Urbanism News
Friday, September 29, 2006
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Communities Unready for Elderly Less than half of the nation's communities have begun preparing to deal with the needs of the elderly, whose ranks will swell dramatically with the aging of the baby boomers, according to a study to be released Wednesday. |
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Londoners say no to extra planning powers for the Mayor Fifty four per cent of Londoners oppose plans to award the Mayor of London extra powers to decide planning applications across the capital – according to a GfK NOP survey released today by the Association of London Government. |
Thursday, September 28, 2006
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The Ecology of Cities Urbanization is one of the dominant demographic trends of our time. In 1900, 150 million people lived in cities. By 2000, it was 2.9 billion people, a 19-fold increase. By 2007 more than half of us will live in cities—making us, for the first time, an urban species. |
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Hong Kong Villages When the British occupied a "barren rock" following the First Opium War in 1841, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston was "greatly mortified and disappointed" at the island's perceived worthlessness. Since then, however, Hong Kong has become one of the world's most important entrepreneurial, architectural, banking, and trading centers. |
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New Ideals for Building in the Face of Modernism Who will stand up to the giants of Modernism? That was the question facing a group of young European architects in the early 1950’s. Chafing within the confines of a functionalist orthodoxy that tended to reduce human individuals to numbers on a chart, they banded together under the name Team 10 to propose architecture grounded in a sense of community identity. But some critics felt that the results never matched the rhetoric, that the group’s designs often seemed more like a timid appeal for the old man’s approval than an insolent rejection of the past. |
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Spicing Up Downtown What do songs, food, and David Byrne have to do with lower Manhattan? Together they inspired a recipe book full of ideas for reimagining the area below 14th Street. |
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Slumming Up Marina City One of Chicago's greatest architectural complexes is undergoing a bit of renovative vandalism, and there's not much anyone can do about it. |
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
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Building Excitement The 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale looks at how cities shape our lives. |
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Berlin’s Post-Wall Master Builder Retires To some he is this city’s savior: a politically savvy, coolheaded master builder who has reconstructed Berlin with speed and conviction. Others call him an empire builder whose absolutism has wasted an unparalleled opportunity for modern city planning. |
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
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High Point: Seattle's green community Not just a few "green" homes but an entire "green" community? Lovely old trees, creative plantings, sidewalks and streets tied to a path-breaking "natural" water-drainage system? Energy-efficient new condos and townhomes, both market rate and public housing, all so attractive you can't tell which is which? Parks, vistas, a strong neighborhood feeling? |
Monday, September 25, 2006
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Architects asked for riverfront inspiration Some of the world's best-known architects, from Frank Gehry and Rafael Vińoly to Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster, could have been forgiven a look of puzzlement when they opened their mail one day last week. There before them was a large black box containing pralines, a can of French Market coffee and chicory, an Emeril Lagasse cookbook, a history of New Orleans' "urban landscape," an iPod full of New Orleans songs and -- of all things -- "Da Mayor in Your Pocket," a device that plays recordings of six of Mayor Ray Nagin's more memorably colorful comments. |
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Toronto's growing sky high The only thing missing from this space-age city is ... space. |
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If You Build It, Will They Come? If the Guthrie Theater celebrates the city’s industrial legacy, it is also part of a familiar formula that draws on a blend of cultural institutions, convention centers, sports venues and brand-name architecture in an often desperate attempt to resurrect dying urban centers. This can turn living cities into Potemkin villages: sanitized shopping environments for the global consumer. |
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Zaha Hadid unveils the Forest of Towers in London Following on from Zaha Hadid’s acclaimed retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the London based practice has announced the unveiling of the installation Forest of Towers at a new temporary space on Holmes Road London NW5. |
Saturday, September 23, 2006
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Return to Milton Keynes
It was always supposed to be the town of the future, and now it is to get its very own TV station. So did the Milton Keynes experiment work, after all? |
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How buildings make us happy Alain de Botton only takes on the biggest subjects. Still in his 30s, the Swiss-born author has written eight books on such topics as love, romance, status, the consolations of philosophy and how literature (in his case, Proust) can change your life. Clearly a student of philosophy, but of the most appealing and accessible sort, de Botton always goes back to the basics. In his bestselling The Art of Travel (2002), he asked, why do we want to go to unfamiliar places? What does travel give us? How can we maximize our chances for more delightful voyaging? Now, in The Architecture of Happiness, he considers the connection between our feelings and the buildings in which we work, pray and live. |
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Shaped by Modernism The buildings we inhabit, the chairs we sit on, and the graphic design that surrounds us have all been influenced by Modernism. |
Friday, September 22, 2006
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Early cities were 'built on fear, not need to socialise' Early urban civilisations, far from being an expression of social and cultural advancement, were simply a means of survival in a changing world. As the climate became drier 6,000 years ago, and the monsoon system over North Africa and Asia collapsed, people found it increasingly difficult to sustain a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. |
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Making the Connection Between HGTV and Downtown Revitalization A convergence of renewed interest in urban downtowns, attractive retail rents, and the popularity of do-it-yourself home improvement and interior decorating could result in downtown being tomorrow's hot "furniture row,". |
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Urban Legend The craze over coffeeshops and condos won't revive American cities. Improving urban life for the middle class will. |
Thursday, September 21, 2006
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Big Digs The problem with underground architecture. |
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After a Half-Century of Decline, Signs of Better Times for Buffalo For years Buffalo’s psyche has borne the scars of a once-mighty city reduced to a shadow of its former First the Erie Canal, which helped propel Buffalo to greatness in the 19th century, was made obsolete by railroads and highways. Then the heavy industry that had sprung up with the canal traffic collapsed: dozens of factories in the region, mainly steel and grain operations, closed in the mid-1970’s alone. The economic decline was so severe that half the people left — the population sliding from 580,000 in the mid-20th century to about 290,000 today. |
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Building cities of the future at Venice Swiss star architect Bernard Tschumi is representing his homeland at the tenth International Architecture Exhibition in Venice with a futuristic design for a city. |
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Virtual cityscapes show town planners the future Virtual reconstructions of real cities are giving town planners and architects a clearer picture of the potential impact of future designs. |
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How Bad Leadership Spoils Good Planning In many ways, a successful urban planner is first and foremost a leader, yet far too many professionals lack the ability to lead, and ignore the importance of cultivating good leadership skills. |
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China: Still the Kingdom of Bicycles? Cars are running China's national treasure off the road. |
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Park along shoreline could be `spectacular' "The potential is here to have a spectacular park," Corner insists, "a park unlike any other. Many of the ingredients are already in place, so it's not just a pipe dream. It offers a feeling of wilderness and a sense of discovery. We don't want to sanitize or anesthetize any of these qualities." |
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
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Deconstructing a monumental ego
"That's why the cult of the starchitect is so reprehensible," Bruce Wagner was saying as he sat in the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge. He was ranting about the narcissism that motivates high-profile architectural competitions, and the ridiculousness of over-designed memorials to the dead. |
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Signposts for an urban civilisation The Architecture Biennale has, for a generation now, been a forum for newness, the place where professionals pick up on the new theories, aesthetics and ideas from around the world, a place where architects can congratulate themselves. When it began two decades ago architects were supremely unpopular, widely perceived as intent on destroying all that was beautiful and humane. They needed to gather to convince themselves they had something to contribute, that someone was listening. Since then they have become celebrities and pop-heroes, jet-setting superstarchitects single-handedly reviving post-industrial wastelands, reinvigorating city-centres, transforming slums into photo-shoot penthouses. |
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Super-skyscraper era far from over For a few months in 2001, architects worried that the era of the super- skyscraper was over. Even as ash from the World Trade Center still swirled, it was clear that the high floors of the twin towers had been a deadly trap. Experts wondered if anyone would ever build tall again. The answer was quickly revealed to be an emphatic "yes." |
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Big Brother is shouting at you Big Brother is not only watching you - now he's barking orders too. Britain's first 'talking' CCTV cameras have arrived, publicly berating bad behaviour and shaming offenders into acting more responsibly. |
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Beijing will ban private cars from Olympic sporting venues in 2008 Beijing will prohibit residents from driving their own cars to attend Olympic events at the 2008 Games, China's official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday, unveiling the latest special measure the city is planning to reduce traffic. |
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A vote for fewer cars Stockholmers grew to like the `congestion tax'. |
Monday, September 18, 2006
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Swedes moving fast on biogas Here in Sweden's fifth-largest city, the road to the future is fuelled by biogas. The city's 65 buses as well as two-thirds of its taxi fleet run on methane-rich biogas. Then there are the city's 30 official vehicles and a growing number of private cars that also use biogas, about 1,000 and counting. There's even a biogas train, the world's first, a retrofitted diesel that carries passengers between Linkoping and Vastervik. It emits 60 times less carbon than ordinary diesel engines. |
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Lovely sauna, guys - but where's the architecture? The Venice Architecture Biennale has lots of clever gimmicks. Pity they forgot about buildings. |
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Seoul to Make More Room for Bicycles The Seoul Metropolitan Government said it plans to increase the number of bicycle lanes and parking spaces to encourage more people to bike for short commutes. |
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Streetsblog Interview: Ryan Russo Ryan Russo is the New York City Department of Transportation's Director for Street Management and Safety, a newly-created job that he started in July. Previously, Russo worked as DOT's Downtown Brooklyn Transportation Coordinator where he was instrumental in designing and developing a number of improvements for pedestrians, cyclists and more livable streets (PDF file) over the last three years. |
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Urban growth changes agricultural education As the Treasure Valley grows, becoming less rural and more urban, agricultural educators are changing the way they approach teaching their subject. In the Treasure Valley, the primary focus of an agricultural curriculum is no longer production — teaching students how to grow certain crops or manage livestock, for example. Now, students are likely to spend more time in a greenhouse than in a field or pen. That’s not to say that schools have stopped teaching production agriculture. But now, the coursework includes a greater emphasis on technology and encompasses more areas like floral design and greenhouse maintenance. |
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Corporate Citizenship and Urban Problem Solving Business-led civic organizations have historically played an important role in urban policymaking, planning, and renewal. However, shifting economic forces—including corporate consolidation, industrial decline, and the suburbanization of many businesses—have diminished the capacity of these organizations, potentially stripping cities of a significant advocate. |
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Podcast - Review Of Joel Kotkin's 'The City: A Global History' Planetizen presents an audio book review of The City: A Global History, renowned author and urban commentator Joel Kotkin's condensed history of all the major cities of the world. Kotkin attempts to boil down the entire history of the world's greatest cities into 200 pages, and surprisingly he doesn't do too bad. |
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The opera house we didn't build Here in faraway Norway is the opera house Toronto should have built. Unlike the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, a generic box that looks no farther than its own black-brick walls, this one is all about national ambition, civic pride, city renewal and commitment to culture. Designed by Snohetta Architects, it is meant to be a landmark in every sense of the word. Located on the old Oslo docks, it was also designed to kick-start waterfront revitalization. Sound familiar? It should. Indeed, the similarities between Oslo and Toronto are startling, but not the response. |
Saturday, September 16, 2006
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Neighbors collaborate to renovate "What's pretty special is it's contemporary architecture but respectful of the context of the neighborhood," developer Holly Wiedemann said. It's been an unusual example of collaboration between a developer and a neighborhood wanting to focus on the arts, Wiedemann and Johnston said. |
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Redefining sculpture is Richard Serra's goal "Public sculpture used to have a code," says the San Francisco native, who acquired his early metalworking experience during a stint in a steel factory. "There was a given iconography written into the way we worshiped our heroes. Public sculpture had to do with the depiction of a historical time or event." |
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The group dynamic Architecture is a bulky and expensive thing to collect. However, next to the absurd prices paid for art, antiques and design, it can begin to look like a secure and useful investment. “Curation” has become the latest buzzword in residential real estate. Developers differentiate high-end schemes by acting as museum directors or art patrons, creating a “collection” of houses from architects usually found designing cultural institutions. You too can live in a masterpiece, the literature invariably says. It’s off-the-shelf avant garde. |
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Germany Champions Sustainability At Architecture Show Sunday saw the opening of the 2006 Architecture Biennale, and many are saying it's more about sociology than urban planning. Entitled "Cities, Architecture and Society," it looks at the changing face of today's urban environments and showcases work from fifty countries. "One of the biggest global problems of today and in the years to come is that of urban progress and population growth," said Davide Croff, chairman of the Venice Biennale. "In 2005, for the first time, the number of the planet's inhabitants living in cities surpassed 50 percent." |
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Anish Kapoor Rips Open Urban Fabric With First New York Artwork As the song suggests, “Autumn in New York will lift you up when you’re down.” Between September 19 and October 27, sculptor Anish Kapoor’s concave, 35-foot-diameter Sky Mirror will attempt a similar feat at Rockefeller Center, where it will reflect Fifth Avenue life in inverse. This is the first New York public artwork for Kapoor, whose works include the popular Cloud Gate at Chicago’s Millennium Park. |
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Trying to tame the mega-city The Architecture Biennale tackles the problems stemming from the great migration into cities. Paradigm shifts rarely emerge quite as dramatically as the one that dominates this year's Architecture Biennale in Venice. In the curatorial equivalent of capital letters, the exhibition announces what has become increasingly apparent to those in the field: that architecture, after spending much of the 1980s and early 1990s mired in obscure theory, and the last 10 years preoccupied with image, is moving into an encouraging period of engagement — with the future shape of rapidly metastasizing mega-cities, with politicians and developers, with poverty and with environmental destruction. |
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\Chicago celebrates architect's 150th birthday For a guy born 150 years ago, architect Louis Sullivan has been in the news a lot lately. Unfortunately, not much of it has been good news for buildings designed by the man sometimes called the "father of modernism." |
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What's wrong with us? Stockholm turned around its waterfront in a few years. All we can do is talk. |
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Maybe the grass is greener when it's gone One of the first things you note about Jim Crist's front lawn is that, well, he doesn't have one. |
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Living Wage Dies in Big Box Battle Only a few years ago, suburb-saturating big box retailers saw the future, and it was urban. Long underserved by major retailers yet not quite as poor as the retail executives once imagined, urban areas began attracting Wal-Mart and Target and Home Depot and the rest. Known for their expansive properties in the suburbs, these retailers sometimes adapted their stores to urban settings in novel ways, such as the multi-story Home Depots that have been shoehorned into sites in Chicago and New York since the early 2000s. |
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Sweden's burning with enthusiasm With a population of 500,000, Malmo, Sweden's third-largest city, is typical. As part-owner of Sysav, a corporation created by 14 district municipalities, Malmo operates an incineration plant that burns waste and in the process provides district heating and electricity. Indeed, 40 per cent of Malmo homes are heated by Sysav, which also supplies 40 per cent of local power. |
Friday, September 15, 2006
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Sex and the City Part 2: Field Notes from the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale Curator Ricky Burdett is not the only one thinking about sex at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Spain has taken a brazenly gendered stance with its offering “Spain (f.) We, the Cities,” and starts by noting that both the country’s very name (Espańa) and the Spanish word for cities (ciudades) are gendered female in the Spanish language. |
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Map for urban growth Experts have questioned the town-planning concept and the Besu panel’s competence in delivering such a master plan. “Town planning as a subject is obsolete for an old city like Calcutta. It can only apply to new towns. What we need are urban design guidelines in sync with the urban character of specific zones,” observed architect Unmesh Kirtikar, member of think tank body Centre for Built Environment. |
Thursday, September 14, 2006
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Inside the Urban Crunch, and Its Global Implications Even architects like to let their hair down once in a while, and the Venice Biennale offers the ideal setting. Between leisurely drinks and gossip, architects stroll over to the Castello Gardens or the Arsenale to catch up on what their brethren are up to in other parts of the world. The big surprise for those who made it to the weekend opening of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition was that it was so hard to find the architecture. Organized by Richard Burdett in the cavernous, decaying rooms of the Arsenale, the core of the show is a sprawling, ambitious look at the evolution of cities — Barcelona, Mumbai, Cairo, Caracas — in an era when the global population is pouring into urban areas at a fantastic rate. Mr. Burdett packs his exhibition with eye-popping statistics, painting a picture of emerging megacities in which poverty is as stunning a feature as density or scale. |
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Chasing Zero Last spring I began a month-long experiment in extreme urban environmentalism. This was not an act of overzealous deprivation: I ate no wheat grass, I wore no hemp. As much as possible, I wanted to live my normal, happily indulgent New York life, but to do so with as minimal an impact as I could manage. Relying on locally grown foods, renewable energies, basic conservation practices, and auto-free transit, I discovered that in New York, as in a growing number of other cities in the United States, the good life is closer than you might think. |
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Thames Town or Ghost Town When in 2001 Shanghai mayor Chen Liangyu presented his inspiring vision to create one city and nine towns in “foreign style”, he might have imagined the temptations of having an original espresso in a gondolier, some German Gemuetlichkeit in a wooden farm or a freshly draught ale from the pub around the corner. |
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Q+A: Zoë Ryan, Senior Curator of the Van Alen Institute “The Good Life: New Public Spaces for Recreation”, is the Van Alen Institute’s latest exhibition, and its biggest undertaking to date. It features 70 urban parks, interventions, and buildings from around the world designed to accommodate contemporary notions of recreation. Open until October 1 at Pier 40—the first Van Alen show to take place outside its sixth-floor gallery/office in New York’s Flatiron neighborhood—the location represents a kind of closure for the group, a champion of public space, which held an ideas competition for reviving Pier 40 back in spring 1998. Senior Curator Zoë Ryan spoke with RECORD about new trends that are encapsulated by “The Good Life,” and how the exhibition represents a new chapter in the Van Alen’s own evolution. |
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Designis Personae The architecture crit—that tragicomic rite of passage—often has a cast of characters worthy of Shakespeare. |
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Car dealer's energy blowing in the wind Car tycoon Joe Zanchin says he was so tired of being part of the pollution problem that he invested $400,000 in a power-producing windmill to make his new car dealership in Maple energy efficient. And on windy days it'll be electrically self-sufficient, too. "I'd like to set an example, to help fix the energy crisis, instead of being one of the guys who helps create it," says Zanchin, 65, who oversees 16 car dealerships in Greater Toronto and another four under construction. |
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Will Toronto follow Swedes down road to less traffic? Around the world, people will be paying special attention to the Swedish election this Sunday. In addition to voting for all three levels of government, the residents of the capital will also cast ballots to approve — or not — a congestion tax. Like the London congestion zone before it, the Stockholm experiment is of enormous interest to urban planners everywhere, except, perhaps, Canada. |
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In the Netherlands, Life Runs on 2 Wheels (Sometimes 3) With more than two bicycles per person and a landscape as flat as a pancake, the Netherlands is a cyclists’ Eden. A generation or so ago, bicycles were popular substitutes for cars, which were too expensive for many people and wasteful, in a country below sea level and thus finely attuned to environmental matters. Now, with greater affluence, more free time and even greater environmental concerns, the Dutch are turning to bicycles in ever greater numbers. Sales are booming, and there is a proliferation of designs for all sorts of purposes. |
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Scraphouse: Putting junk in perspective Film shows how city's trash became a home in 30 days. |
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Basques will not recoup Guggenheim investments until 2010 A new study by the economist Beatriz Plaza of the University of the Basque Country suggests that the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao will not return a profit on the public funds paid to establish the institution until 2010 at the earliest, despite reports from the museum that this investment has already been paid off. |
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Florida county plans to vaporize landfill trash A Florida county has grand plans to ditch its dump, generate electricity and help build roads - all by vaporizing garbage at temperatures hotter than the sun. |
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Alma Matters - Colleges and universities are learning what it takes to go green The greening of academe is nothing new, but it seems to have taken root in a big way. Today, it's not just about doing a few good, green things -- recycling, buying green energy, building green buildings, and all the rest -- and it's not just about saving money or being seen as a good neighbor. It's about being seen as a sustainability leader in order to attract students, funding, and media attention. |
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3rd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam POWER – Producing the Contemporary City is the theme of the third International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, which opens in the Kunsthal on May 24, 2007. Two major exhibitions, Visionary Power and The New Dutch City, which will run through September 2, 2007, will show how architecture and urban design can once more play a prominent role within the complex crucible of forces generated by the contemporary city. The curator of the biennale on this occasion is the Rotterdam-based Berlage Institute, the internationally renowned post-doctoral academic institute for architects and urban designers. |
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New York City Announces Major Bike Safety Improvement Initiative New York City Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall today joined Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly to announce a series of unprecedented bicycle safety improvements, including the addition of 200 miles of new on-street bicycle facilities (paths, lanes and routes) over the next three years. The agencies also announced the release of a joint report describing the factors that contributed to the deaths and serious injuries of bicyclists over the past decade. |
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Real Time Rome
Real Time Rome is the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, directed by professor Richard Burdett. The project aggregated data from cell phones (obtained using Telecom Italia's innovative Lochness platform), buses and taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time. By revealing the pulse of the city, the project aims to show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment. In the long run, will it be possible to reduce the inefficiencies of present day urban systems and open the way to a more sustainable urban future? |
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Drivers with dementia reluctant to hang up keys A significant percentage of older drivers with mild to moderate dementia continue to get behind the wheel, researchers have found, and they're calling on provincial governments to give doctors the tools they need to help persuade such patients to give up their car keys for good. |
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This Land Is Your Land Landfills and prisons and dams, oh my! Visitors to the Land Use Database (ludb.clui.org) will find these and a lot more—bombing ranges, nuclear test sites, UFO sighting spots, the World’s Largest Thermometer—all cataloged with location information, links, and brief, often pithy descriptions. The database is a creation of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a Los Angeles–based research and education organization that since 1994 has been documenting the reshaping of the natural landscape in the United States, from the mundane (tunnels, bridges) to the notorious (Alcatraz, Three Mile Island) to the comically bizarre (the Amazing Maize Maze, the Big Muskie Coal Scoop Bucket). Part sober documentation of the man-made environment, part slyly humorous conceptual-art project, it’s an enterprise that can take a while to wrap one’s head around. |
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
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When in Venice.... London-based Biennale director Ricky Burdett’s decision to focus on, like, cities, rather than using the million-money-shot, superstar strategy of past years has left us feeling like so many whipped schoolboys. Ricky wants us to put off childish things, and remember: buildings sometimes have other buildings right next to them, and we should think more about that and less about our design egos. It seems that Rick’s laptop has Excel installed, rather than 3d Studio Max. Or even Rhino. The exhibition was mostly statistics (has anyone before worked out the GDP per capita of New York in euros?), in an audacious attempt to transform our beloved biennale into a convention of traffic engineers. Not everyone liked this trend. We have always admired Odile Decq for sticking with being a goth despite everyone else leaving it behind in 1989, but she wasn’t happy this weekend. “It’s like architecture is a bad word, all of a sudden,” she was heard to exclaim. Oh, it’s a dark day indeed when these questions surface about this glorious profession. |
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Sex and the City: Field Notes from the 10th Venice Architecture The Biennale has a long tradition of bringing star power to deliver its chosen message and this year was no exception. Richard (“Ricky”) Burdett, the global rock star of urbanism, has delivered on that promise as director of this landmark exhibition. Burdett acknowledges that while urbanism is hardly thought of as a glamorous subject, it may well hold the key to our survival on this planet. “What I’m trying to do is not to diminish the importance of architecture – but to place it in a much wider context. Architectural decisions have deep social implications, and what I have been trying to do is to link the physical with the social.” |
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Herzog Explains Links Between Sex, Skin, Cooking, Architecture Herzog: Architecture should optimize the ingredients that you have. If you badly want to eat a burger but have vegetables and pasta on the table, you shouldn't try to cook a burger. Many architects try to make a burger even though they lack the ingredients for it. |
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Public Domain: The Next Generation of American Public Spaces At nearly the same time as Whitman was writing Leaves of Grass, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were crafting their design for Central Park in New York, drawing on a sense of place they shared with the poet. Olmsted, like Whitman, felt that New Yorkers should interact: “There need to be places where the rich and poor, the cultivated and the self-made shall be attracted together and encouraged to assimilate.” Vaux described the natural elements of the new park as “a translation of democratic ideals into trees and dirt.” Central Park, completed in 1873 and occupying 843 acres, established great public spaces as essential to American democracy and urban life. Today, the designers of a new generation of American public spaces draw inspiration from Olmsted and Vaux. The best new parks, like Central Park, offer pause from the speed of the city, frame spectacular views, and, most essentially, create versatile spaces for all kinds of people to do all kinds of things. They also provide an element of unmanicured wildness within the tamed city. |
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High Visibility Currently standing alone on 21 acres, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s museum takes on an added public role. |
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Petra Blaisse Petra blaisse and I are standing in the passport control queue in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Somehow this is both the most mundane and, for its strangeness, the most exotic place to start an interview. It’s 7.45am and the Dutch designer – coiffed and polished in her long apple-green coat – is impossibly elegant for this time of the morning. She is also the only person in line whose passport is sheathed in the polychromatic stripes of the European Union flag proposed by Rem Koolhaas. In an hour’s time she will just make her flight to Riga, while ten minutes later I’ll be boarding one to London. For now though, she is serenity personified, and it’s rubbing off on me. |
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Britain: Top of the Scofflaw List The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said the United States Embassy owed $1.6 million in unpaid traffic-congestion charges and fines, making it the worst offender in the city. Embassy employees have not paid the charges — Ł8 ($15) a day for any car entering central London — since July 2005, arguing that the charge is a tax; diplomats are exempt from taxes. But London officials say the charge is a toll, not a tax, and say that British diplomats pay tolls in America. |
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Review: Future City The Barbican’s survey of the architectural avant-garde over the last 50 years is like a members’ club. You only make it in if you show the right kind of originality. Architecture seems to nurture a canon of the avant-garde. If at some point in your career you were ever edgy, you stay that way, particularly in the eyes of architectural historians, academics and curators. |
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Live long and prosper — some places The longest-living Americans can expect to survive decades longer than the worst off – and the explanation is far more complex than poverty, a startling report on health disparities says. It turns out that where you live, combined with race and income, plays a huge role in whether you die young, says a study issued Monday that contends that the differences are so stark it is as if there were eight separate United States instead of one. |
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Hanamidori Cultural Centre Unlike Japanese gardens, which are a precise embodiment of certain philosophical principles, parks in modern Japan are filled with cultural anomalies. Take Showa Memorial Park, a large recreational park in the western suburbs of Tokyo. In addition to carefully manicured trees, lakes and flowers, it has: desolate landscapes of underused leisure equipment; juvenilia such as a motorised train tricked up to look like a cartoon stagecoach from an American Western; and statues and fountains that draw on strange aesthetic languages of local government optimism that one suspects would not be out of place in North Korea or Maoist China. The Hanamidori Cultural Centre, designed by the Tokyo practice Atelier Bow-Wow in collaboration with Toyo Ito, takes its place uneasily amid this landscape. Could it be at home here? |
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From onions to a metropolis, Korea plans a new city Right now the 4.5-square-kilometer site is mostly farm land planted with green onions, but in a few years South Korea expects a metropolis will rise from the spot, with commercial and residential properties, schools, hospitals and cultural facilities. |
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Review: Else/Where: Mapping Mapping is the investigative tool of the information-addicted early 21st century. No longer do we simply map topography; we map online networks, purchasing patterns, mobile phone traffic, people flow, brain activity and the human genome. It is an interesting indicator of our times that we can map spaces that don’t actually exist anywhere, such as the internet. For, as Dirk van Weelden points out here, cyberspace is not really a space at all since it “cannot be separated from the activity conducted within it”. |
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Greening the Ivory Tower Conserving energy and creating healthy materials, products, buildings, and communities are essential components of good design, and the tools and technologies necessary to accomplish these goals are only just beginning to be thoroughly integrated into the curricula of many design schools. In this special installment of Learning Curve—now expanded to include both apprenticeship programs and initiatives coming out of traditional colleges and universities—we look at a handful of new institutes, programs, and schools teaching environmental principles to the next generation of architects, landscape architects, engineers, and conservators, as well as extending their knowledge into the broader community. |
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
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Second Street District Austin’s Second Street District is a six-block infill and redevelopment project located north of Town Lake and along the south edge of downtown Austin, Texas. The city’s vision for the project is broad: “to enhance the identity and image of downtown Austin as a civic and cultural destination for residents, visitors, and businesses while preserving and enlivening Austin’s sense of place.” More specifically, the Second Street District Streetscape Improvement Project (SSDSIP) calls for “the inclusion of a critical mass of retail (and other pedestrian-oriented uses) linked by a coherent and uniquely identified, pedestrian environment… linking two important civic destinations—the new City Hall and the Convention Center Complex—along what will become downtown’s key shopping or ‘pedestrian-dominant’ spine: Second Street.” |
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Vision Not Accomplished We know that the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site will have little effect in the struggle to reverse the extremist tide or stem the bloodshed overseas or even its potential reappearance here. We understand that it almost doesn't matter what gets built at Ground Zero; people will still come, stop, look and remember. But of course it matters very much, because when the work is done, this site will become a new and powerful symbolic center for New York City and the nation. The time for fumbled, empty gestures and insincere offerings that condescend to the people they are supposed to honor is over. It's not too late to create something altogether magnificent at this important place. |
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New spin on Shanghai If the goal were simply reinventing the physical face of a place, then the game in Shanghai has been won: In the blur of a dozen years, hundreds of acres of low, lane-linked neighborhoods have surrendered to skyscrapers. So many people in this city of 18 million have scrambled from their torn-down homes and traditions into dizzying new terrain of 2,000 towers and more. Individual lives react again as Shanghai leads China's charge from closed communism toward free-market modernity, stopping who knows where. Politicians and planners cite statistics and strategies to debate whether Shanghai, and China behind it, will conquer or crash. |
Monday, September 11, 2006
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The Politics of Pleasure Most people don't think of urban areas when imagining that idyllic set of conditions sometimes referred to as "la dolce vita," "la vie en rose," or the good life. Despite exaggerated associations with luxury, cities such as New York, London, and Paris are equally renowned for overcrowding, traffic, and claustrophobic density. Chicago may have its Lake Michigan beaches, Los Angeles its perfect weather, and Miami its spandex-friendly strip, but when it comes to leisure we normally head for more remote and peaceful destinations. |
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Wall Street integrates security, design There is a better way to integrate security and design than what they're doing in the nation's political capital and it's evident in the nation's financial capital -- specifically, on Wall Street, right in front of the flag-draped facade of the New York Stock Exchange. |
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Putting Whole Teeming Cities on the Drawing Board Buildings are looking prettier than ever, thanks to the freedom that contemporary architects have these days to play with form. Meanwhile, many of our cities are falling to pieces, as the infrastructure that once bound them into functioning communities crumbles from years of neglect. |
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Planners try for live-work balance "We should be building so many kilometres of subway lines a year, adding streetcar lines, adding hundreds of buses each year. "And it's going to require a real shifting of minds to change the way people think and live their lives. We can't provide space for everybody to drive their car at will." |
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New Urbanism communities make cars expendable It takes Kiki Wallace one minute to get to work. It's not by accident. He built his neighborhood, Prospect New Town, to be walkable, with wide sidewalks, narrow streets and parks scattered throughout. Most notably, its town center is within five walking minutes of every home. To create Prospect, the Longmont, Colo., developer worked with planners AndrŽs Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Since its construction, the town has attracted a great deal of interest in the planning community. |
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Let's get the nation riding bicycles Taiwan proposes a plan to construct 1,000km of bike trails and 10,000km of walking paths. Media reports have also said that the Ministry of Education is drawing up a plan to encourage students to walk to school and use bicycles around campus. |
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Citizens: Take back Main Street The historic centres and main streets of Canada's towns and cities are under threat. They are neglected and are losing the war against bad taste, poor planning and the power of big-box retail. Main Street is home to more boarded-up and broken windows than shops and cafes. Public institutions like libraries are following the trend to big-box formats at the edge of urban sprawl. |
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Broken Ground: The hole in the city's heart Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, ground zero remains a 16-acre, 70-foot-deep hole in the heart of Lower Manhattan. High above it, a scaffolded bank building, contaminated during the attack, hulks like a metal skeleton, waiting endlessly to be razed. |
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'Burbs take a beating on film In Suburban Mayhem, a name-says-it-almost-all feature from Australian director Paul Goldman, a bad-seed daughter revels in sex, drugs and cell-phone usage to rebel against the repressive cookie-cutter lifestyle imposed on her by the tidy subdivision she calls home. Stop me if you've seen this one before. But then, of course you have. For decades, suburban living has provided a rich vein of material that filmmakers have tirelessly mined and processed into films nearly as predictable as the 'burbs themselves: the simmering — and occasionally over-boiling — unrest that lies behind the picture-perfect veneer of non-urban living. |
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The indestructibles The Freedom Tower at Ground Zero could be the world's most attack-proof building. Is this the future of urban design? |
Saturday, September 9, 2006
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Walking to school isn't such a burden How far is too far to walk to school? How far did you walk to school? Are we coddling our children too much by complaining that 2 miles is too far? A teenager should be able to walk a mile in 15 minutes two miles in half an hour. |
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Creative commuters ditch their cars Six years ago, Bruce Wilbur did what most Americans wouldn't dream of: he got rid of his car. And his minivan, too. He started taking the bus to work -- not a common sight in Rochester, N.Y. -- and loved the switch. More recently, he's been biking to work. Getting rid of the car gave him his sanity back, the 49-year-old Web designer said, and saved him a lot of money too. |
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Alternative Japanese Housing Designs on Display at the Vancouver Art Gallery The Vancouver Art Gallery will highlight the ingenious architecture of temporary and semi-permanent dwellings in an upcoming exhibition. Kyohei Sakaguchi's installation Zero Yen House, named for the economic reality under which many of these dwellings are built, will be on display September 23, 2006 to January 1, 2007 as a part of the NEXT series, a presentation of new art and ideas by artists from the Pacific Rim. |
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Modernists’ ‘Utopia’ present The exhibit, “Team 10: A Utopia of the Present,” follows the metamorphosis of Modernism in the post-World War II era. The catalyst for this change was the titular Team 10, a group of architects frustrated with the cold functionalism of buildings of their time and committed to making architecture more community-based. |
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Denmark's architects design a new China The nation's contribution to the 10th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale is a unique partnership between Danish studios and Chinese universities |
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The Wisdom of Woonerfern Sitting on the wrought-iron front steps of a weathered greystone triplex in Montreal recently, watching waves of people saunter along the sidewalk enjoying a rare, mild evening, I had some thoughts concerning my adopted Los Angeles. |
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“We could not realise one single project” Bucharest’s southern centre was wrecked through insane developments by Ceausescu in the 1980s. The dictator levelled a large section of the old city and replaced it with boulevards inspired by North Korea and his elephantine vanity project, the People’s Palace. Following the revolution, many buildings were left incomplete and vast tracts of land were colonised by rubble, weeds and stray dogs. |
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Bucharest - the city where anything goes Bucharest is a city developing almost exclusively through private initiative, where the local authorities lack the resources and legal muscle to impose strict regulations on new buildings. “For the moment, the market dictates what new developments will happen and where,” says Radu-Petre Nastase, associate professor at Ion Mincu University of Architecture and currently running his own practice. |
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Venice architectural fest kicks off One of the world's biggest and most influential architecture fairs opens in Venice this weekend, with the interaction of city life and architecture as its central theme . |
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Now This Is a Tough Commute Some workers are going to great lengths to have the best of both worlds: a good job and a great home, even if they're states apart. |
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Accessible Barcelona 40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet. |
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Accessible Barcelona 40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet. |
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New signs animating critics Electronic displays can be hazardous, have no place in suburbia, some say. |
Friday, September 8, 2006
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Toronto's stand-in role Allen Coulter, the director of the semi-biographical murder mystery titled "Hollywoodland," which opens tomorrow, needed to evoke the movie colony circa 1951-59. Asked recently how much Los Angeles itself can be relied upon to preserve or simulate vintage landscapes and cityscapes from half a century ago, Mr. Coulter replies, "Maybe this will answer your question: We shot six weeks in Toronto and two in L.A." |
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China Syndrome: the true story of the 21st century's first great epidemic Much is made in the west of China's booming economy. But there are inevitable downsides to what has been described as the "greatest mass urbanisation in the history of the world". In China Syndrome, Karl Taro Greenfeld probes one of them: the Sars (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic of 2003, in which an estimated 884 people died, and which only narrowly escaped becoming a devastating pandemic of 15-20 per cent mortality. |
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Vicious cycle? Nearly any bicyclist can tell you pedaling to work helps the environment by taking polluting cars off the road. But the environmental benefits of biking may be all but eliminated through means rarely considered by your average cyclist. The healthy lifestyles of bicyclists, according to one professor, cause them to live longer and use up more of the earth’s limited resources than people who die sooner. |
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Can Los Angeles Become the US’ First Regional City? Among many in the planning and design professions, there is a morbid fascination with Los Angeles. It sometimes seems like good news from Los Angeles is better for its improbability. Some of this is fair, since from an urban design perspective, Los Angeles didn’t get much right. It is, in Mike Davis’ words, a place where “Monolithic public works have been substituted for regional planning and a responsible land ethic.” In fact, LA’s problems are so large, and in some ways, so iconic (immigration, ‘natural’ disasters, traffic, sprawl), that sustainability still seems a distant dream. But Los Angeles has an asset that doesn’t yet know it’s an asset: its decentralized urban form. |
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Triple treat - Designs for three new office towers for WTC site unveiled The much anticipated designs for three tall towers to be built on the East end of the WTC site were unveiled today at a press conference held on the 52nd floor of WTC 7, the first of five towers to be built at the site. More + |
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Science Fiction and the City: An Interview with Jeff VanderMeer The novels of Jeff VanderMeer fall somewhere between science fiction, urban surrealism, dark fantasy, magical realism, and even horror comedy. VanderMeer's literary range becomes immediately apparent when you consider that he's been "a two-time winner (six-time finalist) of the World Fantasy Award, as well as a past finalist for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award." |
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Green ideas ready to bloom We're familiar by now with Mayor Daley's often-repeated call for Chicago to become the "greenest city in America," but is it really happening? The Windy City remains far behind many others in recycling, and while local architects and builders are increasingly using energy-efficient, eco-friendly materials and technologies, only a handful of large-scale "sustainable" projects have been completed. That's about to change. For Exhibit A, see "Sustainable Architecture in Chicago: Works in Progress," an exhibit of plans and renderings for seven ecologically progressive projects by Chicago firms, opening Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art. |
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Global Green Usa and Brad Pitt Announce Winner of Sustainable Design Competition Winning Design Utilizes Green Building to Save Money and Reduce Carbon Pollution; Green Principles Could Cut New Orleans' Electricity Costs by More than 50% |
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Vanishing trick for Ireland's second homes Tackling "bungalow blight" is a priority in an increasingly wealthy country desperate to preserve its tourist industry but littered with more and more second homes. The single-storey dwellings being developed by two County Donegal architects, Antoin and Tarla MacGabhann, could provide the solution, satisfying rural planners and environmental campaigners, as well as those who admire ever-changing coastal views. |
Thursday, September 7, 2006
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Please Walk on the Grass An exhibition explores the reinvention of urban public spaces to meet the demands of 21st century recreation and leisure. |
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Shopping malls dress to impress Big centers cropping up around the city are using architectural talent to make a difference. |
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Urban Renewal In the chronicles of Western civilization, postmodern architecture deserves to be remembered for at least one signal achievement. Thanks to this movement’s revival of decorative facades and ornamental crowns, far fewer architects today are likely to become offended when their skyscrapers are likened to perfume bottles. Many even recognize that the comparison is often intended as a compliment. Few new buildings, tall or short, match the aesthetic appeal of the flacons, vials and jars that crowd the perfume and cosmetics counters at department stores and duty-free shops all over the world. They are my favorite skyline. |
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Urban design experts head for Bristol's 'Liveable Cities' conference Experts on urban development from across Europe will be in Bristol to study plans for expanding the city centre. The Bristol city centre expansion project will be used as a case study for delegates focusing on the theme of public consultation and private public partnerships at the "Liveable Cities" conference. |
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Hong Kong firms raise pay offers to attract expats put off by polution More than half of Hong Kong-based companies have been forced to improve their salary offers to expatriates put off by rising pollution, a survey by Hudson human resources consultancy said. |
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
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Pitt in New Orleans as rebuilding plan unveiled As residents work to rebuild their lives and homes a year after Hurricane Katrina, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will be frequent visitors to the city, observing the progress. They were in New Orleans on Thursday, though only Pitt appeared at an afternoon news conference to announce the winner of the design competition he started in April to rebuild hurricane-ravaged neighbourhoods using environmentally friendly designs and construction. "We're going to be spending a lot of time down here," Pitt said. |
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The pyramid of peace It will be one of the modern wonders of the world. A great pyramid, set in a brand-new capital city on the central Asian steppes. A pyramid that is to be a global centre for religious understanding, a symbol of world peace. It has more space inside than London's St. Paul's Cathedral, or Istanbul's Hagia Sophia. Sounds fanciful? They start building it next month - March 2005. It will open in June 2006. It is designed by Britain's Norman Foster. |
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In Cities Across the United States, It’s Raining Concert Halls As concert halls have evolved into multipurpose destinations — complete with chic restaurants, bars and the inevitable education centers — local officials and business leaders have come to view them as a chance to revive a downtown or add luster to their city. |
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Playground design keeps big kids indoors POOR urban design is discouraging Australian children from playing outdoors, an international obesity conference has been told. |
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Cramming L.A. With McMansions How much longer will the city allow massive houses on tiny lots to engulf Los Angeles? |
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Architect believes time for futuristic cities is now It's the stuff of futuristic movies. Yet David Dobereiner, a semiretired architect and college professor living in Rossmoor, says it's time now to create the kinds of cities many might consider fantastical utopian villages dreamed up by fiction writers. Why? "Because if we don't," Dobereiner says, "we'll all be cooked." |
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How green is my Calgary The amazing parkland and tree cover make great economic sense. |
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All aboard! Light rail and buses beckon. But will Americans really abandon their cars? |
Saturday, September 2, 2006
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Downtown's Last Resort A Critique of the Last 20 Years of Vancouver's Approach to Downtown Living Asks Some Difficult Questions About Where the Future Lies for Canada's Ocean Playground. |