Archinect - News

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 ;)

Taking Parking Lots Seriously, as Public Spaces

2012-01-06T14:19:00-05:00

One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.”

Architect as Auto Designer: Le Corbusier's Minimum Car

2011-05-13T14:38:26-04:00

“Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and the Automobile” ($49.95) focuses on Le Corbusier’s design for a “minimum car,” a two-seat, bare-bones people mover with a sheer, angled front. His design existed only in drawings during his lifetime, but became probably the most famous of all automobile designs contributed by architects.

BIG is dreamin' big with auto-piloted cars

2011-04-21T23:01:00-04:00

"It's a bug," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "that cars were invented before computers." So Ingels reimagines city streets and highways crowded with tight-packed, auto-piloted cars, taking up one-quarter of the road space and allowing for precision guidance alongside people and other vehicles -- all of which would together reboot the city's streets as vibrant public spaces. A smart transport grid, in essence, in parallel with the rise of smart energy grids.

In BIG's competition, entry for Audi's AUDI Urban Future Award, they call for a future city where driverless cars give the streets more plasticity by removing the need for barriers and other concrete-like features by utilizing the relatively new concept of swarm theory. Objects, from people to trees to other cars, interact with one another to relay the best possible path.

BIG hypothesizes that speed increases the necessary surface area a car occupies and remedying that with cars precisely controlled in compact clusters. It also addresses the possibility of eliminating many of the traffic control devices such as stoplights and interchanges as traffic can be instantly reorganized to flow through intersections without stopping.

In addition to traffic control and the reduction of fatalities cause by automobiles, BIG points out that a big accommodation made by the public with regards to automobiles is the widening of roadways to lessen the burden faced by noise pollution. Bus...