Urbanism News
Saturday, December 30, 2006
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How Much Does a Neighborhood Affect the Poor? A decade ago, Lydia Grayson got as far away from her drug-addled, East Harlem housing project as she could. At the time, she was a 28-year-old mother of three, and, she says, a drug user. She took a federal housing voucher and packed her family on a Greyhound bus with one-way tickets to North Carolina. Climbing out of poverty hasn't been as easy as getting on the bus. She says her life is now drug-free and more stable, and her children are growing up in a better environment. Yet in many ways, her struggles traveled with her. "You really need to have a focus to get out of the ghetto," says Ms. Grayson, a New York native. |
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Who you callin’ stoop-id? Brooklyn’s legendary brownstone stoops are little more than speed bumps for the borough’s career-addled, stroller-burdened and iPod-addicted residents, a new Parsons School of Design study has found. “There are not a whole lot of people taking the time to sit on stoops anymore,” said Chelsea Briganti, one of three Parsons undergraduates working on a report and an awareness campaign that they’ve titled, “Sit Here.” |
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In Response to Densification, L.A. Sprouts News Parks On November 17, the California State Department of Parks and Recreation announced that it had chosen a team led by San Francisco–based Hargreaves Associates, with Michael Maltzan Architecture, to design the first state park in Los Angeles. The winning team was selected from 33 entries in an intense, eight-month design competition that was narrowed down to three finalists including New York’s Field Operations and the Los Angeles landscape architecture firm Mia Lehrer + Associates. |
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Historic preservation -- Las Vegas style A masterpiece of motel architecture from the era of the Rat Pack is being preserved. |
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The city rediscovers the street No official place to rally? No problem. The protests for immigrant rights showed how L.A.'s public spaces are a product of their communities, not a planner's desk. |
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London now priciest home market Brimming with posh stores and elegant shoppers, New York City has always held a certain cachet. But there is something that America's largest city can no longer claim: the world's most expensive residences. That honor now belongs to London, the priciest place in the world to buy a luxury home. |
Thursday, December 28, 2006
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Green Rage "These acts were motivated by a deep sense of despair and anger at the deteriorating state of the global environment and the escalating inequities within society. But I realized years ago this was not an effective or appropriate way to effect positive change. I now know that it is better to act from love than from anger, better to create than destroy, and better to plant gardens than to burn down buildings." |
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Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas. |
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New German community models car-free living It's pickup time at the Vauban kindergarten here at the edge of the Black Forest, but there's not a single minivan waiting for the kids. Instead, a convoy of helmet-donning moms - bicycle trailers in tow - pedal up to the entrance. |
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Brands and the Built Environment Two architects and a strategic marketing professional walk into a building. This time, however, it's no joke. Architect Todd Erlandson, AIA, and marketing guru Sherry Hoffman, principals of Los Angeles-based architecture and branding firm (M)Arch., and (M)Arch. project architect Lara Hoad, have structured their firm into what could be a significant niche in the business of architecture. |
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Profits from Idle Cars? First, Think Like an MBA Each time I walk to a Flexcar in my neighborhood, I pass scores of parked private cars. I sometimes fantasize about strolling up to one of them, swiping my Flexcard over the dash, and driving away. I'd be debited automatically; my neighbor would be credited, less a slice for Flexcar. And I'd have a vastly larger pool of vehicles at my disposal. |
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Our growing and groaning cities Australian cities are marvellous organisms. They have centres of awesome skyscrapers and world-class landmarks, suburbs stretching further than the eye can see, and wondrous doses of ethnic diversity. Our largest cities have undergone many changes over the years, presenting governments with many interesting and unique problems. |
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
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Calling For Change An interactive art installation allows participants to temporarily change a local landmark. |
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
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Calling For Change An interactive art installation allows participants to temporarily change a local landmark. |
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Balmy Weatherpeople Fźte Toasty Winter as the World Burns It’s a Hula Christmas! ‘What’s So Sad About 60 Degrees in December? |
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Washington Warming to Southern Plants A warming climate in the Washington area is beginning to affect the area's trees, with cold-loving species finding the weather less welcoming and southern transplants thriving, according to findings released yesterday by the National Arbor Day Foundation. |
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The Barenaked Truth Steven Page has seen the future. In it, there are walkable cities with plenty of bike paths, cleared for cyclists even in the dead of winter. Whole communities are powered by wind and other renewable energy sources. And his pop-rock band, Barenaked Ladies, liberated from its major music label, releases music online and on refillable USB thumb drives instead of CDs encased in plastic. |
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Why birds sing up when they move to the city Songbirds change their tune when they move to cities, according to new research. Scientists found that great tits adapted to urban living by singing faster, shorter songs that were at a higher frequency than their forest-dwelling cousins. |
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On the High Line, Solitude Is Pretty Crowded We New Yorkers have a morbid fascination with pinpointing the death of a neighborhood scene. You wonder, for example, exactly when the seeds were planted for SoHo’s grim destiny as an open-air mall. Was it 1971, when Leo Castelli opened his downtown gallery? The advent of Dean & Deluca’s overpriced cheeses? Victoria’s Secret underwear displays? |
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A car-less commuting exercise Owning a car or two in the Bay Area can fuel a guilt trip. Not only is our main mode of transportation blamed for strangling the environment, but it also distances us from our families, stresses us out and makes our bellies bulge from time devoted to gridlock rather than gyms. |
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Big is not better when it's about how we live A journey across the Melbourne metropolitan area can span roughly 100 kilometres, from Berwick in the south-east to Hillside in the north-west, most of it through compartmentalised fields of suburban housing, car-heavy shopping complexes and industrial zones. |
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Two Steps Back In 1999 large cities and their suburbs had nearly equal numbers of poor individuals, but by 2005 the suburban poor outnumbered their city counterparts by at least 1 million. |
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On the river - at last TEN Arquitectos’s competition-winning scheme connects New Jersey College campus to the river. |
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5th St. Bridge: Green path over Connector Atlanta's newest park is planted in quite a place: 17 feet above Downtown Connector motorists. |
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China's need for crops may curb biofuel plans A shortage of farmland and a government priority to grow food crops for China, the most populous country, could hamper plans by the country's oil companies to produce biofuels on a large scale. |
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The Dance of the Big and the Small We’re swamped by innovation, but starved of meaning. So what steps should we take, and in which order? |
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Planning a New Life in the City When developers talk about who will buy all the high-end condominiums that they are building or planning to build in Manhattan, empty nesters invariably make the list. |
Saturday, December 23, 2006
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All hail Pottersville! The "bad" town in "It's a Wonderful Life" jumps and jives 24/7 with hot bars and cool chicks -- while "wholesome" Bedford Falls is a claustrophobic snooze. |
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OMA wins in Shenzhen Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture has won a competition to design the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Shenzhen, China. The 250m-high building will be OMA’s second biggest project in China after the vast CCTV building in Beijing, which is under construction. |
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Design for coals Just a two-hour drive from Rotterdam is the Ruhrgebiet landscape and culture park, whose main attraction is Zollverein in Essen. With the completion of OMA’s conversion of the Coal Refinery and SANAA's new Zollverein School, the transformation of this former industrial site is starting to take shape. |
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Where nature meets the city
From urban green spaces to sustainable communities: In Green City: People, Nature & Urban Places, Montreal author Mary Soderstrom leads us on a voyage. The destinations: 11 cities worldwide, where she explores the interactions of nature and society. |
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A maverick architect shows a softer side Can it be that Thom Mayne, the architect of confrontation, has gone soft? His acclaimed design for Paris's tallest office building, chosen on Dec. 1, is an elegant silhouette draped in a diaphanous skin, a far cry from the sharp corners, violent eruptions, and fragmented forms that led some to call him the architect of dislocation. |
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Eyesore or eye-opener? The new Brooklyn A $4bn complex of apartment and office blocks in Brooklyn has been approved by planning authorities in what would be the biggest project by a private developer in New York's history. The project would see the construction of 16 skyscrapers and a basketball arena over nine hectares (22 acres) of downtown Brooklyn, a site almost one and a half times the size of the World Trade Centre. |
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Hotel, ship terminal arena are possibilities A team of national and local planners and architects has been chosen to come up with a plan for redeveloping a 4.1-mile stretch of publicly owned land along New Orleans' east bank riverfront. |
Thursday, December 21, 2006
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“We Are Experts Too” People know more about their communities than any architect, planner, or developer can ever know. Now there’s a chance they’ll be heard. |
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
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No Stopping Here: Shanghai Developers Dream On In the ongoing competition of architectural superlatives that is heating up globalization debates, Shanghai has recently fallen back against Dubai. But a Shanghai real estate company is now joining forces with the government of Shanghai’s Songjiang district to beat Dubai in the category “lowest hotel” – by building a hotel in a one-hundred meters deep waste pit. |
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The Art of Survival: Positioning Landscape Architecture in The New Era In a new era of multiple unprecedented challenges imposed by the processes of industrialization and urbanization, landscape architecture is now on the verge of change in the world, and especially in China. It is time for this profession to take the great opportunity to position itself to play the key role in rebuilding a new Land of Peach Blossoms for a new society of urbanized, global, and interconnected people. |
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Shelf life Shop design has always been an important part of marketing a product, from the early Parisian department stores to 19th century perfumeries, but with the onslaught of the digital revolution, shopping has become a multi-sensory experience, says Manuelli. |
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Post-modernism is the new black Dominated by 22 pillars, the long grey neoclassical 1909 faēade of Selfridges, one of London's great department stores, seems anachronistic. The exterior suggests values—of grandeur, dignity and authority—from another era. The interior doesn't. Consumer anarchy reigns, with over 3,000 different brands, all in their own concessions, screaming for attention. |
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Urbanization vs. sprawl Who you gonna believe -- your own eyes or the grandiose statements of ideologues? Well, many Americans, especially those in positions of power, are choosing the ideologues. I'm referring to the ideology of Smart Growth and New Urbanism. Basically, these philosophies argue that traditional suburbia of the sort that has evolved since the 1950s is a terrible thing. They say it promotes isolation, hopelessness, despair and social turmoil; leads to deep divisions among classes and races; and is unsustainable. "Unsustainable" is one of those words that defies precise meaning. But those who throw around such a term are suggesting that suburbia is causing irreparable harm to the environment. |
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The crisis of unspecified specificity Photographer Frank van der Salm beautifully captures architecture on the edge of surreality: uninhabited and lit from within, it's a world before its people arrive – or half a second after they've left. |
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
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Chinese Success Story Chokes on Its Own Growth Few cities anywhere have created wealth faster than Shenzhen, but the costs of its phenomenal success stare out from every corner: environmental destruction, soaring crime rates and the disillusionment and degradation of its vast force of migrant workers. |
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Archinect Travels : Izmir, Turkey Even though they call it the pearl of Aegean Sea, Izmir is no ivory colored postcard. Early on the city surrounded its bay like a necklace all right, but later morphed into a collar first and shortly after, the whole shirt. Mass immigration, increased birth rates and unplanned development have its impact. Imagine pop. 4,000,000 in high density living as a background music while reading this. |
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In Houston, Art Is Where the Home Is Although it’s hard to tell at a glance, this stretch of Holman may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country — a project that is miles away, geographically and philosophically, from Chelsea and Art Basel and the whole money-besotted paper-thin art scene. |
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Leaving empty space behind Logging roads in tropical rainforests expose whole landscapes to disease, fire, drought, longterm human settlement, and uncontrolled future deforestation. "Every second we lose an area the size of a football pitch," Giles Revell and Matt Wiley write, describing the ecological motivation behind their new photographic series, At This Rate. "Every day we lose an area larger than all five boroughs of New York City... Every year we lose an area three times the size of Sri Lanka." |
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Why shouldn't Gehry be allowed to Brighton up the neighbourhood? The trendies love it, but many Hove locals feel a renowned architect's new scheme for its Regency seafront is too big and bold. |
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This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Them? When a community rises up against the specter of a behemoth retailer in its midst, that store tends to be a purveyor of cheap toys, discount hardware or 30-roll bundles of toilet paper, not Chilean sea bass, endive and fresh-baked scones. |
Monday, December 18, 2006
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In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back When residents here in southern China’s richest city learned of plans to build an expressway that would cut through the heart of their congested, middle-class neighborhood, they immediately organized a campaign to fight City Hall. |
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Neither Young nor Chicago The title is a misnomer, but the first exhibit from the Art Institute’s new architecture and design curator makes a good point. |
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Streetcars Make a Comeback in Paris The last Paris tram ground to a halt 60 years ago. Now a new tram line is being introduced with lots of fanfare. France hopes this return to the past will ring in a new era of urban mobility. The tram is quiet, fast and comfortable -- a perfect remedy for traffic jams. |
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World class architect Libeskind was in New Orleans to offer his visionary services to another enormous project, "Reinventing the Crescent," a plan to unify the east bank of the Mississippi River from the Lower Garden District to the Holy Cross neighborhood, producing a continuous strip of public park. The industrial wharves that now dominate much of the curving riverscape would be replaced with glinting new cruise ship terminals, a performing arts center and hotels, some structures perhaps designed by Libeskind himself. |
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City of the future A cyber-city is in the making near Shah Alam, and it will offer amenties such as city-wide broadband, advanced security, "smart" parking lots, and "apps-on-tap" for businesses. It will also feature sci-fi-like technologies such as laser light shows and images on buildings. |
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Shanghai Builds for the Future China is now undergoing one of the most massive urbanization in human history, and nowhere is that more evident than in cosmopolitan Shanghai. The city's population is now almost 18 million, and is forecast to rise to 25 million by 2020. This series looks at how the city is preparing for its future. |
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The new New York To Mr Bloomberg, New York is competing—especially with London—to be one of the great cities of the 21st century, attracting the increasingly mobile and wealthy global elite. His plan addresses what he sees as the three chief challenges facing the city as it makes that transition. First, he expects New York's population, already at a record high, to grow by around 1m by 2030, to 9m. Second, the city's infrastructure—much of it a century old—is crumbling, and needs to be upgraded. Third, the city must become much greener. |
Friday, December 15, 2006
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How to give up cycling Following the shocking revelation that heat generated by vigorous exercise is a major contributor to global warming, we are all having to reassess our own activities. It comes as a major surprise to many of us that storing energy in human fat is actually a valuable way of reducing our impact on the environment. Government may be introducing plans to extract this fat by large-scale liposuction programmes and storing it underground, but we all have a responsibility to reduce our participation in ecologically hazardous physical activity. |
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Woonerven Woonerf is a Dutch word that translates roughly as "street for living," and refers to Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman's innovative and increasingly popular contribution to urban design: a streetscape stripped of lane markers, curbs, sidewalks, zebra crossings and other obvious boundaries denoting spaces meant for single forms of transportation. |
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The Good Life Have we forgotten how to make good use of our public space? A growing list of grassroots organizations and young designers are putting the idea of fun back into the way we use our cities. |
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Intensifying Cities The theme of "Cities: Architecture and Society" for the 2006 Venice Biennale was communicated through an impressive display of our planet's expanding urban centres. Although the exhibition comprised some fantastic documentation, few solutions were proposed in response to the enormous challenges facing cities around the globe. |
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The Great Green Leap Forward: Energy-Hungry China and India Leapfrog to the Front of the Global Green Building Movement The glossy promotional brochure for DSK Vishwa, a new 6,000-unit housing development on the gentle hills surrounding the hub city of Pune, contained an appeal not typically pitched to the aspiring middle-class Indian: a “rain water harvesting channel.” India’s exploding housing sector in high-tech centers like Pune and Bangalore is finally seeing “green” development to satisfy the demands of more sophisticated and environmentally-conscious consumers—and improve the bottom line for developers. |
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A Cinematic Ode to Shanghai's Vanishing World Despite its population of almost 18 million, Shanghai only has 632 protected historic sites. Its distinctive traditional architecture is rapidly disappearing, and along with it, a way of life. |
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2006 in review: architecture It's very sad that the British press are beginning to do to the Olympics what they did to the Millennium Dome. For me, the sad thing about the Olympics is that it isn't reflecting the genuine talent we have here in the capital, due to a severe dose of risk aversion. Next year, I hope we might see some of the old guard of London moving over and allowing room for new Londoners. I'm talking about the Fosters and the Rogers, and the Yentobs and the Serotas. They've done a fantastic job - but it's time for change. |
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You won't recognize L.A. Architectural teams envision the city of the future, circa 2106. |
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The world is on the other side of the line
"The students of architecture whom I influenced as a teacher are not successful in the market," says architect Shimon Shapiro, not without a trace of defiant pleasure. "To be commercial, you must compromise," he explains, "but I don't teach [them] to succeed. I'm difficult and stubborn, a provocateur. They were all my students, but none of them designs the way I do. There are other influences, and there are constraints, and you have to make a living. Not everyone wants to be, or is able to be, a thorn in the side like me." |
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A Grand Design Team Selected for Rutgers Grand Redesign Plans Green spaces and connecting the campus to the river will create places as much for the community as the campus. |
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New York faces all-day rush hour by 2030 By the year 2030, New York City could have so many people straining its infrastructure that it won't have enough electricity or housing to meet demand, and rush hour traffic will last all day. |
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Eric Owen Moss Architects wins with infrastructure-inspired vision When Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa got his first glimpse at a design for a future Los Angeles Tuesday, he turned anxiously to philanthropist and political benefactor Eli Broad. "I want to live another hundred years!" Villaraigosa exclaimed as architects and onlookers crowded into the pavilion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Various glimpses of the city's future were on display all day as eight architectural teams submitted designs of 22nd century Los Angeles for a $10,000 first prize in the History Channel's "City of the Future" competition. |
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Urbanists, Amateur and Otherwise Like any part of culture, a vibrant and inventive city requires professionals, connoisseurs and amateurs: people who care passionately about their city. |
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Gay retirement community is a first Jan Gaynor and Barbara Cohn have decided to spend their retirement years in this city of art and culture, not just because it's steeped in 400 years of history, but also because it offers something new. The sixtysomething couple wanted to live in the nation's first full-fledged retirement community for gays and lesbians. They sold their house in California and moved into a condominium at Rainbow Vision Santa Fe this summer. |
Thursday, December 14, 2006
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Pay as you pollute Want to stop contributing to global warming every time you drive the car or turn on the computer? It may not be as hard as you think. A growing number of Mainers and other Americans are buying their way to more "carbon neutral" lives. Less than $150 can cancel out the pollution produced to power the lights and appliances in a typical Maine home for one year. Another $75 a year might cover the climate damage done by the average car. |
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
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Enhanced Benches The benches are designed and molded entirely from a new kind of plastic which encapsulates and emits fragrance or other chemical compounds for around 20 years. This chemical emission is tailored to a specific desired effect, to subtly manipulate people, animals and insects in the immediate surroundings. |
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Plaza plea: Save the brutalism! There’s no doubt that City Hall Plaza as a whole is a disaster - and I can’t blame Mayor Thomas M. Menino for wanting to vacate the “new” City Hall for Southie, as he proposed yesterday. But the key words are “as a whole” when it comes to City Hall Plaza. There’s no problem with the exterior design of the “brutalist modern” City Hall, opened in the late 1960s. It’s the desolate plaza outside and utterly depressing interior that numb the soul. |
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Brutal, powerful structure of 1969 is now out of style As much as any building in the world, Boston City Hall is a measure of changing fashions in architecture. It's hard to believe now, but in a poll of architects and historians in the bicentennial year of 1976, the building was voted one of the 10 greatest works of architecture in American history. |
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Google Plants Solar TreesGoogle Plants Solar Trees Parking lots are the traditional wasteland of the suburban biosphere -- flat, ugly, resistant to landscaping and immune to whatever aesthetic ideals animate the adjoining architecture.
But now these asphalt acres are getting their day in the sun, with search giant Google joining other companies in planting groves of pole-mounted solar panels between the rows of Saabs and SUVs, generating clean power and providing a little shade at the same time. |
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BCA Announces Environmental Design Winner The Boston Center of the Arts (BCA) is pleased to announce that Eric Hoffman and Tony Patterson of patterhn design of Saint Louis, Missouri are the winners of its national design competition "inside::out – Weaving Arts into the Urban Fabric." The BCA occupies an entire city block from Clarendon Street to Berkeley Street in Boston's historic South End. The winning design will transform the Tremont Street plaza and other public spaces surrounding the BCA into a welcoming public gathering place providing interactive experiences with the arts. |
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From shopping centers to lifestyle centers
I was shocked the first time I went to Universal CityWalk, several months after it opened in 1993. I'd read all about the place beforehand. Social critics had proclaimed it the new white-flight fortress against the crime, disorder and diversity of real city life. It exemplified "a Victorian-style separation of classes in our public life," wrote Norman Klein. George Will called CityWalk "a melancholy comment on metropolitan America." Mike Davis said, "It fulfills our worst prophecies." At best, CityWalk was a fake city, built for customers who, in Lewis Lapham's words, "had no intention of going to see the original city four miles to the south." |
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Where the Sidewalk Ends Behavioral psychology's unexpected lesson for urban design. |
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Suburbs a sin to Smart Growthers The Smart Growth/New Urbanist crowd has a solution to the terror of suburbia. We should all live packed into apartment buildings. Our kids should play on the street like in the old days of the glorious New York City tenements. We should not drive, but depend instead on mass transit. Every urban area should be surrounded by a green zone – i.e., a no-growth area of farms and woods and parks. Government will exert complete control over development decisions so that only the "right" types of things are built. |
Monday, December 11, 2006
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Big Urbanism “Make no little plans,” the architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham wrote a century ago, “they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” For the last four decades, however, little plans have been the signature creations of the American city. Ever since 1964, when Robert Moses, New York’s master builder, was prevented from blasting a freeway through SoHo, the most successful urban-design strategies undertaken by large American cities have been essentially conservative. Jane Jacobs’s crusade against architectural master plans, combined with a growing historic-preservation movement and the fall of heroic high modernism, led to a generation of planners, architects and activists intent on restoring, rather than drastically reshaping, the urban fabric. |
Friday, December 8, 2006
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Three lessons for a better cycling future It began in America, as so many trends do, but for years no one in Europe took any notice. American tourists wearing helmets around the streets of London first drew media attention. And although public response to walking helmets was initially amusement, the appeal of extra safety drew some pioneers to the habit, especially academics and competitive walkers. |
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An Urban Parking Perk: The Automated Garage For decades, Italy, Germany and Japan have been developing automated garages in which cars are not driven to parking spaces but instead are lifted by computerized machines and stowed in compact berths. Such designs greatly increase the number of vehicles that a garage can hold. |
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Pedal Pushers Fair- and foul-weather cities alike are gearing up to make it safer and easier for commuters to bicycle to work. |
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Planners warned of clumsy generation Children in the Compact City: Fairfield as a Suburban Case Study examined the restrictions high-density living places on children. Professor Randolph unearthed a range of behaviours that early-childhood specialists say impair social and motor skill development, ranging from parents feeding young children to keep them quiet, to not having enough space for young children to crawl, walk or play. |
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Art on the Fast Tract Varied interpretations of suburban sprawl are explored in a new exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art. |
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Land-use planning for the masses On St. Paul's University Avenue, you can order Cambodian noodles, buy a secondhand mannequin and replace the muffler on your old Buick. And starting today, you can create your own streetscape. A do-it-yourself urban design center offering equipment, software and technical expertise to the public will open today at 1956 W. University Ave. |
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On yer bike - it's an emergency Ambulance paramedics today unveiled their masterplan to beat Christmas traffic queues in Birmingham - the humble bicycle. |
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Pedestrians Lost In The New Suburbia A resident of a touted New Urbanist development in San Diego, California, comments on its failure as a walkable community. |
Thursday, December 7, 2006
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The Urban Beach Playing in the water: Even on cold Fall and Winter days, people are still drawn to play in the water to experience the soulful call of the hydraulophone, a sound sculpture and musical instrument that you play by putting your fingers on water jets. Hydraulophones used as landscape architecture give aquatic play a sophisticated and spiritually uplifting artistic element that draws people of all ages, not just children, to play in the water. |
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An urban sprawl too far More than 70% of land in Britain is in the private ownership of only around 0.6% of the population (This is an open invitation to developers to try their luck, December 6). Given that there is, we are told, a shortage of land for social housing and for economic development, the government would have been better advised to commission a review on land ownership in the first instance: who owns it, where the land is, the condition of that land, and the suitability of that land for social and economic needs. |
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Museum Plaza plan expands, cost grows Museum Plaza, the skyline-altering complex proposed for downtown's western edge, will be larger than previously planned and cost an extra $85 million by the time it opens in 2010. |
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
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Ai Weiwei : Fragments, Voids, Sections and Rings Ai Weiwei (Beijing) is an artist, curator, and architectural designer who has been working in China and the United States since the late 1970's. An original member of "Stars,"¯ a group of artists working in Beijing in the late 1970's during the first years of reform, Ai attended film school with directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. He then traveled to the United States where he made conceptual art focused on the alteration of readymade objects and situations. In the early 1990's Ai returned to China to edit a series of three books on the art a new generation of artists, based in Beijing's Eastern Art Village: "Black Paper,"¯ "White Paper,"¯ and "Gray Paper."¯ Since that time he has produced work which focuses on China's cultural history, centralized political system, and the contradictions of modernity. His work has shown across Europe, North America, and China. |
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On a Greener Future - A vision for urban living Over the course of the past two years, the city of San Francisco, developers and the public have worked with some of the world's foremost designers, engineers and architects to forge a vision for Treasure Island. The resulting sustainability plan outlines what needs to happen to transform the property from a once-contaminated Navy base into what could become a model environmentally sustainable urban community. |
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Hidden spaces Some recent expansions of historic structures have led planners underground for creative architectural solutions. |
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The architect as lubricant Last October it was the turn of the Jon Jerde Partnership to spark a discussion about ‘power and architecture’ at the Berlage Institute. It was something of a home game for Jerde, the brains behind the Koopgoot shopping arcade in Rotterdam, whose spokesman David Rogers was able to voice his cynical view on the theme unchallenged. |
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Venice architecture show reimagines the modern city The theme of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale is "Cities" - the places where more and more of us are living in and migrating to every year. Just over a century ago, when the Venice Art Biennale was founded, around 10 percent of the world's population lived in cities. By 2050, if United Nations predictions are correct, the figure will have risen to 75 percent. |
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
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The sadness of the strip mall Sure they're convenient. Couldn't they also be beautiful? |
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A vile architectural abortion How to upset an entire city with a few remarks about clone high streets. |
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Arabian heights Whatever next for the Arabian city that has an artificial ski slope covered in snow even when the temperature hits 50C? Not to mention the world's tallest building, some 7,000 metres (2,300 ft) high, rising above palm-shaped artificial archipelagos in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. Oh, and a growth rate of 16% and a population where foreigners in need of "luxury" homes outnumber locals. Well, what about the world's first rotating skyscraper? |
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A Russian Skyscraper Plan Divides a Horizontal City Russia’s largest company, Gazprom, announced on Friday that it had chosen the architecture firm RMJM London to design this city’s tallest building, brushing aside arguments from preservationists and residents that the project — whoever the architect — would destroy the city’s architectural harmony. |
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Towers Will Change the Look of Two World Cities The current mania for flamboyant skyscrapers has been a mixed blessing for architecture. While it has yielded a stunning outburst of creativity, it has also created an atmosphere in which novelty is often prized over innovation. At times it’s as if the architects were dog owners proudly parading their poodles in front of a frivolous audience. |
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Rebuilding the middle class Forget tax cuts and minimum-wage hikes; it's time for massive infrastructure projects that put millions to work in well-paying jobs. |
Monday, December 4, 2006
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Greener Education Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux imagined Central Park as a model for all parks, but even they’d be impressed by this: the Central Park Conservancy, the not-for-profit organization that manages and maintains the park, has been quietly sharing its expertise on park management, maintenance, and development with more than 50 parks from all over the globe. |
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Working on empty: Planning for oil's end No more fuel - After a Portland group persuades the city to create a task force, scenarios of crises emerge. |
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A Whirlwind of Participation An international gathering of architects, artists, and students attempts to preserve the culture of a unique Tokyo neighborhood. |
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How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.
— Philip K. Dick, 1978 |
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Michael Sorkin Smells the Sulphur of Megacities A Conference on Sustainable Urban Design (PDF) was held at U.N. headquarters in New York last month, far from the regular lanes of diplomatic traffic. |
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A tale of two old freeways In 1989 an earthquake shattered the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco. The good citizens of San Francisco petitioned the State of California to demolish, rather than rebuild, the freeway. The state agreed; nearby property values shot up by more than 300 per cent. That would be a three-fold increase not only in real property values but also in city revenues from that district. |
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His changing world Edward Burtynsky's celebrated photos captured global developments — industrialization, waste — without judgment. But now he advocates for a sustainable planet. It's a popular move, but will it hurt his art? |
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We're a drive-through nation Cars idle, move ahead a few feet, idle, move ahead. Some drivers suck down final puffs — breakfast is coming — then drop their cigarettes out the window. |
Saturday, December 2, 2006
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How to build intelligent suburbs The urgency of climate change makes the rebirth of our cities crucial to the planet, and its people. |
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Ikea launches flatpack homes in Britain In a move likely to strike terror into the heart of anyone who has struggled to put together an Ikea wardrobe, the iconic Swedish furniture chain is to launch its own range of houses in Britain. |
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Now, that's a bright idea Artist James Turrell, famous for his massive crater project in an Arizona desert, tells how he plans to animate a downtown Toronto high-rise. |
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Ricky Burdett is to become design adviser to the London Olympics after mounting critcism that the design of the 2012 games is being handed to contractors. Olympics minister Tessa Jowell was made acutely aware of the mounting concern over the design of the Olympic venues at the RIBA conference in Venice earlier this year, which is thought to have prompted her support for the appointment. Unveiling Zaha Hadid 's drastically scaled back Aquatics Centre this week, ODA chief executive David Higgins claimed: 'Design is at the heart of what we are doing here.' |
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The Apartment Atop the Garage Is Back in Vogue The granny flat is back ā€” and not just for grannies. |
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Return to 'real' "In little over 10 years, mobile phone and Internet technology have changed things radically. I think that, without doubt, people, especially young people, have lost a kind of 'rawness,' a nama feeling. I had originally hoped that by engaging with virtual worlds, such as when playing computer games, a new and interesting kind of sensibility would develop among people. However, in truth, I soon began to feel a sense of betrayal. I concluded that the more this virtualization occurs, the greater the need for the primitive body." |
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MIT architech says China cities hard to live in China's soaring economy has spawned an urban construction boom that is giving architects unprecedented opportunities, but its cities ironically are becoming less liveable, a top Chinese architect said on Friday. |
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'Don't be afraid 2 think BIG, evolve' Your inability to comprehend large-scale projects commonplace in China and Europe - we have two in progress - is odd and so not useful to our city," declared star architect Thom Mayne in an email response to my Nov. 6 column, "An Idea That's Off Base," deriding his radical altering of the state-sponsored competition to redesign the former Cornfield in Chinatown as the new Los Angeles State Historic Park. |
Friday, December 1, 2006
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Hooray for Sprawlywood Southern California's development model has its critics, but it's rooted in a powerful idea. As the world adopts our rampant growth, we are reassessing our civic structure. |
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A city's dedication to public space What, then, is the measure of a great city or urban region? Its education systems? Its arts? Its business inventiveness? All of the above. But the most overlooked measure is a city's dedication to the public space. |
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Urban Design Now: A Discussion The definition of urban design seems up for grabs. The question of how and where and even if urban design happens is a matter of debate. |
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What makes a city great? Cities are home to more than half of the industrialized world's population and most of its jobs and output. But what makes for a competitive city in today's global economy? |
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