Urbanism News
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
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China's New Architectural Wonders When global audiences tune in to watch the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the world's fastest and strongest athletes won't be alone in striving for superlative achievements -- a new generation of innovative architecture is rising in China. |
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Rock on -- the relaxing view from the front porch
Sometimes Stephanie Thomas will stroll into the evening cool, set one of the rocking chairs on her front porch in motion and, with her son Gabriel on her lap, watch planes flicker past. |
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For a City Unafraid of a Little Public Snooze On a sunny Monday afternoon in November, Kurt Snay tried something he had never done in public in Manhattan. Tuning out the roar of the elevated West Side Highway behind him, he leaned back, put his feet up and dozed on a public chaise longue. |
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Spurring Urban Growth in Vancouver, One Family at a Time In Vancouver, the number of children living downtown has doubled since 1990; there are now 5,000 children living in the central core. Last year, the city opened the first new elementary school in an inner-city neighborhood in more than 30 years. |
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Police Infiltrate Protests, Videotapes Show Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show. |
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Let us play: New creed for ancient churches "This is a living, breathing building that's still open to the public, and I think that's what churches are for," says Julian Walker, who runs the Bristol Climbing Centre in a converted 15th-century church formerly known as St. Werburgh's. |
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
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Graffiti ads try to reach hip, young urban market Unable to reach young urban 'nomads' in conventional ways, corporate America is turning to graffiti-style ads. |
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Street smart An average city girl sticks to a set of rules on the streets: never be alone on a dark, deserted lane; never walk too close to a parked or a moving car; make no eye contact with passers-by; and keep a mobile phone and pepper spray ready to tackle nasty situations. |
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Rising prices threaten neighborhood character Thirty years ago, the small playground created on five vacant, rubble-strewn rowhouse lots in Northern Liberties unified neighbors eager for a community gathering space, recalled Irene Range. |
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New Blueprints for China's Skyline It's not about pagoda-shaped skyscrapers. |
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Abiding by rules of your neighbor Good fences may make good neighbors, as the proverb goes. But they can play havoc in neighborhoods governed by community associations. |
Friday, December 23, 2005
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Waving & Shouting Size really doesn't matter in architecture. You can get monumental small buildings and pathetically underwhelming huge ones. It all comes down to scale, to proportion, and to attitude. Take the new National Assembly for Wales building in Cardiff by Richard Rogers. It has to look and feel important. Yet the Assembly, with just 60 members, is in the district-council category, size-wise. What's an architect to do? |
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In search of utopia Does utopian thinking offer a route out of today's political doldrums? |
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Shanghai Surprise The radical quaintness of the Xintiandi district. |
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Egypt's window to the world The unswervingly urban, new library at Alexandria overlooks the city's corniche and the spacious waterfront. The Mediterranean skies and sea reflect their light and colour rather benignly on the infant structure. The curve of the exterior wall is dressed in gray granite on which the alphabets, hieroglyphs and symbols of over 120 languages are etched. I squinted my eyes under the gaze of the sharp sun and looked for familiar and recognisable forms. A relentless search revealed alphabets in the Devanagiri script arranged in random. |
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Shaking Off the Rust, New Suburbs Are Born In the shadow of the hulking industrial carcass of the Bethlehem Steel site here, a cozy boutique called Comfort and Joy is selling "aromatherapeutic" cleaning products, herbal teas nested in silk pouches and $1,200 designer quilts. Down the street, another store, Home and Planet, is offering $800 end tables made from recycled steel beams. |
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The Fires Last Time I liked it when it had just snowed because it hid what was underneath. The piles and piles of uncollected trash, the vacant lots that resembled pastures sprinkled with government powdered milk. I couldn't see the charred bricks, the junked furniture, the dirty diapers or anything that lay waste atop the rubble. |
Thursday, December 22, 2005
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2005 - another fantastic year for architects! January The Scottish Parliament passed a law requiring everyone to admire its design. Ireland's smoking ban was extended to architecture, with steep fines for public chimneys. Welsh conservationists warned they could be destroyed by climate change and poor diet by 2025. In the Philippines, an architect successfully sued his IT service provider after software deleted a 'mid-rise development scheme' as junk mail. Ancient buildings in Rome were threatened by
* "burrowing, opera-singing mice" |
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Coal Now Too Expensive To Put In Christmas Stockings With winter's onset driving the demand for surface coal to record-high levels, the mineral's cost is now beyond the reach of low- and middle-income Americans who wish to punish their naughty children. "Coal in one's stocking is meant to serve as an admonishment or warning, not as a dependable grade-B investment," said William Menchell, a commodities adviser for T. Rowe Price. "In today's market, children should only have their stockings stuffed with lumps of coal if they have been studious and obedient, and show an interest in long-term investments in the energy sector." For more affordable punitive options, analysts point to the relatively stagnant switch market, which could soon go the way of coal if demand increases for combustible wooden sticks. |
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In Exurbs, Life Framed by Hours Spent in the Car They begin as embryonic subdivisions of a few hundred homes at the far edge of beyond, surrounded by scrub. Then, they grow - first gradually, but soon with explosive force - attracting stores, creating jobs and struggling to keep pace with the need for more schools, more roads, more everything. And eventually, when no more land is available and home prices have skyrocketed, the whole cycle starts again, another 15 minutes down the turnpike. But in the meantime, life here is framed by hours spent in the car. |
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In search of Utopia Perhaps Team 10 have finally stopped wafting around undefined in the history of architecture and can acquire form and dimension in the collective imagination of architects. |
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Double Decker Living DDL offers a much needed alternative in temporary living accommodation that has been tailored to meet the ever increasing demand for comfortable, adaptable, and value for money homes. We are delivering this solution by effectively recycling the recognisable and greatly loved mainstay of London that is the red double-decker bus. |
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Struck by the Strike For decades, households have been leaving the crowded urban cores of American, Western European, and Japanese cities, moving to the suburbs. There are many reasons, from crime and taxes to the quality of life in the suburbs, that this is so attractive to most people. New York City has done better, having gained one out of every ten new residents in the metropolitan area. The transit unions have just given New Yorkers another reason to vote with their feet. |
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Can't Smart Growth And Sprawl Just Get Along? Problems with nomenclature may prevent "smart growth" -- or high-density housing -- from being used appropriately, including targeting the right audience. If the vast majority of people want "sprawl", should they get it? Smart growth may only be appropriate for the minority willing to accept it. |
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China limits building of villas, golf courses
China plans to limit the building of villas, golf courses and other luxury projects in an effort to protect the environment and prevent wasteful investments, the government said Wednesday. |
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
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Living, Breathing Buildings By devising systems that work with natural forces instead of against them, these young designers are inventing a new kind of architecture that instead of being at odds with the environment, works with it. |
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How to have a blast as a pedestrian Cars get horns, why can't the rest of us? |
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Noo Yawk, new walk: city finds its feet A Citywide bus and subway strike has paralysed America's largest transit system, forcing millions of commuters to use bicycles, car pools or their feet in the frigid weather. |
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Body of work Santiago Calatrava's biomorphic "blob" structures, communicating in easily grasped language, are the subject of a New York retrospective. |
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Pliny Fisk III / Gail Vittori Architecture Talking to Pliny Fisk III--one of the pioneers of the sustainable-design movement--is both inspiring and confounding. In any given sitting Fisk might discuss bio-regional mapping, fly ash concrete, cybernetics, and E.F. Schumacher all in the same dizzying context. It's difficult to grasp, but that's because he isn't following a conventional approach. For him the planet's prosperity is inextricably linked to its architecture. |
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Sir Peter Hall Spots the Unicorn in the Garden Celebrated planner holds forth on sustainable urbanism at the National Building Museum. |
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Ada Louise Huxtable: History When architects put themselves into the same category as art personalities and ignore in every way that their art touches the world, it's not socially responsible. It has a bad physical effect. |
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Did the Beeb bottle it? When the BBC commissioned three landmark new buildings it was praised as a patron of cutting edge architecture. But now the architects of two of the projects have been dropped and the third may not even happen. What went wrong? |
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John Thackara: Cultural Theory A macroscope is something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together. My favorite example is that everybody in Melbourne, Australia, is crazy about building small concrete patios in their backyard as a kind of mini fashion item. When you add all those thousands upon thousands of little bits of paving stones and cement together, it turns out that more of the earth is being sealed off from the rain and nature than all the road and airport building programs put together in the same area. This aggregation of small actions is often invisible to us. |
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A push for animal-friendly roads In road ecology, transportation engineers and biologists cooperate on projects so fewer animals are struck by cars. |
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
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'Mall backlash' helps old-style downtowns Holiday shoppers who are feeling mauled at the malls are finding refuge, charm and unusual wares in Lebanon, one of the region's few remaining real downtowns. |
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JetBlue's JFK Terminal: Airport Architecture Hits Low Saarinen's terminal recalls a more genteel era when airport architecture could stylishly and unapologetically welcome people to the city. JetBlue's new terminal, unfortunately, shows just how low air travel can go. At $875 million, it's $125 million cheaper than the bare-bones JFK barracks that American Airlines opened last summer -- and looks it. |
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Google Offers a Bird's-Eye View, and Some Governments Tremble Since its debut last summer, Google Earth has received attention of an unexpected sort. Officials of several nations have expressed alarm over its detailed display of government buildings, military installations and other important sites within their borders. |
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In Mississippi, Canvas Cities Rise Amid Hurricane's RubbleFrom a distance, it looks like an Army base camp, or perhaps the old set from the television series "M*A*S*H." But here, a little more than a stone's throw from the Gulf of Mexico, on a muddy gravel lot that used to be a Little League field, a makeshift village has emerged for some of the many families who, as winter approaches, are still homeless because of Hurricane Katrina. From a distance, it looks like an Army base camp, or perhaps the old set from the television series "M*A*S*H." But here, a little more than a stone's throw from the Gulf of Mexico, on a muddy gravel lot that used to be a Little League field, a makeshift village has emerged for some of the many families who, as winter approaches, are still homeless because of Hurricane Katrina. |
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I shop, therefore I am Evelyn Welch's Shopping in the Renaissance is concerned with a lot more than proving that nothing much changes over the centuries when you're in desperate need of a pint of milk or some new curtains. Her interest in shopping arises from its status as an invisible activity, so embedded in the rhythms and disciplines of the everyday that it barely breaks the surface of our consciousness. We do it, just as the Italians of the Renaissance did it, almost without noticing. |
Monday, December 19, 2005
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Longing for urbanity
The French architect Jean Nouvel once said that the pretension of planning a new city is akin to the pretension of writing a library. Evidence supporting Nouvel's analysis, which casts doubt on the mere possibility of planning a city, has been scattered around the world, including in Israel, ever since the end of World War II. |
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Mass media's last blast I want my MTV — and my TiVo, Palm Pilot, iPod, podcast and, of course, blog. So does America still have any interest in the big, lumbering, predictable media of Hollywood and Manhattan? |
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For the hearty few, it's bicycles among the icicles Undaunted by mere snow and slush, die-hard bicyclists adapt with a few extra layers of clothing to keep pedaling when the temperatures drop. |
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The End Of Cheap Oil The issue of energy has been looming like a storm cloud on the horizon for over 30 years. North American society's understanding of energy supply and demand has been distorted, because we have had a virtually uninterrupted supply of cheap energy for several generations. Cheap energy has powered the manufacturing, automotive, home heating, agricultural and construction industries. In fact, North American prosperity has been fuelled by an abundant supply of cheap energy. |
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The heights of folly and fashion This was the year that the world's developers went mad about skyscrapers, unleashing a wave of plans to build 1,000ft-plus towers on the London skyline. Ken Livingstone, casting himself as the most pharaonic of Britain's mayors, halfway between New York's Ed Koch and Francois Mitterrand, enthusiastically embraced them as signs of the city's virility. |
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Turning the High Line Into ... the High Life Say bye-bye to the parking lots along 10th Avenue, between 14th and 30th Streets, and maybe a few of the chaotic clubs and bars on the side streets. Bid adieu to the rough-and-tumble allure of taxi garages and the fringe of weeds running the length of the High Line, the derelict but irresistibly charming dinosaur of an elevated railroad that is the backbone of West Chelsea's thriving gallery scene. |
Saturday, December 17, 2005
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Ramp creates power as cars pass A road ramp that uses passing cars to generate power has been developed. |
Friday, December 16, 2005
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Going Down Is too few people the new "population problem"? |
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Too Many Homes on the Range I’ve been herding cattle amidst trophy homes in the nation’s fastest growing county. Our family leases grass on the south edge of Denver, and we’re helping to keep urban sprawl from claiming one more patch of rural America. Nationwide, urban areas are sprouting extreme suburbs -- exurbs -- that leapfrog across the landscape at an unprecedented rate. According to the Department of Agriculture, the United States loses over a million acres of rural land each year. |
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Worlds without end Millions of people now spend several hours a week immersed in “massively multiplayer online role-playing games” (MMORPGs). These synthetic worlds are increasingly inter-twined with the real world. In particular, real-world trade of in-game items—swords, gold, potions, or even whole characters—is flourishing in online marketplaces such as eBay. This means in-game items and currency have real value. |
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Absent- Urbanism Awards The first time I went to Florence, Italy, we stayed at wonderful hotel in the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, known as the city's most perfectly proportioned public square. The former 16th century convent had wonderful, quirky rooms, stone floors and an incredible loggia in front. The loggia, I learned, was typical of European convents and monasteries. The community's poor assembled there to sleep in the evenings, or get food or clothing left by the people of the town or village. |
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British architect Norman Foster to design Ground Zero tower "Norman Foster understands how to design a bold urban icon while simultaneously enhancing the environment and quality of life of the building's occupants," said WTC developer Larry Silverstein, who is leasing the land from its owners, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. |
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Building for brainiacs Cities around the world are taking turns producing a new generation of buildings that frame ballet and opera, expressions of art honed and refined from one century to the next. Built templates exist for those institutions. But, how to design for ways of thinking that never even existed five years ago -- where agents of extreme intelligence have cut themselves loose from conventional thinking? Here's where architecture can get interesting. |
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Smog Fighters May Make Builders Pay Convinced that sprawl begets smog, Central Valley air quality officials are expected today to become the first regulators in the nation to force builders to pay air pollution fees for new development.
Builders would pay less if their new homes, shopping centers and office complexes were designed in ways that limited automobile use — by locating banks and dry cleaners closer to houses, for example, or linking bicycle trails and walking paths to schools and work centers. |
Thursday, December 15, 2005
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Architectural Theft Adds Insult To Injury in Old New Orleans Professional photographer Keith Calhoun is resigned to the hurricane that destroyed his studio. And he has even reconciled himself to the pilfering of negatives he had stored there. But what has him spitting nails is the recent looting of the fat cypress beams that had kept his Victorian-era building standing -- and that would be key to putting it back together. The beams -- or joists -- long pieces of dense, 19th-century timber that support roofs and floors and are virtually impossible to purchase new, fetch about $10 a running foot at a salvage yard, Mr. Calhoun says. He reckons he lost a truckload of antique wood. Mr. Calhoun suspects that common thieves working his neighborhood wouldn't be going after antique building materials such as joists, mantels and Victorian shutters unless they were being directed to by someone in the know. The value, he says, is only clear to renovators and aficionados of historic design. "Not even the cops know this stuff's valuable -- they all live out in the suburbs," Mr. Calhoun says. |
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Flags Snap, Heels Tap Why has Rockefeller Center succeeded where so many other urban mega-projects have not? |
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Suburban Loft, The The loft used to be a distinctly urban animal: empty downtown factories converted first into living spaces by struggling artists, then later into trendy up-market condos. But like many city dwellers, as it has matured, the loft has moved farther away from the hustle and bustle of downtown life. Last year, the National Association of Home Builders incorporated the "loft look" in its annual demonstration home in Las Vegas. A cross between SoHo and Pleasantville, the house featured an open plan, buffed-concrete floors and high ceilings, but it also sat amid a manicured lawn in a gated subdivision. It drew rave reviews and quickly sold for $1.9 million. |
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Recyclecity The objective of Recyclicity is to promote re-use of waste material for construction applications with as little added energy as possible for transport and processing of materials. |
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The Hyperbole Towers New York is constantly building chic apartments for its wealthiest citizens, and what luxury highrise is complete without a fatuous selling pamphlet? Welcome to the art of superlative meaninglessness. |
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
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Razing the past Soldiers and civilians are not the only casualties of war. Aggressors also target the physical monuments to an enemy's existence and so attack their libraries, churches and schools. |
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Business Bay Phase-1 to include 200 towers Dubai Properties, the Dubai based real estate developer will be developing more than 200 towers in its first-phase development of Business Bay. Business Bay, a major real estate development in Dubai will include a 300 meters high tower, a 30-40-storey residential tower and a vision tower. |
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Honk if you love riding bicycles To me, bike riding is a reminder of the natural activity of moving with the rhythm of life regardless of the culture you live in. |
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Japan Loves Its Little Villages, but Wants Fewer of Them Shikabe may soon disappear from the map, along with hundreds of other small towns, as Tokyo seeks ways to rein in its traditional share-the-wealth spending habits. |
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
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Magic in the Motor City A new public square, Campus Martius, brings life back downtown. |
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Top 12 Public Squares in the U.S. and Canada Shining examples to inspire the growing movement to bring back town squares. |
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The World's Best Squares From Mexico to Italy to Iran, these remarkable squares can inspire us all. |
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The 16 Squares Most Dramatically in Need of Improvement These squares could be transformed from embarrassments to great community places. |
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Ten Principles for Creating Successful Squares To really succeed, a square must take into account a host of factors that extend beyond its physical dimensions. |
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How a Failing Suburban Mall Became a Beloved Indoor Town Square Picture an indoor town square, next to a bookstore, ringed with five cafes. People are talking and eating around long library tables, round tables, square tables, some are working at laptop computers. |
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Prairie Wind blows away competition Prairie Wind, a grouping of flexible metal rods designed to flow with the wind like grasses on the prairie, will be the Century Plaza landmark celebrating Saskatoon's 100th anniversary.
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No Talk and No Action Why the Montreal climate summit was too painful to watch |
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Below I-5, new park awakens In a cavernous space under the freeway, Andy Sheffer is witnessing a man-made rainstorm. Water is shooting from overhead sprinklers, irrigating a palm tree that stands out among hundreds of massive concrete pillars holding up Interstate 5. "It's like a movie set, isn't it?" said Sheffer, a city parks employee, pondering the public art project. "It looks stormy now. It looks like 'Gilligan's Island.' " With lights that mimic the sun and moon, the sculpture will re-create daily weather patterns in 1960, before the highway project destroyed Eastlake homes and divided neighborhoods. |
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Leaders Who Build to Stroke Their Egos The pyramids, Versailles, the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, the World Trade Center: it's hardly news that the rich and powerful have used architecture to try to achieve immortality, impress their contemporaries, stroke their own egos and make political and religious statements. |
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Charles Jencks : Being Iconic Charles Jencks is an author, architect, historian, critic, and occasional soothsayer. He is synonymous with the concept of the Postmodern in architecture, as he was the first to extend those ideas into architectural discourse with his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. His numerous books are a perpetual mapping of the trends and paradigm shifts in the lexicon of architecture. |
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Serpentine Gallery axes plan for 'grass mountain' After a year of frustration and false starts, an attempt to build a mountain on top of the Serpentine gallery has been abandoned. The proposal, put forward by the Dutch architect MVRDV, was hailed as the most ambitious project to date in the Serpentine's annual programme of temporary summer pavilions. It called for a 23m-high steel frame, enclosing the gallery and covered in artificial grass, which visitors could climb to admire the views of London. |
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Architects design better city life After years of quickly expanding cities and a boom in high-rises, Chinese architects and urban designers are now shifting their attention to the quality of life and the close relationship between a city and its architecture, exhibits at the First Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture show. |
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Primitive building wins acclaim The building, four floors of more than 10 meters, was built from 1957 to 2004 by Chen Peijun, an 84-year-old woman in Yousong Village. Chen used bricks, tiles, wood and mud, all collected from nearby construction site debris. No modern materials, such as steel and concrete, were used. |
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Final terminus for London's classic bus The London bus died today. Just after midday, RM2217, a 40-year old red double-decker restored for the occasion, gargled away on the 159 route from Marble Arch to Streatham Hill, marking the end of a century of buses designed and custom-made in London by Londoners for London. |
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Casa Pollo A few months ago, a political row blew up over government plans (announced in April) to solve Spain´s housing crisis by introducing State "mini-flats" measuring just 30 square metres. Many people in the country consider that 30sqm are definitely too tiny. |
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Scottish parliament splits public opinion The controversial new Scottish parliament is one of Britain's best-loved buildings according to a new poll out today - just a day after another survey found it was one of the most hated. |
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Death of an American City We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum. |
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Quonsets What better way to celebrate the season than to head over to the Anchorage Museum of History and Art to relive the days when we worshipped, attended school, slept, ate, took holidays and made art in Quonset huts? |
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Not Everything Old Is Beautiful The urge toward reclamation of superannuated infrastructure and industry in the name of culture and leisure will surely be seen, years hence, as the defining element of contemporary urbanism and taste. |
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Hands off my yard, Mr. Mayor! In a series of speeches around town, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has recently begun to flesh out a utopian vision for Los Angeles that gives new meaning to the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. |
Monday, December 12, 2005
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Bilbao? Please, That Was So Eight Years Ago Powered by a democratic awakening after decades of Fascist rule and by the dividends of European Union membership, Spain, is clearly outpacing its European siblings in the breadth and daring of its new architecture. |
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Do-It-Yourself Cartography The most influential mashup this year wasn't a Beatles tune remixed with hip-hop lyrics. It was an online street map of Chicago overlaid with crime statistics. Chicagocrime.org, which was created by the journalist Adrian Holovaty, was one of the first Web sites to combine publicly available data from one site (in this case, the Chicago Police Department's online database) with a digital map supplied by another site (in this case, Google). |
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The Collapse of Globalism The more extravagant promises of globalization theory have come to naught. Where do we go from here? |
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New turf for science: suburbia Suburbia may be familiar turf, but it's one of the last frontiers for scientists trying to understand how ecosystems work and how people are changing the natural world. From the woodsy suburban enclaves of Vermont to sprawling Chico, Livermore and Gilroy, researchers are starting to probe the role of lawns in global warming, how garden fertilizers and pesticides affect wildlife and how storm water running from roofs, roads and driveways undermines the health of streams. |
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Why sprawl is good Consider the much-maligned American suburb. For decades now, it has been mocked by authors and intellectuals as the sterile, soul-crushing birthplace of such cultural blights as McMansions and strip malls. Hollywood, too, has caught on. Witness the success of the Oscar-winning movie "American Beauty" and the Emmy-winning TV show "Desperate Housewives." Both depict everyone in suburbia as somehow weird or depraved. In recent years a whole movement has coalesced, the so-called New Urbanism, to sneer at suburban sprawl and all its various progeny. |
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Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Road to Its Future In the middle of the old Grand Trunk Road a temple sits under a peepul tree. The surrounding highway is being widened to four lanes, and vehicles barrel along either side. But the temple and tree thwart even greater speed, and a passing contractor says they soon will be removed. |
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Driving the argument home A campaign is under way to lower speed limits to 20mph in urban areas, but what's going to make drivers slow down? A bossy road sign, a hump in the road or a three-piece suite parked in the road? |
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Cities, peak oil, and sustainability In mid-August I drove to a party in the country outside of Portland, Oregon. Twenty miles of freeway took me to a two-lane road that wound ten miles up steep forested hills and down through remote valleys. As the roads grew narrower and less traveled, I began to wonder how, if gas hits $5 or $10 a gallon, people and supplies will reach these isolated spots. What kind of post-oil vehicle will climb this hilly, winding road that quite literally goes nowhere—a converted truck run on home-made biodigested methane? Then, after I arrived at the secluded acreage, I questioned whether my hosts could really supply most of their own needs, just the two of them and their kids. |
Saturday, December 10, 2005
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Heed the call of nature A friend of mine, a successful London landscape architect, rails passionately against what she calls "landscape as a verb". This mystifies many people, who see nothing wrong with the notion of "landscaping" something. The red rag, though, is the idea, hidden within that popular assumption, that landscape is something you can roll out around a building, like astroturf, perhaps, or carpet, and cut to fit. |
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The History of New York City Public Space New York City's Park Avenue was once... a park! |
Friday, December 9, 2005
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The Shape Of Things To Come "Where is it written that buildings have to be boxes?" asks Czech-born architect Jan Kaplicky, founder and partner of the London-based practice Future Systems. "People aren't boxes." |
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Cities' success tied to attracting young educated Cities that attract college educated 25- to 34-year-olds will prosper in the next decade while other urban areas will suffer, according to a study released by CEOs for Cities, a national non-partisan organization of mayors, corporate CEOs, university presidents, foundation officials and civic leaders. |
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Heart of gold With no plan other than making money, mall-packed Rama I Road has become Bangkok’s thriving center. |
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Sprawling into controversy Professor and author Robert Bruegmann is defying conventional wisdom with his claim that suburban creep is both an ancient phenomenon and a beneficial one. |
Thursday, December 8, 2005
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New 'Fortified' Homes Aim To Withstand Nature's Assaults In this rapidly developing swath of former Florida swampland, home builders Joe and Mike Redburn are selling more than modest three-bedroom castles: They are selling fortresses. The otherwise ordinary-looking homes have windows that can withstand 130-mph winds. Extra-beefy garage doors roll down like armored shields. Roof decking is held fast with special nails so hard to pull out that they must be cut to be removed. The back of a pickup truck the father-and-son team uses for its Fort Myers, Fla., home-building company boasts: "Our houses don't blow away." |
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More Japanese starting to opt for diversity in their lifestyles Save on commuting time and spend more hours with your family — this is the concept for a new type of apartment in urban Tokyo. Following the success of Mori Building Co's Roppongi Hills, other developers, such as Mitsui Real Estate Co, have jumped on the bandwagon. Housing companies are building high-rise luxury apartments in business and fashion areas in central Tokyo such as Minato and Chiyoda wards. |
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
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Urban Design Lab to Help Promote Sustainability and Environmental Justice in New York City New Earth Institute center will provide practical assistance to community groups working to improve and develop their neighborhoods. |
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Cycling is a healthy way to break the iron grip of the car We are yet to hear any transport expert in North America complain that bikes generate roadway congestion or air pollution. On the contrary, cycling is widely viewed as complementary to improved pedestrian and public transport facilities. |
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Tanks for the Memory “Everyone sees these water towers but most people don't notice them,” said Rahman Polk of Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge, the $3,500 first prize winner of the Chicago Architectural Club's recent competition to find new uses for Chicago's water tanks. |
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
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In Outer Suburbs, Nightlife Venues Find a Burgeoning Clientele Eager to Spend Without leaving the familiar environs of a strip mall, suburbanites in Northern Virginia will soon be able to fancy themselves dancing all night in one of Europe's most famous entertainment districts. |
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Connecticut Town Helps Create an Architectural Anomaly: An Appealing Water Plant It could have been a pitched battle: a snug, Bohemian neighborhood versus a big construction project in a historic enclave. But instead of saying not in my backyard, some of the architects, artists and teachers who live here collaborated with a utility company to make a workaday water treatment plant architecturally dazzling. |
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Metropolitan Dubai and the Rise of Architectural Fantasy Fantasy embraces all forms of dreaming. In architecture, it implies a composed, projected environment that is surprising to the eye—a deliberate exercise that tests reality and triggers possibilities for the future. In a sense, all architecture is fantasy. Architectural design is always speculative, since it attempts to specify the future. |
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Regeneration projects get cash to involve artists Ten groundbreaking regeneration projects throughout the UK are to share funding of £106,000 from PROJECT to support the involvement of artists in their design and planning. |
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The Tipping Point Do you have advice on how much we should tip our doormen and porters for the holiday season? We live in a "working class" doorman building, if there is such a thing. |
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The Easiest Commute Of All The ranks of remote workers are swelling as companies see the sense in freeing them. |
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Architectural Wonders: Building Innovation Architects face such challenges as terrorism and costly energy, while designing ever-higher, technologically advanced buildings. |
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In the rush to rebuild, a house divided While the Gulf Coast lies in ruins, two camps of architects are dueling over the direction of post-Katrina reconstruction. |
Monday, December 5, 2005
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In Manhattan Park's Rebirth, Unease at Corporate Presence During the late 1980's, when Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan was frequented by more drug dealers than sunbathers, the city turned the park's management over to a private group to try to revitalize a public space that many thought of as a lost cause. That group, the nonprofit Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, helped transform the park into one of the city's most heavily used and beloved public spaces. But a major concern has come with the transformation: that Bryant Park is being operated in such a businesslike fashion - including charging fees for holding events, and allowing corporate sponsorships - that it barely seems like a public space anymore. |
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Free market would never pick sprawl Sprawl is possible only through intense government regulation. It is an artificial growth pattern achieved by laws that frustrate the free market's tendency toward density. The free market, left to its own devices, would never produce five-acre minimum lot sizes, or 2,500-square-foot minimum house sizes, or bans and moratoriums on apartments. The free market, left to its own devices, would produce growth patterns more like "smart-growth" policies. |
Sunday, December 4, 2005
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Mazda Discourages Employees From Driving Japanese automaker Mazda Motor Corp. is recommending its employees walk to the office, rather than commute by car, as part of an effort to improve their health and protect the environment, a company spokesman said Friday. |
Thursday, December 1, 2005
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Is it possible to live in America without a car? Uh, sort of. After two weeks of riding my bicycle everywhere, I'd gotten used to people treating me as if I were somehow not right in the head. Store clerks ignored me, old men gave me the hard stare, soccer moms avoided eye contact. After all, almost nobody in America rides a bike if they can afford a car. |
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Urban Glass House: Half Full? Philip Johnson is gone, but not forgotten. A slick sales campaign by real estate marketing firm The Sunshine Group tells us that the Urban Glass House, a vestige of the final projects designed by the late, renowned architect, is rising as we speak in a fast-changing urban industrial outpost at the western edge of SoHo and just north of Tribeca. |
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Sierra Club's new tack: not every development is a bad use of land The Sierra Club is well-known for trying to stop big real estate development projects. But in a move that could help it gain new allies, the United States' best-known environmental group is starting to go to bat for some builders. |
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