Archinect - News

McHarg Center launches blog to support young design writers

2020-01-15T14:41:00-05:00

The McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design of has launched Ian McBlog, a new online publication dedicated to uplifting the voices of "the rising generation of designers who will lead—and are already leading—the response to our overlapping crises of climate, capitalism, and resurgent fascism."

The blog already features two entries, one from McHarg Center director Billy Fleming explaining some of his rationale for initiating the blog.

Decrying the insular, disconnected, and sluggish nature of conventional academic publishing, Fleming writes, "Our conventional platforms for Very Serious publishing remain stubbornly disconnected from the overlapping crises that now shape every rising generation of designers. They too are slow, small, and focused on tweaking our bodies of knowledge. At their best, our peer-reviewed journals force scholars to slog through years of reviews, revisions, and resubmissions, much of which is dictated by the idiosyncrasies and...

Illustrating the massive scale of America's decarbonization challenge

2019-12-15T12:00:00-05:00

The McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania has published a digital atlas that attempts to communicate the wide-ranging implications of both climate change and a potential Green New Deal for the United States.

A color-coded breakdown of land uses across the country that includes agriculture, urban areas, natural landscapes, and other uses. (Courtesy of McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology.)

The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal, as the project is officially known, brings together work conducted over the last two years by researchers at the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, an initiative housed within the Weitzman School of Design at UPenn led by landscape architect and academic Billy Fleming. With the Atlas, the research center aims to answer perhaps the most pressing question of our time: "What will be lost—economically, culturally, psychologically, physically—should the climate crisis continue unabated?"

Taking stock

Top: The geographic range and...

Rep. Ilhan Omar unveils 12 million unit "Homes for All" plan

2019-11-21T16:29:00-05:00

Homes For All

United States Representative Ilhan Omar has unveiled a new piece of legislation that seeks to reinvigorate public housing construction across the country by building 12 million new public and affordable housing units over the next decade.

The so-called “Homes for All Act” unveiled this week would bring a whopping $1 trillion in federal funding for the construction of these new units and would also establish a permanent federal funding steam to ensure housing affordability in the United States, according to The Star Tribune. As proposed, $800 million of the overall total would go toward the construction of 9.5 million new public housing units while the remainder will be used to finance a federal Housing Trust Fund used to fuel the construction of 2.5 million new affordable housing units by nonprofit and municipal entities, The Huffington Post reports.

Colorado Court Affordable Housing, designed by Brooks + Scarpa in Santa Monica, California. Image courtesy of Wikimedi...

AOC and Bernie Sanders unveil "Green New Deal for Housing" plan

2019-11-14T10:05:00-05:00

New York City Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have unveiled a bold initiative aimed at rejuvenating and decarbonizing the nation’s public housing stock.

The visionary Green New Deal for Public Housing Act aims to bring sorely needed maintenance upgrades to America’s 500,000 public housing units through a series of repair, weatherization, and retrofitting efforts. The improvements will come via seven grant programs aimed at addressing specific design and material shortfalls currently plaguing public housing complexes across the country.

Triple bottom line plan

The plan is expected to cost somewhere between $119 billion and $172 billion over the next decade, according to a study conducted by progressive think tank Data for Progress and the University of Pennsylvania’s McHarg Center and Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative research centers. The Data Progress study estimates that the plan could create up to 240,723 jobs per year. Those jobs, u...

Penn renames School of Design in honor of footwear designer Stuart Weitzman

2019-10-07T13:45:00-04:00

The University of Pennsylvania's newly-inaugurated Stuart Weitzman School of Design was officially renamed last week in honor or Penn graduate and global footwear designer Stuart Weitzman.

The school, which houses undergraduate and graduate programs in architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and historic preservation, among other subjects, originally announced the name change in February of this year. According to a university statement, "The new name, the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, reflects Weitzman’s enduring influence in the world of design and his extraordinary support of the School."

The renaming will be accompanied by the redesign of a plaza fronting the school's main building. The new Stuart Weitzman Plaza will be redesigned by landscape architecture firm OLIN, whose principal, Laurie Olin, is practice professor emeritus of landscape architecture of the Weitzman School. The initiative also includes additional scholarships for Wei...

UPenn and The Architecture Lobby to livestream "Designing a Green New Deal" symposium

2019-09-12T07:00:00-04:00

This Friday, the University of Pennsylvania will hold Designing a Green New Deal, a day-long symposium aimed at articulating a design perspective for "a still-abstract set of proposals for decarbonizing the economy, eliminating poverty, creating green, working-class jobs, and retrofitting communities for the coming effects of climate change."

The day-long event features a series of panel discussions made up of some of the leading voices in the climate, sustainability, labor, and design communities, including Peggy Deamer of The Architecture Lobby, landscape architect Kate Orff of SCAPE, and Billy Fleming, director of UPenn's Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism + Ecology.

A description for the event, which will be livestreamed below, says, "Domestically, a Green New Deal would constitute a generational investment in planning and design, reshaping the social and physical landscape of the U.S. in ways matched only by the Industrial Revolution, New Deal, and postwar suburban boom. But th...

McHarg Center exhibition highlights global ecological urbanism

2019-06-20T13:28:00-04:00

In the face of increasingly destructive climate collapse, the University of Pennsylvania's McHarg Center for Urban Ecology is launching Design with Nature Now, a sprawling survey of some of the most inventive ecologically-driven landscape infrastructure projects from around the globe.

The exhibition comes as the recently-launched McHarg Center takes shape and begins to tap into the growing national and international conversation regarding the proposed Green New Deal.

Some of the projects highlighted in the exhibition are well-known, others, less so. Divided into five discrete categories, the collected projects present a vision for how humans can use the principles of ecological urbanism to meet their own needs while also staying out of nature's way.

Some projects, like BIG's Big U plan for Battery Park in New York City, aim to retrofit existing urban ecologies for the coming era of sea level rise.

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Animal crossing overpass, Banff Nati...