Urbanism News

Urbanism News

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Living for the modern city

The Architecture Biennale, the world's most influential architecture festival, is usually focused on the promotion of "starchitecture", big new showstoppers from the jet-set design divas. It had, in fact, become a little dull, a blown-up version of coffee-table hagiographies. I ask Burdett how the "Cities" theme would fit into this tradition. "The Biennale," he replies, "is rediscovering its potential not just as a mirror but as a way of influencing thinking on the development of the discipline. There is a desire that Biennales should have a message. Over 100,000 people come to the shows and there are about 150 separate events in the city. It's important to realise that the architecture events are part of a bigger cultural programme."

Can mainstream families survive without cars?

Not 20 minutes after the Amtrak clerk said our train would be at least an hour late -- "probably much more" -- I almost caved. "We could rent a car and drive home," I thought, and maybe even muttered. "Nobody has to know."

A Trainspotter's Paradise

Some cities have a river; others have a harbor. In Birmingham, residents cozy up to an 11-track railroad corridor. Still very active, the railroad serves as a vital emblem of local history and character but also, by running through the heart of downtown, splits the city in half. To help stitch the downtown back together, Tom Leader Studio’s masterplan re-envisions the area as a park that puts Birmingham’s train infrastructure in the spotlight.

Temples of vroom

In Germany, automakers are in fierce competition to come up with the most jaw-dropping shrines. Car-loving travelers, come peek under the hood.

China nomads on energy's cutting edge

Gulinar Sitkan's contribution to China's pollution problem is four tons of coal a year. It forms heaping black piles outside the shepherd's log cabin in this mountainous village of China's northwestern Xinjiang Province.

Coal is cheap and readily available, and China burns nearly 2 billion tons a year for energy - more than India, Russia, and the United States combined.

But coal also contributes to polluted skies and respiratory disease, now a leading cause of death in China. As the government launches its campaign to get 15 percent of China's energy from renewables by 2020, it figures villages like Sorbastow - where people are waiting to get on the power grid - are a good place to start.

B.C. bylaws targeting homeless face court challenge

Should municipalities have the right to make it illegal for people to sleep in public spaces if there isn't enough shelter space for the homeless in the community?

Cities across Canada and the United States have decided that it is, indeed, appropriate and they are enacting bylaws restricting the activities of the homeless.

Beyond The Gardiner

Imagine a line of white-cabled pyramids stretching across the Toronto skyline -- a cable-stayed bridge that iconically serves as a gateway to the revitalized waterfront to the south.

Our long commute just gets longer

Chicago-area residents spend more time getting to and from work, and many of them even go to the `extreme': 90 minutes and up each way.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Engineers race to steal nature's secrets

A new generation of small green companies is emerging with radical but proven ideas to revolutionise engineering and create anything from intelligent fridges to colossal wind turbines moored at sea.

Rebuild New Orleans wetlands

New Orleans should embrace its watery environment and restore wetlands as it rebuilds, suggests a prize-winning architect hired to design a modernistic central park in the city's downtown.

Thom Mayne, known for maverick designs, urged New Orleans to treat the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina last year as a chance to re-imagine the city, adding both technology and a dollop of the nature that has been erased over the years.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

The Housing Crisis Goes Suburban

Seventy years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the Depression had left one-third of the American people "ill-housed, ill-clothed and ill-nourished," Americans are well-clothed and increasingly overnourished. But the scarcity of affordable housing is a deepening national crisis, and not just for inner-city families on welfare. The problem has climbed the income ladder and moved to the suburbs, where service workers cram their families into overcrowded apartments, college graduates have to crash with their parents, and firefighters, police officers and teachers can't afford to live in the communities they serve.

Watch what you say in New York

In a city of eight million people, someone's always saying something strange. And, odds are, someone is around to hear it. Like the guy on the D train who said: "Yeah, it ain't safe for kids to go missing these days." Or the woman on her cellphone in Bryant Park who noted: "Quite frankly, I'd rather be pole dancing." And that's the clean stuff.

Chronicling such utterances is the mission of Overheard in New York, a website that has become an Internet sensation, spawned a book and inspired countless imitators throughout the world.

JOSEPH EICHLER: Developer who made a difference

In 1950, after experimenting with some prefab projects, Eichler hired the Bay Area architecture firm of Anshen and Allen (later he also worked with architects A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons) to create an affordable modern home.

At the time, it was unprecedented. No other developer wanted to spend the money to have tract homes designed by architects. "The firm came up with houses that had an open plan, post and beam construction, whole walls of glass, and radiant heating," said Adamson. "Those were the kinds of things you might find in an expensive, custom-built home at the time, but certainly not in a house for the masses."

America's Drunkest Cities

It will come as no surprise that the residents of a city known as "The Nation's Watering Hole" like to have a beer or two.

But Milwaukee isn't just your average brewing town. It's the hardest-drinking city in America, according to Forbes.com's ranking of America's Drunkest Cities.

Dubai considered as urban development trend-setter

With ambitions to become a hub of global commerce, a top tourist destination and a shopping centerā€“ a New York/Hong Kong/Las Vegas/Miami rolled into one ā€“ Dubai has been spending billions of dollars to build an astonishing modern city nearly from scratch in a mere 15 years. Some US$100 billion worth of real estate under construction or in the pipeline continues the boom to date.

Once bubble bursts, cities feel the pain

Like binge drinkers or fast-food fanatics, American urban leaders have had a tendency to run wild when things appear to be going well. But soon they will find that the good times are coming to end.

The prime culprit this time will be deflation of the residential real estate bubble, which has brought about a surge of tax collections and development.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Why Some Towns Place Roadblocks on Cul-de-Sacs

Highly popular after World War II, the cul-de-sac is essentially a dead-end residential street, often but not always ending with a large circular patch of pavement allowing vehicles to turn around. The form was initially embraced as something that promoted security, neighborliness and efficient transportation.

Homeowners found that the cul-de-sac limited traffic, creating a sense of privacy, while encouraging ties among neighbors, who could hardly avoid one another. Developers liked the cul-de-sac because it made it possible to build on land unsuited to a grid street pattern and because home buyers were willing to pay a premium to live on one.

Now the cul-de-sac is excoriated in certain quarters, especially by New Urbanists, as a detriment to security, community and efficient transportation.

End of the Road

After over a century, Chicago's Carson Pirie Scott store, designed by architect Louis Sullivan, is set to close early in 2007. Does it matter?

Chinese leaders caution against urban sprawl

Chinese leaders warned here on Tuesday that urban sprawl at the expense of the environment and excessive energy consumption was detrimental to China's modernization and contrary to the interests of the general public.

A city that rotates? Only in Dubai

A little over two years ago, Faisal Ali Moosa had what he himself described as a “crazy idea”. He wanted to create something that was “absolutely unique”, “that people would go ‘wow’ for”, and “that would become talk of the region”.

The owner of High Rise Real Estate travelled to Brazil, Canada and Germany — countries where his idea already existed in one shape or another — and his concept to create a city where every building would rotate was born.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Sometimes I Feel Like I'm The Only One Trying To Gentrify This Neighborhood

When I moved into this neighborhood, I fell in love right away. Not with the actual neighborhood, but with its potential: It's affordable, there are nice row houses all around just waiting to be filled up by my friends, there's lot of open space to be exploited, and plenty of parking. Plus, this area has got a great authentic feel and, with a little work, it could be even more authentic. Perfect, right?

Shanghai by Bike

In 2005, China became the world's second-largest car market, selling nearly 6 million vehicles. Suddenly it was littering its western high deserts with oil pumps and sucking oceans of crude out of Sudan. Meanwhile, Shanghai was cracking down on cyclists, barring them from select vehicle-heavy downtown streets and increasing by tenfold the fines it imposed on two-wheeled lawbreakers. Ridership was way down. While 60 percent of Shanghai's population commuted by bike in 1995, only 27 percent did so in 2000--and the city's power brokers seemed happy about the decline. As one former deputy mayor saw it, "The bicycle is just a reminder of past poverty."

Friday, August 25, 2006

'Wow factor' buildings compete for £20,000 architectural award

Choosing the best of British, or simply a television-style gameshow?

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Island Hopping in St. Louis

When the Great Rivers Greenway District called upon Balmori Associates to provide a proposal for the St. Louis riverfront master plan in October 2005, the firm initially developed four schemes for the underutilized three-quarter mile riverfront. Traditional plans of a pedestrian promenade in a landscaped park were discarded, however, for a more bold and atypical concept: a riverfront of floating islands.

A simple beauty as clear as glass

Is there any meaningful difference these days between the sparest of modern architecture and a minimalist approach to building, in the tradition of Donald Judd and other postwar artists? The Toledo Museum of Art's remarkable new Glass Pavilion, the first American project by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa and their Tokyo firm, SANAA, suggests how useful the distinction can be, however slender or academic it might look on paper.

Anger at Foster's Moscow high-rise

“This is a city with a low skyline and hardly any skyscrapers. Foster’s building will change Moscow’s landscape for ever because it will dwarf everything else. It will be so massive that when people are standing off Red Square it will stick out from behind the Kremlin. No one is thinking about the effect it will have on the old Moscow.”

Peak Oil prophecies

Peak Oilers envision a fitful collapse of our hyper-industrial society, when crude oil passes its peak supply arc and slowly declines as a resource. As the supply of cheap energy sputters out of existence, Peak Oil adherents imagine resource wars, population die-offs, and eventually, an agrarian society surrounded by urban and suburban ruins. Essentially, it's a progressive dystopia, mirroring the gloom and doom of the Christian Left Behind series of books. Until recently, it seemed like more an environmentalist, Luddite revenge fantasy than an accurate image of the near future, but with gas prices surging, it doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore.

The complete community

Mixed-use developments offering places to live, shop, dine and even work are becoming more popular in southeast Michigan.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Stuck in Traffic: Free-Market Theory Meets the Highway Lobby

Put a conservative in the driver's seat, and he can sound like a utopian Marxist. If you ask him about food, housing, or health care, he'll explain how buying it and selling it in the marketplace creates the best of all possible worlds. But his car has an inalienable right to free parking and open roads. "To each automobile according to its needs" is a truth so self-evident that it need not be uttered.

No Matter How They Are Pitched, Parking Solutions Often Fall Short

Will parking increasingly shape our cities? Are our children and grandchildren destined to spend ever more time searching for that elusive and increasingly costly 9-by-18-foot rectangle?

Reston Town Center: The Upside Of A Suburban Downtown

The story of Reston Town Center, the first suburban downtown in America, is a remarkable history lesson for modern day planners. A longtime resident comments on Reston's story, which is chronicled in a new book, and offers some suggestions for the community's future.

Life's slimmer in the big city

There's a new report indicating that adults who live in cities are less likely to be obese that those living in outlying areas. Statistics Canada says it found that overall, 20 per cent of residents aged 18 or older who lived in large centres were obese in 2004, compared with 29 per cent of those who lived outside a metropolitan area.

City dwellers far less likely to be obese

Urbanites tend to do more walking than country cousins.

City Sleekers

Where we live plays an important role in how much we exercise and in how healthy we are.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Eatin' Good in the Neighborhood

Why "the market" alone can't save local agriculture.

Siberia takes the lead in contemporary architecture

Erick van Egeraat’s shopping-center to be built in Siberia plays with the rhythm of light and dark, and counts on the dramatic makings of the chilly country.

Cityscape of fear

American architecture is still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Critics and architects say that security now trumps design, as barricades and mall-like plazas are sucking the soul out of urban life.

Mile-High

After the World Trade Center furor, Daniel Libeskind moves on.

Ųrestaden Masterplan

The area designed by Libeskind is located at a major junction between the motorway and the railroad, with access to Copenhagen Airport and Sweden, and the new Metro that connects Ųrestaden with the center of Copenhagen.

VM Houses

The buildings are like a 3 dimensional Tetris game of people's living units.

Building a bolder future

After six years in the job, Deyan Sudjic, the Observer's architecture critic steps down this week. Here he reflects on the changing face of global design and argues that the UK has seen a truly remarkable renaissance, resulting in some of the most audacious and brilliant buildings of the post-war era.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Severe weather warning

Climate change is bringing more rain, more wind, more chaos. So why are architects planning for a future in which we bask in eternal sunshine?

How Angry Is Your City?

The last time an entire U.S. city got monumentally mad was back in 1864, when a guy named Sherman paid a little visit to Atlanta. This isn't to say that it takes 100,000 invading troops to make a town lose its temper—Orlando has never been a strategic military target, and yet the folks there are furious. Yes, Orlando, home of the Magic Kingdom and mandated happiness. Who knows? Maybe living in Goofyville wears thin after 35 years.

Two Urban Makeovers of the Industrial Age

Although their roots go back more than a thousand years, the Paris and Berlin of today were truly born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when industrialization, inward migration and technological change combined to produce vibrant urban cauldrons that were both elegant and debauched, and endlessly alluring.

Thanks, 82nd Ave.

Think it's an eyesore, just a street jammed with used-car lots, fast-food joints and discounters? It's far more. It's a vital artery that keeps Portland honest . . .

Where the car is not king

The benefits of a car-free diet for public health and the environment are huge. At a time when greenhouse gas emissions America wide have risen by 13%, in Portland they're down to pre 1990 levels. Here they've got an eye on global issues and are responding with local answers.

How to Upholster a Tree Stump

The STUMP project began in 1999 on the sidewalks of New York City — the sidewalk plots where there are tree stumps are generally neglected spaces left to collect debris. The tree stumps reminded me of the childhood story, The Giving Tree by Shell Silverstein, in which a tree has given of herself to the point of being diminished to a stump, but selflessly perks herself up to give to the last, by providing a seat for the beloved boy who is now an aged man.

Corroding sewers, not Alaskan oil pipes, are the real danger

Even the worst Alaskan oil pipe is in better shape than your average city sewer pipe, including cities like Boston, where the first sewer system was installed in the 1800s and the harbor is still recovering from decades of dumped sewage. Say what you will about oil spills, but they are usually small and in remote places where damage to human life, property, and wildlife is minimal.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Street artist draws cred

Peter Gibson used to do his stencil art under cover of darkness. Now the city that tried to stop him is commissioning his work

Bridge creates troubled water

It is a view of Middle England that has been snapped on millions of cameras from around Britain and the globe. But protesters claim a new bridge over the River Avon would forever change a famous vista associated with William Shakespeare's home town.

This Old House

At Ēatalhöyük, a Neolithic site in Turkey, families packed their mud-brick houses close together and traipsed over roofs to climb into their rooms from above.

Environmentally Smart Design, Powered by Hollywood

Can Brad Pitt make "sustainable design" sexy?

Even before Pitt joined forces this summer with an environmental group to foster "green" housing in New Orleans, he was lending his voice to "Design e²: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious," a three-hour documentary (airing tonight at 8 on Channel 26) that might lure viewers based on its narrator alone.

CivCity: Rome

Rome wasn't built in a day? Heck, they must have been lazing about. Icon constructed more than a dozen thriving cities, complete with burgeoning economies and spectacular palaces, and that was just our first 12 hours on the job.

Friday, August 18, 2006

Dublin’s Docklands — a Spectacle in Red, Green and Blue

Redevelopment of the Docklands is expected to last at least another decade. Part of that project is Grand Canal Square. The master plan for this major new public space has been called a “stunning design” by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.

Gehry: The Greatest Architect On Earth

I have a confession. I’ve seen Frank Gehry naked. And I liked it.

Gentrification Comes To Harlem

Harlem’s building by building upgrading was only seen in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in the 1970’s. But that gentrification effort was spawned by a city-created code upgrade program, whereas the Harlem process appears to be driven by private investors seeking to profit from upgraded housing.

Cathedraltown: suburbia with a twist

U.S. versions of new urbanism seek to evoke small Southern towns at the turn of the 20th century, with their white frame faēades, sociable porches, Fourth of July picnics and so forth. In sharp contrast to that brand of nostalgia, Cathedraltown offers its own: 19th-century European this time, with robust little buildings standing proudly around a central square dominated by a great church.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

City plans? Hand me the matches

We should get angry about architecture. When was the last decent row we had about the way our cities are developing, about the big glass boxes that seem to be this century’s only contribution to office design, the lack of vision in so much of our urban planning, and the cheap housing that disfigures our suburbs? Why don’t we care enough? In Rome the other day, Richard Meier’s design for the Ara Pacis was publicly burnt in the streets by an enraged critic, who described it as “an indecent cesspit by a useless architect”. Right or wrong, he seized the headlines. We need a few bonfires.

Sneak Preview of Bloomberg’s 21st Century Urban Vision

A team working under Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff has, for the last year or so, been secretly developing a sweeping, new urban planning vision for New York City. In its scope and ambition, the Observer compares the plan to the 1811 layout of Manhattan's street grid system and the 1929 Regional Plan that gave us many of today's highways and parks.

When in Rome . . .

If you're in the Eternal City, expect to hear the eternal buzz of motor scooters.

Where the fastest commuters are ... 'slugs'

On a recent Friday morning, David LeBlanc donned his Army uniform, kissed his wife and four children goodbye, and pointed his blue Mitsubishi toward a commuter parking lot near his home in Lake Ridge, Va. In another part of this Washington, D.C., suburb, Mildred Bowen put food out for her cat, packed a lunch, and, grabbing purse and briefcase, left her house.

Colonel LeBlanc and Ms. Bowen had never met, but within minutes of parking in the commuter lot, Bowen and another stranger were climbing into LeBlanc's Mitsubishi and driving off together.

Filling in the Hudson to Rebuild New York (Mar, 1934)

Plug up the Hudson river at both ends of Manhattan . . . divert that body of water into the Harlem river so that it might flow out into the East river and down to the Atlantic ocean . . . pump out the water from the area of the Hudson which has been dammed off … fill in that space . . . ultimately connecting the Island of Manhattan with the mainland of New Jersey . . . and you have the world’s eighth wonder—the reconstruction of Manhattan!

Grass isn't greener

Where’s the daring vision in Eisenman’s design for Arizona Cardinals Stadium?

Can industrial civilization really become sustainable? Should it?

To be, or not to be -- that is the age-old question, and civilization today faces its own dire version of it. As the negative social and ecological effects of 150 years of industrialization are becoming impossible to ignore, people are asking whether we can maintain our standards of living. But very few are asking if we should.

Finding a cure for our sick cities

There has been much debate about the legacy of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the first so-called "green Games". Would getting Sydney on track as a healthy and sustainable city be an appropriate Olympic legacy?

The discussion among health professionals about cities often focuses on urban penalties - the disease epidemics associated with rapid urbanisation during the industrial era in England, or epidemics of obesity, depression and asthma associated with urbanisation in the US, Australia and elsewhere.

Our cities are killing us

Think of it as a vast experiment in human biology. Put millions of people in a limited space, then crank a few levers: increase the hours they work, and increase the distance they have to travel; tempt them with material goods but undermine their sense of security about the future; allow them almost unlimited access to food, but subtly direct their choice by making grease and sugar most accessible. See what happens.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Some modern building details are simply gewgawful

If God is in the details, what would he make of all the clunky doo-dads, clumsy balconies, wrongly scaled windows and poorly sited mechanical systems that mar so many newer buildings in Milwaukee?

Big Chill of ’36: Show Celebrates Giant Depression-Era Pools That Cool New York

One by one, week after week, starting in late June, Fiorello H. La Guardia, the mayor, and Robert Moses, the parks commissioner, unveiled a succession of gifts for the dispirited masses in the five boroughs: 11 enormous, gleaming outdoor swimming pools — some as regal as a Romanesque fortress or Norman castle, others streamlined Modernist fantasies — filled with cool, clean water and financed by the federal Works Progress Administration.

Here's hoping 1,900 new units don't add up to one big monster

Only architects as sculpturally inventive as the ones at Arquitectonica could take an overstuffed political deal like 1177 Market St. and come up with a design that has the potential to be an energetic, counterintuitive triumph.

Landscape Class Cultivates Access

A UCLA Extension course puts able-bodied students in wheelchairs to teach them how to design for everyone.

Welcome to China's Thames Town

Builders are putting the finishing touches to a new town that is forever England, complete with pub and market square. This is not the Home Counties, however, but the outskirts of the world's fastest-growing city.

Building a zero-carbon world

Ken Livingstone is in cahoots with Bill Dunster, but it's in China where the eco-architect is fulfilling his dreams.

Property that's so hyped, you'd think they were selling Shangri-La

Victorian houses. Washington Square. The Golden Gate Bridge and neighborhood cafes.

These are the time-honored symbols of San Francisco -- and they can't be found in the sales pitches for two cloud-pricking residential towers now rising near the bay.

Dubai clinches deal to build new port on Thames

The government is set to give the go-ahead to a £1.5bn new port east of London in a move that will help the UK compete with Rotterdam as a vital European distribution hub.

Turkey's new delights

With a new megamall, modern-art museum and bold plans for the future Istanbul is joining the 21st century.

Planned Tower Would Cap Off Revitalization of Times Square

A New Jersey developer plans to build a $1 billion office tower on the last parcel in the 13-acre Times Square redevelopment district, bringing an end to the 26-year effort to clean up an area that was known as the Deuce when it was a motley collection of movie houses, sex shops, T-shirt stores, pimps and drug dealers.

Could rising gas prices kill the suburbs?

When a high-cost commute reaches the point of no-return, home buyers will start finding houses closer to work. In fact, some already are.

Slicker Cities

The real contest is among communities, not nations. Check out these hot spots.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

New era in shaping a city

Hong Kong now stands on the brink of a monumental tipping point.

For the past 150 years, the government has had free rein to reclaim, sell and plan every inch of land in the territory. But decades of disputable planning, coupled with the public's increasing attention to quality of life, are propelling the territory into a new era.

"Within the next 10 years there will be a dramatic change. People are going to say: `No! This isn't what we want,"' predicted Christine Loh Kung-wai, head of think-tank Civic Exchange. "We'll be tearing down roads and reshaping Hong Kong."

How cafes, clubs and a parking garage made a city cool

There was never a master plan for Harrisburg's Restaurant Row.

No blueprint dictated that a diner go here, an open-air cafe go there, and a New Orleans-themed complex be built farther up North Second Street.

Somehow it just happened, evolving since 1998 into a drinking and dining destination.

Web site brings world of water management to public

"We track the Dow. Why can't we track our watersheds like the (financial) markets?" said Sobczak, a hydrologist with Big Cypress National Preserve.

Sound Bite Society

Planners who have a hard time persuading elected officials or the public at large should take a cue from the late attorney Johnnie Cochran and come up with a phrase that will stick in the minds of citizens.

"If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

Vancouver tussles with condo, office mix

Despite two-year-long moratorium on downtown condominiums, city grapples with keeping workplaces in the city centre.

Monday, August 14, 2006

World now has more fat people than hungry ones

The world now has more overweight people than hungry ones and governments should design economic strategies to influence national diets, a conference of international experts have heard.

The Logistics of Distance: An Interview with Kazys Varnelis

In July 2006, Columbia University announced that Kazys Varnelis would both found and direct a new Network Architecture Lab – or NetLab – at the school. The NetLab will be part of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and it will open its doors only a few weeks from now, in September 2006.

Bike sculpture built for 300

As a temporary installation, the Bike Arch isn't likely to enter the pantheon of bike-related art-objects.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Political footfall

The Barker review will show that the UK is failing to learn from mainland Europe how to make cities attractive for reasons other than chain-store shopping.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Packing homes like pancakes into small spaces

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned a community where each family would live on at least an acre of land. He called it Broadacre City.

These days, the trend is just the opposite.

Yale Students Imagine the Future of Red Hook

The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, based in Red Hook, operates one of the rawest exhibition spaces in New York City: a corner of the Beard Street Warehouse, an 1869 complex of storehouses built of rough-cut schist on reclaimed marshland. The galleries have no air-conditioning or heating. Light enters through arched iron shutters and bounces off wooden ceiling beams and support columns. Electric fans provide feeble ventilation.

Winds of change blow from Chicago

"He's the Daniel Burnham of the 21st century," said Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, comparing Daley to the creator of the city's 1909 plan that preserved the lakefront for recreation and made the river a centerpiece of the city.

Enlist a forum, not factions

Does London need a "design tsar"? No. The last time a tsar tried to design a capital city, he chose to build on swamp infested with mosquitoes. St Petersburg might be beautiful in a deathly, Venetian manner, yet Peter the Great, though not nearly as ambitious as Ken Livingstone, proved to be neither the wisest nor most humane city planner.

The good life in Havana: Cuba's green revolution

Twenty years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet empire, Fidel Castro's small island faced a food crisis. Today, its network of small urban farmers is thriving, an organic success story that is feeding the nation.

Friday, August 11, 2006

It's All in the Swoop

Skateboarding, once associated with concrete wastelands and empty parking lots, has inspired a whole new design field. Here's how skate parks became fast, deep, curvaceous and breathtaking.

Redesigns mask security barriers throughout USA

Anti-terrorist barricades that went up to protect public buildings after Sept. 11, 2001, are slowly disappearing from the public landscape. They're not going away, just being disguised. Bollards — those ubiquitous waist-high steel posts — and concrete highway barriers meant to keep out bomb-carrying vehicles are giving way to barricades designed to blend with the appearance of streets and buildings.

Far from reassuring those they are meant to protect, fortifications of any design create "a climate of fear," says architect Michael Sorkin, director of the graduate design program at City College of New York. "It's creating a kind of culture of paranoia." The goal now is to make public places safe but not scary.

Failed Icons

Why it's so hard to make unforgettable architecture.

Rebel architect tipped as London design tsar

One of Britain's most outspoken architects has emerged as a frontrunner to become London's "design tsar" promising more landmark buildings and attacking the current lack of "coherent vision".

Making a mess of the Tate Modern extension

Herzog and de Meuron's 'pile of boxes' design for the art gallery's new wing shows that architecture is embracing chaos over order.

Exurbanization and Gentrification: How the Two Patterns Have Been Linked Since the Beginning of Urban History

Most conventional histories of postwar urban America focus on the decline of the central city, as neighborhoods emptied out, and the rise of the suburban periphery, as highways, factories, and subdivisions sprouted on the edges. Two other movements beginning in the 1970s - dubbed at that time “Back to the City” and, apparently in opposition to it, “Back to the Country” - have been ignored or relegated to mere footnotes in the conventional retelling of history. At the dawn of the 21st century, these two movements may do at least as much to explain metropolitan dynamics as the conventional city-suburb story.

Oslo, London world's most expensive cities

Oslo and London are the world's most expensive cities, while Zurich and Geneva residents have the highest buying power, according to a report released on Wednesday.

A reminder of the coming waterfront makeover

This summer party, brought to you by Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp., will probably be a lot of fun. But it will also be a public reminder (as it's intended to be) that TWRC is indeed busy with the vast, complicated, $17-billion rollout of thousands of homes, myriad shops and parks and new streets, some museums and galleries and artists' studios, and much else, on 2,000 acres of downtown real estate. Apart from the urban activists who regularly turn out for the TWRC's occasional public consultations, Torontonians have a tendency to forget just how big and potentially exciting this project is — and how firmly it's under way. We shouldn't.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Giant Robot Imprisons Parked Cars

The robot that parks cars at the Garden Street Garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, trapped hundreds of its wards last week for several days. But it wasn't the technology car owners had to curse, it was the terms of a software license.

Starchitect power

Save for The Netherlands’ Rem Koolhaas, England’s Foster and a few others, the world’s most famous architects had been historically reluctant to integrate green design practices into their projects or even promote such practices when they do, Fraker says. The reason was that they perceived that a building’s green attributes overshadowed good design.

Grand experiment

The Wal-Mart Supercenter in Aurora, Col., is one of two experimental stores (the second is in McKinney, Texas) intended to advance the company’s ambitious new “sustainability” mandate. In a shot heard around the world, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott in 2005 delivered a speech to employees heralding a new era of sustainable business operations for the world’s biggest corporation.

Long rail trip to work may add to your office woes

Researchers studying commuters travelling by train have reaffirmed the common known fact that the longer a commuter has to travel to reach his office, the more he feels frustrated, irritated and experiences physiological stress.

Travelling by car has previously been linked to high blood pressure, tension, reduced performance in specific tasks and bad moods after the working day has finished. However a Cornell researcher and his colleague have found that the same holds true for rail commuters, based on biological evidence.

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

10 Mile Spiral

In their recent and immensely enjoyable book Tooling, New York-based architects Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch propose, among other things, a "10 mile spiral" that will "serve two civic purposes for Las Vegas":

First, it acts as a massive traffic decongestion device... by adding significant mileage to the highway in the form of a spiral. The second purpose is less infrastructural and more cultural: along the spiral you can play slots, roulette, get married, see a show, have your car washed, and ride through a tunnel of love, all without ever leaving your car. It is a compact Vegas, enjoyed at 55 miles per hour and topped off by a towering observation ramp offering views of the entire valley floor below.

"Wow" architecture does not fit comfortably into the Helsinki skyline

Ever since its completion, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao has been used as a textbook example of how architecture rescued a rather scruffy harbour city from being ignored and falling off the map.

The design, by American architect Frank Gehry, for the spectacular edifice of glass, limestone and titanium cladding is also a typical example of what is these days referred to as "wow architecture", often the handiwork of superstar signature architects.

This term - which was launched on the world by New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp - pertains to awe-inspiring, "totally gobsmacking" buildings that world-famous architects have been designing around the world in recent years. Aside from the Bilbao Guggenheim, classic examples include the 145-metre high guided missile that is the Torre Agbar in Barcelona, or the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Did you ever feel you were being watched?

With surveillance technology so quietly pervasive, Electroland looks to pull back the curtain in its public art.

Trying to Build the Perfect Park

In late July, state parks officials took a significant step forward in the effort to create a permanent park on the site long known as the Cornfield when they named three finalists in a competition to re-invent the 32-acre space. Now comes the hard part, at least for the architects and designers.

Britain's unsung landmarks

We're lost without famous landmarks like Edinburgh Castle and the London Eye, a survey has found. But away from the sites that tourists love so much, what are Britain's unsung landmarks?

In New Orleans, Each Resident Is Master of Plan to Rebuild

Rebuilding a city, it seems, is too important a task to be left to professional planners. At least that’s the message behind a decision to place one of the most daunting urban reconstruction projects in American history in the hands of local residents.

The Italian Job

Foster and Partners have recently been commissioned to design ‘a city within a city’ in south-east Milan. The massive 1,200,000m² site was left following the closure of the Montedison factory and the Redaelli steel mills. Social life at Milano Giulia will revolve around the 600 metre long pedestrian promenade, lined with shops and services.

Planning a city from teens' viewpoint

"We want them to understand that they have a voice in their community,"

Two-dozen teenagers are getting the chance to play urban planner in the very neighborhoods where they live and go to school. Thanks to a program run by Volunteers in Providence Schools, these high school students will redesign a street in the West End or Olneyville and then present their revitalization plans to the city Department of Planning and Development.

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Urban Fables: The Role Of Storytelling And Imagery In Successful Planning Movements

New Urbanists and pro-property rights advocates have made good use of both allegory and myth to capture the attention of planners and the public.

City with an eye to the future

Paris has a tower, so does Pisa. Does Melbourne need an iconic structure to put it on the tourist map, or does the city already have inherent charms?

Cities Grow Up, and Some See Sprawl

For decades, planners and environmentalists have been fighting a grinding war against sprawl. They have argued that as families seeking affordable homes pushed the suburban fringe ever outward, new development has cannibalized parks and open space, strained water and power resources, and snarled highways in increasingly unmanageable traffic.

But a new front has opened in the battle against sprawl: cities. From Austin, Tex., to Palo Alto, Calif., from Washington, D.C., to Denver, clashes are unfolding between residents of older, low-density neighborhoods and alliances of planners, politicians and real estate companies that see those neighborhoods as prime locations for higher-density mixed-use projects.

As Power Bills Soar, Companies Embrace 'Green' Buildings

When bank executive Gary J. Saulson told his project team that he wanted to turn a partly constructed operations center in Pittsburgh into a "green" building, they called him "well-intentioned" -- but "crazy."

Five years later, no one is questioning Saulson's sanity. Thanks to midcourse changes in the building's design, materials, lighting, and heating and cooling systems, the 647,000-square-foot steel, stone and curved glass structure overlooking the Monongahela River spends $1.5 million a year on utilities -- 26 percent less per square foot than one of the bank's comparable standard buildings.

Building as art

Modern architecture tries to remain true to its roots while being warmer and more expressive than in the past.

Suburbia: Homeland of the American Future

For the better part of a half-century, America’s leading urbanists, planners, and architects have railed against the growth of suburbia. Variously, the suburbs have been labeled as racist, ugly, wasteful, or just plain boring. Despite the criticism, Americans have continued to vote with their feet for suburban or exurban landscapes. These Americans now include not only whites, but also a growing proportion of recent immigrants, Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. And it’s not just people who are moving - suburbia is also snagging the lion’s share of new economic growth and jobs.

London's a rat hole

London is a "filthy, lawless and expensive" city to live in, a prominent British design critic said today.

Stephen Bayley, an art and culture guru, said the British capital was a "frightful mess" where "very few of the patiently evolved systems that support the daily movements and transitions of the megalopolis work properly.

"Most of them are getting worse. London is filthy, lawless and expensive. These are not great conditions for civility to flourish."

A thirst for the road

$3 gas? That apparently isn't enough to put the brakes on our passion for love affair with driving. But even as people soak up increasing amounts of fuel and experts say energy costs really aren't that bad, small-car sales are up.

Monday, August 7, 2006

Urban Discourse

An unorthodox project encourages the residents of Portland to participate in the shaping of their city.

Build Your Dream, Hold Your Breath

The arts world operates on a different economic model than the commercial sector does. It does not solely depend on operating revenues — i.e., ticket sales — and its backers do not expect to be rewarded with a profit. But even those arts advocates who justify these projects based on their intangibles tend to be well versed on their economic benefits. The Alliance for the Arts, a nonpartisan, nonprofit arts advocacy and research group that is a principal sponsor of the Center for Architecture exhibition, reported in 2003 that the economic impact of cultural construction projects in New York — including factors like jobs created and collateral spending in the city — between 1997 and 2002 was $2.3 billion, with an anticipated impact of $2.7 billion for the period from 2003 through 2006.

Saturday, August 5, 2006

New Homes of the Rich and Famous

For years, potential homebuyers leafing through the New York Times Magazine have known exactly where to turn: the “Luxury Homes and Estates” classifieds, sequestered in the back pages, just before “Camps” and “Schools.”

But today the real real estate excitement is to be found in the larger and more provocative ads nearer to the front. Most of these focus on the posh condominium towers that continue to sprout as part of New York’s (and America’s) urban revival. These advertisements, whose focus ranges from new housing by architectural heavyweights like Richard Meier and Philip Johnson to renovations of the Palace and the Stanhope, have introduced a new reading experience for the Sunday Times audience: the conflation of fantasy consumerism with fantasy urbanism. Obviously, the ads are developed outside of the Times’ editorial offices. But their carefully costructed visions of a utopian New York are still worth reviewing. What promises does this future New York hold?

Bringing New Life to Some Old European Waterfronts

In Europe, though, many old harbors are being reinvented as architecturally experimental areas with modern residential buildings, hotels, art spaces and artificial beaches.

Boomers, retirees go for downtown life

Roland and Joan Korte needed a change.

Life as retirees in the suburbs was as comfortable as a couch — on which they found themselves spending too much time.

"We were kind of vegetating," says Roland, 75.

An artist among architects

A major show of Zaha Hadid's work shows her thrilling vision - one that often didn't translate to the street.

A Deeper Shade of Green

At times he can seem like a biblical prophet, lamenting how our human failings are destroying the planet. Yet listen more carefully to Bill McKibben—environmental essayist, activist, and author of the best seller The End of Nature—and you'll hear a redeeming message that transforms the idea of what "green" can mean.

Friday, August 4, 2006

The New Math of Green Buildings

It used to be that if you wanted wholesome organic food, you had to go to the health food store or a special restaurant and pay a premium. Now, Wal-Mart stocks organic produce and fast-food restaurants are adding salads and fruit cups to their menus that are much healthier, but not much more expensive than the burgers and fries.

The same thing is happening in commercial real estate: Demand for environmentally-friendly, healthier buildings is growing, making green building commonplace and much more affordable, says Murray Newton, an executive vice president with Koll Development Co. (KDC) which has built a series of “Intellicenter” green office buildings on spec in three markets.

Absolute development still evolving

'Modernism and the contemporary city has been too much related to the industrial city of the past,' says architect Yansong Ma, designer of the curvy Absolute buildings.

Thursday, August 3, 2006

Urban Slot Machine : A conversation with Keller Easterling

You would be hard-pressed to find someone in architecture today with the kind of versatility that Keller Easterling exhibits. Her ability to navigate in waters as diverse as theater, urbanism, technology, theory, comedy, globalization, literature and capitalism have made her an essential figure in decoding the contemporary condition. Additionally Easterling writes (and speaks) with a highly developed customized vocabulary that serves her choreography of such seemingly unrelated topics. From protocol to spatial products to cocktails to errors, she has devised a way to occupy both literary space (theater) and physical space (architecture / city). Language as a fly tower with layers and layers of malleable phyllo-like backdrops.

The street where happiness is three bedrooms, a steady job - and a shed

There is still a corner of suburbia where people just mow their lawns and don't get divorced.

Wednesday, August 2, 2006

Rise of the garden grabbers

From Nimbys to Bimbys: Build in my Back Yard.

It is astonishing how quickly people adapt to circumstances and change their spots: from Nimby (Not in my Back Yard) to Banana (Build Absolutely Nothing at all Never Anywhere) to Gits (Gor Blimey I’ll Take Some) to Imam (I’ll Make a Mint). Across Britain, people are selling their homes to developers who pay over the odds to buy sites with gardens they can build on, in a process that has become known as “garden grabbing”. Any garden within a built-up area counts as a “brownfield” site because it’s classified as having “been residential”.

Americans' love affair with cars falters

Americans love their automobiles, but not as much as they used to.

Nearly seven in 10 drivers enjoy getting behind the wheel, while the rest think it's a chore. In 1991, nearly eight in 10 said they liked driving.

The biggest reasons for dreading the road: traffic and the behavior of other drivers. Only 3 percent point to high gas prices.

"Other drivers get on my nerves," said Steve Heavisides, a 45-year-old teacher from Vernon, Conn., who had just returned home from a short drive. "There was a women who could have gone right on red and she was just sitting there talking on her cell phone. People don't pay attention and that gets on your nerves."

The sky is the limit

With high-rise apartments and condominiums gaining popularity, the face of design in Bangkok is changing.

Building in Bangkok once again is booming – both literally and figuratively. High-rises apartments and office towers are quickly taking residence among the ubiquitous cranes that occupy the skyline, and the sounds of construction work can be heard day and night. But the boom is changing more than just the view; it has also led to a rise in land and property prices, sparking a change in the nature of design in a city once known for its Thai-style roofs, low-rise villas and expansive public housing.

A Utopia sans automobile

You can't miss the bright blue trams of Montpellier. If you're walking through the Place de la Comédie, the one wide-open piazza in this southern French city's compact centre, the bullet-nosed streetcars are the dynamic constant in a place otherwise devoted to plein-air pleasures. They zip into the cobbled pedestrian zone with a grace that belies their bulk and release their exuberant crowds so close to the busy café tables that the fancy apéritifs seem to shake with sympathetic vibrations.

Solo living's eco threat

The rising number of one-person households in England and Wales will put increased pressure on the environment, research out today revealed.

People living on their own consume more energy and create more waste than individuals sharing a home which could cause an environmental crisis in the near future, according to a report published in the journal "Environment, development and sustainability".

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Designer has land to conquer

He listens to Chinese opera on his laptop – "The Peony Pavilion," a Ming dynasty masterpiece described as "more than the erotic story of a teenage ghost and her dream lover" and that's 20 hours long.

It's a very hot day here on what used to be the El Toro Marine base – think hellfire and dragon's breath – but he wears raven black from head to toe. He could certainly take a few quiet minutes for lunch – he's the boss, after all – but he scarfs down spicy chicken soup while hiking the dilapidated stretch of concrete between the lonely lunch counter and his office in Building 83.

Great Park revision proposed

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