Archinect - News

Town over gown: Local zoning holdups could be preventing the expansion of America’s elite colleges and universities

2023-08-09T17:59:00-04:00

[The] quintessential local issue of zoning squabbles ends up generating a national scarcity of elite college admissions slots, fueling zero-sum competition and ultimately reducing America’s ability to increase global “exports” of its best-in-class high-end higher education product.

The Washington Post has a useful primer on the zoning hangnail stimying elite American higher-ed institutions from expanding their enrollment in response to societal outcries and prospective applicants' increasingly high standardized test scores.

The issue dates to the mid-1990s when municipal planning began to disfavor most top-tier institutions. Author Matthew Yglesias then goes on to argue that officials in states like Massachusetts, Maine, New Jersey, and Connecticut ought to curtail their parochialism in deference to the overall economic betterment of the country.

This year was supposed to offer a turning point in the delivery of student housing nationwide, according to prognosticators looking at overall decreases in enrollment. The University of California and other state systems, meanwhile, are still very much in the throes of their own deepening crises despite the sector's reputation as a "bright spot" for investors.

Spiegel Aihara Workshop's Wraparound House creates fluid connectivity without sacrificing Bay Area views

2022-08-05T15:28:00-04:00

San Francisco-based transdisciplinary studio Spiegel Aihara Workshop (SAW) shared new images of an extensive home renovation project of a 1930s Spanish Revival home in the Bay Area's Marina neighborhood.

Aptly named the "Wraparound House," the project was commissioned by a couple looking for their home to include increased indoor and outdoor space for their family without sacrificing surrounding views of the Bay. While the project includes horizontal and vertical expansion to engross six bedrooms and additional interior space totaling 4,738 square feet, the house also needed land stabilizing beneath the home.

Home's front facade. Image © Mikiko Kikuyama/Courtesy of SAW.

Rear view of the home and spiral staircase starting at the base of the newly landscaped backyard. Image © Paul Dyer/Courtesy of SAW.

SAW noted that the Marina neighborhood site is historically known for being built on a former landfill and impacted by soil contamination due to a gas plant spill decades prior. Due to ...

UK to radically overhaul land-use system in the name of "beauty"

2020-08-06T12:27:00-04:00

the government is tearing up the national rule book that has been in place since the second world war to ensure the best use of land, and replacing it with three simple classifications. From now on, all land in England will be designated for either “growth”, with automatic planning permission, “renewal”, with permission subject to some basic checks, or “protection”, preserving the sacrosanct status of the green belt.

Among the drastic streamlining of the planning approval process proposed is a system of automatic approvals that privileges pattern book-style developments that make use of readymade designs similar to those already used in Bath, Belgravia and Bournville, BBC reports.

Trump administration initiates resource extraction plan for former national monuments in Utah

2020-02-07T13:02:00-05:00

The U.S. government implemented final management plans Thursday for two national monuments in Utah that President Trump downsized. The plans ensure lands previously off-limits to energy development will be open to mining and drilling despite pending lawsuits by conservation, tribal and paleontology groups challenging the constitutionality of the president’s action

About two years ago, President Trump cut the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by almost 50 percent and the Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent. The President said the scaled back size was to reverse misuse of the Antiquities Act by previous Democratic presidents that he feels led to oversized monuments that hinder energy development, grazing ad other uses, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The plans come despite pending lawsuits from conservation, tribal, and paleontology groups arguing that the downsizing was unconstitutional.

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...

After Rahm Emanuel steps down, critics of Obama Presidential Center may have stronger chance to negotiate a CBA

2018-09-26T16:12:00-04:00

Nearly everyone in Chicago is in favor of establishing the Obama library on the South Side. But now, “There’ll be more room for dissent, and more people in Chicago generally willing to speak their mind without fearing the Emanuel administration,” said Juanita Irizarry, executive director of Friends of the Parks, which has opposed the seizure of parkland. [...] Emanuel’s departure also gives hope to critics pushing for a more open process.

In the ongoing controversy about the Obama Presidential Center's proposed site on Jackson Park, design journalist Zach Mortice writes about how critics of the library might have more opportunities to argue their case for a community benefits agreement (CBA) and transparency on the project planning process, once Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who decided to not run for a third term — steps down.

New report presents staggering amount of parking in US cities

2018-07-16T15:13:00-04:00

Groundbreaking research presents credible estimates of the total parking supply in several American cities, and it's not pretty. Parking spaces are everywhere, but for some reason the perception persists that there’s “not enough parking.” And so cities require parking in new buildings and lavishly subsidize parking garages, without ever measuring how much parking exists or how much it’s used.

A new report from Eric Scharnhorst at the Research Institute for Housing America, an arm of the Mortgage Bankers Association, estimates the total parking supply in five US cities. Looking at satellite imagery and tax record data, Scharnhorst tallied on-street parking, surface parking, and garage parking in New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming. The results show staggeringly high amounts of land use dedicated to parking with low use percentages.

Send your ideas to the 2016 Chicago Prize “On the Edge” competition

2016-12-05T19:45:00-05:00

Visionary plans, policy, and infrastructure have all played crucial roles in the development of the city and consequently in the definition of its edge. Today, conflicting interests regarding ownership, use, and value of the Lakefront have produced a stalemate of what this civic treasure could become.

A hotspot for land-use disputes, the urban development of Chicago's Lakefront is the subject of the 2016 Chicago Prize competition, "On the Edge”. Launched on November 29 by the Chicago Architectural Club and the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the competition seeks speculative architectural interventions for the Lakefront “in consideration of the stated issues that imagine and speculate its scape” — as exemplified in recent situations like the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the Barack H. Obama Presidential Library, or the impacts of Lake Shore Drive.

The Chicago Lakefront. Photo: Payton Chung/Flickr.

The CAC asks: “Would new strategies of zoning recharge this long strip of stand-alone city-land? Can architectural interventions function as a framework for the excitation of the edge? How will the collision of the metropolis and the lake create a radical emergence of the unimaginable?”

There is no set program for this competition. A Question-and-Answer period is open now until December ...

Sprawl isn't just bad for cities – it's bad for friendships too

2015-10-29T12:50:00-04:00

Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. [...] in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built. [...] We do not encounter one another in cars. We grind along together anonymously, often in misery.