Urbanism News
Monday, October 31, 2005
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China's Next Big Boom Could Be the Foul Air The steady barrage of statistics trumpeting China's rise is often greeted elsewhere as if the figures were torpedoes and the rest of the world a sinking ship. Economic growth tops 9 percent! Textile exports jump 500 percent! Military spending up! Manufacturing up! The numbers inflame the exaggerated perception that China is methodically inhaling jobs and resources and, in the process, inhaling the rest of the planet. Burp. There goes the American furniture industry. Burp. Thanks for your oil, Venezuela. But one statistic offered last week by a top Chinese environmental official should stimulate genuine alarm inside and outside China. The official, Zhang Lijun, warned that pollution levels here could more than quadruple within 15 years if the country does not curb its rapid growth in energy consumption and automobile use. |
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New York dims lights to aid birds The city that never sleeps is turning out the lights on dozens of skyscrapers in the hope of protecting birds distracted from migration paths. Every night in autumn, hundreds collide with Manhattan's high-rise towers. |
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Material guy He builds houses out of sand, beer crates, even paper - and he's just been chosen to create the Pompidou's new outpost. |
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A Light in the Piazza Once outrageous architect Renzo Piano now shows a quiet elegance. Did he lose his edge—or find his soul? |
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Family to leave subdivision for urban life "It will take us out of our comfort zone, in a healthy way," Marta said. |
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Envisioning a new community Placemaking" is a term often used in real estate development circles to describe the notion of creating a sense of place for residents. This ideal has grown out of a concerted effort among many in the design and development industry striving to create and sustain places that foster community. |
Saturday, October 29, 2005
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Even the road less travelled can be harmful to your health As daily commutes get longer, medical studies look at how workers can drive themselves into the ground. |
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The End of Cheap Furniture - Oil shock hitting furniture prices \Retail costs likely to climb more than 10 per cent Supplies scarce for materials used in chairs, sofas. |
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Ikea bus delivers city buyers to stores in suburbs Ikea understands that Toronto, with its condo boom, is potentially a huge home furnishing market. And the company also realizes that many downtown condo owners have opted not to own "personal transportation," as Etobicoke store manager Mark Hillard puts it. |
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Cool(er) Roofs Tar Beach, those black tarred rooftops where regular New Yorkers got their summer tans, is celebrated in song, in movies like “On The Waterfront” and in a well-known quilt and children’s book by Faith Ringgold. But if they evoke the same kind of nostalgia as stoop ball and stick ball, those roofs turn out to be bad for the environment. |
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Not in My Neighbor's Backyard The mansionization battle rustling the leaves of North Barrington Avenue is something new even for Brentwood. It's a dispute not over a 12,000-square-foot neo-Tudor monster or a towering modernist cube, but over a backyard treehouse for an 18-month-old girl. |
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Solar Power Brightens NYC Commute On a sunny day, 60,000 square feet of integrated solar paneling on its the station's roof can generate 210 kilowatts of power, enough to meet two-thirds of the station's energy requirements. The solar energy doesn't run the trains, but is expected to contribute approximately 250,000 solar kilowatt hours per year to the station's other energy needs -- primarily lighting and air conditioning in the station and its attached offices and retail stores. |
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Skyline makeover Downtown Denver's skyline is set for its biggest metamorphosis in 20 years. At least a dozen buildings along the fringe of the Central Business District - the core of downtown - either are under way or on the drawing board.
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The end of motor city As gas and transport prices rise, so will the costs of our spreading, globally dependent economies. |
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Doctors offer tips on fighting suburban sprawl An Ontario College of Family Physicians report demonstrated that the suburbs have higher incidence of cardiovascular and lung diseases including asthma in children, as well as cancer, diabetes, obesity, traffic injuries and deaths. It concluded that air pollution, gridlock, traffic accidents, lack of physical activity and negative social impacts such as road rage lead to a variety of these health problems. |
Friday, October 28, 2005
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Travel's no sweat in Netherlands In the Netherlands almost everyone rides bicycles - mothers with babies, executives with briefcases, students with backpacks, senior citizens with flower-filled satchels. As high gas prices sour Americans on their Hummers and SUVs, the Dutch happily pedal past gas pumps charging the euro equivalent of $5 a gallon. |
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Breaking Ground Rogers Marvel shows that security design needn't be defensive and formidable. With a holistic design approach, they prove that that there’s more to safe streets than bollards and bomb dogs. |
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Reclaiming Urban Wastes The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Architecture Dialogues - Reclaiming Urban Wastes: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, on Thursday, November 3 at 7:00 pm. Since her 1969 manifesto, "Maintenance Art--Proposal for an Exhibition," Mierle Laderman Ukeles has explored art projects that collapse the distinction between fine art and the often hidden infrastructure of everyday life. |
Thursday, October 27, 2005
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Gentrifying Disaster: In New Orleans: Ethnic Cleansing, GOP-Style Into this fraught and sinister situation now blunders the circus-like spectacle of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU): the architectural cult founded by Miami designers Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. |
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Constant and New Babylon’s roots Constant’s “city for homo ludens”, New Babylon, was a “nomad camp on a planetary scale”. It was born in 1956 in Italy, at Alba, in a settlement of Piedmontese gypsies on the land of painter Pinot Gallizio. Fifty years later, Domus visits the site to reconstruct the origins of architecture’s first nomadic utopia. |
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Sense of the City This fall, the Canadian Centre for Architecture invites the public to experience the city like never before. In a major exhibition entitled Sense of the City, visitors can explore sensory perception in the urban environment and discover hidden qualities of the city. |
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Automobile apartheid -- another lesson from Katrina Analyses of the failure of all levels of government to prevent or effectively manage the Katrina calamity in New Orleans have generally missed a crucial point. Alongside bias against poor people and African-Americans is automobile apartheid, born of fifty years of suburban sprawl. First-class citizens drive motor vehicles, second-class Americans walk, cycle, or ride public transit. Certainly many of the latter are poor, but millions more are middle-class Americans. |
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Where to Play Superman and See Architecture, Too It is quite a thrill: zooming from outer space through cloud layers into your continent, country, state, city and neighborhood, finally onto the roof of your very own house, then zooming back out again, twirling the globe and landing at another spot. But after a while, you might want to explore the higher applications of Google Earth - for example, browsing modern and contemporary architecture. |
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Idea for city's water tanks generates award A design that would turn Chicago's water tanks into a network of electricity-generating wind turbines won the top prize on Wednesday in a city-sponsored competition to envision ways to re-use the aging tanks. |
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Afloat in the Flood Zone FROM Jakarta to the coast of Louisiana, floodwaters are a growing concern. This is especially true in delta regions, where river and sea combine, as they do in many of the world's great cities, to create a double hazard. No place is more concerned with this problem than the Netherlands, literally "the lowlands," where for centuries people have lived on the edge of water-borne disaster. About a quarter of the country is land reclaimed from the sea, while half of it lies at or below sea level. The country's vulnerability to rising water levels, commonly ascribed to climate change, was on full display last summer at the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, titled "The Flood," which contained proposals for a floating soccer stadium and housing built on spongelike synthetic riverbanks capable of absorbing flood waters. |
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Suburban sprawl begs the question, ‘Where have all the small towns gone?’ Small towns are designed to integrate people into a community, conferring a sense of belonging rooted in a sense of place. Sprawl offers none of that. |
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The greening of China China is investigating whether its rigid system for assessing the performance of party leaders and civil servants can be used to tackle pollution. |
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LEEDing Us Astray? Top green-building system is in desperate need of repair. |
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The Granny Flat Grows Up A Santa Cruz program promotes garage conversions as an alternative to sprawl. |
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
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What is a Land Value Tax? Our system of property taxes punishes anyone who puts up a decent building made of durable materials. It rewards those who let existing buildings go to hell. It favors speculators who sit on vacant or underutilized land in the hearts of our cities and towns. In doing so it creates an artificial scarcity of land on the free market, which drives up the price of land in general, and encourages ever more scattered development, i.e., suburban sprawl. In tandem with zoning, the taxing of buildings rather than land itself promotes such wasteful practices as putting up cheap one-story burger joints in huge parking lots on prime city land. It is one of the biggest impediments to the free market creation of affordable housing. As a consequence of all these things it is a drag on economic productivity and employment. |
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Sustainability And The Supermarket
Supermarkets are rarely at the forefront of social and environmental sustainability, but mcgauran giannini soon’s building for coles, gisborne, is leading the way. |
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The Shoreline Walk in Beirut A line between the old city and a new reclaimed area of Beirut will reconnect the city centre with the shorefront and link together four new urban spaces. The line recalls the former shoreline and the spaces evoke memories that were forgotten and destroyed through the fifteen-year civil war. |
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Intelligent Regions - Learning to understand the transformation of cities As cities expand to become megacities ever pushing outwards towards their borders, architects need to redifine their role within the context of new global networks, mobility and individualization. |
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Parachute Pavilion Inspires Delirious Designs At the Van Alen Institute’s Parachute Pavilion exhibition, over 100 design proposals are mounted on boards jutting from the gallery wall like the pages of a giant sketchbook. Leafing through them reveals a dizzying array of ideas--ranging from the pragmatic to the fanciful to the bizarre--for a new pavilion that will sit in the shadow of Coney Island’s famous Parachute Jump. |
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Maya Lin creates a plaza of possibility The elements of a new Arts Plaza at UC Irvine may be subtle, but they create areas that invite intimate contemplation. |
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Water Shed A water purification plant and park by Steven Holl and Michael Van Valkenburgh is a model of sustainable infrastructure. |
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Dutch design lets homes float on the floodwaters 'God created the earth," says an old Dutch saying. "but the Dutch created the Netherlands." Indeed, precious few nations share the distinction of having forged much of their land from the sea. |
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
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Zhivopisnaya Tower by Zaha Hadid Roll over Norman Foster - Zaha Hadid is on the move. For years deemed a visually thrilling but unbuildable architect, Hadid is now producing a stream of major buildings, and with her painting of the Zhivopisnaya Tower in Moscow, a residential development planned by Russia's Capital Group, she makes clear that her ambitions are as tall as they are broad. |
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The Sculptor Santiago Calatrava redefines the apartment tower. |
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Out to stimulate, so forget public happiness The American architect Thom Mayne is a formidable presence. A tall, sturdy man who manages to look austere even when he is smiling, he has a reputation for being as uncompromising and provocative as his designs. Architecture is not supposed to make people happy, he declares after levering himself into a chair at a cafe in central Sydney. "There is no point in trying to achieve consensus. I have no interest in pleasing anybody because I don't see it as a possibility." |
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Trouble in paradise Downtown Vancouver faces the dismal prospect of fewer and fewer sites having the proper size and location for office towers. This will fix our destiny as a shortsighted residential resort, not the diverse and lively mixture of living and work that is a real downtown. |
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The Benefits of the Boom It seems counterintuitive, but the luxury real estate market is helping to build housing for low- and moderate-income people. |
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Fallen Fruit A specter is haunting our cities: barren landscapes with foliage and flowers, but nothing to eat. Fruit can grow almost anywhere, and can be harvested by everyone. Our cities are planted with frivolous and ugly landscaping, sad shrubs and neglected trees, whereas they should burst with ripe produce. Great sums of money are spent on young trees, water and maintenance. While these trees are beautiful, they could be healthy, fruitful and beautiful. |
Monday, October 24, 2005
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Elizabeth Hickok San Francisco in Jell-O. |
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Biggest commuter cities Ever notice that on weekends you have a lot more elbow room? Maybe you live in one of those cities where the daytime population is a lot higher than at night and on weekends. |
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F.R.U.I.T. Exploring your city and its connection to the world via fruit. |
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Room for improvement Los Angeles developers take steps to transform, revitalize city’s downtown. |
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Are Manhattan's Right Angles Wrong? To many, the inflexible grid of the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which made Manhattan's streets an iron fist of right angles, was the worst planning mistake ever made in the city. It has been condemned almost since it was laid down. But these days, some opinions are changing. Critics are providing a reassessment, and several find sunshine in the borough's straight lines. |
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Taller, higher, bigger, Foster Norman Foster may be 70, but he shows no sign of flagging. |
Saturday, October 22, 2005
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Interview with Richard Harris Richard Harris is a professor and associate director of the School of Geography and Geology at McMaster University. He is an expert in 20th century urban geography, specifically Canadian and American cities and housing. He has authored many books, including his latest, Creeping Conformity: How Canada became suburban, 1900-1960 (University of Toronto Press, 2004). |
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Sprawl is Dead. Long Live the Suburbs! For better or worse, sprawl suburbs are here to stay. Either we come up with ways to make them livable or we're going to be in big trouble. |
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The Psychology of Previous Investment There is an understandable wish to rescue the suburban habitat that we have poured our collective wealth into constructing for nearly a century. I have consistently described the suburbs as "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world," and I stick by that. Having made these tragic choices, we (in North America) are now additionally burdened by the psychology of previous investment. That is, we cannot even imagine letting go of this investment, or even changing the way it works - especially where cars are concerned. |
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Ripping up Asphalt and Planting Gardens There has never been a sustainable city anywhere on the planet. Sustainable villages, yes. Sustainable camps, yes. But not cities. |
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The Primacy of Ecology Nature and agriculture must work its way back into what presently is a massive, disastrous design mistake fueled by weakness, laziness, greed on ego as well as gasoline. |
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The Simpler Way Above all, the basic feature of the new suburbs and towns must be their highly self-sufficient local economies. These settlements and the space close to them must produce most of the things their people need, from local labour, soils, skills and resources, dramatically reducing the need for travel, transport and trade. |
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Self-Reliant Suburbs I think the prospects of suburbia are quite good. Sure, there will be some rough times - very rough times - as the cost of oil and natural gas skyrocket, but the long-term prospects are good - that is, if we're smart. I say that because the suburbs have many of the raw materials needed to create sustainable enclaves of human existence. |
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Retrofitting the Suburbs for Sustainability The suburbs of our Australian cities have, in the main, become sterile wastelands, lacking in any true spirit of community, impoverished of local resources, and filled with fearful people whose daily efforts are focussed elsewhere. What has happened to the Australian "suburban dream"? |
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Saving the Suburbs For decades, suburban development has been defined by uncontrolled growth, dependence on the automobile, and mile after mile of isolated single-use tracts of housing, retail and office buildings. Today, several important trends are finally challenging this development, and municipalities, developers and the public are looking toward suburban redevelopment as a solution to the woes of sprawl. |
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Sprawl Kills In his new book Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health, and Money (Sterling & Ross, 2005), author Joel S. Hirschhorn dispenses with moralistic entreaties to consumers to sacrifice for the common good. Instead, he calls on consumers to demand better homes and neighbourhoods for their own good. |
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They're healthy, thrifty and don't give a hoot Kimberley Francis is part of a small, but growing, minority group. She is discriminated against, she is beeped at, and the Government pays little heed to her needs. She is a cyclist. |
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On a grand scale The names of the great cities of the ancient world echo in the mind like evocative fragments of poetry: Babylon, Nineveh, Persepolis, Thebes, Rome, Athens, Alexandria. Historians have told us repeatedly that the earliest cities were the fountainheads of civilisation, that their founding signalled the end of the pastoral and nomadic life and the beginning of law, government, architecture, art and the life of the mind. But what did these great cities actually look like? Two centuries of archaeology have told us a great deal. But the people who lived in them have left us no surviving record - no maps, no views, no urban panoramas of their cities. All we have are a few sketches on stone or clay tablet showing city walls, usually under attack in battle or siege. The only real exception that we know of was the massive plan of Rome incised on stone around AD200 and laid out for public display; several small fragments have been discovered. |
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Talking trash cans keep Berlin clean Solar-powered rubbish bins in the heart of Berlin have the city's residents talking. In fact, it is not only the people doing the talking -- the rubbish bins themselves are speaking. Whenever an item is placed inside the trash cans, the bin says, "vielen danke" (many thanks). |
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'Oscars' of Design Awarded in New York It's all about design -- from a scarf to the viewing platforms at ground zero to signs for the Chicago Bears and even recycled underwear. Eleven individuals and companies have won the annual National Design Awards -- a kind of Oscars of design announced Thursday at Manhattan's Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design and Decorative Arts, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. |
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Is It Too Easy Being Green? Eco-friendly, or "green," buildings are one of the most talked-about trends in the trillion-dollar U.S. construction industry. Boosters say that for a relatively small up-front cost, such buildings can be cheaper to operate. Though more attention is paid to pollution by cars, buildings today account for a third of U.S. energy use, 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, and 30% of raw material use. Americans spend 90% of their time indoors. But unlike other so-called green products -- such as hybrid cars and compact fluorescent lightbulbs -- some green buildings are little more energy-efficient than traditional structures. Yet they manage to earn a coveted certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, a leading, private environmental organization. |
Friday, October 21, 2005
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Garbage Land Zero Waste is a sexy way to talk about garbage,” Haley said. “It gets people excited.” I considered that for a moment. Could we solve our garbage problems by making garbage sexy? |
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Navigating city life without owning a car Although Chicago doesn't have an obsessive car culture like Southern California's, where you are what you drive, private car usage here remains high. But that hardly means savvy "urban girls" can't live rich, full lives without owning one. |
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The once and future ranch The postwar icon is wooing a new generation. Yes, your folks' house is cool again. |
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The Edifice Complex Deyan Sudjic's new book, The Edifice Complex, makes a spirited argument that architecture is not merely an art but a form of communication—or, more pointedly, a kind of propaganda. |
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Russia plans 'millionaires' town' Keeping up with the Jones's could take on a whole new meaning in a town being planned for rich Russians near Moscow. |
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What does one do when millionaires clog up the place? Build them a town. First there was the millionaires’ supermarket, then the millionaires’ fair. Now an entire town for millionaires is to be built on the outskirts of Moscow. |
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From Forest To Fishbowl Trees felled by a hot housing market. |
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If You're Going to Be Safe, May as Well Be Stylish "Safe: Design Takes On Risk," which just opened at the Museum of Modern Art, sounds like the kind of show that might probe dark psychic territory. It was not to be. A pleasure to the eye, this show's beguiling array of objects floats just above the surface of its subject. And the result is as comforting as warm milk. |
Thursday, October 20, 2005
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Getting to the roots of obesity: why surroundings may matter Obesity affects people of all income levels, but poor people face more hurdles in trying to stay healthy. [via] |
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An Elevated Plaza Finally Worth Going Up to See Lower Manhattan, a place of brooding valleys, has reclaimed a precious slice of sky. This silvery harbor sky unfolds over a gentle dunelike hillock, with a boardwalk at its crest, on a one-acre public plaza more than 30 feet in the air over the East River waterfront. The elevated plaza at 55 Water Street, one of the largest and least-loved privately owned public spaces in New York, is to be rededicated tonight after a three-year, $7 million renovation. |
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New Film Center to Be Built in Pusan by 2008 Local politicians and VIP visitors from home and abroad to the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) gathered on Friday to commemorate the official launch of the project to build a film center for the festival in Centum City, Pusan. |
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
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New Retail and Office Development to be Built by Nouvel in London "The design of One New Change is about enriching the city with a new sort of modernity, one that reaches beyond itself to speak, to contemplate and to reveal the diverse character of its surroundings. The proposed design provides a unique opportunity to bring the public into the site and enjoy new views of the Cathedral." |
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An ancient map of Rome that's surprisingly up to date In 1748, architect and surveyor Giambattista Nolli completed a map of his hometown. The Pianta Grande di Roma ("Great Plan of Rome") was built from 12 minutely detailed copper plates, covered six by seven feet in its assembled state, and was so accurate that it continued to be used as the basis for government maps of the city until the 1970s. In 2005, a team at the University of Oregon brought the map online in order to "create and implement an innovative and highly interactive website and teaching tool for the study of the city of Rome." It may be a wordy mission statement, but the University of Oregon team certainly met its goals - The Interactive Nolli Map Website offers a good deal more than just a new look at an old map. |
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A rebel in the neighborhood "They had all kinds of rules about how buildings were supposed to look, and they were supposed to look like that," Booth says with a nod to a row of Stepford-like town houses across from the Kohl. "We said, 'We can't do that.' I knew it couldn't look like an ordinary, prim-and-proper Glenview building, because it wouldn't attract the children. It would fail, because it wouldn't spark their imagination enough to say, 'What's that? I want to go in there.' " |
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Flight plan soars At a time when Renzo Piano is at work on Wilshire Boulevard, Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne among the high-rises of downtown Los Angeles and Rem Koolhaas on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, perhaps the single most promising design project in Southern California is slated for a very different kind of location: an expanse of cracked-asphalt runways and peeling military barracks in the geographical center of Orange County. |
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Great Architecture's Big Day Britain's Stirling Prize shows how to raise public awareness of civic design. Wouldn't it be nice if that could happen in the U.S., too? |
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Full steam ahead With its sleek new museum, built by 'winking-eye bridge' architects Wilkinson Eyre, Swansea may yet become the next Gateshead. |
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The city that ate the world It's goodbye to mao and hello to Europe's top architects, all Australia's iron ore... and half the World's concrete. With its sights set on Olympic gold, Beijing is being rebuilt round the clock. |
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China Builds Its Dreams, and Some Fear a Bubble Move over, New York. This year alone, Shanghai will complete towers with more space for living and working than there is in all the office buildings in New York City. |
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Stop supersize trend Physician tells Notre Dame crowd that urban sprawl threatens nation's health. |
Monday, October 17, 2005
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SketchUp meets Google Earth Models created in SketchUp can now be easily located at their exact position in the world and shared with everyone through the free Google Earth application. In just three easy steps you can share your model with the world! |
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More commuters riding bicycles to work Bicycle stores have been getting a new type of customer recently: former car commuters. They've wiped the cobwebs from their dusty 10-speeds and they come in looking for accessories and a tuneup. They wander the aisles and marvel at how far bikes have come since the classic Schwinn Cruiser. |
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Cities face their high-rise futures From Austin to Boston, Tampa to Portland, cities want to make their downtowns lively 24-hour districts that will enhance their image and tax base. Austin and some other cities also are hoping that more downtown housing options will reduce sprawl as their populations grow. |
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A 'new' New Orleans? Lots of major American cities have historic districts; New Orleans is the only one that is almost entirely a historic district. So now what? |
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Storefront in the desert "Prada Marfa" looks incredibly out of place, a permanent public art sculpture in the middle of nowhere. |
Saturday, October 15, 2005
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Cool beauty The Cira Centre, Philadelphia's first new office tower in 15 long years, is a giant crystal that has emerged from somewhere deep in the Earth. Scratch that. It is the prow of a ship docked at the entrance to Center City. No. It is an iceberg about to crash into the Philly Titanic. It's a mammoth laser-cut diamond. It's a towering cathedral, here to bless the city. |
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Famous City Planner Edmund Bacon Dies At 95 Edmund N. Bacon, a renowned city planner whose vision transformed postwar Philadelphia and whose influence continued to shape the look and feel of the nation's fifth-largest city, died Friday, his daughter said. He was 95. His 1967 book "Design of Cities" remains one of the key texts for architecture students. |
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Making NYC's Streets Safe for Hydrants & Pay Phones Bollards -- chances are you don't care about them or even know what they are. Sadly, I do. And I'm about to tell you all about them. But this is exactly what Internet self-publishing is for, right? Two-thousand words on bollards. |
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Psychogeography: a beginner's guide Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets: the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle, and the record ends. Walking makes for content; footage for footage. |
Friday, October 14, 2005
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Green Means Go Silver Spring's Synthetic Lawn Is a Sweet Success |
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Second Look: Tracey Towers by Paul Rudolph, 1972 How did Rudolph, a restless and challenging architectural mind, end up doing subsidized housing in the Bronx? |
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One Town Stops Time by Turning Off the Water Blessed with a quaint downtown and some of the most impressive scenery on the Pacific coast, this town is largely unknown even in San Francisco, just 20 miles south. To keep that from changing, residents have a habit of tearing down highway signs that so much as mention Bolinas. |
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Suburbia becomes a cool place to live At last it's happened. Just as flared trousers have been welcomed back into society, so suburbia has finally been recognised as cool and retro. |
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SUV Drivers in Paris Get Wind Knocked Out of Them Under cover of night, a clandestine crew of environmentalists target Jeep Cherokees, Porsche Cayennes and other four-wheel-drive vehicles parked on the tree-lined avenues and cobblestoned lanes of wealthy neighborhoods. The eco-guerrillas deflate tires without damaging them, smear doors with mud and paste handbills on windshields proclaiming that the vehicles are dangerous, polluting behemoths that do not belong in the city. |
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Who cares? Recent events in New Orleans frame the Sustainable Waterfronts symposium in Chicago with a new urgency. Paul Preissner asks whether the US will ever find the discipline necessary to focus attention on finding a lasting response to the challenges created through our relationship with water. |
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
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Closeout time coming for big lots for homes? Sustainable-development chief advocates using less land and embracing town-center idea. |
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Night Watch: Checking in with the Dark Sky Movement A few years ago, discussion about the dark sky movement focused on defining terms and explaining the issues. Today, owing to the efforts of lighting professionals, astronomers, and active citizens, dark sky concerns are becoming part of the public consciousness and a healthy contender with sustainability for the attentions of policymakers. |
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Don't Let Fear Kill Muni Wi-Fi Plans are afoot in Philadelphia and Huntsville, Alabama, as well as my hometown of San Francisco, to provide residents with low-cost or free wireless internet access. It's a great idea whose time has come, like drinking fountains, public toilets and park benches. But last week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that my city's mayor expects a legal challenge from internet service providers like SBC and Comcast, who presumably prefer every San Franciscan to pay a monthly access fee. |
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A Doubting Claus 'Doubt is an important aspect of our work as architects and designers of public space,' said Felix Claus on September 13 at the Brakke Grond in Amsterdam. |
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Better suburban planning needed to curb obesity, experts find It's time to shift the focus from blaming individuals for being fat to understanding how the environment we live in discourages healthy living, a scientific think tank has concluded. |
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
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Gas Math: Subtract 2 Wheels For morning commuters, the hours trapped in gridlocked traffic are a ripe time for fantasies of drastic change. It is little wonder that many have pondered the notion of pedaling a bicycle to work. |
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Living Too Large In Exurbia Big houses. Big cars. Now, bigger bills. A lifestyle built on cheap energy and cheap credit is in jeopardy. |
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School choice could be an answer to sprawl Imagine a country -- we'll call it Hobsonia -- that requires all its residents to shop at officially assigned supermarkets based on where they live. Now, Hobsonians care passionately about food, and since the law allows them to move if they wish, citizens decide where to live based largely on where they can buy groceries. Those with money move to the best supermarket districts, which tend to be in affluent areas where store managers know that unhappy customers have the scratch to move elsewhere. Hobsonia thus sorts itself into good supermarket districts and bad. While people talk passionately about improving the latter, nothing ever seems to make much difference. |
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Brits 'n' mortar The Stirling Prize exists to encourage new British architecture, and there are some stunning buildings on the shortlist. But why do some of our most innovative talents have to go abroad to make a name for themselves? |
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Monorail! Seattle's great mass transit project becomes a "Simpsons" punchline. It was supposed to have been a Jetsons future for Seattle. A gleaming new monorail would silently skim along above the rooftops, whisking contented commuters into the city so smoothly that not a ripple would mar the surfaces of their $4 Tully's mint mochas. Seattle was so in love with this vision--sleek, futuristic, anti-car--that voters had approved the proposed monorail four times, most recently last November by a whopping 64 percent. |
Saturday, October 8, 2005
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Canada likes Alsop Controversial British architect Will Alsop is expected to be named the winner next week of an international competition to design a $40-million revamp of the Edmonton Art Gallery. [images]
Also: Will Alsop, the British architect acclaimed for his irreverent buildings, has been hired to create an iconic building for the Filmport, in Toronto's port lands. |
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Rubber sidewalks add bounce to city foot traffic There are rubber balls to bounce, rubber galoshes to keep your feet dry and rubber gloves for the nasty cleaning chores. Now, in Seattle's South Park neighborhood and in a growing number of cities around the country, there are rubber sidewalks. |
Thursday, October 6, 2005
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Bike Sales Booming As Gas Prices Soar More bicycles than cars have been sold in the United States over the past 12 months, with rising gas prices prompting commuters to opt for two wheels instead of four. |
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
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Discover a hidden world in your own city! From Ninjalicious, the author of Infiltration zine, comes Access All Areas, the the first published guide to the exciting art of urban exploration, a rapidly growing hobby that allows participants to personally experience their cities’ hidden and off-limits spaces. |
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
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Chard on the Green? San Francisco in a post-oil future Acres of chard and lettuce in Golden Gate Park? The Marina Green with community gardens? Wind turbines on top of the Bank of America Building? Welcome to the post-oil future. |
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Jam Nation How to put the brakes on employee driving |
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Cité Multimédia Montreal's Cité Multimédia (Multimedia City) is a large-scale office development in an old industrial area of the city geared towards internet and other technology companies. |
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Dutch Answer to Flooding: Build Houses that Swim The Dutch are gearing up for climate change with amphibious houses. If rivers rise above their banks, the houses simply rise upwards as well. Such innovation could be good news for hurricane and flood-stunned America. But are water lovers prepared to live on swimming family arks? [via] |
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The virtues of sprawl Sprawl isn't what it used to be, some experts contend. Is it time we stopped worrying and learned to love the subdivision? |
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Vancouver world's most liveable city In recent years, it seems every few months another ranking finds Vancouver on the list of the world's most desirable places to live. |
Monday, October 3, 2005
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Big and Green The first book to examine the sustainable skyscraper, its history, the technologies that make it possible, and its role in the future of urban development. |
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Google offers San Francisco Wi-Fi -- for free Google Inc. has offered to blanket San Francisco with free wireless Internet access at no cost to the city, placing a marquee name behind Mayor Gavin Newsom's effort to get all residents online whether they are at home, in a park or in a cafe. |
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Shelter From The Storm Disaster relief housing draws designers but do their ideas fit the people? |
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These trains should run under water Money is now flowing toward the Los Angeles River for the first time since 17,000 people paved it by hand. Putting the rail lines underground is a minor task in comparison — but a big step toward a bold goal. |
Sunday, October 2, 2005
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City of RVs Is Ready For Families By Monday, families displaced by Hurricane Katrina will move here into a "mini city" of neatly spaced rows of about 600 white RV trailers that was, until eight days ago, a 65-acre cow pasture outside of Baton Rouge. A team of 200 engineers, plumbers, laborers, draftsmen and city officials have worked around the clock to install water and sewer pipes to the grassy fields, converting the area into what some evacuees working on the project call the "City of Hope." |
Saturday, October 1, 2005
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Dog Days There's no place like ancient Rome—except for sweltering modern-day New York City |
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Cut-Rate Homes For Middle Class Are Catching On "We figured we would rent our whole lives," Ms. Quinci said. "We didn't really think that we could afford to have a place to ourselves." |
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Angry drivers call ‘bike safety’ an oxymoron “I don’t really like to drive anymore,” says 54-year-old Lynette Jones of Northeast Portland. “These cyclists have basically taken over. They refuse to be polite. You honk; they just go slower and look at you like you’re crazy. … To me it feels like they’re taunting: ‘I dare you to hit me.’ ” |
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Jazz Urbanism The power brokers named to oversee New Orleans’s reconstruction must take pains not to destroy the city’s unique character—and should listen to everyone. |
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Light and the City It’s no coincidence that some of the most iconic and beloved images of the city date from the middle of the twentieth century, when illumination was warmly embraced by the world’s metropoles. Every city with dreams of making it big boasted a Great White Way, the best and brightest part of town to which crowds flocked, looking for excitement. Ever since electricity was invented in the late nineteenth century, light has been used to define urban space and create a sense of place. Stern white light projected against the facade of a church or city hall instills a sense of power and gravitas; the blinking neon and all-consuming illumination of a busy main street, by contrast, shouts, “You are here!” with giddy enthusiasm. |
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Hummers for babies: Strollers cause friction One recent evening during rush hour on a Washington subway, Jose Rivas found himself cornered by a giant stroller, with no clear path of escape. "She saw us," Rivas, 33, said of the woman pushing the buggy. "She looked at us. She was basically like: 'You better find a way to get out. It's not my responsibility.' " |
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