Urbanism News
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
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Don't Blame Le Corbusier for the French Riots Practically all architects dream of changing the world through their work, achieving fame not merely of the celebrity sort but the world-historical variety. They aspire to be not merely the next Frank Gehry, but the next Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. After the Paris riots, though, there's one world-historical architect they almost certainly don't aspire to emulate: Le Corbusier. |
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Noise machine deters shop gangs A shop manager's annoyance over problem teenagers hanging around his store is being tackled head on with a noise nuisance device. |
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Silent Streams Sprawl is threatening almost every stream in the country. But a rising citizens movement is trying to save one of our most important natural resources before it's too late. |
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Condos Breathe New Life into Old Offices Historic office buildings are a hot item these days – but not for office tenants. Urban housing shortages, low mortgage rates, and soft office leasing markets are resulting in a wave of condo conversions, as historic downtown office buildings find new life as luxury condos. |
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It's the stuff of dreams Could buildings one day be made of carbon? |
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The (im)possibility of cultural engagement The contemporary city is a succession of disparate enclaves, commercial centres and amusement parks. The public character of the public domain is deteriorating rapidly. The city as a place of emancipation and democratisation no longer exists…. A bleak urban scenario? Nostalgic whimpering from the wings? Or can a new revolutionary project for the post-ideological city be distilled from this perspective? |
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Tall, Stark, & Handsome When Joni Mitchell sang "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot," she articulated what was already conventional wisdom: Industry is the antithesis of nature. But Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape demonstrates that our artificial ecosystem can radiate similar beauty. |
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The Emptying of the Mega-Cities It is difficult to believe that Brazilian mega-cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, with millions of inhabitants and traffic-clogged streets, are seeing their population densities decrease, which experts say aggravates the cities' problems and makes solutions even more difficult to find. |
Monday, November 28, 2005
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City champion goes to school The founder of Urban Splash has a new vision, but politics gets in the way. |
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Tracking effects of suburban life on health Is suburbia harmful to your health? |
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A palette where the colors don't mix Paris' segregated suburbs are a breeding ground for unrest -- and artistry that allows an escape route for some |
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Suburbs suddenly hot on campus Colleges have found surprising demand for studies of life beyond the city. |
Saturday, November 26, 2005
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In Search of a City It can be hard to see Los Angeles with fresh eyes. Whether it is exalted for its glamour, mocked for its vanity, reviled for its artifice, or condemned for its sprawl, the city is emblematic. Even individual streets and intersections--Rodeo Drive, Sunset Strip, and Florence and Normandy--hold a place in our modern mythology. |
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The New Iconic Building? On October 26, writer Charles Jencks and architect Peter Eisenman spoke at Columbia University in a debate titled "The New Iconic Building?" The debate was inspired, in part, by Jencks's new book, The Iconic Building, which discusses the role of these increasingly popular, instantly-recognizable monuments in contemporary architecture. |
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Terrorist group claims responsibility for fires An environmental terrorist group has claimed responsibility for four fires set early Sunday in Hager's Crossing west of Hagerstown. The group - Earth Liberation Front - sent an e-mail to The Herald-Mail Co. saying they "put the torch to a development of Ryan Homes ... to strike at the bottom line of this country's most notorious serial land rapists." |
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Retailers thinking outside 'big box' The huge cinder-block stores that have defined suburbia for a generation are undergoing a facelift. City planners in Charlotte and other towns are taking a stronger stand against big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Lowe's, responding to complaints about their monotonous facades and high vacancy rates. |
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Bringing Back the Big Easy Four designers discuss what it will take to rebuild New Orleans. |
Thursday, November 24, 2005
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Nobody Bikes in L.A. But they'd be a lot happier if they did. |
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Back to utopia Can the antidote to today's neoliberal triumphalism be found in the pages of far-out science fiction? |
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Suburbs waiting for a connection First there was the global village; now we have the global suburb. |
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
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World’s skyscrapers take shape here Young boys and girls are busy, leaning down on their desks, sketching designs for landscapes across the globe. From a mosque in Kuwait and F-1 track in Italy to a casino in Las Vegas and skyscraper in New York, whole cities emerge, as the pace of their hand quickens. Welcome to the world of architect design outsourcing! With rising costs and shortage of architects in US, Middle East and Europe, architecture outsourcing is scaling heights in India. From 3D rendering of planetariums, auto malls and luxury resorts to helping archaeologists find lost cities and monuments through virtual walkthroughs, the global $57 billion industry is booming. |
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Niemeyer, Architect of Brasilia, Riles Critics Anew at Age 97 Oscar Niemeyer, whose modernist architectural designs in Brazil's capital city were called a ``utopian horror'' by Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, is under fire again. |
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Circuit City Viva the façade as computer screen! Viva façades not reflecting light but emanating light—the building as a digital sparkling source of information, not as an abstract glowing source of light! . . . Viva iconography—not carved in stone for eternity but digitally changing for now, so that the inherently dangerous fascist propaganda, for instance, can be temporarily, not eternally, proclaimed! —Robert Venturi, Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time (2004) |
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Taste for Space Is Spawning Mansions Fit for a Commoner In the two years since they moved into their voluminous 8,000-square-footer on the edge of Virginia's suburbs, the Bennett family has not once used their formal dining room, where the table is eternally set for eight with crystal, an empty tea set and two unlighted candles. |
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Middle class flight and poor design damaging cities The middle classes are abandoning inner London and other cities for the countryside in a drift that threatens to cause a "deepening racial and social" divide, an urban taskforce warned yesterday. |
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Council turns up the heat on energy wasters
Leicester city council is looking after the environment and residents by using a spy in the sky to spot energy-wasting homes. |
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Not building: the lure of desolation. Living in a city of ever-present ghosts, as London is - a city scarred by past and present violence but also blessed with almost mystical regenerative powers - is to acknowledge the power of what some might see as imperfection. It is not imperfection. It is part of the endless transition that any living city must undergo. And it is why I have come to treasure the most potent and necessary part of any urban process: dereliction, desolation. |
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
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Underground, but not unconnected BART has become the first transit system in the nation to offer wireless communication to all passengers on its trains underground, putting an end to miles of technological isolation for multitasking commuters with cell phones glued to their ears, Blackberry devices stuck in their palms and computers perched on their laps. |
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Playing the Fame Game How celebrity architecture Is pervading design and development. |
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'In Britain, money and marketing are what matter most' David Chipperfield is one of the UK's best architects - yet he may never build here again. |
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New plan to 'lift' sinking Venice Italian experts are proposing a dramatic new solution to the watery threat facing the city of Venice. |
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Water shortage panics China city The major Chinese city of Harbin is facing four days without water because of an unexpected mains stoppage. |
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Rise in bike deaths gives edge to clash over cycling in New York Jen Shao, the immigrant owner of a Chinatown souvenir shop, wasn't trying to make a political statement as she pedaled her bicycle through downtown Manhattan two months ago. The 65-year-old woman biked, her family told reporters, because she found it easier than walking. But her September death beneath the wheels of a tour bus was one of an increased number of biking fatalities this year, adding a melancholy edge to long-running tensions over the presence of bicycles on the city's crowded streets. |
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Delirious New York Our long architectural snooze is over, thanks to neomodernist mania and the arrival—finally—of Gehry. Brooklyn should embrace him. |
Monday, November 21, 2005
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Alternative Anchors On any Saturday night, long after stores have closed, the square at Victoria Gardens regional shopping center in Rancho Cucamonga, California, is filled with families watching free outdoor movies. |
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Eden Project team plans eco-rainforest in Lancashire The team of architects behind the Eden Project in Cornwall is planning to turn a Lancashire rubbish dump into a tropical rainforest which would heat itself with decomposing garden and kitchen waste. |
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What can be done to improve the suburbs of Paris? People are starting to understand that the real challenge is to turn peripheries into cities. |
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The Secret City
It's a small, country town where people know people and look out for one another. "I love the people. I really like the town," says one person who lives there. [via] |
Saturday, November 19, 2005
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What I'd do if I had the money I would build a totally zero-CO2-emissions city, using every trick in the architect's book. Solar panels, hydrogen, wind power - it would use everything possible to get the energy load down to nothing. For example, you can actually cool a building by pumping up ground water and passing it through a heat exchanger. |
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New Buildings Help People Fight Flab Buildings have long been designed so people can get from one place to another with minimum physical effort. Now, in a bid to fight a rising tide of obesity, companies, universities and other institutions are embracing the opposite idea: buildings that force employees to move around a lot more. |
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Business Groups Hear Plea: Do Something to Cut Traffic Ideas for reducing car traffic - including the politically volatile notion of charging drivers for entering the busiest Manhattan streets - gained momentum yesterday during a meeting of leaders of the city's business improvement districts. Jan Gehl, a Danish architect whose fervent advocacy of bicycle lanes, pedestrian walkways and restrictions on car use have made him renowned among urban planners, addressed leaders of the districts, and several city officials, on the need to reduce the automobile's dominance of public spaces. |
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UN predicts 'internet of things' Changes brought about by the internet will be dwarfed by those prompted by the networking of everyday objects, says a report by a UN body. |
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Suburban ‘prisons’ for France’s immigrant poor In 1961, American critic Jane Jacobs wrote of cities with “amputated areas” that “develop galloping gangrene”, and of housing projects that were contributing to the death of US cities. |
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Homes for Henry and Hanna -- and for the rest of us There's a certain style of critical writing about architecture and urban design that leaves me cold. This from former architecture critic for The New York Times Herbert Mushcamp's take on that city's thwarted plans for an Olympic village: "Mr. Mayne's and Ms. Hadid's projects do not stem solely from Le Corbusier. They also embody Oscar Niemeyer's concept of the poetic urban object and the sculptural tradition that has been carried forward in recent years by Frank Gehry. These designs are right-brain poetry, not the precisely calibrated gridscapes of modernism's cold, objective truth. The forms are sensuous, playful, sinewy, as if the buildings had incorporated nature into themselves instead of standing apart from it." |
Friday, November 18, 2005
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California's ports, hig hways teeter on the edge of crisis California's infrastructure, from ports to highways, won't be able to handle increased trade unless hundreds of billions of dollars are spent building new roads, expanding ports and increasing the number of rail tracks laid throughout the state. |
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Sprawl costs billions Residents of the area centered on Sacramento will pay $57,093 per person by 2025 to cover the additional costs caused by sprawling development, second only to Las Vegas among U.S. economic centers that face the sprawl problem, a new book asserts. |
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Conservation Refugees To conserve wilderness areas and keep up biodiversity you may need to toss aboriginals out of their homelands. |
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On Criticism Architecture criticism, whether written for the profession or the general public, has one primary purpose: to parse the good from the bad. Of course, criticism involves much more than thumbs-up, thumbs-down assessments. Architecture is far too complex, demanding analyses on far too many levels. |
Thursday, November 17, 2005
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Everyone pays for 'free' parking If Donald Shoup had his way, the only "free parking" you could find would be on a Monopoly board. He says the notion of free -- or cheap -- parking produces a litany of negative effects on communities. |
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Vancouver: A downtown with no offices? Vancouver's core is a busy, vibrant centre any time of the day or night. It's why people are clamouring to live there, and it's one of the reasons why condo towers have sprung up where there could have been -- or once were -- office buildings. |
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Dr. Evil's Lair Evolves "I've been expecting you, Mr. Bond," Goldfinger purred, perched on a wooden stool in his American farmhouse kitchen. Spot the mistake? Of course: A Bond villain cannot be surrounded by farmhouse vernacular. |
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Getting There No Longer Just About Highways and Cars in Detroit Regional economic transition invites new reckoning with transit. |
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Museum Plaza architect offers peek inside firm's unique designs Ramus teased the audience by promising to reveal a preliminary design idea for Museum Plaza. His final image, flashed on a screen behind him, featured a black-and-white photo of a woman, upside down, over a bed, her feet planted on the ceiling. |
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Want to save $3,150 in taxes? Buy a hybrid car. Buying a hybrid car to save gas and the environment may be its own reward. But for curmudgeons who need extra incentives, help is on the way.
Across America, states, cities, and corporations are leaping on the hybrid-incentives bandwagon. On top of state tax credits, some hybrid drivers now enjoy exemptions from emissions-testing and excise tax. Others even get unlimited use of HOV commuter lanes. |
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Great design raises bar, worth the cost It's a toss-up which is more breathtaking - architect Daniel Libeskind's design for Covington's new 22-story luxury condo tower or the challenge it lays down for future high-visibility projects in our community. |
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
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Big Box Mart In Big Box Mart an unsuspecting consumer learns an economic lesson the hard way when his high-skilled factory job is shipped overseas to accommodate the "everyday low prices" he's come to expect from his favorite retailer. Now only one question remains: Paper or plastic? |
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Why walk when you can fly? Rui Cho, a chatty teen, is preparing to pounce. He cuts a lonely figure atop a six-foot-high wall, his knees bent and fists clenched, rocking gently back and forth as he contemplates the five-foot gap between this wall and the one he's about to - I hope - land on. There's nothing to cushion his fall, if it should come to that: just unforgiving pavement that will not treat this wiry kid kindly. |
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Don't mock it Many of us dismiss suburbia as endless, homogeneous avenues of 1930s pebbledash in end-of-the-line places; cul-de-sacs of unremarkable chalet bungalows; unfashionable net curtains; and tedium. But no longer. |
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Sizing up the suburbs: A quest for the best “The battle’s over,” social trends analyst Joel Kotkin writes about metropolitan areas. “Now it’s time to call it a day and declare a winner. “The winner is, yes, sprawl.” |
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Vicious cycle Laws against electric bicycles are the latest step in China's move towards a car culture, fuelling fears of highway chaos and an energy and pollution crisis. |
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
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Rome takes a dim view of wasted energy Rome is to dim its public lights to save energy and make the night sky more visible. |
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Why do you want to kill me?
* I gave up my parking space for you again today. Why then, do you want to kill me when I benefit you in so many ways? |
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Drive-through wait times creep up as menu options get more complex Quick-serve restaurants are having a tougher time keeping the fast in fast food, as menus become more complicated in response to customers' evolving culinary impulses. |
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West Coast Woman To Build Crash Pad Out of an Old 747 Francie Rehwald wanted her mountainside house to be environmentally friendly and to be "feminine," to have curves. "I'm a gal," says the 60-year-old retiree. Her architect had an idea: Buy a junked 747 and cut it apart. Turn the wings into a roof, the nose into a meditation temple. Use the remaining scrap to build six more buildings, including a barn for rare animals. He made a sketch. |
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Why Immigrants Don't Riot Here France's rigid economic system sustains privilege and inspires resentment. |
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The inner life of a city gets dragged to the curb Mary Kelly-Swafford never knew mold could come in so many colors until she and her husband, Bert, began to gut their mid-city home. "Black, white, red, yellow, blue, green, purple," she ticks off from inside the structure's skeletal remains, stripped bare of furniture, appliances, electronics, clothes, mementos, and even sheetrock - all of which is piled 10-feet high on the front curb. |
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Ten Common Sense Rules For TOD What are the necessary ingredients for successful Transit Oriented Development (TOD)? Bruce Liedstrand, Planner for Liedstrand Associates, lists the ten fundamental, common-sense elements of TOD. |
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Selecting the best of Seoul's designer buildings Cities distinguish themselves by their architecture; it is as true for modern cities as it was for ancient. But urban planning is more complex that ever before, and Seoul has had its fair share of failures in that department. |
Monday, November 14, 2005
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Creative-Class Struggle Intuitive ideas need to be quantified before they can be transmuted into policy and action. And Richard Florida, who's turned his theory of the Creative Class into a mini-industry, gets it. His foundation thesis -- that the Creative Class is a distinct segment that drives innovation, creates urban success, and is critical to American competitiveness -- isn't just nifty rhetoric. |
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Cut down to size What to do with a tower block that no one wants to live in? The solution: pull it down, slice it up, turn it into pleasant family homes. |
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They're Soft and Cuddly, So Why Lash Them to the Front of a Truck? A bear with a prominent grease spot on his little beige nose spends his days wedged behind the bumper guard of an ironworker's pickup in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. A fuzzy rabbit and a clown, garroted by a bungee cord, slump from the front of a Dodge van in Park Slope. Stewie, the evil baby from "Family Guy," scowls from the grille of a Pepperidge Farm delivery truck in Brooklyn Heights, mold occasionally sprouting from his forehead. |
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Warning: Driving Kills I don't drive. But my life is dominated by cars. They are around me and inside me; I breathe their fumes every time I walk along a road. As a child I breathed in their glamour and persuaded my parents to buy me countless toy cars. |
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Futures imperfect “The future,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov, “is but the obsolete in reverse.” From the Parthenon to Battersea Power Station, decay has a powerful glamour, reminding us of our own brief interlude among the living and the eons of rot yet to come. |
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Building On Brownfields High demand for real estate drives eco-cleanup. |
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'Green' is driving force for condo projects If Linda Plano buys a loft condo at Forbes Park in Chelsea, she'll probably have to leave her Volkswagen GTI behind. It won't fit in the parking spaces. |
Saturday, November 12, 2005
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Driving Around Manhattan, You Pay, Under One Traffic Idea It is an idea that has been successful in London, and is now being whispered in the ears of City Hall officials after months of behind-the-scenes work by the Partnership for New York City, the city's major business association: congestion pricing. |
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A design the judges couldn't bypass With architects Tonkin Zulaikha Greer and Australian artist Robert Owen, Taylor Cullity Lethlean designed a $30 million entrance to Melbourne comprising sound walls, pedestrian bridges and architectural features. |
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Ornate crosswalks paving new ground It was the question of the week around downtown. What is the elaborate design that appeared overnight on Congress Street behind the cement monolith of City Hall? Public art? A red brick gateway to historic Boston? A cleverly concealed message from city leaders? |
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Curitiba: A Global Model For Development To learn from Curitiba, the rest of the world would have to break some longstanding habits. And the hardest habit to break, in fact, may be what Lerner calls the "syndrome of tragedy, of feeling like we're terminal patients." Many cities have "a lot of people who are specialists in proving change is not possible. What I try to explain to them when I go visit is that it takes the same energy to say why something can't be done as to figure out how to do it." |
Friday, November 11, 2005
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I'd rather have the everyday any day In a 1972 essay Henri Lefebvre posed the question "Why wouldn't the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?". In the prosaic details of life the French philosopher found the optimism to counter Sartre's existential nothingness, and "everydayness" is a wonderful word for the stuff that forms the background to our lives. Lefebvre's fellow Parisian, the novelist Georges Perec, was also fascinated by the mundane, and coined the word "infra-ordinary", in contrast to the "extraordinary", the stuff of headlines, which so bored him. |
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'Together, we can accomplish a lot' Recalling his first trip in 1975 to Beijing where he spent his 29th birthday, the US president said his deepest impression is "how different China is today than it was in 1975." Back then, he said, he had a fantastic experience in the Chinese capital, where he saw "everybody was on bicycles; there weren't many automobiles." "I happened to be one of the people on bicycles. I rode all over the place in Beijing, which was fascinating," he said. "There wasn't much exposure to the West, and all of a sudden, an American starts riding a bike amongst them and it, frankly, surprised some people," he said, adding "it was great. It was really interesting." He also "noticed there was uniformity in dress. People wore the same style clothes." |
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Dipping City's Toes Into the East River The architects Richard Meier and David M. Childs have completed a master plan for four buildings, a park and an ice rink on part of a nine-acre site near the United Nations. |
Thursday, November 10, 2005
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Unauthorized alleys Chicago Tribune special series on urban alleys. |
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
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Brickbats and mortals Are architects dickheads? That was the subject of a recent debate. I went because the question had been keeping me awake. Here, I felt, was something a person in my position should know. Are they? |
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Towers, farm seen for Treasure Island Self-sustaining neighborhood of 5,500 residences proposed. |
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The Americans Were Coming Russia’s architectural history is unimaginable without the foreign masters invited throughout the centuries to supply expertise and fresh ideas from abroad. Some of the country’s most iconic landmarks – from the Kremlin to St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum – were designed by leading European architects. More recently, architects from abroad left behind ground-breaking buildings during the first decades of the Soviet period. |
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Double Dutch in Amsterdam Amsterdam has transformed a decrepit harbour into a futuristic mirror image of the old city. |
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Down on the Farm, by the Golf Course and Subdivisions For the past month or so, a hunched man with watery eyes and stained teeth named Xi Qiuyuan has raked piles of corn into a long yellow quilt to dry in the sun. Then he has watched it. Mr. Xi is a night watchman, and what he watches is the corn. His role would not have been uncommon in China a century or more ago. He sleeps outside on a pallet of packed mud and keeps warm with a crude brick oven. He uses a handmade rake to sweep the corn along the side of a narrow farm road. He has no complaints but could do without the S.U.V.'s. |
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Denver community proves there's life after a base closes When the long and winding path of the Pentagon's base-closure process comes to an end Tuesday, as the list of bases to shutter becomes law, scores of towns across the country will take their first steps toward an uncertain future - shorn of the military jobs and identity that defined them for generations. |
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Suburban sprawl near San Ramon, California. Photographed by Matt Jalbert. |
Tuesday, November 8, 2005
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British to help China build 'eco-cities' British engineers will this week sign a multi-billion contract with the Chinese authorities to design and build a string of 'eco-cities' - self-sustaining urban centres the size of a large western capital - in the booming country. |
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Urban sense and sensibility in Montreal Animals have a better, or at least a more complete, sense of what's going on around them. They inhabit an environment alive with olfactory and auditory information. By comparison, we humans are aware of little, which underlines the significance of the visual. |
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City Could Become U.S. Solar Leader "The bottom line is they want to build 2,450 homes outside the city on sensitive lands," said David Reid of the Greenbelt Alliance. "All the solar panels in the world don't make that environmentally friendly." |
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Uncool Cities From London and Berlin to Sydney and San Francisco, civic authorities agree that the key to urban prosperity is appealing to the "hipster set" of gays, twentysomethings and young creatives. But the only evidence for this idea comes from the dot-com boom of the late 1990s—and that time is over. |
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A web of walkways Under pressure from suburban shopping malls - many of them enclosed to offer customer comfort - Cincinnati and other cold-weather cities tried to fight back with a concept based on moving people in a climate-controlled setting. Thus, the skywalk was born. |
Monday, November 7, 2005
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Mad Max meets American Gothic Can you feel the mood shifting? I can. A year of spiking speculation about peak oil and the death of suburbia has rattled lots of Americans. Plenty of people suddenly feel that real, civilization-shaking change might be around the next corner. And plenty of them also feel frozen in the headlights, unsure what, if anything, to do about it. Other than wait. |
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Hey buddy, can you spare a car? Here’s a common-sense conclusion guaranteed to grind some mental gears in Portland: Driving yourself up out of the pothole of poverty is irrefutably easier if you own a car. A researcher from one of Washington, D.C.’s most influential public-policy think tanks suggested during a visit here recently that if advocates for the poor really want to help low-income families, they’ll start putting their energies toward enabling people of meager financial means to purchase automobiles. |
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Healthy growth of cities The current pace of urbanization in China is nothing short of miraculous. Ten million people move to cities in China each year. In Beijing alone, the city must add 10 million square metres of new housing every year. Never in the history of modern civilization has something like this happened. |
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Iraq's Lethal Traffic: Warning! Anarchy Ahead In a city of daylight assassinations and regularly exploding cars, it is perhaps surprising that the most pervasive daily headache comes in the far more ordinary form of snarled lines of traffic. With the virtual collapse of the state, rules have fallen away and the city seems almost to have caved in on itself in an egocentric free-for-all. Drivers shove past one another under broken traffic lights. Policemen gesture frantically to try to control them. |
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Smart directions for green ideas Electro-car public transport and a scheme to track the proper disposal of waste are two of smartest ideas for using satellite-navigation technology. |
Saturday, November 5, 2005
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Deep Green: ideas that take green building to a new level Chilled beams … Self-cleaning cement … Preferred permitting … Mini-wind turbines … Air-filter skyscrapers … Form-based codes … Online processing for LEED projects … |
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House In Town With New York City’s real estate boom, few parcels of land have been overlooked. Even the city’s tiny infill lots have become hot property—and the perfect sites for reinvigorating the town house type. |
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"Sprawl: A Compact History" Presents Both Sides of Sprawl Sprawl, like any other settlement pattern, has created problems but also offers benefits, according to a new book by Robert Bruegmann, professor of architecture and chair of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. |
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Rebellious Brit Architects - Pushed Modernity to the Limit Archigram was best known for several exhibits and its sporadic but highly popular, eponymous magazine; the collective didn’t open an office until 1970, and even then completed only a few minor projects. |
Friday, November 4, 2005
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They See The Future of Your House: Plastic The house of tomorrow will be made of soda bottles--that's how we best know the substance called PET, or polyethylene terephthalate. But architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake see a much different use for the plastic: embedded with flat circuitry that will enable walls to store heat, generate electricity and double as giant, flat-panel displays. Their iteration, called SmartWrap, could also make the building process faster and cheaper than ever. |
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Architecture and Cities: Recombinant Urbanism
Architecture and Cities: Recombinant Urbanism
Co-sponsored by the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union. |
Thursday, November 3, 2005
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The Legacy of 'Silent Spring' Forty-three years ago, Rachel Carson became the unlikely founder of the radical ecology movement. Her message is even more powerful today. |
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Trading the Car for the Train Los Angeles may be the car capital of America, but a few Angelenos, it seems, are beginning to consider leaving their cars at home. |
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XXXL America's mania for big has reached epic proportions. Bigger is now more than just better--it's ginormous! |
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Rebuilding New Orleans: Twenty Big Ideas and a Postscript Rebuilding any city is a complicated business. As soon as the flood waters began to subside in New Orleans, suggestions for what to do with a devastated city started coming from everywhere. Two local citizens suggest twenty points of entry. |
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Cab riders, hail your taxis of the future If you've ever scarred your shins trying to pry yourself out of a New York City taxi or wrinkled your nose at the scratched, always-open partition covered with peeling stickers, you know that the yellow cab is one of those urban fixtures in dire need of a makeover. As you scurry out into a rainy avenue at rush hour, your arm imploringly extended, only to see another seeker emerge half a block upstream and hijack the sun-colored chariot that was meant for you, perhaps the thought has crossed your mind: There must be a better system. |
Wednesday, November 2, 2005
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Review: The Dictionary of Urbanism The Dictionary of Urbanism by Robert Cowan is described by its publisher as: "a comprehensive and often irreverent reference for everyone whose business or passion is cities." Fowler's Modern English Usage probably sets the standard for sarcasm in set texts, if not for pith. Its entry on split infinitives should be frequently and loudly proclaimed to all who think that the appearance such trifles signals the decline of the English language. No letters about that one, please. |
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GRAND GESTURE, SHORT SIGHTED? As the rebirth of downtown Los Angeles hums along, spurred by the reclamation of numerous obsolete office buildings as apartments and condos and the slow but steady leasing of office space in more contemporary towers, the 3 million-square-foot Grand Avenue Development Project looms ever larger. Grand Avenue is downtown's – and, indeed, L.A.'s – pre-eminent commercial project in the making. |
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Idyll conversation Old-fashioned planning and discipline are needed if Sydney's 'green belt' is to be anything more than wishful thinking. |
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Nature Hits the Roof
An emerging trend for environmental, religious, and aesthetic reasons, green roofs can create an urban canopy sensitive to the intersection of architecture and landscape. |
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‘Nature of Order’ is wise but disorderly Architect and University of California, Berkeley emeritus professor Christopher Alexander began an odyssey of research and reflection 35 years ago, spurred on by one simple question: Why do we build buildings and neighborhoods that are ugly, inhospitable to the occupants and out of touch with the needs of community? |
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A glimpse of God in matter An interview with architect Christopher Alexander on his new work The Nature of Order, which seeks to discover, using the vocabulary of architecture, the divine elements that unify all beautiful created matter. |
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For sale: Britain’s underground city Welcome to Cold War City (population: 4). It covers 240 acres and has 60 miles of roads and its own railway station. It even includes a pub called the Rose and Crown. |
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Urban gardening on the cheep Yes, it's still OK to raise chickens in Seattle. But on a typical 50-by-100-foot single-family lot, no more than three are allowed, with one more bird permitted for every extra 1,000 square feet at your disposal. |
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City wants to turn green into green Chicago, which introduced its green roof program in 2001 is giving grants totaling $100,000 to help homeowners and small businesses make roofs green -- with vegetation -- to benefit both the environment and their budgets. |
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
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Design guru's road rage over traffic scheme THE world-renowned architect appointed to improve development in Edinburgh has launched a scathing attack on the council's new city centre traffic restrictions. Sir Terry Farrell said: "Most cities are looking at ways of returning to two-way streets and getting rid of gyratories, and Edinburgh is beginning to impose them. "There is no excuse for it. The fact is, [city leaders] are making all the mistakes other cities are ripping out. They are making them as if nobody has made these mistakes before." |
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