Archinect - News

Considering the Quayside failure as proof futuristic Smart Cities may be a thing of the past

2022-06-30T18:16:00-04:00

Smart city technology should do things like shorten commute times, speed the construction of affordable housing, improve the efficiency of public transit, and reduce carbon emissions by making building technology more efficient and providing less polluting transportation alternatives to the car. But often its proponents focus on what it can do rather than what it should. If Sidewalk’s Quayside failure taught us anything, it’s that these technologies need to respond better to human needs.

The MIT Technology Review took a dive into the abandoned pre-pandemic conversion of Toronto’s 12-acre Quayside waterfront plot into an elaborate “Smart City” development by the hands of Sidewalk Labs. The revitalization was recently repackaged as a mixed-use green corridor concept to be overseen by Adjaye Associates, Henning Larsen, and Alison Brooks Architects. Sidewalk Labs has said it was planning to redevelop the vacant brownfield site “from the internet up.”

Previously on Archinect: Sidewalk Labs' Quayside project in Toronto is cancelled

Author Karrie Jacobs considers the history of urban planning concepts such as the 15-Minute City and Ville Radieuse in relation to the rebuked concept, which has dominated the past two decades of planning, and will be felled, she predicts, by an “emphasis on the optimization of everything” and the contradictory desire to “eradicate the very thing that makes cities wonderful.”

Wing is setting up its drone delivery service in Dallas-Fort Worth

2021-10-21T16:54:00-04:00

Drones will soon be buzzing overhead in Dallas-Fort Worth, bearing small containers filled with Tylenol and Band-Aids. Wing, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, is bringing its drone delivery service to the Texas city, its first densely populated market.

Walgreens will be the first U.S. retailer to employ this new service. For now, just one Walgreens in the Dallas-Fort Worth area will be involved, making deliveries to the city of Fresco and the town of Little Elm. The drones will arrive in small containers that serve as hangars from where the aircraft will be deployed. Walgreens employees will be trained to process orders and load packages onto the delivery drones.

Along with the Walgreens location, Wing plans to establish another drone delivery facility in Frisco Station, an urban, mixed-use development north of Dallas.

According to Wing, this type of service in the U.S. has been limited to smaller towns, where land usage is less crowded and complex. The company attributes their automated drone delivery service’s ability to operate in more urban environments to their aircraft’s advanced flight planning and routing capabilities.

Alphabet launches smart infrastructure investment company

2019-09-06T19:54:00-04:00

The technology giant is teaming up with its subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs LLC, and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to launch an infrastructure holding company that is being spun out of Sidewalk. Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, as the new firm will be known, will focus on investing in what the group calls technology-enabled infrastructure, the partners said.

The firm, according to The Wall Street Journal, will target its investments on "advanced mobility, energy, water and waste, digital infrastructure, and social infrastructure" projects that require more than $100 million in equity.

Sidewalk Labs, Google's innovation-forward city, faces backlash

2019-03-06T15:26:00-05:00

In 2017, Sidewalk Labs, aka Google's Company for Cities, announced plans to build an innovation-forward community along Toronto's waterfront. Developed alongside designs by starchitecture firms Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studios, the idea behind the mini smart city is to integrate cutting-edge technology into its built environment in order to promote sustainability, affordability, and overall livability. As an example, the company has been experimenting with features such as heated sidewalks and 'raincoats' for buildings that would make it easier to get around during the winter months.

Plans for the waterfront have received wide public backlash centered on concerns over transparency, technological surveillance, and urban profiteering. Part of what would make Sidewalk Lab's Quayside community 'smart', is a network of digital sensors embedded in the public realm. What the company would do with, and how it would control, the data collection of these public spaces has stroked fears of a d...

From Search Engines to Sidewalks?

2018-01-10T12:22:00-05:00

Yet what has drawn the most concern and curiosity with regards to Quayside is a uniquely 21st-century feature: a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming “digital layer” that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life. According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on”—to an astonishing level of detail—as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all.

While tech companies struggle to discover the new way to get a glimpse into our daily habits—attempting to discover how and where we spend our time and money—Alphabet might have just brought the ‘Truman Show’ approach to marketing.

With Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, announcing its first ever Urban Development in Toronto earlier this year, it is no surprise that tech companies have switched gears and begun to see the city itself as a device, rather than just the thing in your hand. Tech giants are beginning to turn architecture into a tool for data collection and that data is then becoming the perspective in which the Architecture is critiqued. What does that spell for the discipline at large?

Beyond our discipline, if every decision is based on its ability to produce more data, how does that impact privacy and freedom of choice? What would the pop-up ad equivalent become if it is capable of leaving the digital screen and becoming an urban phenomenon and where would the ...

Google's Sidewalk Labs to redevelop Toronto waterfront as one of the largest smart city projects in North America

2017-10-25T14:43:00-04:00

Silicon Valley, and the tech industry at large, is known for reinventing the everyday. From buses to vending machines, and from the necessary to the indulgent, each week seems to bring another headline about the tech world's disruptions. Amazon has recently comprised a good sum of this ink with the announcement of plans for a new headquarters and the subsequent bidding war straight out of Hunger Games that has cities across North America submitting over 238 proposals to host. But while Amazon searches for cities to house a new campus, another tech giant—Google, that is—has decided to go in a different direction, cutting to the chase and just building the city themselves.

Digital Infrastructure Vision. Image courtesy of Sidewalk Labs.

The online empire began as a quaint search engine but has since transitioned into the business of measuring pretty much everything. In 2015, the company reorganized itself into multiples under the umbrella company Alphabet, in order to separate its core...

This video shows you how to hand-letter like an architect

2017-08-15T12:33:00-04:00

If you draw by hand and want that authentic, angular all-caps architectural lettered look for the text on your drawings, this straightforward video breaks down how to create all 26 letters of the alphabet. Get ready to learn about "dynamic angles" and suggested connections:

Google's Dandelion startup wants to make geothermal energy more affordable for homeowners

2017-07-10T14:49:00-04:00

Google parent Alphabet is spinning off a little-known unit working on geothermal power called Dandelion, which will begin offering residential energy services. [...] Dandelion chief executive Kathy Hannun said her team had been working for several years "to make it easier and more affordable to heat and cool homes with the clean, free, abundant, and renewable energy source right under our feet," and that the efforts culminated with the creation of an independent company outside of Alphabet.

"In the U.S., buildings account for 39% of all carbon emissions, mostly from the combustion of fossil fuels for heating and cooling," Dandelion CEO Kathy Hannun explains on the company's blog. "In the Northeast, heating and cooling is particularly carbon-intensive due to the relatively high use of fuel oil or propane as a heating fuel. This also leads to unpredictable costs for homeowners; if fuel prices rise during a particularly long and cold winter, their wallets take a hit."

Hannun describes how designing a better drill was the key to reducing cost, time, hassle, and environmental impact of the drilling process: "After months of testing, we hit upon a design for a fast, slender drill that hit our objectives. It could drill just one or two deep holes just a few inches wide, and compared to typical installation rigs, it produced less waste and took up much less space as it operated. It left a typical suburban backyard relatively undisturbed, so we could minimize landscaping costs ...

Alphabet's secret plan to overhaul public transport in the US

2016-06-28T20:07:00-04:00

Sidewalk Labs, a secretive subsidiary of Alphabet, wants to radically overhaul public parking and transportation in American cities, emails and documents obtained by the Guardian reveal. Its high-tech services, which it calls “new superpowers to extend access and mobility”, could make it easier to drive and park in cities and create hybrid public/private transit options that rely heavily on ride-share services such as Uber.

"But they might also gut traditional bus services and require cities to invest heavily in Google’s own technologies, experts fear."

In related news:

Google launches Waze Carpool with cost-neutral pricing

2016-05-26T18:46:00-04:00

The pilot program is limited to about 25,000 employees of companies including Walmart and Adobe Systems... Waze will match riders with drivers already heading along similar routes during the morning and evening rush hours. [...] Waze Carpool is charging riders just $0.54 a mile, which is also what the IRS recommends companies reimburse their employees per mile for business-related travel. “Waze Carpool focuses on covering costs, not generating an income,” the company explains.

Google purchased Waze, the Israeli GPS-based navigation system with real-time travel details submitted by users, in 2013 for $1.15B. With a fleet of already operating autonomous vehicles, Google stands to leverage its Waze transit data in big ways for an autonomous taxi service that could hit companies like Uber and Lyft hard.

That $0.54 rate for the Carpool rides is also significant because it won't lead to the same insurance-scrutiny that has plagued other ridesharing companies:

Waze Carpool’s $0.54 rate is also important from a regulatory standpoint. As Waze explains, car insurance policies in states including California typically cover “not for profit, share-the-expense carpooling.” By framing its operations that way, Waze Carpool may be able to avoid the scrutiny around insurance coverage that has at times sidelined Uber and Lyft.

Related on Archinect:

Google's Sidewalk Labs contemplates building an entire city

2016-04-06T12:49:00-04:00

The Information notes that building a city could allow Sidewalk Labs to “rethink government, social policy, and data-driven management.” [CEO Dan] Doctoroff explained that “thinking about a city from the Internet up is really compelling,” while also noting that “cities are hard. You have people with vested interest, politics, physical space…But the technology ultimately cannot be stopped.”

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs joins the rarefied stable of companies potentially looking to expand from an initial service (in this case, improved WiFi access and traffic flow in cities) into a fully-fledged social experimentation machine. Will they build 21st century company towns or create a genuinely new, technology-based approach to living?

Here's a round-up of other mass-scale experimental projects:

Win a copy of "Archibet" by Federico Babina!

2014-12-26T13:00:00-05:00

Architect and graphic designer Federico Babina has become popular for his whimsical illustration series that fuse together his love for architecture and drawing. This includes his "Archibet" series, where famous modernist and contemporary architects like Alvar Aalto, Luis Barragán, Herzog de Meuron, Quincy Jones, Mies van der Rohe, and Zaha Hadid are rendered as each letter of the alphabet in their signature architectural styles. Starting on January 20, Archibet will be widely available as a binded collection of postcards through Laurence King Publishing.

But guess what, five Archinectors can get their hands on a copy of Archibet before it's out in stores.

TO ENTER THE GIVEAWAY: First, have a look at the entire Archibet series here. Then in the comment section below, say which architect and for what letter that you would include in the Archibet.

Giveaway ends January 2, 2015. Five winners will be selected at random. Good luck!

"Archibet": if architects designed an alphabet...

2014-01-10T19:35:00-05:00

The Barcelona-based illustrator responsible for Archicine and Archipixel, Federico Babina, has created a whimsical alphabet in the style of 26 particularly inspiring architects. For Archibet, Babina modeled each letter after an architect with that shared initial. The Guggenheim wraps around a leg of "W" (is for Wright); wood and colorful panels form a grid in the shape of an "E" (for Eames). The references are as diverse as the architectures, but Babina's style beams overall as colorful, retro, almost Saul Bass-ish.

Seeing the alphabet all together as a composite "Archibet City" is another surreal treat, and a snapshot of architectural history.

You can check out the rest of the Archibet and all of Federico Babina's work here: http://federicobabina.com/

The ABC of Architects ~ this is so great!

2013-01-08T14:37:00-05:00

This work is an alphabetical list of the most important architects with their best known building. A lot of them have been left out with grief because we only need one for each letter and we done an effort to have differents nationalities.