Archinect - News

Navy Pier remake adds urban park elements

2013-05-20T14:53:00-04:00

Some members of Chicago's design community have said privately that the Navy Pier project's parameters, which limited the scope of changes, stifled creative possibilities, even for highly regarded designers such as Corner. "Anything that makes it more parklike is all to the good," said eclectic Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman. "It can only go up, architecturally."

Our Parks Are Not for Sale

2013-02-17T17:15:00-05:00

Community activism that simply nibbles at the edges is not enough. Small-scale rebellions can raise consciousness and help bring needed improvements to cities, but what we really need is a revolution.

In the Winter 2013 issue of Dissent (the quarterly magazine of politics and ideas), Alex Ulam follows a thread From the Gold Coast of New York to the Venice Biennale. He argues Spontaneous Interventions "was not an outlier at the Biennale" but indicative of a general movement in support of the "Right to the City". Mr. Ulam then lays out a frame, wherein, the fact that many "municipal parks agencies have become charity cases", a new awareness of POPs, plus the continued selling off of corporate naming rights, are all examples of cities "being redesigned to benefit moneyed interests".

Treasuring Urban Oases

2011-12-04T22:45:19-05:00

...the city should reverse its approach, zoning neighborhoods like Midtown, Lower Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by thinking first about the shape of public space instead of private development.