Archinect - News

Asphalt Art Initiative expands pedestrian safety program to these 25 North American Cities

2023-11-14T15:53:00-05:00

Another round of funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies' Asphalt Art Initiative has been announced in an effort to improve the pedestrian safety of 25 different cities in North America.

Grants of up to $25,000 were awarded also in Mexico and Canada for the first time in the program’s history. This fourth round will bring the total number of cities impacted by the program to 90. The initiative says they chose from a field of 200 applicants, and that each selected project will be installed by the end of 2024.

Mexico City, San Francisco, Calgary, and Portland are among the larger metros of the group, which also includes smaller American cities like Stamford, Connecticut, and Anderson, South Carolina.

A 2021 Asphalt Art Initiative installation in Pittsburgh, PA. Lead artists: Tim Englehardt and Randi Stewart. Image: Sean Carroll

The latest grantees, divided into three respective categories, are:

"Improve a challenging intersection using curb extensions and other tools"

United States: An...

Want to help improve Chicago’s streetscape? Here's your opportunity!

2022-12-22T06:30:00-05:00

Following last week’s look at an opening for a Robotics Fabrication Lab Manager at the New York Institute of Technology, we are using our Job Highlights series this week to explore an open position on Archinect Jobs for a Project Manager at site design group.

The role, based in Chicago, calls for an individual to serve as a “municipal consultant” for the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT)’s Streetscape and Sustainable Design Program, responsible for managing streetscape design projects in collaboration with the public body. Among the qualifications requested for candidates are degrees in landscape architecture, architecture, or a related field, as well as three or more years of professional experience.

Why the role interests us

In recent years, our editorial has featured several instances of private design firms engaging with Departments of Transportation, and the st...

Provencher_Roy completes transformation of historic downtown Montreal district into pedestrian mall

2022-10-19T15:59:00-04:00

Provencher_Roy has released photos of their recently completed pedestrian redevelopment along a six-block stretch of Montreal’s heavily-trafficked Sainte-Catherine St. West commercial district just north of Ville-Marie.

The project entailed the reimagining of a busy former four-lane street into a singular pedestrian and bicycle route between De Bleury and Mansfield Streets with the help of engineering consultants CIMA +.

Image by Adrien Williams, courtesy of Provencher_Roy

The plan increased greenery in the area by a total of 46% while eliminating street parking and drastically widening the sidewalk to create a linear plaza that connects a disjointed network of squares and public monuments into one “cohesive urban landscape.”

Image by Adrien Williams, courtesy of Provencher_Roy

Modular paving was used to achieve a visual distinction between vehicular lanes and the protected pedestr...

Two Midwesterners on the quest to document the untapped potential of America's rural architecture

2022-06-22T13:34:00-04:00

It's fascinating to document how architectural and cultural trends are deployed across the country, but we've seen that widespread disinvestment — as well as patterns of renovation and repurposing — add to an already palpable sense of impermanence.

Chicagoans Zach Huelsing and Jon Lehman’s Rural Indexing Project was first launched during the Obama administration and has grown to an archive of more than 1,200 locations spread across 25 different states. Huelsing and Lehman both studied architecture and urban planning respectively, and their backgrounds have been useful in guiding their realization that the built environment in many cases, offers more than suburbanites and city dwellers are exposed to in the easily repeatable, clickbait-laden news cycle.

“So many of the images that are propagated from rural parts of the country focus on decay or on destruction or abandonment, and we're very interested in the ways that buildings, in particular, continue to serve and continue to be adapted in ways that meet the needs of communities," he said. "I think we can actually learn some lessons ... the stories that our photographs tell are stories of adaptive reuse."

Third wave Open Streets: Open for whom?

2021-07-02T09:00:00-04:00

According to New York Times restaurant critic, Pete Wells, who “loves outdoor dining,” the Big Apple is in the process of another makeover with a “third wave” of Open Restaurants being added to the city’s already bustling streets.

Nevertheless, as more parking spaces are given over to myriad semi-permanent structures, how this program is enacted will determine who is able to enjoy the public realm. Are restaurant-going people the only New Yorkers that should stand to benefit from this significant shift in urban design?

Open Restaurants and Open Streets were conceived in 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which indoor dining was prohibited, allowing restaurants to move their tables outside. The latter was designed to provide additional public space for New Yorkers to socially distance outdoors. Restaurant-going locals have enjoyed the redesign of city streets—however provisional the structures—and now, through regulation, the city has the opportunity to make this a...

The Cultural Landscape Foundation organizes tour of San Francisco's finest public spaces

2019-09-10T10:00:00-04:00

Drawing on the Bay Area's rich cultural landscape legacy, this weekend of free, expert-led tours will feature dozens of sites, including gardens, campuses, plazas, public parks, and cultural institutions. An online city guide and printed guidebook will be produced in tandem with the Weekend.

The tours, scheduled for September 14 and 15, include visits to the Makoto Hagiwara-designed Golden Gate Park Japanese Tea Garden, the first public Japanese garden in the U.S., and to San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza, a site currently undergoing substantial renovations.

Can a commute be beautiful? These colorful rendered maps show us they can

2018-12-05T20:25:00-05:00

Everyone can relate to daily commutes. Whether it's fifteen minutes or an hour, infrastructures in various cities dictate how transportation affects our daily lives. Through the use of data visualization, Craig Taylor, Data Visualization Design Manager at ITO World uses color and form to portray commute distances in an artistically beautiful way.

Coral Cities: European Cities © Craig Taylor

A project that depicts city infrastructure in a whole new light, Taylor blends art, urban planning, and science together to create beautifully rendered images of street networks in 40 major cities. The project appropriately called, Coral Cities, showcases how far one can travel by car 30 minutes from the center of major cities across the globe. Growing from the inside out, the visual depiction of city infrastructures resembles the form of growing coral.

Early idea of plinth renders © Craig Taylor

Depending on the geological features of the city, each "Coral City" is unique to its region. According...

Where the street has no claim: Presidio Terrace in San Francisco bought after no one paid the street's taxes

2017-08-10T12:33:00-04:00

Tina Lam and Michael Cheng snatched up Presidio Terrace — the block-long, private oval street lined by 35 megamillion-dollar mansions — for $90,000 and change in a city-run auction stemming from an unpaid tax bill. They outlasted several other bidders. Now they’re looking to cash in — maybe by charging the residents of those mansions to park on their own private street.

When the annual $14 city tax bill for the street on Presidio Terrace went unpaid for a little over thirty years, the frustrated municipality held an auction to recoup its lost monies. A savvy couple who live in the decidedly less swanky South Bay snapped it up and now are causing all of the exclusive residents of the street to pay much closer attention to civic matters.

Los Angeles selects HDR to manage its $1.4 Billion Sidewalk Repair Program

2016-07-08T14:14:00-04:00

The city of Los Angeles has selected HDR to serve as program manager for the next three years for its robust Sidewalk Repair Program. The 30-year, $1.4 billion program aims to repair sidewalks to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and ensure universal access for all Angelenos. The second largest city in the U.S., Los Angeles is home to roughly 11,000 miles of sidewalks, many of which hinder passage because of cracks, buckles and bulging tree roots.

People-streets link small L.A. neighborhood and $325MM Shenzhen transformation

2014-09-09T15:09:00-04:00

"Giving the boulevard back to the people... makes the streets habitable again," says Sean O’Malley of SWA.

How does a 10-block neighborhood intervention of volunteers in Highland Park, Los Angeles link to a $325 million streetscape and storm water infrastructure transformation in Shenzhen, China? “This is about giving the street and the boulevard back to the people,” says Sean O’Malley, Managing Principal of SWA, the landscape architecture, planning and urban design firm. Throughout history, China has been a country connected by the intimacy of village life: the chance encounter on the street, the smile of a passerby. Small streets that were once filled with people are now large boulevards of traffic, noise, and pollution. As China has grown rapidly, it has lost much of its connection to its past. “We aim to make the streets habitable again,” says O’Malley.

A major focus of the commission from the City of Shenzhen is the revision of a street system in the new urban core that was designed strictly for automobiles just a few decades ago. As part of a winning competition proposal, SWA stres...

Paris to limit speeds to under 20 mph over entire city

2014-05-22T13:18:00-04:00

The just-elected new Mayor of Paris, Madame Anne Hidalgo, has prepared a revolutionary sustainable mobility project whereby virtually all of the streets of the city will be subject to a maximum speed limit of 30 km/hr. The only exceptions in the plan are a relatively small number of major axes into the city and along the two banks of the Seine, where the speed limit will be 50 km/hr, and the city’s hard pressed ring road (périphérique) [...].

Rotterdam salutes Coolsingel street with "Tribute" film screenings

2013-12-03T18:37:00-05:00

Once a bustling and stylish avenue, now a street that no longer knows its identity or purpose, no other street in Rotterdam provokes as much discussion as the Coolsingel.

The Coolsingel is Rotterdam's civic artery, a 1km street home to the city's economic, commercial and political focal points. But despite its central position and function for the last century, the street has suffered a bit of an identity crisis, and lacks the vibrancy it once channeled.

To reinvigorate its presence in the city and honor its history, Sculpture International Rotterdam (along with guest curator Laurie Cluitmans) will transform the street into an outdoor cinema, for a project it calls "Tribute To An Avenue". Every night for a month early next year, short films by accomplished international video artists will be projected onto the Coolsingel's walls and windows, accompanied by special tours including food, music, and nightlife. The event is not only a move to invigorate the space, but to refine its muddle, and draw public attention to the relationship between a city street and its citizens.

"Tribute To An Avenue" will run every night from January 8 to February 9, 2...

How much does a (Toronto) street cost?

2013-11-13T18:02:00-05:00

For other cities, order comes easily. Washington, D.C. was built all at once on the Potomac River to the specifications of the 1791 L’Enfant Plan; a half-century later, Paris was gutted and remade, top to bottom, per Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s instructions. Things in Toronto have always been a little less tidy—instead, we’ve got “messy urbanism,” as American urban planner James Rojas has called in.

Click here to view the full size image

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.”

Streetmix Makes Designing Streets Easy and Fun

2013-09-18T14:55:00-04:00

For those that suffered through classes in planning school in order to hack Illustrator and Photoshop to show streetscapes, behold Streetmix. You can drag and drop transit elements like light rail, streetcars, buses and bike lanes. You can add street furniture like benches, way finding signs, transit shelters, parklets and trees. You can adjust the width of the lanes and change the type of plantings.

Dedicated Bike Lanes Can Cut Cycling Injuries in Half

2012-11-01T15:34:00-04:00

As it turns out, infrastructure really matters. Your chance of injury drops by about 50 percent, relative to that major city street, when riding on a similar road with a bike lane and no parked cars. The same improvement occurs on bike paths and local streets with designated bike routes. And protected bike lanes – with actual barriers separating cyclists from traffic – really make a difference. The risk of injury drops for riders there by 90 percent.

Narrow Streets Los Angeles

2012-07-24T20:48:00-04:00

Could the entire mood of a neighborhood depend on something as simple as street width? That was the question David Yoon, a writer, designer, photographer, and self-confessed urban planning geek living in Los Angeles, asked himself after returning from a trip to Paris. He started documenting existing streets of Los Angeles and narrowing them to see the effects that his manipulations had on the city.