Urbanism News
Friday, October 31, 2003
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Can The Creative Class Save Cleveland? On the one hand, Cleveland has something to be proud of - lots of cheap work space and a cost of living that allow artists to produce. On the other, the city seems to revel in attempts to legislate revival on the backs of people near the bottom of the economic ladder. |
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Beijing on the brink
The world's architects are pouring into China's capital to join the 21st century's defining urban project. |
Thursday, October 30, 2003
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Body and Space in the work of Lucy Orta Architects, especially young ones, are presently working with miniature structures in order to find out how small, how modest a space can be while still being able to claim that it is architecture. |
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Artificial nature How to make nature in a city where space is a precious? Sixteen useful garden ideas from Japan. |
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
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Designing Rules Irvine, California, is the epitome of tightly controlled urban design, a squeaky-clean edge city of office parks and master-planned neighborhoods. The Orange County town is so tidy that when my husband started teaching at the University of California campus there he couldn’t find a gas station. |
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Urban designer explores the suburbs Many urban designers, especially the academic sort, turn up their noses at people who live in the suburbs. |
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Road to ruin America produces a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, the population has risen by 100 million since 1970 and when an area three times the size of Britain was recently opened up for mining, drilling, logging and road building, no one took much notice. What does the Bush administration do? It ignores all attempts to curb environmental damage. |
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Tallest tower will change city's skyline Planning approval has been given for a 47-storey glass tower in Manchester which will become the tallest residential building in Britain. |
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Green building investments yield high returns, says study Investments in green buildings pay for themselves 10 times over, according to a new study for 40 California government agencies. |
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The country in the city In the centennial of Olmsted's death, the vision of America's greatest landscape artist lives on -- but just barely. |
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
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Tricycles the answer to NYC gridlock? 'Pedicabs' provide an environmentally sound - and fun - way to navigate the Big Apple. |
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Metal guru Can anyone now seriously dispute that the Canadian is the world's greatest living architect? |
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Funky Towns Where would you go to discover the world’s top hot spots for design? Yeah, we’d go to Paris and London, too. But you won’t believe what else we’ve found. |
Monday, October 27, 2003
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Emergency units to aid gridlocked motorists Special units of emergency staff with life-saving equipment are to be created to deal with potential gridlock on Britain's roads. Amid rising concern about growing congestion throughout the country, transport officials fear that a whole city or trunk route could seize up - leaving drivers stranded in their cars. |
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Construction boom gives Beijing a new look In a city that has been called "the busiest construction zone on the planet," work crews break ground on a new high-rise almost every day in a prolonged construction binge that is giving the capital a gleaming new look and unleashing vast social and economic change. |
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St. Louis has the Arch. Seattle has the Space Needle. New York has... And now Tom Overby wants to create a monument for his hometown of Kansas City, Kan.: a 650-foot-tall tornado -- 45 feet taller than the Space Needle, 20 feet taller than the Arch and 345 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty -- that would anchor a tourism district with a theme based on The Wizard of Oz. |
Friday, October 24, 2003
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Upscale housing to meld with wildlife Backers of a new housing development in rapidly growing St. Croix County intend to share the woods and water with wildlife through a unique effort that many hope will become commonplace. |
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
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Cities thrive on `creative class' Gays, bohemians are indicators of urban health. |
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Out of the box Bauhaus was all about simplicity and economy. Or was it? |
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The McMansion Next Door Why the American house needs a makeover. |
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
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The Street Gets Star Treatment Outdoor movies have become the hook to draw people to tired business districts and public spaces. The reviews have been good. |
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Washington's Enhanced Grid Pattern Makes City One of a Kind Can anyone doubt the virtue of geometrically rational yet remarkably variable grid patterns for composing urban and suburban environments? Recent visits to Houston, Little Rock and Milwaukee again reminded me of that virtue. |
Monday, October 20, 2003
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L.A.'s Urban Model After years of setbacks and controversy, Playa Vista is officially open. Planners are studying it as an experiment in high-density housing. |
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Square Vic reborn The rebuilding of a major Montreal public space has been met with a surprisingly unanimous reaction: thumbs up! |
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In Asmara, all roads lead to Rome The Italian occupiers who built up Asmara in the 1930's used the city as an architectural petri dish. Bold experimentation that might have gone too far in Europe was permitted, even encouraged, in this colonial outpost. "The Italians tried to express the modern Roman empire in grand terms on a blank slate, just as the British did in Delhi," said Gabriel Abraham, an Eritrean architect in Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
Saturday, October 18, 2003
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Taipei tower takes height record An office tower in Taipei, Taiwan, has overtaken Malaysia's Petronas Towers as the world's tallest building. |
Friday, October 17, 2003
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Rusticating the City With Ice, Rock and Seed The landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh stood by the 10 red maples he planted years ago near his modest 1849 white shingle farmhouse on Martha's Vineyard, and talked about something so subtle I had to pay close attention. |
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Subterranean City Packed to the gills aboveground, Tokyo looks to expand its skyline below the earth’s surface. |
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He wants to reclaim towns for pedestrians Dan Burden is playing in traffic. The lanky 50-something scurries into the busy main street of this western New York village, unfurling a metal tape measure as he goes. He gets a quick measurement of the distance from the curb to the double yellow line, then retreats to the sidewalk. |
Thursday, October 16, 2003
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Translucent, shimmering dance centre takes architecture prize
The Laban centre: 'not since the early 18th century has Deptford been the focus of such happy artistic scrutiny.' |
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Trees to Buildings In the last decade of the 20th century, inventive architects from our part of the world redefined not only the block method of construction with round wooden beams and the clay method of construction. The "Sanfte Strukturen" (= Gentle Structures) from the atelier of Marcel Kalberer and his followers experimented also with willow rods with roots. The largest structure is their willow dome used for religious services, weddings, plays and concerts. It is 50 meters long, 15 meters high and one of the main attractions of the IGA in Rostock. |
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Herzog and de Meuron Stirling Prize On October 12, the Royal Institute of British Architects announced the 2003 winner of the coveted Stirling Prize. This year's honor went to Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for Laban, a center for contemporary dance in the London suburb of Deptford. |
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Bradford looks to lake to improve image A lake in the shape of the giant speech bubble is to be sunk in centre of Bradford to help revamp the city's image. |
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McCormick Tribune Campus Center The first completed building in the United States by Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), and only the second building on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus since the sixties (beat by one month by Helmut Jahn's design for a dormitory across the street to the south), the McCormick Tribune Campus Center straddles Chicago's well-known elevated train tracks to connect the educational and residential areas of the campus designed by the great Mies van der Rohe in 1940. |
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
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Ship of Glass for Chelsea Waterfront The proud city sails on. Frank Gehry has designed a New York headquarters for Barry Diller, the media and e-commerce mogul. The new building will be opposite the Chelsea Piers sports complex, on the West Side Highway between 18th and 19th Streets. |
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Sprawl costly for Toronto, new study says Cities will pay price in air, water quality if development continues uncontrolled. |
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
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Building Up China’s biggest cities are struggling to balance modern design with their historical structures. |
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Young Seattle architects are making their mark in tough times Life as an architecture junkie has it rewards, but in Seattle they can be few and far between. |
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Baltimore's Beacon of Design When I first heard about the angular, all-glass building going up on the urban campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art, I thought, "Aha, an ice cube at the costume ball." |
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Learning from Nature The environment and the arts blend in the design of a Kapolei school's center. |
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The Socialist City, Still Some thirty years ago when Planners Network started, many progressive planners proposed or discussed socialist alternatives to capitalist urban development and planning. |
Monday, October 13, 2003
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Creative Class Act Richard Florida knows exactly what's wrong with Phoenix . |
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Doing up the Middle Kingdom A boom in private housing is fuelling a new market for home decoration and could change the way the Chinese shop. |
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Trailer Park Class You hear the words "trailer park" and what comes to mind? |
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Push to pedal boulevards of dreams Cars could be banned from service lanes on major roads such as Royal Parade and St Kilda Road under an ambitious Melbourne City Council plan to enhance the city's boulevards and create a string of new grand city entrances. |
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Meet the Space Gang A high-tech presentation by a group of talented and energetic condo owners may forever change how downtown developers choose to encroach on others' views. |
Friday, October 10, 2003
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The Bolder, Bigger Apple A glimpse of New York's future - visions that include spectacular new skyscrapers, a retractable-roof football stadium and whole new neighborhoods - was unveiled yesterday at a new gallery in Greenwich Village. |
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Urbis Ian Simpson creates a monumental shape for a small glass Museum, where the urban surroundings become part of the exhibition.
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Imagining the future How will we make buildings in 2030? |
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Hertzberger's Watervilla prototype The Watervilla, a prototype floating house designed by architect Herman Hertzberger, is supported like an oil rig, on a frame of hollow steel tubes. Inhabitants can reorient the house to optimize its solar orientation. |
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A tale of cool cities Some cities are hip. Others aren't. But 'unhip' cities are trying to change their image and attract young professionals. |
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Naturally Cool Convention Center Echoing the shape of bridges arcing over the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the new David L. Lawrence Convention Center. A sail-like roof is suspended from steel cables over the four-story riverfront building. |
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The Eden project Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of work starting on the world's first garden city. But has Letchworth lived up to the communal ideals of the man who planned it? |
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Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Designed by Portland, Oregon's Allied Works Architecture, the museum shares its site in the Grand Center District a few miles west of downtown with Tadao Ando's Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. |
Thursday, October 9, 2003
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Architecture And Culture Andrew Benjamin argues that australian architecture must open itself to the wider world of public policy. We can do this, he believes, by acknowledging that architecture is always traversed by the complexities of culture. |
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New Markets, Cultural Differences A population urbanizing at a rate never before seen on the planet, an ostensibly open attitude to foreign influence and contemporary design, and a glut of new projects ranging from chichi restaurant interiors to new cities.... |
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Redeveloping Circular Quay Circular Quay is one of Sydney’s most significant public spaces – and one with an intense array of stakeholders. Andrew Nimmo considers recent redevelopments and speculates on issues for the future. |
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In Between 140 Onslow Road, a mixed-use development by blacket smith in association with Daniela Simon design, is an intense exploration of the middle ground as a site for architecture. |
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Liberty Tower Elenberg Fraser’s first large building is an eloquent essay on the tower genre and on speculative building. |
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Suburbia and Its Discontents Most Americans don’t think much about the design of the built environment, odd though this may seem to those who do. |
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The Emergence of “Landscape Urbanism" Reflections on Stalking Detroit. |
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Monumental/Conceptual Architecture Are the monumental-conceptual works living up to the responsibility of public money and public attention or do they verge toward con games, feeding the self-indulgence of a new breed of installation artists—architects as seers? |
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Municipal Theatre–Auditorium and Music School, Xátiva, province of Valencia Facing the Albereda boulevard, surrounded by a park, the Theatre-Auditorium will rise in the same manner as the theatres of classical times, with its seating following the slope of the ground. |
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Playing rough Skateboarders just want to have fun, but they don't mix well with other users of the streetscape. Good design can shepherd them in the right direction. |
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Walks, Routes, Movement - Line, plane space In the city, the two most important structuring and organising elements are the street and the square. |
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New City Hall, Benidorm. Alicante The place offers two contrasting, somewhat ambiguous aspects that had to be integrated. On the one hand, the space that was created had to be an entrance to the park from the city, a place of passage. On the other, it had to be a place where people could spend some time, a meeting space linked to the City Hall. |
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New Urbanism at the NEA: A Q&A with Jeff Speck As the NEA's newly appointed Director of Design, Jeff Speck supervises the panel selection and grant-making process in design, as well as oversees the Mayors' Institute on City Design and Your Town programs. |
Wednesday, October 8, 2003
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Losing oneself in the yawn of Vaughan I am lost at the corner of National Pine Drive and Deep Springs Crescent. Or is it Komura Road and Deep Springs Crescent? Or is it Jarret Crescent and Komura Road? If you've gone in circles as long as I have in a subdivision in the city of Vaughan, all the streets look the same. Of course, that could be because they are. |
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A Communism of ideas Towards an open-source architectural practice. |
Monday, October 6, 2003
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Laguna West a decade later Reality may fall short of New Urban visions, but residents like the community. |
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It's aquatic. It's epic. But is it real art? A proposal to build a landmark piece of sculpture sparks a debate over artistic taste and the city's identity. |
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Road fears 'stopping walk to school' Fears about public transport, abduction and accidents are stopping children walking to school, a survey suggests. |
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Thomas Balsley has designs on the Willamette River If it weren't for Frederick Law Olmsted, Thomas Balsley might be known as New York City's most important landscape architect. |
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Beijingers spend lives on road as traffic congestion worsens While many European countries are marking car-free days, Beijingers remain stuck in traffic as the number of automobiles in the Chinese capital has surpassed two million. |
Friday, October 3, 2003
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Lightly on the land This solar-powered house is no soulless metal box. It has an organic beauty, an environmentally smart design -- and a $30-a-month electric bill. |
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A Building With a Song in Its Heart Some great buildings allow you silence. Others give you song. The new McCormick Tribune Campus Center in Chicago got my fingers snapping. On my visit this weekend before Tuesday's dedication, the Goo Goo Dolls were playing on the building's sound system. But another track was playing inside my head: a bouncy 2002 lounge tune by Joseph Malik with a silly lyric that goes, "You oughta take it all in and check it all out." |
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What's sprawling is our worship of comfort Right up top, let it be recorded that I am not a fan of sprawl. Regions like the Bay Area should find ways to fold new homes into existing cities and suburbs -- carefully, elegantly -- rather than raze another orchard in Brentwood. |
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America's Town Square Rockefeller Center is one of the world's most elegant places. How it got that way wasn't pretty. |
Thursday, October 2, 2003
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Monumental/Conceptual Architecture Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, of course; Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University and Galician Cultural Center in Santiago de Compostela; Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin—have an influence disproportionate to their number, becoming the focus of much recent nonacademic (and much academic) debate about architecture. |
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The Emergence of “Landscape Urbanism" Stalking Detroit is valuable for the window it opens onto the emerging world of Landscape Urbanism. Its rich background in landscape ecology offers many lessons for urban designers wanting to link structures to specific flows of populations, activities, construction materials, and time. |
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Ontario College of Art The public speaks back on the new Ontario College of Art building by Alsop Architects. |
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Experts: Sprawl is unhealthy, difficult to change It took Americans decades to forget how to walk, and experts think it could take longer to learn it all over again. |
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IIT architect would love encore Sipping the first espresso served at his shiny, new high-tech IIT student center Tuesday, architect Rem Koolhaas revealed one of his most unfulfilled desires: to design a high-rise in Chicago. |
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The Roster of Ground Zero Architects Grows Three celebrated architects — including Norman Foster, who offered his own vision last year of twin towers rising from ground zero — were added yesterday to the growing roster of international designers working on the World Trade Center site. |
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Who owns the view? As population increases and second-home purchases grow, many scenic areas are equally valuable to developers and valued by preservationists. |
Wednesday, October 1, 2003
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Koolhaas Rock Walking through the new IIT student center is like entering the late Mies van der Rohe's head. |
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