Archinect - Features

Perceptions of Safety: Weronika Zdziarska Questions Urban Design and Its Impact on Gender-Based Violence Experienced by Women in Cities

2021-09-27T11:43:00-04:00

How safe can one feel in a city? To be more specific, how safe do women feel in the city? While discourse around public space and the perceptions of women's safety in urban and rural areas have been an ongoing topic, one student utilized her appointment as the 2021 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship recipient to expand on these issues. Weronika Zdziarska's research proposal, "Don't Stay Out Alone: Addressing women's perception of safety and freedom in cities by design," focuses on urban safety and how better design strategies benefit the well-being of women as well as others. She adds, "special attention is devoted to design solutions that successfully evoke the sensation of safety and freedom."

Zdziarska explains the reason for her research stemmed from conditioning women around the world are all too familiar with when it comes to public spaces and cities. During our interview, she shared that her intention was to explore a topic important to her. She dives into her own exp...

SITELAB on Building an Uncompromising Practice That Embraces a “Both-And” Perspective

2019-09-27T12:45:00-04:00

SITELAB urban studio is a multi-disciplinary urban design team based in San Francisco. The 16-person firm tackles a wide-ranging set of concerns through their work, which bridges between urban design, landscape architecture, community engagement, and placemaking focuses. Viewed simply, SITELAB urban studio endeavors to improve the spaces between and around buildings by working to recast "urban design as a social practice, beyond simply technical or formal study," according to the designers.

For this week's Studio Snapshot, we spoke with Laura Crescimano, co-founder of SITELAB urban studio to discuss the importance of working collectively as a practice, looking up to firms and designers that are blurring traditional definitions of practice, and how the firm brings a "holistic lens to design by co-creating places" with clients and project partners.

David Baker Architects on Growing a Team-Based, Family-Friendly Practice

2019-08-07T10:37:00-04:00

San Francisco's David Baker Architects is a leading office in the realm of affordable housing design. Founded in 1982 by University of California, Berkeley-trained architect David Baker, the firm has designed over 8,000 units of affordable housing across the San Francisco Bay Area, and has garnered hundreds of design awards, including the American Institute of Architects California Council's 2012 Distinguished Practice award.

Baker, who was elevated to the AIA's College of Fellows in 1996, runs the practice with principals Amanda Loper and Daniel Simons. Their work, which spans affordable, senior, workforce, and low-income housing types, is distinctive for the inventive sense of materiality and playful but dignified formal approaches the architects pursue as they go about fulfilling the myriad and sometimes tedious requirements specific to these types of projects. Using this approach, the team strives to concretize their "passion for and deep understanding of the power of humane an...

Getting to know London Landscape Architects Gustafson Porter + Bowman

2017-05-05T04:46:00-04:00

Gustafson Porter + Bowman are a landscape architecture firm based in Camden, London, with work ranging from conservation of significant sites to innovative re-thinking of urban brownfields.