Archinect - News

Architect Gita Balakrishnan embarks on 1,000-mile walk to spread awareness on importance of design

2022-02-15T16:39:00-05:00

Kolkata-based architect Gita Balakrishnan has embarked upon a 1,700-km walk from Kolkata to New Delhi on Sunday to spread awareness on how good design can play a substantial role in changing lives. Doing 30-35km per day, she plans to reach Delhi in two months on April 16.

The walk aims to shed light on the role the architecture and design industry plays in society and the issues it seeks to address. The initiative was conceptualized by the Ethos Foundation, which Balakrishnan founded in 2002 as a means to connect students and professionals in the AEC industry, in collaboration with the Council of Architecture (CoA) and the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA).

Balakrishnan will travel through West Bengal, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. She is a graduate of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and she completed her practical training at the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Personal car use will drop 10% by 2030, study says

2020-02-14T14:55:00-05:00

Private car travel will decline in the world's largest cities by 10% over the next decade, according to a study from research consultancy firm Kantar, revealed this week at the UN-Habitat World Urban Forum. Based on the survey, Kantar predicts greener means of transport will represent nearly half (50%) of all trips taken in cities in 2030, with cycling to increase globally by 18%, walking to increase by 15% and public transit use to increase by 6%.

According to Smart Cities Dive, the UN-Habitat World Urban Forum surveyed 20,000 city dwellers across 31 cities to better understand how their preferred methods of travel might change over the next decade. The10 cities that will see the biggest change in green transport are Manchester, England; Moscow; Sao Paulo; Paris; Johannesburg; Guangzhou, China; Milan; Montreal; Amsterdam and Shanghai, Smart Cities Dive reports.

The creative power of walking

2019-10-08T08:00:00-04:00

Sitting there, program in hand, concept underway, and with constraints to abide by, we consider the possibilities. The design process isn't a scientific thing, there's an artistic aspect to it, one that sometimes leaves us searching for the perfect solution. We arrive at something, but know when it isn't right, it could be better, we think. But, how do we get there? We sketch, we model, we converse, we charrette, and yet sometimes there are still those moments of creative contemplation where we can't put our finger on that thing that we know lies in the back of our minds. Historically, walking has been one way to bring that thing to the forefront of our creative pursuit.

The School of Athens by Raphael.

Mobile pondering

In 335 BCE, after his pupil, Alexander the Great, rose to power and conquered Athens, Aristotle began teaching at the Lyceum, a school of philosophy whose followers would later become known as the Peripatetics. In the famous fresco The School of Athens, Italian Renai...

Perkins Eastman reimagines NYC grid for increased pedestrian and shared space

2018-08-31T13:29:00-04:00

The city grid, which once served to organize the development of private real estate by providing access to land parcels, now has a more pressing role to play in making cities livable. Our reimagining of the grid starts from the premise that how we use public rights of way no longer meets the city’s needs, so we should transform the streets radically, dedicating them to pedestrians.

Jonathan Cohn and Yunyue Chen propose a new pedestrian plan for Manhattan's grid grouping blocks into larger neighborhoods and organizing streets into either thoroughfares or local streets. Cohn leads the transportation and public infrastructure studio of Perkins Eastman, while Chen received the 2017 Perkins Eastman’s Architectural Fellowship for the Public Realm.

Manhattan grid divided into thoroughfare and local streets. Image: Perkins Eastman.

Their plan is a combination of the Dutch shared street idea of woonerf and the Barcelona “superblocks”. Shared, local streets would include continuous, curbless, and textured surfaces with cues that conform drivers to speeds of about 6 miles per hour.

Example of a shared street with less vehicle access and more pedestrian space. Image: Perkins Eastman.

"Superblocks" are limited to local traffic inside and would be sectioned off by thoroughfare streets with local streets in between. Local streets would always be within a 5 minute walk of any...

A new London Tube map shows walking times between stations

2015-11-11T05:41:00-05:00

Transport bosses have unveiled the first official map showing the walking times between central London's Tube stations. The comprehensive plan highlights the time it takes to travel on foot between almost all of the stations on London’s Underground network. [Transport for London] Chief Executive Gordon Innes said: “The Tube is the most used transport method by visitors in London, stations for many of our top attractions are within walking distance of each other.

You can download the new map here.

Antonia Malchik on the end of walking in America

2015-08-31T18:39:00-04:00

For decades, Americans have been losing their ability, even their right, to walk. [...] there are vast blankets and folds of the country where the ability to walk – to open a door and step outside and go somewhere or nowhere without getting behind the wheel of a car – is a struggle, a fight. A risk. [...] we encourage car travel and discourage moving on foot. More than discourage it, we criminalise it where deemed necessary.

Los Angeles on cusp of becoming 'major' walkable city, study says

2014-06-19T13:03:00-04:00

“The future — of a walkable, transit-friendly Los Angeles — is being built right now,” the report says. “It will allow people to drive everywhere they want, assuming they can put up with the traffic, and provide the option of walkable urbanism for those who want it.”

Why Can't One Walk To The Super Bowl?

2014-01-02T10:44:00-05:00

Ready, Set, Hike! A Trial Trek to MetLife Stadium The officials planning Super Bowl XLVIII want it to be the Super Bowl of public transportation. They are not just discouraging fans from walking to MetLife Stadium on game day in February — they are forbidding it.

A reporter attempts to walk to MetLife Stadium. Most likely the reason one won't be allowed to walk into the Super Bowl is "terror"-related, but the article raises again the question of why our pedestrian environment is so degraded. Why have we allowed our cities to be built in such a way that the owners of publicly-financed sports teams and their multi-billion-worth corporate sponsors can helicopter in to the game, but a regular person can't find infrastructure to make it safe and possible to walk in even if they *were* allowed to?

An assignment: look at your local stadium, most likely financed by public (your) money, on Google Maps and assess whether it's walkable. How does it rate on the Walk Score scale? (Indianapolis' rates a 72.) And a design problem: what could be done to make it better for a pedestrian, a family, perhaps a team of football-playing dogs?

In Los Angeles, walking illegally is more than twice as expensive as parking illegally

2013-12-27T14:00:00-05:00

The city of Los Angeles is cracking down on pedestrians who sneak across streets when the traffic signal says “don’t walk.” But when you put a price on bad behavior, like being in a public street illegally, you see clearly what a city values. The cheapest parking ticket in Los Angeles (pdf) is $58, and the one most commonly issued for parking in a prohibited zone is $73. Jaywalking—the term of art for a pedestrian crossing against the light—will cost you $197.

What Do Pedestrian Traffic Icons Say About Your Culture?

2013-10-15T14:03:00-04:00

From the sparsely dotted Chinese walking man to the top-hat-wearing, cane-bearing Dane, almost a hundred “walking men” are displayed life-size on banners that line the sidewalk. “It’s important to me that they are on human scale because they really represent us,” said Ms. Barkai. Only rarely are the icons depicted as women, she noted. Of the hundreds of images in her collection, Ms. Barkai has only “about six or seven women, mostly from European countries.”

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.