Archinect - News

Waukegan, IL: future home of the Lucas Museum?

2016-05-05T16:02:00-04:00

With the future of a Lucas Museum on Chicago's lakefront in doubt, the city of Waukegan is asking the organizers to look a little to the north. Waukegan Mayor Wayne Motley reached out to Mellody Hobson, a Chicago financial executive and the wife of "Star Wars" creator George Lucas, about locating the proposed museum featuring digital, traditional and narrative art on Waukegan's lakefront, a city spokesman said on Wednesday.

After a shake-up Tuesday wherein Chicago-based Friends of the Parks (which was taking a 30-day break from suing to prevent the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art from being built) announced that it wasn't going to budge on its anti-LMNA position, George Lucas announced that he was seriously considering other locations. According to the Chicago Tribune Lucas' wife, Mellody Hobson, noted that "this process has been co-opted and hijacked by a small special interest group." On Thursday, The Chicago Tribune reported that Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked his Law Department Wednesday afternoon to ask a federal appeals court to reject the Friends of the Parks case before it is tried. Could the force be with the industrial shoreline of Waukegan, Illinois, population 90K?

You can conquer the box-office, but stakeholder groups are a whole different echelon:

Entrepreneurs look to tackle Austin's traffic woes

2015-11-01T12:24:00-05:00

*Obviously Austin needs a transit system championed by a game designer.

Back in August, Michael Theis highlighted plans by "a few private-sector entrepreneurs — including some with deep pockets", to address transit needs, especially in Central/downtown Austin. He also spoke with spokeswoman Cathy Conley of USA PRT Inc and later attended a presentation where Richard Garriott (CEO) is proposing "a fleet of automated podcars".

For more info about PRT, read 'Emerging Rapid Transit Technologies Introduction, State of the Art, Applications', from the Proceedings of the AATS conference, Bologna, Italy, 7-8 Nov.2005.

h/t @Bruce Sterling

Mastering behavioral master planning: inside The Global Studio

2015-10-08T17:07:00-04:00

For his master's architecture thesis, Geoff Piper proposed reorganizing a Kenyan village with an estimated 70% HIV infection rate so that instead of being isolated in their post-colonial individual land plots, people would regularly cross paths. "There was a funeral every few days," Piper explains, "because for people living in these separate plots, it wasn't easy to grasp the extent of the [HIV] problem." By reorganizing the village to create more frequent public meetings, Piper hoped to raise awareness and stop the spread of the disease. A little over a decade later, Piper is now one of the six principal members of The Global Studio, a collaborative design-build organization that teams with non-profits to master plan settlements around the world. The Global Studio's expertise isn't just technical: it's the rare and difficult art of working successfully with people, whether it's the particular culture of non-profits, tenant farmers, or savvy village teens.

"We're willing and try ver...