Archinect - News

The too-smart city

2013-05-22T20:01:00-04:00

We’re already building the metropolis of the future—green, wired, even helpful. Now critics are starting to ask whether we’ll really want to live there.

"Unconscious Perception" and 99 other urban trends in BMW Guggenheim Lab's glossary of ideas

2013-05-22T17:47:00-04:00

Unconscious perception represents the automated processes the body goes through to take in the surrounding environment and its metaphysical status. While our five senses help us perceive the physical world, unconscious perception connects us to the realm of intuition. To shed light on how we are influenced by this dimension of our minds, artist Dan Graham spoke about his practice, which challenges our perceptions of space through performance, installations, video, sculpture, and writing.

NEW CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR MONU #19 - GREATER URBANISM

2013-05-15T11:36:00-04:00

Are cities becoming "greater" these days? (Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, May 2013)

Are cities becoming "greater" these days? When two years ago, in our 14th issue of MONU Magazine entitled "Editing Urbanism", we claimed that in the Western world, the need for new buildings and city districts was decreasing or even ceasing to exist altogether due to demographic changes and financially difficult times, we did not believe in all those new, big-scale, and long-term urban development strategies for the metropolitan areas of certain European cities that were being proposed at the time. The growth numbers that plans such as "Greater Helsinki" envisioned for the year 2050, trying to brand the city as one of the most dynamic metropolises in Europe, predicting a population growth from 1.3 million to 2 million, were too exuberant and too vast. However, other European cities, such as Paris, seem to be changing substantially within their metropolitan areas, their "greater" areas. Paris needs to build 70.000 new housing units per year. Mainly because of such requirements, but...

Eric Owen Moss will be a guest on HuffPost Live today at 3:30 PST to discuss cities

2013-05-14T17:59:00-04:00

Eric Moss gets to play a real-life game of Sim City. The architect's 1986 master plan for Culver City proposed 43 buildings and half are completed today. Eric joins us along with others from across the country to discuss urban revitalization.

Too Big to Flood?

2013-04-15T12:10:00-04:00

over the next half-century these coastal megacities may grow “too big to flood.” But flood they will unless they dramatically revise their growth strategies and undertake major infrastructure projects

Bruce Stutz explores how as economic activity and populations continue to expand in coastal urban areas, particularly in Asia, hundreds of trillions of dollars of infrastructure, industrial and office buildings, and homes are increasingly at risk from intensifying storms and rising sea levels.

h/t Bruce Sterling

Building a better big box

2013-04-03T16:41:00-04:00

D’Hooghe, a Belgian-born architect and director of the Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, cares deeply about urban form and the large-scale issues cities face in achieving more efficient energy use, better transportation and less congestion. One of his main concerns is better integrating suburbs with the larger metropolitan areas in which they exist.

A quick look at some of the most talked-about "smart-city" projects

2013-02-21T11:33:00-05:00

Technology being used in urban communities around the world hints at how we may live in the cities of the future

Jane Wakefield reviews recent efforts by large technology firms such as IBM and Cisco, as well as more grass root projects, to harness the power of technology to build the "cities of the future now". The list of projects includes Songdo in South Korea, Masdar in Abu Dhabi, Rio de Janeiro new city-wide operation centre,

Moby Celebrates LA Architecture for Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.

2013-02-07T15:00:00-05:00

Musician, DJ, photographer and architecture blogger Moby riffs on LA architecture in this video about the Getty-led initiative Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.

Adaptation: Architecture, Technology and the City by INABA in collaboration with FREE

2012-12-12T15:03:00-05:00

"As the city becomes more technological, architecture will become more essential. Technologies are growing as part of the functioning of cities, and as a result, the design of the urban environment will take on central importance. But this shift won’t occur as we might think.”

Download the PDF

Bringing together a host of interviews, contributions, and art works, Adaptation: Architecture, Technology and the City is a preliminary study of digital technology in the built environment. The publication surveys the ways that technology generates new kinds of experiences in the city, as well as the spaces created in its wake, including outmoded infrastructure, glitch space, and public zones populated with tethered cables. If digital technology promised a smooth environment independent of the constraints of geography, Adaptation makes clear that the digital also overlaps with and complicates the physical world.

Adaptation concludes by exploring the unexpected ways in which t...

Architects Issue Report Documenting the Connection Between Design and Public Health, Press Releases

2012-12-11T12:33:00-05:00

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) today issued a report: Local Leaders: Healthier Communities Through Design that provides a roadmap for towns and cities looking to help their populations stay healthy by employing design techniques that encourage residents to increase their physical activity.

The report, which was released today at Governing Magazine’s “Summit on Healthy Living,” demonstrates how active lifestyles aided by positive design choices lead to a healthier population. Individuals who live in livable, mixed use communities, with options for transit - weigh less, are more physically active, and experience less chronic disease.

“Architects play a key role in designing healthy environments,” said AIA CEO Robert Ivy, FAIA. “This report shows the benefits our profession can bring to establishing a built environment that encourages exercise and discourages a sedentary lifestyle.”

Key barometers of health suggest America is heading in the wrong direction, namely toward physical inactivity, obesity, and chronic disease. Studies, highlighted in the report, demonstrate that the median improvement in some aspect of physical activity for livable urban communities can be over 160 percent. Studies also show that a community designed for exercise can prevent 90 percent o...

What Jane Jacobs Got Wrong About Urban Economies

2012-12-05T14:49:00-05:00

To survive, a city or a region has to make money; it has to export more than it imports, in dollar terms. Cities that decline are on the losing side of this equation. So if you care about cities, which I do, it leads you to think about how they function as economic entities. It leads you to think about economics. I think this is what happened to Jane Jacobs, and why she ended up writing several books about economics after her seminal 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

15 of the world's most bike-friendly cities

2012-10-11T13:59:00-04:00

Grab a helmet and check out these 15 cities where drivers use all five fingers when they wave at you.

Top cities include Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Boulder, Chicago, Davis, Ottawa, Portland, San Francisco, Beijing, Cape Town, Bogota and Perth.

Architecture Exhibit Outlays Cities of the Future

2012-09-28T12:10:00-04:00

The Future of Architecture, an overnight exhibition led by the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA), looks into the city’s future and explores different architectural visions as to how Toronto may evolve and transform in the coming years.

The world's first city for robots

2012-08-21T20:17:00-04:00

A science project of unprecedented scale begins this month in the New Mexico desert, as a technology firm breaks ground for a model metropolis. Washington-based Pegasus Global Holdings will build a town replete with schools, parks and an airport. But the intended residents are not people, but robots.

The New Architectural Wisdom of Airports: Ikea, iPads, And Ice Skating Rinks

2012-07-31T17:55:00-04:00

Take Korea's Incheon International, for example. Built on top of a landfill 40 miles outside of Seoul, it features its own skating rink, cultural museum, and an assortment of other lavish amenities — all worthy investments for an airport that transported 34 million passengers and 2.5 million tons of cargo last year.

Using Flickr Geotags to Map the World's Cities

2012-06-27T19:36:00-04:00

You'll also notice a bit of color coding on the maps. Apparently, Fischer was able to guess that the picture taker's mode of transportation--presumably using the time stamps and distance traveled between a user's pictures. He then created a color code: Black is walking (less than 7mph), Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph), Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph); Green is freeways or rapid transit.

Creating the Post-Hipster City

2012-05-22T22:23:00-04:00

we want to experiment in making better public spaces. Cities are built in a very formal and classist fashion, which is at odds with the good that rapid production and public participation can do for urban development.

Tidda Tippapart recently talked to Aurash Khawarzad ( founder of Change Administration + co-founder of the Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary collective DoTank) about the challenge of creating the post-Hipster city, gentrification, and what it means to (re)build New York City from the ground up.

Understanding the Resource Intensity of Cities

2012-05-14T17:24:00-04:00

Urban planning has focused on identifying many important questions about the formation and functioning of our cities. However, there is a lack of understanding about the spatial patterns related to material and energy use in cities. This work attempts to address this knowledge gap.

urbmet.org is a web-map that illustrates data on material and energy use in cities. The goal is to provide an intuitive way of understanding this complex problem using an interactive interface. We have analyzed 42 cities and estimated material and energy intensities.

To make this work as useful as possible, we are interested in examining whether this information is presented in such a way that it builds intuition about the functioning of cities.

Chartered Territory

2012-05-08T12:37:07-04:00

Economist Paul Romer believes he can create and launch a new city in much the same way tech companies create and launch startups. Looking to Hong Kong and China’s Shenzen for inspiration, Romer’s theory is that the rules and organizational structures of prosperous nations can be grafted onto poorer nations, or areas within those nations, to become highly functioning states-within-a-state. Though so far untested, the theory has gotten the attention of multinational companies...

Future Cities: Imagining, Planning, and Bringing them to Life

2012-05-07T19:19:00-04:00

The concept of building or imagining a new City is actually more than just a concept, and has been delivered in recent times for political, economic, social or other reasons. Abuja, Nigeria is one of the more recent, purpose built in the 1980s and now Nigeria’s Capital City since 1991.

INTERVIEW: Rem Koolhaas on the Invention and Reinvention of the City

2012-04-24T15:47:00-04:00

Things are changing enormously in almost every sense. The effects of globalization have been positive and negative. My generation of architects is the first that could work almost anywhere in the world. We had the option to repeat the same building everywhere or to push ourselves forward, to create an encounter between ourselves and the local culture.

Why People in Cities Walk Fast

2012-03-21T19:05:00-04:00

With the exception of Nairobi — insert joke here about Kenyans crushing everyone at the New York City Marathon — the fastest walking cities were from wealthy nations. The statistical analysis confirmed this general perception: two of the three strongest social predictors of walking speed were a country's G.D.P. and its purchasing power parity (the other was its individualism).

This reminds of of a fascinating Radiolab episode from a couple years ago about cities. I HIGHLY recommend listening to this - download it here.

If you care about cities, return that new iPad

2012-03-15T17:20:00-04:00

Apple is actually taking a site that is now parking lots and low-rise boxes and making it worse for the community. Yes, it will be iconic, assuming you think a building shaped like a whitewall motorcycle tire is iconic, but it will reduce current street connectivity, seal off potential walking routes and, as I wrote some time back, essentially turn its back on its community. With a parking garage designed to hold over ten thousand cars, by the way.

Kaid Benfield, staff member at the Natural Resources Defense Council, slams Apple on it's proposed new HQ in Cupertino.

Before you run off to return your idevices, though, consider that the new Archinect iPhone app will be released shortly ;)

Daily chart: Where the living is easier

2012-03-14T21:05:00-04:00

THE Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, has devised a new index which ranks the competitiveness of the most prominent cities across the globe using a number of economic, demographic and social variables. The 120 cities in the index are home to some 750m people and $20.2 trillion worth of GDP, 29% of the world's total.

The 10 Fastest-Growing (and Fastest-Declining) Cities in the World

2012-01-30T12:44:00-05:00

Shanghai is the fastest-growing city in the world, according to MetroMonitor, a quarterly analysis from the Brookings Institution that compares the 200 most prosperous metros by income and job growth. The victims of the euro zone crisis dominate the end of the list. Athens, Lisbon, and Dublin, the capitals of the three most endangered nations in Europe's sovereign debt crisis, made up the bottom three.

IKEA Urbanism: A New Era In Urban Design?

2011-12-19T20:29:59-05:00

IKEA has proposed to build a complete neighborhood in East London. The Swedish furniture giant tries to implement its ideas and concepts in new fields of knowledge and urbanism. After its injection of each single family’s interior with cheap design furniture and the introduction of the IKEA standard house by daughter company BoKlok, it seems to be time for a complete IKEA neighborhood...

How should we design the cities of our dreams?

2011-11-28T14:33:02-05:00

New York has turned large swaths of Broadway over to bikes, benches and cafes. Los Angeles is going all-in on a plan to turn its car-addicted populace into rail commuters. And Minneapolis, the frostiest city of the Frost Belt, is creating a sophisticated citywide bike trail system that has made it the No. 1 city in the country for bicycling.

Hip Cities That Think About How They Work

2011-11-23T11:46:07-05:00

This survey is not based solely on quality of life, number of trees or the cost of a month’s rent. Instead, we examine some cities that aim to be both smart and well managed, yet have an undeniably hip vibe. Our pick of cities that are, in a phrase, both great and good...

The NYT selects Auckland, Berlin, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Curitiba, Santiago, Shanghai and Vilnius as the hippest cities for young professionals.

Photo-Realistic Model of Tokyo Braces a Highrise Dream

2011-09-28T12:03:05-04:00

A complex scale model of Tokyo is on view by appointment at Tokyo's Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills. The model was built in 2003 by 30 Mori employees over approximately 17 months. All streets and buildings were photographed at street level and from above via helicopter. They were then adjusted in Photoshop and glued to polystyrene models.

The Curious Case Of The Vanishing Chinese City

2011-09-24T17:07:37-04:00

Imagine a city like Los Angeles disappearing from the map completely. That's exactly what happened to Chaohu, a city in eastern China's Anhui province with a similar population — about 4 million. The people have remained, but the city has vanished in an administrative sleight of hand.