Archinect - News

Understanding the difference between cities proper and the metro areas that surround them

2019-08-27T16:30:00-04:00

When tracking the performance of cities across the United States, various factors come into play. Growth in population and employment are often the first to be researched and analyzed. However, not all cities are seen and discussed in the same light. CityLab co-founder and editor-at-large, Richard Florida, writes a new series that dives into understanding contemporary urbanism by researching cities and their economic performance.

In the first installment of this four-part series, Florida explains the importance of making this distinction between cities proper and metropolitan areas through population and job growth. "The reality is that most studies that purport to talk about cities are really talking about the performance of broader metropolitan areas, which are made of up core or principal cities and their surrounding suburbs and exurbs. Looking at cities by themselves is important and useful for several reasons."

He continues to point out, "there is lots of talk these days abou...

MVRDV's porous shopping mall in France breaks ground

2018-03-13T14:20:00-04:00

Construction has just begun on MVRDV's Lyon Part-Dieu, a shopping mall located in Lyon, France. The new design features a porous facade breaking up the exterior pattern and allowing for greater fluidity with its surrounding environment.

Lyon Part-Dieu Shopping Center by MVRDV, located in Lyon, FR. Image: Kréaction.

Dissolving the facade allows for a subtle shift from concrete to glass while also enhancing the pedestrian flow. The renovated facade features a depolluting coating on the concrete panels to improve air quality of the area.

Lyon Part-Dieu Shopping Center by MVRDV, located in Lyon, FR. Image: Kréaction.

MVRDV's competition-winning design aims to transform one of the largest downtown shopping center's in Europe.

Lyon Part-Dieu Shopping Center by MVRDV, located in Lyon, FR. Image: Kréaction.

Founded in 1975, Lyon Part-Dieu Shopping Center was an introverted complex built for the car century. The new design opens up the entire space through revitalizing and re-organizing the m...

"Great brutalist buildings, it turns out, have soul"

2016-09-29T13:27:00-04:00

In this thoughtful ode to the unexpected charms of brutalism, Felix Salmon explores why the formerly nightmarish architectural style is experiencing a renaissance, or at least a renewed appreciation. Salmon's observation that ubiquitous, unimaginative glass towers have replaced brutalism as the new hated icon of class strife is ace:

"The international style evolved, and not well. What used to be aspirational started becoming an in-your-face statement of conspicuous consumption. The gauche gaudiness of was embraced not only where you might expect it (the Wynn towers of Las Vegas, say), but also in places with real history, such as New York City. Go to Columbus Circle today, for instance, and you’ll see Christian de Portzamparc’s billionaire condos at One57 face off against 'a 1950s international style glass skyscraper in a 1980s gold lame party dress,' as Muschamp described the Trump International Hotel. Such erections generate almost as much hatred today as the worst mistakes of brut...

Los Angeles gets dense (housing-development-wise, at least)

2016-09-01T14:14:00-04:00

Once known as the city of single family homes, Los Angeles is now developing high-density housing complexes, not only in downtown, but according to this Urban Land article, on the traditionally reluctant-to-develop West Side.

The developments mark a shift in how Los Angeles conceptualizes living, trending away from its iconoclastic, sprawling roots into a more traditional urbanism. The developments come at a time when Los Angeles is also investing heavily in public transit partially to help alleviate the city's signature traffic congestion.

For more on new urban development trends in Los Angeles:

Buying homes by “the four-pack”

2016-04-03T19:48:00-04:00

According to the Knight Frank Wealth Report, released on Wednesday, the population of multimillionaires in major cities around the world now changes radically from month to month...The American rich, he says, are moving from second-home ownership to more of a hub-and-spoke model.

Robert Frank reports on the seasonal nature of today’s ultrawealthy and the resulting resortification, of architecture and real estate in major global cities.

Hack The City

2015-12-03T21:00:00-05:00

NBBJ calls the concept No-Shadow Tower, though it would be more accurate to call it the Smaller-Shadow-From-One-of-Two-Towers, since it depends on a pair of buildings separated by an open space. For that reason, the technique is an awkward fit for New York

A weeklong series of ideas for improving urban life, ranging from an examination of how Next-Generation Drones Will Save New York City’s Infrastructure, to how new building designs will usher in the Age of Shadowless Skyscrapers.

Jan Gehl's perspective on making "a good urban habitat for homo sapiens"

2015-08-24T14:09:00-04:00

Every time we build something, we manipulate the conditions of people’s lives, but most planners don’t know enough about this manipulation...I have worked very hard to find out what the life is that goes on inside our buildings and how our buildings influence that life...Because if you just do form, then you are doing sculpture, but if you look after the interaction between life and form, you are doing architecture.

More on Archinect:

Is Jan Gehl winning his battle to make our cities liveable?

Jason Danziger heals psychosis with design

MIT's "Placelet" sensors technologize old-fashioned observation methods for placemaking

We're suckers for any architecture that looks like us

Our infrastructure is expanding to include animals

MIT's "Placelet" sensors technologize old-fashioned observation methods for placemaking

2015-08-18T19:49:00-04:00

With a $35,000 grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, [MITs Elizabeth Christoforetti] and her team are working on a project called Placelet, which will track how pedestrians move through a particular space. They’re developing a network of sensors that will track the scale and speed of pedestrians [and vehicles] over long periods of time. The sensors, [currently being tested in downtown Boston], will also track the 'sensory experience' by recording the noise level and air quality of that space.

More on Archinect:

The Life of a New Architect: Elizabeth Christoforetti (Featured interview)

MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bike

MIT's Newest Invention Fits All the Furniture You Need in One Closet-Sized Box

MIT develops self-assembling modular robots

Architecture of Segregation

2015-08-16T19:27:00-04:00

After the dramatic decline in concentrated poverty between 1990 and 2000, there was a sense that cities were “back,” and that the era of urban decay—marked by riots, violent crime, and abandonment—was drawing to a close. Unfortunately, despite the relative lack of public notice or awareness, poverty has re-concentrated.

The Century Foundation publishes a Paul Jargowsky paper laying out the facts and statistics of decline and poverty's impact on American cities.

Paul Jargowsky is a fellow at The Century Foundation where he writes about inequality, the geographic concentration of poverty, and residential segregation by race and class.

This work was support by The Century Foundation and the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University–Camden. The author received helpful comments and suggestions from Marie Chevrier, Natasha Fletcher, Straso Jovanovich, Lucy Muirhead, Jason Renker, Christopher Wheeler, and Zachary David Wood and production support from Abigail Grimshaw.

This Archinect editor thinks architecture must pay much more attention to this issue and start producing solutions instead of getting shamelessly high on celebrating star architect designed luxury condominiums for the globally rich clientele and elitist minimalist lakeside homes, and teaching their renderings in schools.

...

A little reminder that U.S. rent affordability is at its worst, according to Zillow

2015-08-14T20:40:00-04:00

Americans living in rentals spent almost a third of their incomes on housing in the second quarter, the highest share in recent history. Rental affordability has steadily worsened, according to a new report from Zillow, which tracked data going back to 1979...While mortgages remain relatively affordable, landlords have been able to increase rents because demand for apartments remains strong. The U.S. homeownership rate fell to the lowest level in almost five decades in the second quarter.

More on Archinect:

Venice Beach's ongoing grapple with the tech titan invasion

2015-08-11T21:20:00-04:00

Slapped in the face is exactly how many Venetians are feeling by the tidal wave of new money. And the local tech boom, prompting 'Silicon Beach' references around town, is just one source of it

More on Archinect:

The rise and spectacular fall of Venice Beach's Pacific Ocean Park

Are apps the virtual gateway to physical gentrification?

Oren Safdie's play "False Solution" finishes up its 3-week run this weekend in Santa Monica

Those hipster millennials might not be the true gentrifiers of U.S. neighborhoods

Christopher Hawthorne on repairing L.A.'s long-broken relationship with its freeways

2015-08-07T20:27:00-04:00

The truth is that Los Angeles, once a pioneer in defining the freeway’s place in urban life, has fallen behind other cities. From Dallas to Paris to Seoul, the most innovative ideas about freeways and how they can be redesigned are coming from places far from Southern California. It’s time for L.A. to catch up...

Following his recent review of the 405 Freeway expansion through the Sepulveda Pass, Christopher Hawthorne sums up why the time is ripe for Angelenos to refresh their perspectives on the city's freeways.

More on Archinect:

Are apps the virtual gateway to physical gentrification?

2015-08-05T18:26:00-04:00

Laundromats have recently been closing down in San Francisco, which prompted a Google employee to tweet in response "cost of disruption: washio and others have removed need for laundromat on every block." Who needs laundromats when there's an app for that? Well, people who can't afford to spend $15 a pop on washing their socks, for starters. The tweet prompted a thoughtful article in Tech.Mic, in which the short-term gains of disruptive app inventors are speculatively played out to their potential society-eroding ends, especially in the arenas of transit and health care. In this case, the article points out that the laundry delivery app in question is exactly that: a delivery service that still uses third-party launderers to actually clean the clothes, but charges for the convenience.

Apparently, the San Francisco laundromats are closing mainly because of the usual gentrification pressures in the form of desirable cheap real estate, not necessarily because of apps. However, assuming ...

How university presses influence our understanding of urbanism — then, now, and for the future

2015-07-28T18:52:00-04:00

Many [university presses] have a storied history of amplifying voices that were long ignored...The litany is endless, underscoring the audacity of university presses in believing that every city deserves the best ideas possible. We need that. As we make choices about our modern cities, as policymakers, advocates or citizens, we need these books to ground our vision, to help us imagine what is possible. And that’s why the tenuous future of university presses is so alarming.

More on Archinect:

Pump Out the Volumes: 50,000 free books form 1 art installation

Bradley Garrett on the importance of gonzo journalism for understanding cities

Wilkinson Eyre-renovated Weston Library at Oxford now reopened

Archinect's Screen/Print series

Revisiting Sharon Zukin's "Loft Living" and NYC gentrification

2015-04-08T13:14:00-04:00

When Loft Living was first published, artists’ laments about real estate in New York City mirrored the concerns that have plagued residents for much of the last century. Namely, it’s tough to find a suitable and affordable place to live. Since the late ’80s, the tenor of that complaint has shifted from one of anxiety to one of fear...

Guernica magazine interviewed sociologist Sharon Zukin following the 25th-anniversary release of her 1989 landmark book "Loft Living" last year. Revisiting her timely book -- which focuses on NYC's SoHo neighborhood when upscale real estate properties took over industrial lofts and artists' studios -- Zukin discusses urban theorist Jane Jacobs, perpetually soaring rent rates, NYC's changing demographics and affordability, and the influential yet seemingly overlooked role that arts communities play in the complex American "pastime" that is gentrification.

‘Choral Fields 1-6’ of MIRRORCITY in London ponders the urban city’s rhythmic flow

2014-10-30T23:18:00-04:00

For as long as digital technology continues to creep into every part of our daily lives, so will the discussion regarding its impact on everyday reality. Over at London's Hayward Gallery, the MIRRORCITY exhibition features the multimedia works of London-based emerging and established artists that address the dilemmas, consequences, and experiences of living in the digital revolution. MIRRORCITY will be at the Hayward Gallery until January 4, 2015.

One of the MIRRORCITY artists is Emma McNally whose Choral Fields (1-6) graphite drawings are featured in the exhibition. If McNally's name sounds familiar, she exhibited her beautiful cosmos-inspired drawing/space body of work in the Drawing Room's "Abstract Drawing" last year. Similar to drawing/space, McNally's Choral Fields offers a metaphysical, cartographic perspective to contemporary urbanism.

Buy Condo, Then Add Parking Spot for $1 Million

2014-09-10T13:17:00-04:00

A new development, 42 Crosby Street, is pushing the limits of New York City real estate to new heights with 10 underground parking spots that will cost more per square foot than the apartments being sold upstairs. At $250,000 a tire, the parking spaces in the underground garage cost more than four times the national median sales price for a home, which is $217,800, according to Zillow.

The best thing about this article was the NYT pop up ad for luxury condos in Chelsea.

Launch event tonight! "Shaping the City" refreshes case studies of contemporary urbanism

2013-11-01T18:52:00-04:00

Drop by Hollywood’s finest art and architecture bookstore, Hennessey + Ingalls, tonight for a special event launching Shaping the City, a newly revised edition of contemporary urbanism case studies. The event will also feature a conversation with University of Toronto’s Director of Urban Design, and Shaping the City’s editor, Rodolphe el-Khoury, along with Qingyun Ma, Dean of USC School of Architecture. The conversation will also include Shaping the City contributors Teddy Cruz, Victor J. Jones, and Paulette Singley.

Archinect picked the brains of el-Khoury and Singley before the launch, here’s some tidbits:

Archinect: What was your contribution to Shaping the City?

Rodolphe el-Khoury: [Co-author Edward Robbins and I] conceived Shaping the City as a potential textbook that would sample aspects of the city without imposing an overarching conceptual framework on the complex and varied manifestations of urban forms and phenomena.

Paulette Singley: "Los Angeles: Between Cognit...