Urbanism News
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
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Faking It For Real Ken Smith is the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture. A potpourri of kitsch, deep one-liners, and catchy riffs. For Smith, 185 plastic rocks + 7 tons crushed glass + 4 tons rubber mulch + 560 artificial boxwoods equals MoMA’s new roof garden. What a guy. |
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Pedestrians and Drivers Beware! Motoboys Are in a Hurry This is a city with nearly 11 million inhabitants and 4.5 million passenger cars, 32,000 taxis and 15,000 buses. Traffic jams more than 100 miles long are not uncommon, and even on an ordinary day, getting from one side of town to the other can take two hours or more. |
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Cairo Digs Into Its Past to Give Park-Starved Residents an Oasis When it comes to dust and din, perhaps no city on the planet can match Cairo, a desert-bound megalopolis clinging to the Nile whose 17 million people get by with only a few square feet of green space each. |
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Wal-Mart, Retailers' November Sales Slow as Gas Prices Rise Sales at U.S retailers including Wal- Mart Stores Inc. probably slowed in November, the start of the holiday shopping season, as rising energy prices curbed consumer spending. |
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Put Internet Access On The Trains As the Metropolitan Transit Authority struggles with its newest round of financial and political woes, the agency is failing to consider a ripe opportunity for peripheral economic development: providing wireless Internet access, commonly called Wi-Fi (for wireless fidelity) on its commuter trains, the Metro-North and Long Island Railroads. |
Monday, November 29, 2004
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House price boom fuels social divide Housing charity says Britain risks a return to Victorian times as millions of people are caught out by the unequal property market. |
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Urban renewal, the wireless way Thanks to Wi-Fi networks, cellphones and global positioning locators, there's a new sense of place in the city. |
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How Ground Zero Changed the Equation Great buildings, whether St. Peters in Rome or the Chrysler Building in New York, are the product of the interaction between great architects, clients determined to create great architecture, and a culture that values and demands a minimum level of quality. Still, as participants in an open society, we should welcome this new interest in architectural design. |
Sunday, November 28, 2004
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Meet you at the mall Oh, how those shopping meccas have changed since the boxy buildings of years past. |
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L.A. chain reaction A small but expanding number of people enjoy traveling the urban streets by bicycle, and the Bicycle Kitchen in Koreatown has become the focal point of their community. |
Friday, November 26, 2004
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Culture clash in Hong Kong On a grassy expanse of reclaimed land on Hong Kong's waterfront, government officials are planning a sprawling arts centre to put the city on the world's cultural map. |
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Reducing Cancer Risks One Step at a Time A recently released study of commuters in Shanghai, China shows that walking or bicycling to work may do more than minimize pollution and improve cardiovascular health. Researchers from the Maryland-based National Cancer Institute found that moderate day-to-day physical activity significantly reduced Shanghai residents' chances of getting colon cancer. |
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Subterranean Homesick Blues Finding trapdoors and secret entrances to the Pratt Institute's underground steam tunnels occupies the minds of countless students and piques the curiosity of urban explorers. Yet despite myriad tales about failed entrance attempts, there I was, walking beneath the school, dodging the occasional ceiling drip and roasting in the heat emanating from pipes near my head. But it wasn't my talent that got me there—it was my guide, Julia Solis, queen of all things subterranean and author of New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City. |
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Cramped Style How regulators derailed California’s most environmentally progressive development. |
Thursday, November 25, 2004
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Polidori’s Metropolis Robert Polidori may be the greatest architectural photographer of his time—but don’t tell him that. “I don’t photograph architecture,” he says. “I photograph habitats. |
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Architecture in Sydney "The Sydney boom is over", say many Sydneysiders and yet Sydney's population is increasing by a thousand new inhabitants every week. |
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Pretty vacant skyscrapers? One of London's tallest and perhaps best-loved skyscrapers, the Swiss Re Tower, has been a resounding critical success. But it's also standing half-empty.
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China's supersized mall For sale: everything. Goat-leather motorcycle jackets, Italian bathroom sinks, hand-made violins, grandfather clocks, colonial-style desks, Jaguars, diapers. And that's barely getting started. |
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For Sale: 1945 Diner; $33,500, Nostalgia Included Looking for that unique Christmas gift? Don't search those expensive shops on Fifth Avenue. Instead, go over to 49th Street and 11th Avenue, where you can get, for only $33,500, a jewel-like work of art in stainless steel. |
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
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Edens Lost & Found There is a tendency to think that we are living at the pinnacle of civilization. Is this true? Or are we living in a way that robs future generations of the resources they will need to live humane and satisfying lives? Edens Lost & Found, a forthcoming PBS Television special, is the story of urban rebirth and sustainability -- telling real stories of real people who are building cities that sustain and support today's generations ... and those yet to come. |
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Cities of Joy Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, believes that one day cities of the developing world will offer us lessons about providing everyone with equal access to happiness. |
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Houses of the Future YBE2004 Houses of the Future is the showcase event for the Year of the Built Environment. |
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Munich Says "Nein!" To Tall Buildings A win for democracy as vote sets height limit for Bavarian capital.
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Coming to a high street near you ... Tesco are proud of their inner-city stores. They shouldn't be. |
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
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San Diego plots a downtown boom to fight sprawl In the shadow of her new high-rise condominium building, Carol Rutkin paused in her morning stroll with her poodle to count her blessings as a Southern Californian without a car. "I'm completely independent - I can't think of anything I can't walk to," said Rutkin, a retiree who moved here from Florida a year ago after her husband died. "The bank is right around the corner. There's a grocery store. The library is close. The cleaners is right in my building. The train station is close. Even the cruise ships - last year, I took a cruise, and I walked down to get on the ship." |
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'Design or die' The new head of the Design Council tells Edward Simpkins about his mission to help British industry see off low-cost overseas rivals. |
Saturday, November 20, 2004
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Can "hitchhiking" help commuters? Consultant seeks to ease congestion Steve Raney has a new idea for getting suburban commuters out of their cars that isn't really new at all: hitchhiking. |
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Car ports How those eerily beautiful bubble cars in "The Incredibles" may well appear in our not-too-distant future.
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Architect and client matched by a mouse
Web sites help homeowners take some of the anxiety out of searching for Mr. Wright. |
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Grand designs After decades of suspicion, Britain has finally fallen in love with modernism. |
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Mileage tax proposed for state's drivers Opponents include privacy advocates and owners of hybrid vehicles. |
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Three Visions Compete for European Bank's New Home Choosing a German city to be the home of the European Central Bank and its new currency, the euro, was a diplomatic challenge worthy of Talleyrand. Choosing an architect to design a new bank headquarters here is proving no less tricky. |
Friday, November 19, 2004
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Million-Dollar Blocks In recent years, as the U.S. prison population has soared, million-dollar blocks have popped up in cities across the country. Maps of prison spending (like the one on the left) suggest a new way of looking at this phenomenon, illustrating the oft ignored reality that most prisoners come from just a handfulof urban neighborhoods. These maps invite numerous questions: How is the community benefiting from all the money being spent? And might there be another, better way to spend those same criminal-justice dollars? |
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What If... Every day I wander neighborhoods. Sometimes it is in the pursuit of abandoned and derelict buildings that after rehabilitation can become home to exciting venues. Sometimes I am guiding a neighborhood group who desire to see their neighborhood with new eyes as they go about creating a shared vision of what can be. And other times, I am just passing from here to there when something catches my imagination. In no particular order, here are some of thoughts that have stimulated my thinking about what could be, if… |
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Big, Bad S.U.V.'s Are Spreading to Europe The Land Rover barreled around the narrow corner like a whale splashing into a swimming pool, parking, for lack of a better alternative, in the middle of the road. Needless to say, it was not making many friends. |
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Sustainability With a View Visitors to Seattle’s new City Hall and Justice Center probably don’t spend much time considering the sustainability, energy savings and ecological benefits of these new civic buildings’ high profile garden roofs. They’re too busy enjoying the views. |
Thursday, November 18, 2004
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URO1.ORG: prototipo M7 The young cooperative of Chilean architects URO1.ORG have devised a system for designing low-cost housing. Based on the assembly of a small number of serial units, it permits an infinite variety of solutions. |
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It's the Cities, Stupid. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. |
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Luxembourg's New Concert Hall by Christian de Portzamparc A new home for the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg is one of a number of cultural projects underway as the city prepares itself for its second stint as European Capital of Culture. |
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Most of our traffic carnage is anything but accidental Seniors with dementia who continue to drive are not the problem; teenagers who speed are not the problem; stressed-out commuters who take dangerous risks are not the problem. The problem is that we have created a society where we are subservient to the automobile. |
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
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Space craft Design-led and 'soft' alternatives to security cameras and fencing are needed to keep vandals out and encourage people back into parks and public areas, says a new study. |
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
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Landscaped Roofs Have Chicago Mayor Seeing Green When cities run out of valuable real estate, planners look up. The search for green space is no exception. Europe's green roofs have long provided environmental, aesthetic, and economic benefits. Is the idea growing in the United States? |
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China plans world's tallest tower The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has announced plans to build the world's tallest tower. |
Monday, November 15, 2004
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Taking a Lesson in Math to Limit Urban Sprawl
Without a fundamental shift by government to address the fundamental policies that exacerbate urban sprawl, building new light rail systems and subsidizing select projects alone will have little impact on urban growth patterns or environmental preservation. |
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Burned-out coal towns fired up by culture, art England's Newcastle-Gateshead port rubs off the gritty dust of its past, discovers it can sparkle. |
Sunday, November 14, 2004
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Lives in ruins The rapid redevelopment of Shanghai has come at a cost as building after building is bulldozed to make way for gleaming skyscrapers. The demolished blocks were once homes to the city's poor, but any attempts to complain have been brutally swept aside. |
Saturday, November 13, 2004
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Pleasantville How a perfectly nice little town in the Catskills is being renovated courtesy of reality TV. |
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Attributing designs to 1 name can slight teams of geniuses It's part of architectural lore how the preening international architect Daniel Libeskind was chosen in early 2003 as lead designer for the World Trade Center site in New York, only to lose control and see virtually all the actual buildings and memorials to the victims of Sept. 11, 2001, designed by other people. |
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Wind power not all pleasant breezes A group of Canadian and U.S. scientists reported Tuesday that computer simulations show that a large-scale use of wind farms to generate electrical power could create a significant temperature change over Earth's land masses. |
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High-tech buildings may save energy Buildings are getting smarter — and the next generation of building materials is expected to do even more. Windows could trap the sun's energy to heat hot water. Sensors that measure the carbon dioxide exhaled by people in a room could determine whether the air conditioning needs to be turned up. |
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Creating local food options in an urban setting How one woman channeled her discovery about the perils of an industrial food system into creating local options for healthy, sustainably produced food in her own Chicago neighborhood. |
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
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Take a Ride to Exurbia Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It's a new world out there. |
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Private Sector, Public Good: The Necessity of Economic Sustainability in Architectural Activism We must create economically and socially sustainable private sector paths for addressing issues of disenfranchisement. |
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Modernism gets a new welcome in Philadelphia The country's politics may be shifting right, but progressive architecture is in the ascendancy in Philadelphia - at long last. With very little fanfare, and even fewer complaints, two proudly modernist apartment towers have slipped into the red-brick territory of Center City. |
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On Waterfronts of the Present, Rail-Bridge Relics of the Past A two recently built waterfront parks, evocative industrial archaeology - huge, rusting float bridges, once used for transferring freight cars to and from cross-river barges - have been made integral parts of the design. |
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Can We Live Without Oil? Americans are addicted to the joys of the open road. But the joys come at too high a price and we’re about to hit bottom. We can get around without oil. Here’s the 12-step program to do it. |
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Beijing Is Facing "State of Emergency" from Filthy Air China's capital is in "a state of emergency" because of air pollution, and one of the biggest polluters in the city, host of the 2008 Olympics, will slash production till the end of the year, state media said on Thursday. |
Monday, November 8, 2004
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Park / No Park These images examine the ethics of space and nature in past and present New York City. |
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The Devil's Ordinary Consuming Public Culture in the Coffee-House. |
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Skateable Reverse Engineering Skateboarding's evolutionary leap from flat ground to the vertical walls of Southern California's empty swimming pools in the mid-70s was the starting point for an inspired re-appropriation of familiar sites. |
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Space in the Age of Non-place
A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. |
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Lifestyles of the Rich (Buyers) and Famous (Architects) With the real estate market up and public appreciation for design surging, residential buyers are willing to pay more for the cachet of a big-name architect—and developers are catering to the new demand. But are “designer buildings” adding quality to New York’s urban fabric or just padding developers’ pockets? |
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PLAYING WITH URBAN LIFE: How Simcity Influences Planning Culture
Is it time—to be Mayor? Do you have the empire-building skills to develop a metropolis of soaring skyscrapers or the aesthetic sensibilities to create a city that delights the eye? Do you enjoy tinkering with an entire world—widening a riverbed there, increasing a tax rate here—to see the effects on the inhabitants under your sway? Or do you want to get down and dirty with The Sims in your streets, taking on missions that have you hurtling down highways in a tank? |
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Eccentric building wins top award An eccentric King's Cross development made from straw bales has scooped a prestigious award for environmentally friendly architecture.
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Invisible Cathedral A walk through the new Modern. |
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Where Blade Runner meets Las Vegas Shanghai is mad for skyscrapers - it has more than the entire west coast of the US, and still they keep coming. But, as Stuart Jeffries discovers, preserving the past and planning for the future are rarely part of the architect's vision. And now the city's planners are grappling with the consequences. |
Friday, November 5, 2004
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Architect and Client Matched by Mouse Two years ago Nancy and John Fields had a plot of land in the Oakland Hills above Montclair, Calif., and a dream to build a house. All they needed was an architect.
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A Different Sort of Mall for a California Town Visitors to Victoria Gardens, which its creator calls "a superregional lifestyle center,'' may have a sense of the uncanny. Within an area that encompasses 1.3 million square feet of retail and office space covering 12 blocks of this affluent suburb 50 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, they may feel as though they are in a city that has existed for decades. And yet it has actually been open only for less than a week. |
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A parallel world "Designers of the spatial landscape have never been architects," says architect Eyal Weizman, "but rather politicians and military men. |
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Websites Are the Ticket to Getting to Bus on Time Each day before he leaves his Santa Barbara office for his home in Camarillo, Michael Collie checks to see if his bus is coming. |
Thursday, November 4, 2004
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Urbanity in the Suburbs Taut and compact, the first of tony caro architecture’s works for broughton anglican college skilfully infiltrates the school, lending it a measured yet intimate urbanity. |
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Old London stirs: KPF and the battle for Smithfield. Regeneration. It's a word that can mean whatever you want. It can mean bringing life back to run-down districts, sure. But does that mean knocking the buildings down and starting again, or finding new uses for the buildings that are there? |
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The Forum of Cultures, Barcelona 2004 The Forum, an ambitious urban design project of Barcelona, supplements the strategies for the revitalization of the public open spaces. |
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Open spaces for Hamburg’s HafenCity Flood control measures and the history of the harbour underlie the open space design for the HafenCity district. |
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Blow up Arup’s computers went into meltdown while performing calculations needed for the cladding of Peddle Thorp and Walker’s National Swimming Centre for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. |
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Elemental Building innovative social housing in Chile. |
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Architects Behaving Badly Since architecture centrally involves constructing environments for people, why has the architectural community largely ignored environmental psychology, the field that analyses how well we do in meeting people’s needs? |
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An 'Experiment' Commenting on L.A.’s Ecology In a city like Los Angeles, with its constructed landscapes, concrete river, and imported palm trees, a show about gardens is obliged to be about more than pretty greenery and idyllic nature. |
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Quality street Ash Sakula's foil-wrapped flats show the way out of Britain's housing cul-de-sac. |
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In This Ring, a Designer Slugfest No jaws were broken, no eyes blackened, but at the annual gathering of the Industrial Design Society of America here last week — where the chatter usually revolves around the next big thing in cellphones and cars — a few stridently held ideas about the farming of human genes took a beating.
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Frank Gehry for the Rest of Us
Designed on a desktop, custom-cut with a laser, assembled on demand. It's computer-driven construction raised to high art. |
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Alarm bells ringing From the pristine waters of Duffins Creek in Pickering to the disappearing meadows in Mississauga, young people are speaking out against the massive subdivisions and shopping complexes that are swallowing up their natural heritage. |
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Is this how tomorrow's homes will be made? No more estate agents, solicitors or fixing the boiler. |
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
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Recycling taken to a new level: Buildings Some projects see savings and environmental benefits. |
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'Creative Class' author sets record straight If Richard Florida didn't know before, he has found out lately that no good deed goes unpunished.
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Tuesday, November 2, 2004
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Taking the Drive Out of Central Park Almost four decades ago, city leaders forced the drivers who use the looping Central Park roadway to start sharing it with joggers and cyclists, first on weekends and later during the week as well. Now the joggers and cyclists are getting closer to having the road all to themselves. |
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To Be a 'Clone Town,' or Not: That Is the Question To survive the approach to the home where William Shakespeare was born, a striking timber-frame house in the center of this bustling town, it would be wise to bid adieu to all bucolic notions of quaint old England and ready oneself for the onslaught of globalization. |
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When trees blemish that room with a view Forest of complaints grows in Vancouver over homeowners who would chop down an oak to spruce up their ocean sightlines. |
Monday, November 1, 2004
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HCM City to weave past with future While HCM City gears up for the 30th anniversary of the country’s unification and liberation, designers around the country are trying to envision a logo that perfectly embodies the ever-changing city. |
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Dreaming a dream of B.C. A group of thinkers gathers to imagine our future. The discourse is heartfelt and inspiring. |
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Digital World High-tech media has made inroads on our privacy, but a panel of designers says it's as much an atmosphere as an invasion. |
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Press May Ignore Architects, but So Does (Almost) Everyone Else When buildings are featured in the media, often the architects responsible for their design and execution are not mentioned. |
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