Urbanism News
Monday, December 29, 2003
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Gehry: `I'm just an architect' Celebrated architect Frank Gehry, hailed for his provocative building designs, doesn't waste his breath on would-be clients who want a baby Bilbao. |
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The Buildings (and Plans) of the Year Year highlights from the New York Times. |
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What's New Urbanism Worth? "The American public seems conflicted and self-centered" when it comes to where they want to live, says Mr. Knaap, who also is the executive director for the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland. For instance, people like to able to walk to the store, but they don't want the store in their immediate neighborhood. They like having a street grid that is easy to navigate, but prefer to live on a cul de sac, a feature that disrupts traffic flow. |
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Green Design: An Urban Fit Being environmentally sensitive in the city. |
Sunday, December 28, 2003
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Munich Depression? "Off" architecture relates to a new type of network culture. From Hamburg to Leipzig, from Cologne to Berlin, more and more groups are getting together, usually describing themselves as loose working communities. At the same time, architectural scenes are forming in the cities as well. A critical mass of architects exchanges ideas, meets in public and works within a network. |
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Spaces of Uncertainty
Archivists of the discontinuous: Architecture at the edge. |
Saturday, December 27, 2003
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Canadians catch on to city building Architecture can do the most humiliating things to people. |
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Urban visions reborn
Toronto's art scene has come alive in the past year. |
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
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A chance to reach new heights Towers could energize San Francisco skyline. |
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Cities in the Digital Age City scholar Joel Kotkin argues against the idea of an urban revitalization panacea. |
Monday, December 22, 2003
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A view of the city A growing young city like Melbourne cultivates itself in all directions. |
Saturday, December 20, 2003
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Students to live in shipping containers Faced with a chronic shortage of student accommodation, Amsterdam will use 1,100 shipping containers from 2004-05 as self-contained student rooms. |
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Go to Kensington, call a friend A new storytelling system offers cellphone-wielding wanderers an intimate slice of urban history. |
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The Windy City's idea should blow our way Toronto's new Mayor David Miller went to Chicago recently to meet with Mayor Richard Daley, to discuss waterfront revitalization and other civic lessons to be gleaned from the Windy City. |
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Almost famous Architects get all the credit, but where would they be without structural engineers? |
Friday, December 19, 2003
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Five Finalists Chosen To Design Proposed Olympic Village In LIC NYC2012 has chosen five design firms as finalists to build the proposed Olympic Village in Long Island City. |
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Street revival
After tunnel, Boston opens new chapter in reshaping its urban landscape. |
Thursday, December 18, 2003
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Wired Japan seems to be the only society who achieved the status of a modern society without modernity. |
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Councils use colour and grants to rescue communities Northern councils are going to increasingly extreme lengths to stop people abandoning blighted areas.
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New York subway always a colourful ride The Manhattan streets were gridlocked at 5:30 on the Friday two weeks before Christmas, as cars, buses and the ubiquitous yellow cabs competed with shoppers to cross midtown intersections. |
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Best and Worst Case Scenarios for the Future
We asked designers, urbanists, and city-dwellers to outline their personal best- and worst-case scenarios for the future: one idea they would like to see happen, or one they fear might be on the way. |
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
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Attack of the blobs A giant splodge in Austria, another one in Birmingham, and a heavenly hotel in the Chilean desert. |
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The call of the wild Emerging architect Pierre Thibault finds being out in nature can trigger fresh, creative ideas. |
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
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Are Cities Changing Local and Global Climates? New evidence from satellites, models, and ground observations reveal urban areas, with all their asphalt, buildings, and aerosols, are impacting local and possibly global climate processes. |
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Weather patterns redrawn by urban sprawl, experts say The massive amounts of heat and pollution that rise from urban areas both delay and stimulate the fall of precipitation, cheating some areas of much-needed rain and snow while dousing others.
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Saturday, December 13, 2003
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Master Planner or Master Builder? Much of the confusion that reigns today centers on the public's — and apparently Governor Pataki's — misunderstanding of what constitutes a "master plan." |
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Made to measure Play with size and scale, and you can create illusions out of even the most familiar landmarks - it's the modern thing to do. |
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Rebels Who Saw the World as Being Too Full of Objects Superstudio was the name not of a 60's rock band but of a group of five young architects based in Florence, Italy, who joined together in 1966 to practice "radical architecture," a trend that bloomed internationally in the decade of youthful rebellion. |
Friday, December 12, 2003
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Courtside Seats to an Urban Garden Garden of Eden grows in Brooklyn. This one will have its own basketball team. Also, an arena surrounded by office towers; apartment buildings and shops; excellent public transportation; and, above all, a terrific skyline, with six acres of new parkland at its feet. Almost everything the well-equipped urban paradise must have, in fact. |
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'Hipsters' discuss cool cities So you want more nightlife, more culture, more restaurants? Well, don't leave it up to politicians, policy-makers and community leaders, says Richard Florida, world-renowned creator of cool cities. |
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Living Amid Green Space Is Highly Beneficial to Children A house surrounded by nature seems to help boost a child's attention capabilities, a study by a Cornell University researcher suggests.
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Thursday, December 11, 2003
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Urban Case Study - Los Angeles Today's problems are not so much related to the necessity of producing additional residential buildings but rather to urban planning approaches such as the issue of public space for the inhabitants of the metropolis. |
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Rem Koolhaas wins Royal Gold Medal Rem Koolhaas is the winner of the Royal Gold Medal, presented by the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects). Given in recognition of a lifetime's work, the Royal Gold Medal is approved personally by the Queen of England and is given annually to a person or group of people whose influence on architecture has had a truly international effect. |
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AIA Gold Medal for Samuel Mockbee The late Samuel Mockbee, FAIA, has just joined Thomas Jefferson in an elite club of architects who have received AIA Gold Medals posthumously. The widely admired Mockbee was a practitioner and educator until his death in 2001. |
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Shanghai banning bicycles from main roads Shanghai plans to ban bicycles from its major roads next year, banishing China's most popular form of transportation from its congested streets to make more room for cars, official newspapers said Tuesday. |
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
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Suburban flight, worked in reverse Like thousands before him, Jim O'Brien succumbed to the lure of suburban flight. Unlike most of the others, however, he fled not to the suburbs, but from them. |
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Architecture's rising stars Last summer, partners-in-design Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen had a lot of choices for how they could apply their architectural talents. |
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Makeover for New York's 10-storey oddity One of New York's most curious buildings is to be given a radical new appearance. Architects are putting the final touches to a controversial re-design of the derelict 1960s structure, derisively known as the "Lollipop", to make space for a new museum. |
Monday, December 8, 2003
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Los Angeles by Kayak: Vistas of Concrete Banks So subdued is the river that some maps do not acknowledge it. Rand McNally describes it as dry.
This is untrue. About 80 million gallons a day flow along its channeled, concrete-lined banks in the dry season, fed by the sewage treatment plant near the Sepulveda Dam, a few miles from the high school, and street runoff. |
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Well built He detests planners, thinks Bath is boring and says his fellow architects are 'terrible people'. But why does Will Alsop, the man behind some of Britain's most exciting buildings, hate Tate Modern? |
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Ground Zero's Only Hope: Elitism Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: now that everyone agrees that the ground zero memorial finalists are a disappointment, there's only one thing to do. |
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Singapore sees sewage as tourist draw Singapore is promoting a factory that turns sewage into drinking water as its latest tourist attraction. |
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For Parisians, Green Acres Is the Place to Be You have 15 days to leave Paris. |
Saturday, December 6, 2003
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From Architect to Psychologist? Peter Eisenman is performing a questionable transfiguration into the psychologist of the collective German mind. He got his chance when Germany finally decided to build a central holocaust memorial in Berlin after ten years of discussion. The memorial plays a key role in the way Germany is dealing with its guilt from the holocaust. More than any other memorial the Berlin project anchors the history of the mass murder in the capital, just next to the Reichstag building.
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Oscar Niemeyer Luis Berrios, current MArch I at MIT recalls a conversation he had with Oscar Niemeyer at his home and studio in 2002. |
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A Farmland Showcase for Modern Architecture It must have been 1964 or 1968 when I first visited Columbus, Ind., which no less a personage than Lady Bird Johnson called "the Athens of the prairie." |
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Breakdown in logic kills the function Confessions of an architecture critic: When I reviewed the Berkeley Public Library last year I paid no attention to the granite slab provided for patrons to use when they stamp due dates on items they check out. No, Mr. Bigshot was too busy checking out the Big Things, like the aesthetic challenge of merging a new structure with the existing 1930 landmark by James Plachek. |
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Citizen Architect
"I do not believe that courage has left our profession." |
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Heat's on at the Distillery
"The truth is," Mr. Jones says, "you can't engineer bohemia, but you can create the conditions in which it can thrive." |
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Tallest tower means big payback for city SKYLINE I Benefits would include 57,000 new trees. |
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Walk on the Wild Side
In creating the town green and an overarching landscape plan for the new town of WaterColor, Florida, Nelson-Byrd Landscape Architects let the site's diverse native vegetation take the lead role. |
Friday, December 5, 2003
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Rem's Junk in Mies' Space It can’t have escaped anyone: the first major exhibition devoted to Rem Koolhaas and OMA/AMO is now on show in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Big, plenty and perplexing. Rem Koolhaas lets loose. |
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Loo with a view
Prison toilet turned work of art. |
Thursday, December 4, 2003
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Britain's No. 2 City Gets Respect (After All These Years) It has long been fashionable to scorn Birmingham, the second city of Britain. |
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The Dangers of Designing by Public Consensus Do you attend meetings or public hearings to consider the design merits of project proposals affecting you, or in which you are interested? When a design concept is finally approved, do you then think that your views and suggestions, no matter how forcefully expressed, went unheeded? |
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In the Capital of the Car, Nature Stakes a Claim Paul Weertz lives less than 10 minutes from downtown, but the view from his window is anything but urban. On a warm day this fall, the air was ripe with the smell of fresh-cut hay and manure. In the alley behind his house, bales of hay teetered and listed where garbage cans once stood. Chickens scratched in the yard, near a garage that had been turned into a barn. Mr. Weertz drives a Ford — not a sleek sedan but a rebuilt 1960 tractor. |
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Military Fighting Urban Sprawl Beset by enemies abroad, the U.S. military also faces an insidious threat to training and operations at home -- urban sprawl. |
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Retailers Embrace the Great Outdoors It was a dreary November day and Stacey Hill was getting a head start on her Christmas shopping. She could have driven half an hour to the enclosed mall in Columbia, but chose instead the closer, smaller and -- on that day -- wetter open-air Bowie Town Center. |
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Star architects eye Beijing skyline The last time Beijing stumped the world with mind-blowing architecture, a Ming dynasty emperor had ordered up the Forbidden City in the shadows of the Great Wall. |
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Shanghai choking on wires Tech-happy Shanghai, the most wired city in China, has a problem: wires. Telephone wires. Fibre-optic wires. Electrical wires. Wires no one can seem to identify. They're everywhere, and they're gumming up the works. |
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Urban renewal takes its toll in Beijing A booming economy is costing many of China's poorest the very roofs over their heads. |
Tuesday, December 2, 2003
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Happy trails Want to get to the post office in a hurry? The nearest bike trail may be the best way. |
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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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CiBoGa Terrain Ice floes drifting in a green sea - this is the association that the master plan for the CiBoGa terrain in Groningen wishes to evoke. On the abandoned site of a former gas factory, a car-free residential and business district is to be created by the year 2008. |
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Meet the Smithsons Separating the hype from reality. Should Alison and Peter Smithson have stuck to talking? |
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Star architects eye Beijing skyline The last time Beijing stumped the world with mind-blowing architecture, a Ming dynasty emperor had ordered up the Forbidden City in the shadows of the Great Wall. |
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They don't make them like they used to Letchworth had good homes, churches, libraries, a corset factory... today's new towns don't even get a railway. |
Monday, December 1, 2003
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Parents exercise right to drive Mom's taxi may be fattening kids, worsening pollution. |
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Chestertown: Battle of The Big Box Wal-Mart liked to say, "We don't lose." Think again. |
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Not Your Daddy's SOM Roger Duffy's quiet demeanor masks a steely determination to remake one of architecture's behemoths. |
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