keep us from moving forward. |
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White Noise / White Light One of 9 internationally selected projects as part of ATHENS 2004: Catch the Light Olympic program, White Noise / White Light is an interactive sound and light installation which creates a luminous sound-scape within an urban plaza. |
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Do urban trees really help reduce pollution and clean the air? Back in 1872 Frederick Law Olmsted, the granddaddy of American landscape architecture and the designer of New York's Central Park, proclaimed that trees were the "lungs of the city." |
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The joy of filth
Under-the-radar Canadian entrepreneurs are cleaning up a polluted planet with innovative technology. Will they clean up financially too? |
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A Glut of Cars, New and Used As ads for new cars saturate the airwaves and fill the newspaper, I got to wondering what was happening to all the old cars that people are trading in so they can drive off in those groovy new wheels. |
Monday, August 30, 2004
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No, You Can't Walk and Talk at the Same Time With nearly two-dozen states now enacting some sort of restriction on the use of cellphones while driving, the random weaving and inexplicable speed variations, the short stops and sudden lateral jerks of drivers with phones tucked against their ears are slowly becoming things of the past.
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Up Against the Mall An L.A. developer fights the Glendale Galleria to get his shopping center built. The clash between old and new retail carries national implications. |
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Is 'Keep Off the Grass' Elitist? Is Central Park a serene "church" for reflective New Yorkers or a bustling "town square" for the masses? |
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Building a Better Soundtrap In his classic book "The Experience of Place," Tony Hiss describes the sensation of stepping into the concourse at Grand Central Terminal: "I felt as if some small weight suspended several feet above my head that I had not till then even been aware of, had just shot 15 stories into the air." But, Mr. Hiss stresses, he knew this not by sight but by sounds, smells, even a subtle change in his own breath. |
Saturday, August 28, 2004
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Will the 2008 Olympics be a boon or boondoggle for Beijing? Suspense is building The 28th Olympiad will come to an end with Sunday's closing ceremonies in Athens, but planning and construction have already begun for the next edition of the Summer Olympics four years from now in Beijing. |
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WTC Events Didn't Cloud Skyscraper Construction The conventional wisdom has it that the desire to build tall received a serious setback from the World Trade Center disaster. As usual, the conventional wisdom has it wrong. The reality is that we are building higher than ever, with buildings in construction, or on the boards, that dwarf everything we know now. |
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Address alone does not make Philadelphia's Ikea 'urban' This week the giant furniture chain departed from the corporate script and debuted its first "urban" store, on Columbus Boulevard in Philadelphia, with a view of the City Hall tower. |
Friday, August 27, 2004
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Architecture
A show of imagined buildings, structures and schemes, Fantasy Architecture (on until September 19) offers a taste of how the world might look today had the politics, economics, technical possibilities and tastes of our predecessors been different. |
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Destination Distinction or Disarray? Communities, cities, and even states all compete in the world of everything -- commerce, tax bases, cultural riches, hometown intellects, the creative class, and happy folks using it all. It's the fuel to keep geographic areas going and growing.
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On The Periphery: Homeless Housing The design of shelter represents the fundamental application of architecture. |
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White van man keeps house prices down Living next door to a lorry driver or someone who keeps a caravan in their drive can knock thousands of pounds off the value of your home, a survey out today warns. |
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China to train developing nations in solar technologies Chinese scientists are to train 10,000 technicians from African and other developing countries in the use of solar energy technologies over the next five years. |
Thursday, August 26, 2004
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Happy shopper They have glass walls, smart terraces and spectacular views of the Austrian mountains. James Paul on a revolutionary chain of supermarkets that puts British stores to shame. [via] |
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Environmentally Conscious Development Olympic athletes may dream of gold, but for developers of environmentally sound buildings there is an even higher level of achievement - platinum, the best mark a building can receive under a four-tier system developed by the United States Green Building Council, a nonprofit industry group. |
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The $24 Million Science Experiment Few schools can boast their own eco-system, complete with a bamboo forest and pond teeming with birds, bugs and other critters. Fewer still include a high-tech lab where students work side-by-side with top-notch scientists. |
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Building society For the past couple of years there have been critical whisperings about the magical 'Bilbao Factor', the idea that an adventurous piece of architecture by a high-profile architect can magically transform the image and economic fortunes of a city. |
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
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Too Perfect: Seven New Denmarks
What if Denmark was the port to the New Europe? |
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Big developments on Barcelona’s waterfront A city famous for daring design is reinventing itself with multibillion-dollar projects. |
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When push comes to shove, laneways are streets ahead Breathing life into the city's under-used lanes and alleys - and using that model of rejuvenation to improve the quality of life in the sprawling suburbs - could hold the key to Sydney's growing pains. |
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Big stores creating a nation of ‘clone towns’ Think tank says spread of retail multiples is reducing diversity and taking profits away from local communities. |
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Burnham Made No Little Plans As an architect, Daniel H. Burnham thought only one way — big. |
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
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Federation Square team wins $100m prize The architects behind Federation Square have won a $100 million contract to build a project in Beijing's central business district. |
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Red Car Rising Since the late 1990s, city and transit planners have battled budget cuts, bureaucracy and leadership changes in an effort to bring back the city's fabled Red Car to Downtown.
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Monday, August 23, 2004
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Africans Find a Refuge in Cast-Off 'Big Boxes'
From her place behind the barred window of the Nonto Tuck Shop in Soweto, Constance Jwara sells lollipops and soda, salt and sugar and plates of meat and pap, an African staple made of boiled cornmeal. To her left is a dry cleaner's. To her right, an older woman sells fruit, vegetables and a sampling of native condiments. |
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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? |
Saturday, August 21, 2004
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Portland's many coffeehouses do more than quench thirst: They offer places where people forge bonds that build society For Steele, 79, and many Touchstone regulars, this coffeehouse is about more than caffeine. It's about community. |
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Sao Paulo's balancing act Sao Paulo is one of the biggest urban sprawls on the planet. |
Friday, August 20, 2004
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Put 'Em in a Tree Museum Many have the attitude toward development that we once had toward smoking: sure it's bad, but it won't be a problem for me. |
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Look what washed up on the Beach By most material measures the new community is a success, but not all is well. |
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Living with a highway in the yard A hot housing market and a land squeeze has builders putting houses on land once thought undesirable. |
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Squatters denied garbage collection "We've really just got the run-around today," said Joe Dale, 18, who has been dubbed the "Mayor of Shantytown" by his fellow squatters. |
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Safety Gap Grows Wider Between S.U.V.'s and Cars People driving or riding in a sport utility vehicle in 2003 were nearly 11 percent more likely to die in an accident than people in cars, the figures show. |
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Architecture of the New Society Every city is a deeply interconnected web of spatial designs and patterns. From the urban to the suburban, our built environment is carved out into commercial and residential areas. |
Thursday, August 19, 2004
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Death of the British front garden leaves cities in peril of flooding Traditional lawns disappear under concrete to make parking spaces. |
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Earth needs full-body scan Scientists are planning to take the pulse of the planet -- and more -- in an effort to improve weather forecasts, predict energy needs months in advance, anticipate disease outbreaks and even tell fishermen where the catch will be abundant. |
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Recycling Gets Concrete A lot of attention has been given recently to the reuse of building materials rescued from demolition sites. Of course, some materials are more reusable than others. In some places, it has become quite fashionable to install century-old doors and windows — or entire buildings — nicks, stains, and all. |
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Shopping on 1, Sleeping on 2 In Lincoln Park, one of Chicago's more crowded and costly city neighborhoods, Tania and Scott Janos can shop as if they lived in the suburbs. There's the Bed Bath & Beyond on North Broadway, the Borders, the Petsmart, the T. J. Maxx. Mr. Janos, 34, said a "pretty swank" Home Depot is nearby, but not as nearby as Best Buy, which is just downstairs in their 57-unit condo building, Lincoln Park Commons. The Best Buy, at 30,000 square feet, takes up most of the street level of the building, on a site that once held a Chicago Transit Authority bus barn. |
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The Architecture Issue Las Vegas has an eclectic architectural history. The city originally germinated along the downtown railroad tracks with a series of unmemorable buildings. During the 1930s, legalized gambling and quickie divorces brought new life into Las Vegas, transforming the city into a tourist destination. It also gave birth to dude ranches, or short-term residences, along the intestate that would prove the forerunner of the modern Strip resort. |
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we (and Maybe Acolytes) From Bold Architecture When Alessia Urso, an architecture student, came to celebrate Sunday Mass at the spectacular new sanctuary in this pilgrimage town in southern Italy, she made sure that she brought her camcorder. |
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60 Cheap Places To Live In these 60 small towns, medium-sized cities and larger metro regions, you can live well and your dollar will go far. Of course, the "live well" half our claim is shot through with subjectivity. |
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Stonehenge tunnel faces tough road Whoever built Stonehenge, the 5,000-year-old circle of megaliths that towers over green fields in southern England and lures a million visitors a year, couldn't have planned for the automobile. |
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Entr'acte For banal skyscrapers: Off with their heads! Many countries routinely shield historic buildings from the scourge of philistine developers by listing them as part of their national heritage. But in Britain, where three grades of protection of buildings already exist, a fourth - more radical - category has now been proposed: Grade X to be attributed to buildings ... that deserve to be torn down. |
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The Hyper Building The Hyper Building is a one-kilometer-high tower surrounded by a double set of concentric exedrae. The exedra is a semi-circular edifice that can host a large spectrum of urban activities. Tower and exedrae are not separable. |
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Absolutely Prefab This modular home is where the art is. |
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Gender flaws beneath the glass ceiling Women architects don't see their sex as a barrier to success. |
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The pros and cons of capital flight South Korea is the latest country to decide that it needs to build a new capital city. It has some good reasons for doing so, but history suggests it may not be such a great idea. |
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The urban maze Don't feel bad if you often get lost in cities. Network analysis shows their structure is peculiarly difficult to navigate. |
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
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Think globally, eat locally Move over, organic. A new socially conscious food movement want to reset the American table. |
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
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Stabilizing the global 'greenhouse' may not be so hard Today's tools could cap emissions that contribute to global warming, study finds. |
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How graffiti artists are cleaning up Mindless vandals or creative geniuses? |
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Should grotesque buildings be demolished?
Sheffield's Park Hill Estate is an eyesore, according to the president of the Architect's Institute |
Monday, August 16, 2004
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In his native Valencia, an architect sets his imagination free It has not generated as much buzz as Santiago Calatrava's other razzle-dazzle buildings and bridges, with their all-white curves, spurs and spines. |
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Avant-Green: Landscaping as a Fine Art Do gardens, like art, have something to say about the human condition? That question — along with the more basic "just what is a garden, anyway?" — is posed by an ambitious project taking root amid the vineyards of Sonoma County, an hour north of San Francisco. |
Sunday, August 15, 2004
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Jane Jacobs: Sticking Up For Cities Her activism permanently altered urban planning. |
Saturday, August 14, 2004
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The Rendering and the Reality Unlike their lucky graphic designer cousins, architects can’t show their clients a same-size prototype with every detail in place. That’s why so many architects compensate with out-of-scale personalities: it takes real personal magnetism to make a bunch of suspicious people give you a lot of money to remake the world. |
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Workers' homes expendable as China prospers In the shadow of the Great Hall of the People, where Communist Party officials meet to build China's future, Ye Guo Qiang tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge to protest the city's demolition of his family's home and restaurant. |
Friday, August 13, 2004
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Bangkok's canals, once its lifeline, losing ground to urban sprawl Along the banks of the canal, women in rowboats grill fish and sell fresh bananas. Families eat on floating pavilions, rocked gently by waves from passing boats. |
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Organic Architect Does It With Principle Eric Corey Freed bills himself as an "organic architect," but he's a deeper shade of green. Think of him as a one-man wrecking crew driven to transform an industry that consumes 40 percent of the world's resources. |
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The New Culture Czars Who needs Sotheby's when there's Costco? |
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Say goodbye to Hollywood: Downtown Los Angeles is garnering raves for its new look A stroll along Grand Avenue takes you past LA’s two top new attractions: Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall and the Cathedral of our Lady of Angels. |
Thursday, August 12, 2004
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Planners' Brains vs. Public's Brawn Neighbors' Hostility to Dense Projects Impairs Md. Land Preservation. |
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The Bungalow Bill In Global Languages What began as a simple hut of the Bengal peasant has become the only building type which can be found in every continent. |
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Design without license Though some of my colleagues might cringe to hear it, non-architects -- those who lacked either the formal schooling or the license to legally use the title "architect" -- have had a huge impact on American architecture over the past century.
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Gardens in the Air Where the Rail Once Ran A team of New York-based architects led by Field Operations and Diller, Scofidio & Renfro has been selected to design a master plan that would transform an abandoned section of elevated freight track into a public park that would weave its way north from the meatpacking district to Hell's Kitchen, two stories above the city. |
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
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A ground beef McDonald's chickens out designing its River North restaurant. |
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'Cloud' may float across Mersey The Cloud, architect Will Alsop's controversial 10-storey globe which Liverpool found it could not afford to erect as the landmark building of its capital of culture year in 2008, may float away across the Mersey. |
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
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Los Angeles Mayor Seeks to Freeze Valley Growth It was here that 100 years ago the nascent city of Los Angeles pulled off a stealthy and fateful land grab, buying up 320,000 acres of Owens Valley land and the rights to the plentiful water of the Owens River. The Owens Valley water heist gave birth to a major city and formed the backdrop for the 1974 movie "Chinatown." |
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Character assassination Suburban retailers' influx poses a threat to the experience of city neighborhoods. |
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Sick of nature Today's nature writing is too often pious, safe, boring. Haven't these people re-read Thoreau lately? |
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Building the 'world's most environmentally responsible high-rise office building' Upon completion, Bank of America Tower will be the world's most environmentally responsible high-rise office building and the first to strive for the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum designation. |
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Beware the monster mall's curse Neon shopping sprawls are ripping the heart out of our cities. |
Monday, August 9, 2004
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Urban cowboy For planner Richard Florida, the solution for struggling cities hoping to thrive again is simple: attract more people just like him. |
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Iranian Three-Story Underground City Served As Haven Archaeologists believe that a three-story underground city, recently unearthed in central Iran, used to function as a collective shelter for its residents in wake of relentless invasions. |
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theboxtank Launches Welcome to theboxtank, a weblog about big-box urbanism, what we consider to be one of the major forces driving the development of the American city and how we live. The focus of this blog is Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, and it’s role in shaping American cities and culture. |
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'Metapolis': Iconic shapes in motion Performance combines dance, architecture while exploring contemporary city life. |
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Africans Find a Refuge in Cast-Off 'Big Boxes' From her place behind the barred window of the Nonto Tuck Shop in Soweto, Constance Jwara sells lollipops and soda, salt and sugar and plates of meat and pap, an African staple made of boiled cornmeal. To her left is a dry cleaner's. To her right, an older woman sells fruit, vegetables and a sampling of native condiments. |
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Was It Worth It?
After six years, interventions, delays, an almost 11-fold price increase, two deaths, resignations and an inquiry, the new Scottish parliament is at last complete. But will the new Holyrood complex ever live down its difficult birth? |
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A midsummer night's bargain It may well be the funniest European film of the year. It was certainly the most successful spoof in Czech history. Two film students persuaded advertising and public-relations agencies, graphic designers, printers, jingle-writers, even crowd-psychologists from the Czech army to help them devise a marketing campaign announcing the biggest and cheapest hypermarket ever seen in Prague, a city already besotted with supermarket shopping.
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The Milwaukee effect
If you build it, will they come? Second-tier cities are making big bets on high-end architecture. |
Sunday, August 8, 2004
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Cutting edge in the country Why are these architectural traditionalists so afraid of the shockingly modern? |
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Sprawl Politics Traps Americans In Blandburbs Automobile-dependent sprawl living is dominant because Americans have had virtually no other choice. |
Saturday, August 7, 2004
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Monu
Monu is a newly founded magazine on urbanism based in Amsterdam, New York City, Berlin and Kassel. Monu will be a forum for young writers, designers, photographers etcthat are working on urban topics. |
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Cars over happy children? It doesn't feel good opposing Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market, a big street festival, thrown every week, born of a desire to decrease reliance on cars. I mean, the first day I visited, there were musicians and performers and there were children literally laughing and dancing in the streets. What kind of asshole is opposed to that? What the hell is wrong with me? |
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem The Project, New York, is pleased to present its summer group exhibition, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. |
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'Pasta towers' to transform Milanese skyline Twist and shout: the proposed new skyscrapers in Milan, designed under the direction of Daniel Libeskind. |
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Ultimate teardowns Some people pay millions for a beautiful home -- then destroy it. |
Friday, August 6, 2004
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A Future More Nasty, Because It's So Near It has long been axiomatic that speculative science-fiction visions of the future must reflect the anxieties of the present: fears of technology gone awry, of repressive political authority and of the erosion of individuality and human freedom. |
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California's SUV Ban The Golden State has outlawed big SUVs on many of its roads but doesn't seem to know it. |
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Moms on the go: Mothers spending more time as 'taxi drivers'
Average mother of school-age kids spent 74 minutes a day in car in 2001. |
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Do-it-yourself digital drive-ins Like most cities in Silicon Valley's outer stratosphere, Santa Cruz has a district dedicated to an odd marriage of high and low tech, where lumber mills and cement factories squat beside gleaming software business parks. But the geeks and hipsters who parked their bikes on this slab of broken land and sneaked past the "no trespassing" sign were not here on business. They were going to the movies.
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Europeans offer lessons on renewal Port cities around the world are rejuvenating neglected brownfield sites in waterfront areas -- with high-rise condos being very much a part of the development mix -- to try to reconnect them with downtown cores. |
Thursday, August 5, 2004
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Le Corbusier's new archive for digital viewing The legacy of blueprints and sketches by Le Corbusier, one of the most influential and admired architects of the 20th century, will become accessible from you desktop next year. |
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Sow's Ear, Big Purse, Silk City
A blighted area of downtown Dallas is being transformed - inch by dogged inch - into an upscale urban neighborhood by Dallas-based Hillwood Development, an investment and development company headed by Ross Perot Jr. With $520 million in cleanup and development already completed, the next challenge is . . . shopping. |
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South Bank embraces skateboard culture The South Bank Centre has got together with art collective the Side Effects of Urethane to commission five "skatable sculptures" for the Queen Elizabeth Hall's undercroft, a mecca for British skateboarders since the 1970s. The concrete sculptures arrive on Saturday, and could be in place for up to two years. |
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Health considered in companies' building designs In some ways, Mary Still is a typical weight-loss success story. She changed her eating habits, started working out and dropped 82 pounds in a year. What sets Still apart is that she and her husband, Ed, who has lost nearly 100 pounds, get most of their exercise at work. They visit an onsite fitness center almost daily, meet co-workers outside to walk through beautifully landscaped grounds and take wide, airy stairs instead of elevators. |
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Abandon all hope, ye who drive in Boston A new national study ranks metropolitan Boston as the USA's most difficult area to navigate by car. |
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Designing Like They Give a Damn Located on a verdant belt of subtropical land that slopes from mountains to the warm Indian Ocean, the impoverished South African community of Somkhele, in KwaZulu-Natal, has one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world.
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Wal-Mart, Jesuits square off The world's largest retailer is taking on one of the Catholic church's most respected religious orders. |
Wednesday, August 4, 2004
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Architecture: Signature Redundancy Clients insist on repeating looks that make their designers famous. |
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Cure for billboards ad nauseam Is this the virtual city theorists have envisioned? Probably not, but it could be a precursor of sorts, a hint of a future in which the two-dimensional space of the video screen and the 3-D world we occupy start to blur and merge. |
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'Cutting-edge' country house plan Ministers have changed planning rules for the countryside to favour "innovative cutting-edge designs" over traditional country house styles. |
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The Battle of (Downtown) Saratoga In 1973, Saratoga Springs was more than a little worse for wear: Sidewalks were crumbling, the few remaining elm trees on Broadway were dying, flophouses and shuttered buildings were not uncommon. Strip malls sprouted up in spots where glorious buildings from the city’s golden age had been razed. Visitors—what few there were—would have been hard-pressed to detect any promise of the distinctive landscaping, cleanliness and well-kept buildings that Saratoga boasts today.
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Tuesday, August 3, 2004
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Kids and the city Sooner or later, couples with children have to decide whether to stay in the city of move to the suburbs. In some cohesive neighborhoods, that decision is twice as hard. |
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What's Preventing Utopia?
The time has more than come for transit villages, so why aren't more people flocking to them? |
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Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda Ultimately, the measure of a great city is not only how flawlessly it advances the causes of good taste and intelligent urban planning, but also how well it accommodates its mistakes. |
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Illusion of danger a radical way to cut speed Roads could be altered to appear more dangerous to drivers in a radical new attempt to slow down traffic without the need for speed bumps. |
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