Urbanism News
Friday, September 30, 2005
|
Venice 'will get protection dam' Controversial plans to build an underwater dam to protect Venice from flooding will go ahead, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said. |
|
Design: Copenhagen It lacks the buzz and hype of London and the familiar ring of Bilbao. But Scandinavia's Oresund region, which includes the Danish capital, Copenhagen, and Malmo in southern Sweden, has - at least for the moment - taken Europe's center stage for new architecture. |
Thursday, September 29, 2005
|
It's Not Easy Making Art That Floats The island of Manhattan was formed over the course of more than 500 million years, shaped by metamorphic pressure, erosion, continental drift, glacial deposits and rampant real estate development. |
|
Ideal homes and petty snobberies Suburbia has suddenly become a serious subject. It was once endlessly teased in and lovingly mocked, but the suburbs are no longer a laughing matter. |
|
Peripheral vision Over-emphasis on inner-city regeneration has left suburban areas badly neglected. |
|
No Green Acres? Try Skyscrapers It might turn out that the only way to make agriculture truly sustainable is to stop farming the crops and start manufacturing them. |
|
Bicycles provide opportunities Have you ever driven a car six blocks just to buy some food? Do you live at the bottom of Flora Street or Ohio Avenue? Are you worried about heart disease, weight problems or your physical appearance? Well, if at least one of these problems is an issue for you, then the solution is rolling down the street. That solution, a sexy and sleek apparatus on two wheels is called a bicycle. A bike (as it is commonly referred to) is an instrument that can radically change your life. In the age of high gasoline costs, one can avoid car worries and simply ride a bike on short distance trips. |
|
Elastic Fantastic? Based on figures through August, per-capita gasoline consumption in British Columbia in 2005 has dropped to its lowest level since 1978, which is the earliest year for which records are available. In contrast, Washington residents use about 60 percent more gas, person for person, than do residents of BC. |
|
Escape the jams with a driverless bus straight to your door City dwellers will be able to summon driverless buses to their front doors and be taken direct to their destinations under a futuristic plan for urban transport unveiled yesterday. |
|
The Grip of Gas Why you'll pay through the nose to keep driving. |
|
Uncovering History A hundred and more years ago, the land we know today as Portland’s Pearl District was a robust wetland, fed by streams that rushed down from the west hills. Where pedestrians now wander the streets of the Pearl, frogs and blue herons browsed at the edge of broad and shallow Couch Lake. |
|
The Death of Marshall Fields and the Dissolution of the Sense of Place From their inception, department stores were like a museum, a riverfront, a memorial, or a stadium - something that defined the unique character of a city. Now they're just roadkill in Wal-Mart America. A look at Field's recent history helps explain just how this happened. |
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
|
Our love-hate relationship with developers A century ago, architects were the most dynamic interpreters of the American dream. Builders? Well, they built what they were told to build. Today, the architect's stature has been dwarfed. |
|
The Rise of the Few: Key Ingredients for the World's Tallest Skyscrapers n the search of power, prestige, and profitable returns, developers around the world are commissioning the next great skyscraper. But despite the potentially striking skylines and intricate details, few plans actually get off the drawing board. And of those that do, few buildings achieve their promised, record-setting heights. So why are some projects successful and others not? |
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
|
Now at Design Schools, Big Concepts on Campus On a recent afternoon at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, students were lounging in front of the new architecture school building, smoking, drinking coffee, talking. Sitting atop a low wall that rises on a diagonal angle on the building's new brick plinth, they seemed to revel in the communal space, a stone's throw from their drafting studios in the glass-enclosed building behind them."We're all seeing the same thing - our students, our staff and our faculty are asking that we provide quality facilities," said Bob Kerrey, the president of New School University, which includes Parsons. "They matter. They affect the decision to come, the decision to stay and the quality of the work while you're here." |
|
No Longer Just Hippie, Green is Finally Chic
Don't look now, but the '70s are back. Not disco, thank God, but the energy crisis. Gas not only costs an arm and a leg, but consumption is peaking toward that dreaded point where demand may outstrip supply. California's electricity crisis of 2000-2001 may have been orchestrated by corporate bad boys, but rolling blackouts and brownouts could become as much a part of our summers as record-breaking temperatures and water rationing. And speaking of water, we have a problem: There's not enough of it. |
|
The Great Revival of Public Markets America's future may be small vendors as much as big boxes. |
Monday, September 26, 2005
|
Governors Island Name a problem that can be solved with real estate and inevitably someone offers up Governors Island. |
|
With Bilbao in Mind, Roanoke Goes for the Bold "Isn't this a glorious day for the Roanoke Valley?" Rep. Robert Goodlatte of Virginia's 6th Congressional District shouted. Roanoke Mayor C. Nelson Harris worked the crowd into a chorus of "wows." Gov. Mark Warner intoned, "This city has had the courage to be bold. This city is on that path to greatness." |
Saturday, September 24, 2005
|
If You Go Down To The Woods Today Fear of traffic risks and ‘stranger danger’ are holding our children captive indoors. For the sake of their health and development, and for the environment they will one day need to protect, we have to fi nd ways of getting them into the wild. |
Friday, September 23, 2005
|
Deal Is Reached to Put Toilets on City Streets After more than a decade of false starts, New York City officials announced yesterday that they had selected a company to remake the city's jumbled streetscape by providing aesthetic order to its thousands of bus shelters and newsstands and, perhaps most intriguing, installing 20 freestanding public toilets on city streets. |
|
Give it to us sexy, shiny, and in public! The Stirling Prize for Architecture is ten years old. What sort of buildings has it rewarded, and what has it ignored? |
|
Kill the Light, Save a Bird Tourists have always flocked to see the bright lights of New York City, but starting this week, the city is dimming parts of its renowned skyline to ward off one group of visitors: migratory birds. The Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center, the Citigroup Center, the Morgan Stanley Building and the World Financial Center are among the high-profile high-rises that have agreed to requests from the city and the Audubon Society to dim or turn off nonessential lighting at midnight. |
|
Bus boffins' "solar stops" even work in UK winter Solar technology that can light bus stops even through the British winter will soon be appearing on London's streets in a project that will give the capital the biggest network of 'solar stops' in the world. |
Thursday, September 22, 2005
|
East Bay man driven to create car-free village The world may or may not be ready for The Quarry Project, a car-free village of 1,000 homes that Lewis wants to build over a long-vacant quarry near Carlos Bee Boulevard. |
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
|
Why we should junk the green belt Where would you like to live? If you’ve just left home having grown up in the sticks, chances are you’ll opt for the alcohol-centric nightlife of Birmingham or Manchester. So that’ll be a high-rise urban shag-pad, please. If you’ve got a family and are now through the alcohol/shagging phase, you’ll go for somewhere further out with a garden. If you’re brave, you might even forsake the city altogether for a knock-through live/work cottage in the village of Broadband-on-Demand, where you can grow your own soft fruit and check your Blackberry. These are the time-honoured categories of home: urban, suburban and rural. And yet, as far as I can see, none of them fits easily into the government’s masterplan for how we should live in the 21st century. |
|
Vancouverism vs. Lower Manhattanism: Shaping the High Density City Shaping high density residential environments is the most important issue before urban designers in North America today. As the urban consequences of permanently higher energy costs sets in, and as the benefits to urbanity of properly-managed high density living become ever more evident, new debates are emerging, while old debates are falling away. |
|
Too much gray in Tokyo When returning to Tokyo from abroad, I am always struck by the colors of Narita Airport. Or rather, by the lack of colors. Narita is a gray zone. Nearly every surface, every material is gray. Carpets, doors, waiting-room seating, baggage trolleys — no matter what the question, gray is always the answer. And not just any gray. Matching grays. |
|
Rhythm and blues Prince Charles's latest experiment in community planning is inspired by a village in Florida. It hopes to transform UK housebuilding. |
|
Using Technology to Combat Nature Has Environmental and Economic Costs "Design with Nature" is the title of a weighty book written in the 1960s by landscape architect Ian L. McHarg -- and it is also precisely what we have not done in the Gulf Coast region, as Hurricane Katrina tragically demonstrated. |
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
|
With Traffic at a Crawl, Planners Talk of Tunnels For decades, underground highways in Southern California were a frustrated commuter's fantasy — too costly, too hard to build and, given the wealth of land, not necessary. But Los Angeles is in its 18th year as the nation's most congested metropolis, freeways have little or no space for new lanes and traffic experts are running out of time-shaving options. So civic leaders are joining engineers to consider burrowing the longest highway tunnels in America. |
|
Proposed Brooklyn Park Draws Class Lines When is a park just a glorified front lawn? That's the question behind the proposed Brooklyn Bridge Park, a 1.3-mile-long waterfront project overlooking one of the most spectacular views in the world: the glimmering wall of towers that rises across the East River at the tip of Manhattan. |
|
The Incredibly Bold, Audaciously Cheesy, Jaw-Droppingly Vegasified, Billion-Dollar Glam-Rock Makeover of Coney Island “Imagine something like the Bellagio hotel right now—just stop and see it,” he says, sweeping his hand in a long, slow arc over his head. “The lights. The action. The vitality. The people. We wanna evoke the same feeling you get when you’re in Vegas. It’s exciting. It’s illuminated. It’s sexy.” |
Monday, September 19, 2005
|
Extreme Makeover: Museum Edition It would seem embarrassing for any architect, let alone one as prominent as Peter Eisenman. You design a museum - your first large-scale work, a breakout project whose exterior scaffolding design, a virtual celebration of impermanence, sets the architecture world buzzing. Within just a few years, however, cracks start to show. Quite literally: the skylight leaks. The glass curtain wall lets in too much light, threatening to damage delicate artwork. The interior temperature swings by as much 40 degrees some days. |
|
Building in Green Can China move 400 million people to its cities without wreaking environmental havoc? Eco-urban designer William McDonough says yes—and Beijing is listening. |
Saturday, September 17, 2005
|
Give these people an inch and they take a city Frank Gehry should be told to scale down his two 'Prescott' towers, or Hove will suffer the fate facing London's skyline. |
|
Will build to shoot Employing a mini-DVD camera and no crew, and quizzing the likes of Bob Geldof and Julian Schnabel, Sydney Pollack has made an intimate documentary about his long-time friend Frank Gehry. |
Friday, September 16, 2005
|
Nature may offer vital clues on rebuilding New Orleans When Katrina's winds flattened Gulf Coast homes and businesses, biologist Janine Benyus looked to the trees for clues on how to rebuild. "Under a forest, you have as much biomass as you have on top -- there are root systems grafted to other root systems," Benyus said at San Francisco's Palace Hotel last week. "So when the wind blows, ... notice how many trees stood among buildings that fell. When we go back to build, we have to ask those trees: How are you still standing?" |
|
Courts with a new spark The courtyard apartment is an idea whose time has come back. Amid today's high-rise building trend, the need for such urban oases -- infused with a communal spirit -- is greater than ever. |
|
Suddenly, Those Solar Panels Don't Look So 1970's AS prices for coal, natural gas and oil have soared, solar power has been getting perhaps its most serious look from investors since President Jimmy Carter pulled on a cardigan and asked Americans to damp their furnaces. The new interest means that the handful of domestic solar stocks has been surging, too. |
|
You Can Sit on Your Parks, or Save Them While the public is by now accustomed to the idea of preserving historic buildings, landscapes are still thought of as the spaces in between, just trees and grass that can easily be changed according to changing needs. |
|
As We Build So Shall We Live While it probably won't rid the world of greed, ethnocentrism and violence, building a nonviolent city that respects other life forms and celebrates human creativity and diversity is consistent with solving those problems. The city, town, or village - this arrangement of buildings, streets, vehicles, and planned landscapes that serves as home - organizes our resources and technologies, and shapes our forms of expression. It is the key to the future healthy evolution of our species and will determine the fate of countless other species as well. |
|
Cheap Gas Is a Bad Habit What this country needs is $4-a-gallon gasoline or, maybe, $5. We don't need it today, but we do need it over the next seven to 10 years via a steadily rising oil tax. Coupled with stricter fuel economy standards, higher pump prices would push reluctant auto companies and American drivers away from today's gas guzzlers. That should be our policy. The deafening silence you hear on this crucial subject from the White House, Congress and the media is a sorry indicator of national shortsightedness. |
Thursday, September 15, 2005
|
Architecture shows 'crap' Graeme Russell, a former director of the Cube architecture centre in Manchester, says he wants to bring "entertainment and glamour" to architecture shows. |
|
World Faces Prospect of Teeming Mega-Slums A new report by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) warns that governments will have to take the lead in building some 96,150 housing units per day if the world hopes to avert a massive urban crisis in the near future. |
|
Final seafront designs go on show Plans for a controversial £250m sports and housing development on Hove seafront by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry have been finalised. |
|
A twinkle in the eye of the storm Libeskind has already hit the gym in his Hudson Street apartment. “A good hour on the treadmill,” Nina, his wife and business partner, says. “If he didn’t, he’d never get through the day.” Striding away on the walking machine he watches the History Channel and memorises poetry — Shakespearean sonnets. |
|
When Architects Plagiarize - It's not always bad. For most of the last 500 years, imitation was the sincerest form of architectural flattery. The pattern was established during the Renaissance, whose architects were trying to re-create the buildings of ancient Rome. The fact that most of these buildings lay in ruins meant that designers had to do a lot of creative reconstruction, but that didn't alter the principle of learning from—and copying—the past. Invention was necessary, but it was not the most important factor. |
|
Indiana town to become BioTown A task force of state leaders, including a Ball State University director, are hoping a tiny northwest Indiana town will become a model for rural communities by using renewable energy to fuel cars, heat homes, and power businesses. |
|
`It's about going places nobody knows about' They call themselves enemies of the ordinary. Guided by their insatiable curiosity and desire for adventure, a group of urban explorers armed with cameras has been venturing deep into abandoned buildings, deserted tunnels and old cemeteries to remember what many have been long forgotten. |
|
Cheating hearts tend to be urban, poll finds The results showed that only 6 per cent from the suburbs had engaged in a relationship with a married person, compared with 12 per cent in the urban centre. |
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
|
The Incredible Shrinking Box In the last few years, a veritable stampede of Americans has returned to city and older suburban neighborhoods, seeking shorter commutes and fun things to do. But they still end up spending Saturdays in the place they tried to leave behind: the newer suburbs. |
|
Reviving a City: The Design Perspective Even as the federal government and local developers push to resurrect New Orleans as quickly as possible in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, some architects and urban planners are contemplating the larger question of what form the city should take - whether restored, reimagined or something in between. |
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
|
Meet the New Loss If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story -- the U.S. safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world -- then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our politics in the coming decades: America befuddled about how to cope with a planet suddenly turned unstable and unpredictable. |
|
Bush to Cities: Drop Dead! The news is all bad. And it's nearly impossible to focus when confronted with the 99th article about the soaring deficit, the Bush administration's efforts to privatize Social Security, or the latest multibillion-dollar request for funding the Iraq war. The numbers are incomprehensible, the arguments read like boilerplate, and it's tempting to tune it all out. Better to let the policy wonks in Washington squabble. |
|
Architects Weigh In On Rebuilding Unlike Chicago and San Francisco, which were brash young centers of economic expansion before the Great Fire of 1871 and the earthquake of 1906, New Orleans is, by American standards, an ancient city with a declining economy. |
|
Why people hate fat Americans If Americans had to be described with one word, there's a good chance it would be 'fat'. Americans, we are constantly told, are the fattest people on the planet. Obesity is rife. Compared with other nations the Americans are not just big, but super-size. |
|
Public Transit, Public Gallery At $2.50 for a cash ticket, Montreal's metro system is probably the cheapest art museum in town. |
|
Parking costs driving business to suburbs Land prices, taxes kill downtown lots, which hurts viability of some office space. |
Monday, September 12, 2005
|
Sustainability in the Mile High City Sustainability is a central value in the Mile High City. By focusing on the interconnectedness of the social, economic, and environmental impacts of our policies and programs, we in Denver seek to ensure that our future generations will enjoy a quality of life characterized by environmental beauty, economic opportunity, and resource abundance. |
|
Denver's Stapleton: Green Urban Infill for the Masses? With nearly 600 acres of mixed-use neighborhoods nearing completion, Stapleton already claims to be the nation’s largest urban infill redevelopment. Since groundbreaking in 2001, Stapleton has quickly blended urban sophistication with suburban amenities such as parks, retail uses, and new public schools, in the process winning several national and international awards. |
|
Hate traffic? Hoof it On the face of it, getting enough people to bike and walk to work to relieve highway congestion seems ludicrous. But to Lea Schuster, who will be overseeing a $25 million initiative intended to accomplish just that, it's not far-fetched at all. |
|
Can the Way We Eat Change Metropolitan Agriculture? The Portland Example Agriculture and urbanization have traditionally been linked in discussions of loss of agricultural land to urban growth. However, there are regional variations in patterns of urban growth and in the adaptive transformation of farms. The cultural and economic context of agricultural change around Portland suggests that population increase and cultural change can provide opportunities for farming by creating markets for locally grown products. |
Saturday, September 10, 2005
|
Without Doubt, Rail Builds Better Economy Within months of its launch, the Twin Cities’ new light rail system beat initial ridership projections by 61 percent. Just last June the Twin Cities, one of the Midwest’s fastest growing metropolitan regions, celebrated the first anniversary of the Hiawatha Line, a light rail route linking downtown Minneapolis with the region’s airport and the Mall of America. |
|
Boulevard of dreams, the premiere It was 16 years ago that the Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the Central Freeway, forcing the demolition of key ramps and setting off a series of political battles over its fate. Come Friday, that fate becomes reality -- and will be put to the test -- with the opening of a replacement roadway, one that is intended to bring together a neighborhood, not divide it as the old Central Freeway had. |
|
'Zero waste' is Seattle's new garbage mantra The city of Seattle is talking trash. Moving beyond recycling to preventing garbage itself as the next generation of social and civic responsibility, Seattle Public Utilities is launching an initiative called Wasteless in Seattle. |
|
Trapped in New Orleans by the flood--and martial law Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot.... The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. |
Friday, September 9, 2005
|
Can Design Prepare for Disaster? Could more have been done?" asked Jan Egeland, a United Nations emergency relief co-ordinator, speaking last Friday of the lack of preparedness for the descent of Hurricane Katrina. "I would say every society in the world is not preparing adequately for catastrophic events." |
|
There's No Place Like Home With estimates of the time before evacuees can return to New Orleans ranging from months to years, there is an immediate need for housing for those who have been displaced. FEMA has announced that it will fill this need in a variety of ways, including renting cruise ships and hotel rooms, buying trailers, and using military bases. In his 1978 classic, Shelter After Disaster, British architect Ian Davis examines contemporary and historic experiences with providing shelter in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters. His observations are worth repeating in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. |
|
Don't Refloat - The case against rebuilding the sunken city of New Orleans. Nobody can deny New Orleans' cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let's investigate what sort of place Katrina destroyed. |
Thursday, September 8, 2005
|
Found Space
As users of space, we create associations to certain spaces by establishing connections between ourselves and those whom we share it with. As a result, there are spaces with in our built environments which become discarded due to a lack of human presence with in them. Through the use of my physical presence, I look to activate these unused spaces. |
|
Flood City MVRDV's movie of their urban design for the Dutch city of Kampen. |
|
Gas prices driving commuters to bicycles Now that we're at the point where one or two months' of gas can cost as much as a bicycle, I think people are looking for alternatives to the high cost of gas. |
|
Eldertopia or Autotopia? It has been said that those of use who are able-bodied are only so temporarily; eventually old age and infirmity will take their toll. |
|
Car-less in the Eye of Katrina The reason so many lives are in jeopardy from Hurricane Katrina is a result of our extreme dependence on cars and the lack of planning for public transportation, both for regular use and for emergencies. |
|
Battle of the bricks - The Stirling Prize shortlist is the first shot in the style wars Return to your drawing boards, architects, and prepare for war! Will Alsop, British architecture’s fiftysomething “enfant” terrible, has enlisted a Gang of Four to take on the establishment that has dominated British architecture since the 1980s. “It’s become intolerable,” Alsop says. “The tyranny of boredom. Much as I respect them, it’s time for change.” |
Wednesday, September 7, 2005
|
Pumping Us Dry The Katrina tragedy is an absolutely perfect storm for oil companies. |
|
Vanished, Under Force of Time and an Inconstant Earth Only the wind inhabits the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado, birds and vines the pyramids of the Maya. Sand and silence have swallowed the clamors of frankincense traders and camels in the old desert center of Ubar. Troy was buried for centuries before it was uncovered. Parts of the Great Library of Alexandria, center of learning in the ancient world, might be sleeping with the fishes, off Egypt's coast in the Mediterranean. |
|
Filling a Desperate Need for Shelter Begins With Cruise Ships and Proposals Phase 1 of the government's plan to provide desperately needed transitional housing for tens of thousands of hurricane evacuees is scheduled to begin this morning, when homeless elderly people from various Texas locations board 30 buses destined for two Carnival cruise ships in Galveston, Tex. |
|
Maine man arms self with pistol, bicycles to safety Mike Stanford armed himself with a .45-caliber handgun and rode his bicycle through the filthy flooded streets of New Orleans last week before finding safety 175 miles away and flying to Maine. |
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
|
Reconfiguring the waterfront
To walk the East River waterfront from the Battery to the Williamsburg Bridge is to pick one's way through a derelict but magical terrain of heart-swelling views, parking lots, red-brick memories of New York City's stevedore past and stretches of cracked asphalt slick with fish slime. |
|
In Europe, High-Tech Flood Control, With Nature's Help The Dutch case is one of many in which low-lying cities and countries with long histories of flooding have turned science, technology and raw determination into ways of forestalling disaster. London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on the Adriatic. Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on stilts as emergency havens for flood victims. Experts in the United States say the foreign projects are worth studying for inspiration about how to rebuild New Orleans once the deadly waters of Hurricane Katrina recede into history. |
|
Smaller is big at food chains Two of the biggest burger chains -- Wendy's and Burger King -- are developing restaurants with smaller kitchens and seating areas that operate profitably in small towns, cost less to build and fit into cheaper parcels of land. A third chain, Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, also is trimming the square-foot fat, and even Applebee's, a sit-down chain, has reduced restaurant size in rural areas. Analysts said the smaller stores operate more efficiently and allow chains to stake their claim both in sparsely populated areas that generate less traffic and urban areas where large plots of land are scarce and have become increasingly expensive. |
|
The Urban Green Revolution Forget watered-down global treaties among nations... cities are the next environmental frontier. Jaime Lerner is beaming like a proud grandfather. After speaking at the United Nations summit on urban sustainability, held here in early June, the 67-year-old architect and former mayor of the Brazilian city of Curitiba has just been mobbed by adoring fans. For the founder of the growing green cities movement, this is nothing new. He's long been the darling of progressive urban policy wonks for the way he transformed his hometown into what many now call the greenest city on earth. |
|
China plans networks of high-speed buses China plans to build networks of high-speed city buses to tackle congestion and soaring demand for oil, a senior transport official said yesterday. |
Monday, September 5, 2005
|
Gas Prices Drive Man to Commute by Horse Jim Jundt was so determined to rein in his spending on gasoline that he got out of bed early and rode his 14-year-old quarterhorse mare to work. |
|
My Way of Dealing With Rising Gas Prices Today I took a step toward having more efficient means of motorized transportation -- I bought a small motor scooter. A Honda Metropolitan in "Salsa" red to be exact. |
|
When Chicago Baked Unheeded lessons from another great urban catastrophe. |
|
City's Rich Culture Proves Lucky Too Fortunately situated on higher ground, many of New Orleans' most famous landmarks appear as if they will weather the storm. |
|
A strong, soulful, wicked, frail city After disaster recedes, the rebuilding will begin. Artists and others wonder: What will become of the culture? |
|
Man-Made Mistakes Increase Devastation Of 'Natural' Disasters While storms such as Hurricane Katrina are sometimes called an act of God or a natural disaster, the devastation they leave behind is not. Some scientists believe even the storms themselves could be at least partly man-made. |
Saturday, September 3, 2005
|
The Jewel of the South New York 1835, Chicago 1871, Galveston 1900, San Francisco 1906. To this list of apocalyptic urban disaster must now be added, New Orleans 2005. As evidence slowly becomes available, it is clear that the effect of Katrina on the city is of epic proportions. In many ways, the case of New Orleans is even worse than its historic antecedents. Although the resources being marshaled in the rescue operation are greater—how did they manage before helicopters?—so is the problem; the city is much larger, and its infrastructure more complex and hence more difficult to replace. |
|
Future Face of New Orleans Has an Uncertain Look for Now The impulse to rebuild follows any catastrophe within hours, relief drawn on a future account when there is little comfort in the present. But when New Orleans staggers out of the devastation now engulfing it, it will face questions of an unimagined scale, beginning with how much of its urban fabric - from the cherished to the derelict - will even be salvageable as a foundation for rebuilding. |
|
For Its Motorists, Only Parts of Rome Prove to Be Eternal "The massacre of the cobblestones," as one Roman official put it, is well under way, part of a city program to lay asphalt on streets that are used mostly by cars, buses and scooters. On pedestrian walkways and piazzas treasured by tourists, like Piazza Venezia, the city has pledged to keep the cobblestones, called sampietrini. (They were supposedly first used around St. Peter's Basilica; there is also lore about St. Peter's having saved as many souls as there are cobblestones in Rome.) |
Friday, September 2, 2005
|
Adopt An Architect / Disaster Relief Information Our friends at Archinect have set up a resource for displaced students and architects from Hurricane Katrina as well as streaming news updates from New Orleans. |
|
Hurricane Katrina Our thoughts are with all those left stranded without food or water, those coping with the loss of loved ones and those left homeless by the disaster. Over the course of the next several weeks we will be evaluating ways that we can help locally-based architects and community groups rebuild their homes and communities. |
|
A Sad Day, Too, for Architecture We are just beginning to appreciate the human disaster occurring in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have already perished. Hundreds of thousands will lose their homes and all their worldly possessions. Untold numbers of businesses will close their doors, throwing huge numbers of people out of work. New Orleans, its population already in decline, now faces economic and social collapse. It also faces the loss of some of America's most notable historic architecture. Maybe not in the French Quarter, which may emerge relatively intact, or the Garden District, which was spared most of the flooding. The dangers lie in neighborhoods like Tremé and Mid-City, which extend along Bayou Road toward Lake Pontchartrain and are rich in 18th- and 19th-century homes, shops, churches and social halls. They have been badly hit by the violent winds or torrents of water. And so have hundreds of other important buildings and vernacular structures throughout the city and across the breadth of South Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. |
|
British firm designs Chinese Manhattan Arup, the London-based consultancy, was last week chosen as master planner of the first phase of the multi-billion pound Dongtan “eco-city”, which is being developed by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation, the Hong Kong-quoted investment arm of the Shanghai city government. The new city will be built on the eastern end of Chongming, a large island that sits in the mouth of the Yangtze river delta a few miles northeast of the city centre, and close to Shanghai’s new airport. |
|
Buildings are from Mars, people from Earth Modern architecture in the early part of the 21st Century reflects the visions of science fiction writers and film makers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. |
Thursday, September 1, 2005
|
SUV City: Short Animated Movie Weclome to SUV City! The friendliest place to drive your Big SUV! Our exclusive, “SUV friendly” community is custom designed for you, the proud owner of a Big SUV. |
|
Disaster Engineering New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama lie devastated in the days-old wake of Hurricane Katrina. As water floods through New Orleans and desperate rescues continue, our hearts go out to the hundreds of thousands whose lives have been devastated and to the untold thousands whose loved ones have been lost. |
|
The end of grass as we know it. The American appetite for grass farming has always amazed me. With only 6 percent of the world's population, we account for 70 percent of the world's small-scale grass farmers. For 50 years, grass farming has been the single largest difference between cities and suburbs. Forget all-white public schools and low taxes. It's about grass farming. But it's a way of life that is starting to disappear and may well collapse entirely in the next generation. The next time you read a phrase like "high gas prices will be with us for a long time," turn the page and read something else. The writer is either lazy or deluded. The price of gas is NEVER going down in any significant and sustained way. |
|
Families turn to scooters to battle gas prices When Kathy Helland and Doug Montgomery bought scooters for the kids earlier this year, they were thinking about fun, not saving money. “When the gas prices went up, they became an even better deal,” Kathy Helland said. |
|
A Green Blueprint A Portland neighborhood may become a model for sustainable retrofits. |
[Archives]
Search entries: