Urbanism News
Saturday, November 29, 2003
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Seattle Reboots Its Future The leaders of the city that Bill Boeing and Bill Gates built are asking what it will take to thrive in the 21st century.
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Friday, November 28, 2003
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Money and the City On October 30th, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, spoke with Robert Rubin, the Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, and Felix Rohatyn, who was instrumental in solving New York City's fiscal crisis in the mid-seventies. Remnick, Rubin, and Rohatyn discussed the economic and psychological ramifications of the September 11th tragedy, and what might be done to stimulate the economy and recovery. Here is a partial transcript of that conversation. |
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The Noises What was going on in the apartment upstairs? |
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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. |
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Liberty Tower Elenberg Fraser’s first large building is an eloquent essay on the tower genre and on speculative building. |
Thursday, November 27, 2003
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According to Plan Over the past two decades, Vancouver, British Columbia, has become famous for an urban-design experiment. |
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Radical Architecture We live in uncertain times, so much is certain. But there is no reason to be gloomy; a new generation of architects, urban planners and artists see potential in this situation of crisis. The Blitz-show 'Radical Architecture III: processing uncertainties' in the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (museum of applied arts) in Cologne is a first-time collection of the standpoints represented by 19 internationally active initiatives. |
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Architects slate 'mediocre' hospitals A chance to transform Britain's urban landscape and the health of its people could be thrown away by second-rate work, says a report today on the government's plan for almost 140 new hospitals within the next 10 years. |
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First Step Housing - New York City One winner of the First Step Housing Design Competition is Vancouver, British Columbia's Forsythe + MacAllen Design with their entry "Soft House". |
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From Grit to Chic to Très Chic In a typical weekday there is a bustle of activity at Chelsea Market, which occupies the ground floor of the old manufacturing building that covers the block between Ninth and 10th Avenues and 15th and 16th Streets. Shoppers browse the food stores to the sweet smell of baked goods, while others enjoy a snack at the tables spotted at strategic corners of the irregularly shaped main-floor corridor. |
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Left for dead Though the largest suburban malls are thriving, many are deceased or on life support. What do you do with all that space? |
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
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Prefab-ulous A cadre of high-style architects brings designerly ambitions to the mid-priced, kit-built house. |
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
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My Other Front Door Is for My Customers
A new suburban lifestyle is emerging in south Orange County's Ladera Ranch: hybrid dwellings where people live and do business. |
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... but who's looking out for obese bears?
North America's obesity epidemic is getting so unbearable that it's spreading to the animal kingdom. |
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What ever happened to walking to school?
A mere 10 percent of kids actually walk to school. Sprawl and bad urban planning are to blame. |
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It'll never take off How do you get into the Butterfly House? Easy - just walk up the caterpillar and through the chrysalis in the lobby. |
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At home with Foreign Office Architects: what animals are they breeding today? The two leaders of the ironically-named Foreign Office Architects were putting a brave face on things when I met them (and tiny daughter Mina, bearing cake from a friend's birthday party) in their cavernous Pimlico home one Saturday. |
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Are Memorial Designs Too Complex to Last? Apart from Daniel Libeskind standing in a swarm of camera lights, there were relatively few architects present on Wednesday when the eight finalist designs in the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition officially went on view downtown at the Winter Garden. |
Monday, November 24, 2003
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Between Rivers The coastline to the south of Barcelona, particularly around the delta of the river Llobregat, is where the city's main logistic and transport infrastructures are concentrated. |
Saturday, November 22, 2003
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Bowery Flowering
The Bowery, one of Manhattan's true historic thoroughfares, has always been a street for the adventurous and for the desperate, for the insatiable and the incurable, for the brave and also for the brazen. When the New Museum of Contemporary Art completes its dramatic new home there sometime in 2006, the Bowery will hold the front line of cultural tourism. |
Friday, November 21, 2003
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Sprawl may cost city jobs, reports indicate Atlanta's suburban sprawl may be literally driving away good jobs. |
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Time to Recognize the Politics of Suburban Sprawl On the pages of nearly every newspaper in the nation, there are daily articles on suburban sprawl. Attempts to get sprawl under control started in the 1950s relatively soon after sprawl exploded after the end of World War II. They all failed. Even now, with a strong national “smart growth” movement, unless sprawl-haters understand sprawl politics and the power of the sprawl lobby, by mid-century with a population lunging toward 400 million, it will be too late to save so much of what so many Americans value, including public greenspaces, rural lifestyles, farmland and social capital. |
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Prescott approves disputed 'shard of glass' tower The government yesterday ignored the advice of its own heritage agency by approving the construction of Europe's tallest tower block, dubbed the "shard of glass". |
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A Dutch Treat: Rem Koolhaas in Berlin The highly acclaimed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was recently awarded Berlin's architecture prize for his design of the Royal Dutch Embassy in the German capital. A new exhibition looks at the work of the top architect. |
Thursday, November 20, 2003
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Out of the Driver's Seat Jennifer Clark never thought she would find herself without a set of car keys tucked in her purse or her mechanic's phone number taped to her refrigerator door. |
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BBC chooses young designers for music studios A competition to design the BBC Music Box, highpoint of the corporation's emerging White City "media village" in west London, has been won by the acclaimed young practice Foreign Office Architects (FOA). |
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Shipping Containers Show Promise for Living Space With tens of thousands of empty shipping containers clutteringAmerica’s seaports, one New York City architectural firm has developed a novel idea for converting the ubiquitous metal boxes into low-cost housing and working space. Firm officials are now talking with developers about making it a reality. |
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
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Bikes Are Flying Off the Racks, Not Down the Streets "Before urban sprawl happened, kids could walk or bike to school," said Angela D. Mickalide, program director at the National Safe Kids Campaign. |
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With bigger cars and more of them, parking becomes a priority with homeowners Pile in the bikes and the garbage cans, the broken lamps and the golf clubs. Toss in tools, balls of all kinds, holiday decorations, boxes of cast-off clothing and perhaps an automobile if there's room. And there you have the garage, the most dumped-on and dumped-in space in the house. |
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Study: Community Design Influences Health In a community where people are more likely to drive than to walk, residents are generally less physically active. And the less active residents of such spread-out or sprawling communities are, the more they weigh and the worse their health. |
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
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Zaha Hadid - High Speed Station - Napoli The New High Speed Station Napoli Afragola is a bridge above the tracks. The key challenge of the architectural scheme is to create a well organized transport interchange that can simultaneously serve as a new landmark to announce the approach to Naples thus a new gateway to the city. |
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Foster goes Deco, and reinvents the skyscraper. What are we to make of the "Gherkin"? In the interests of research, I have taken a jar of pickled gherkins out of my fridge and examined them closely. They do not look much like the new circular, tapering Lord Foster skyscraper at the epicentre of the City of London. |
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Foreign mission FOA never repeat themselves - and their one-off approach could spell the end for the big-name architects. |
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New center can't live up to promise of its name In jerkwater towns on the Western frontier, shopkeepers built phony storefronts two stories high to make their one-story buildings look bigger than they really were. |
Saturday, November 15, 2003
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Lunchbox for Art: A New Museum The New Museum of Contemporary Art wants to build a seven-story bento box for art on the Bowery. Plans and models for this deftly composed lunch break of a building are now on view in the museum's mezzanine gallery, at 583 Broadway, between Houston and Prince Streets in SoHo. |
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Women desire integrated communities Access to transportation, good grocery stores, parks top neighborhood strengths. |
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Homes far away from home
Beijing property developer creates subdivisions on Canadian blueprint. |
Friday, November 14, 2003
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Grand Slam for Grand Ave? Will Frank Gehry’s triumphant masterwork, Walt Disney Concert Hall, serve as a catalyst for large-scale city-making in downtown Los Angeles? |
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Building on the back streets Two architects suggest a better use of Toronto's wasted laneway lots. |
Thursday, November 13, 2003
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Shop and Awe: The Peril of American-Style Commercial Development for Europe The lesson from America begins and end with a warning: Conventional suburban retail formats that constitute a major portion of sprawl in the United States represent a voracious virus that, once introduced into the European fabric, will rend it and eviscerate the small scale, high-service shopkeepers that have been a cornerstone of European social and cultural life for ages. |
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Shopping Japanese Style Despite dips in the economy over the past decade, Japan maintains a strong commitment to urban development. Retail construction appears to flourish. And unlike the boxy shopping centers that blight U.S. suburban and rural landscapes with their featureless design and sprawling parking lots, some recent Japanese developments set examples for combining dynamic design with urban sensibilities. |
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But Is the Commute Worth It? Would you rather make $10,000 a year more or shave 10 minutes each way off your commute? |
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Sprawl takes bite out of China farmland The farmers of this hamlet outside Beijing figured to be the luckiest peasants in China. They ended up bitterly disappointed. |
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New power source: wall vibrations Imagine using a computer that runs on energy generated from your building's wall and window vibrations. Masayuki Miyazaki, a senior researcher at Hitachi Co. Ltd.'s central lab in Tokyo, is trying to do just that. |
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Architecture can be fun
Pros guide students through design basics for pair of competitions. |
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Simple geometry
Clutching at straws and thin budgets, artist Michael Olexo tries to invigorate public education through architecture. |
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Mud, glorious mud They are west Africa's most exciting, ambitious buildings. Some of them have lasted 700 years. And they're made of dirt. |
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More Women Design Their Way to the Top Women are finally making their mark in the manmade world of architecture. |
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
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Why mall styles are on Target Here's what I learned at the Urban Land Institute conference: Target and Nordstrom are exactly alike. |
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Berlin 'Waschmaschine' wins architecture prize German chancellor Gerhard Schröder's new office - which critics liken to a giant washing machine - scooped Germany's most prestigious architectural prize last night. |
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
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Brain-Gain Cities Attract Educated Young In a Darwinian fight for survival, American cities are scheming to steal each other's young. They want ambitious young people with graduate degrees in such fields as genome science, bio-informatics and entrepreneurial management. |
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The Economics of Eco-Friendly Land Development Is a "green" property developer an oxymoron? |
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A powerful exhibit
Out of the Box, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, is a blast from the 1970s and is a must-see for anyone with an interest in the philosophy of art and architecture. |
Monday, November 10, 2003
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The Big Squeeze: Cities that grow up in style It's the cities that have said, "Let's develop a way of managing future growth" that achieved good quality results. |
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The Incredible Hulk
A behemoth rises up in Columbus Circle. |
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The moral angle Contemporary architects are not accustomed to presenting their plans in terms of morality, but the replacement for the Twin Towers, destroyed in moral outrage, is being judged in moral terms. |
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Is That A Load-bearing French Fry? Wacky, wild, and cartoonish architectural design, although eerily reminiscent of the "gaudy, cheesy, and tacky" schemes of the 1950s and 60s, reinvigorates southern California cities with much-needed visual interest. |
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Loving and Hating New York Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple, those T-shirts with a heart design proclaiming "I Love New York," are signs, pathetic in their desperation, of how the mighty has fallen. New York City used to leave the bragging to others, for bragging was "bush." Being unique, the biggest and the best, New York didn't have to assert how special it was. |
Saturday, November 8, 2003
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Design Guidelines for Ground Zero Point More to Space City U.S.A. How did we end up in Houston? That is the burning question raised by a new set of design guidelines for the office towers at ground zero. True, we've got a hole the size of Texas sitting down there in Lower Manhattan. But how did ground zero come to inherit a vision of glitzy, structurally inept towers that would look more at home in an office park for energy companies in Space City U.S.A.? |
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New Urbanism, Mon Amour! They're cropping up all over the Santa Clara Valley: the preplanned, prefab communities that promise to take suburban life back to the future. Is this heaven or what? |
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New York and Paris retain retail rent crown Fifth Avenue and the Champs Elysées retained their spots as the world's highest-rent districts for retailers, according to a survey released Thursday. |
Friday, November 7, 2003
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Gehry, Moneo and Meier in Los Angeles, not forgetting Welton Becket. Where has L.A. got to with its non-movie culture? I felt like a character in an H.M. Bateman cartoon: "The Man Who Suggested That Frank Gehry's Disney Hall in Los Angeles Was Maybe Not So Great After All". |
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What the El?! Koolhaas Design Is Roaring Success The confrontation taking place on State and 33rd streets on the Near South Side has been eagerly awaited. And now it's here. |
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The prophet comes to Oakville Miami architect Andrés Duany is spreading his New Urbanist gospel and has big plans for a huge swath of Oakville land. |
Thursday, November 6, 2003
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Disconnected Urbanism The cell phone has changed our sense of place more than faxes, computers, and e-mail. |
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In Japan, Rethinking the Shoe Box A small house need not be claustrophobic, even here, where the average apartment is just 774 square feet. |
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Interview with David Harvey: Questions about The New Imperialism In his recently published The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), geographer and social theorist David Harvey makes the case for a "New Deal" brand of imperialism in which the responsibilities of government are carried out by a “benevolent… coalition of capitalist powers.” |
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Virtual realities revealed Using computer tools and organic forms, architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture create designs like wrapping. |
Wednesday, November 5, 2003
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Freed architecture Rem Koolhaas, recently awarded the 2003 Praemium Imperiale for architecture, is prolific to the point of relentlessness. Looking at the stream of bold, innovative and aggressively hip buildings Koolhaas' Rotterdam-based office has produced, one well-known Japanese architect was prompted to liken him to a baseball pitching machine. Intended as a compliment, the analogy reflects the intensity and perfect control that are characteristic of Koolhaas' work. |
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Curbing sprawl to fight climate change If governments do not act quickly to discourage the building of cities for cars, the international effort to control global warming will become much more difficult, warns a new study by the Worldwatch Institute. |
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Concepts, not concrete, matter For world-renowned architect Bernard Tschumi, concepts, not concrete, are the building blocks of architecture. |
Tuesday, November 4, 2003
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How to Make a Building Fly WE could have built four or five floors on the vacant parking lot," the English architect Will Alsop says of the $30 million building he designed for the Ontario College of Art and Design. "But there's no magic in that, there's nothing to raise the spirit." So he raised the building nine stories on multicolored stilts. |
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Low-rise Paris set to scrape the sky Housing crisis forces rethink of 30-year ban on tall buildings. |
Monday, November 3, 2003
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Giving power to the people Imagine. You, as an ordinary resident of Toronto, can meet with your neighbours to decide how tax dollars will be invested in your neighbourhood — or decide, after meeting with representatives of other neighbourhoods, that another area needs the money more. Imagine — government recognizes the knowledge and experience of ordinary people by allowing them to participate, on a day-to-day basis, in the planning and administration of civic affairs. |
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Pullman district on track for true preservation You can almost sniff the steam clouds and feel the vibration of the tracks. Yet most of the mirage is spun of nothing more than sepia photos and century-old echoes in the Pullman neighborhood of South Chicago. |
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Ransom exhibit reminds us we are all moderns now Modernism has been embraced, post 9/11, by architects, artists, writers and other thinkers as a comforting certainty preserved from the 20th century. |
Saturday, November 1, 2003
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New urbanism in former harbours Colourful archipelago districts are appearing in harbour areas. Radically mixed uses provide an example for the whole city. |
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The city blurred by speed You know those incredible statistics on Dubai's building boom? Well, the next wave of development is going to be even bigger. |
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Design Revolution Returns Apartments to Nature Savvy developers have discovered a new way to build value in their residential properties. |
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Surplus land: perspectives for the cultural landscape Farmers are going; new settlers are coming. Students at TU Berlin developed ideas for a different land use. |
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