Archinect - News

Allison Arieff on the upsides of the new, car-free cities

2020-04-08T20:13:00-04:00

We can see our cities for the first time without the choking traffic, dirty air and honking horns that have so often made them intolerable. Throughout the world, the coronavirus has forced extreme changes in our behavior in just days. And we’re already seeing the impact of those changes: On Monday, for example, Los Angeles had the cleanest air of any major city in the world.

In today's NYT Opinion piece, Allison Arieff attempts to look at the benefits of the global social distancing experiment, from the cleaner city air through unprecedented street access for pedestrians and cyclists to potentially lasting design interventions in the public urban space.

"Covid-19 presents a wholly different challenge," Arieff writes, "how to think about bringing people together while also needing to keep them apart."

Don't miss out on latest developments with Archinect's continuously updated COVID-19 Guide for Architects & Designers.

Allison Arieff describes Silicon Valley's outdated and dysfunctional planning

2017-07-10T14:08:00-04:00

The built environment of the Valley does not reflect the innovation that’s driving the region’s stratospheric growth; it looks instead like the 1950s. Looking at aerial views of midcentury campuses like the Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Labs next to contemporary ones like Apple, it’s nearly impossible to tell the midcentury structures from the 21st-century ones.

While Silicon Valley is a place of much interest to many, its architectural image and overall planning is hard to grasp or call successful.

Allison Arieff of NY Times argues that the isolated corporate headquarters of tech giants have no consideration for the larger context of their surroundings, and heavily contribute to the Bay area's ever-worsening traffic which in combination with the outdated zoning laws, makes the whole region an extremely hard place to live in.

"In 2011, when asked by a City Council member what benefit the new Apple headquarters would have for Cupertino, Steve Jobs responded that it’d get to keep the company there. And that’s about the extent of what it got. A project like the new Norman Foster-designed Apple Park shows a blatant disregard not only for the citizens of Cupertino but also for the functionality of the region."

Apple Headquarters in Cupertino

"Because of the Bay Area’s chronic underinvestment in housing and transit, home prices escalate and cong...

What problems are really being solved by today's tech innovations?

2016-08-03T12:43:00-04:00

We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do.

Last year Allison Arieff served as a juror on our competition, Dry Futures. Revisit some of the winners of the competition:

And check out an interview with Arieff here:

Meet the jury of Archinect's "Dry Futures" competition: Allison Arieff of SPUR

'Hyperloop as transportation’s new girlfriend: mysterious, unencumbered, exciting, expensive.'

2016-05-24T13:12:00-04:00

“What we’re seeing right now is what I saw in 1996,” said Mr. Lloyd, a former president of sales and development at Cisco. “We all had I.P. routers and everything was done a certain way. At Cisco, we said, ‘You can carry that over the Internet,’ and everyone said, ‘No.’ But those high-speed networks made the Internet possible.” Hyperloop, he said, “will do to the physical world what the Internet did to the digital one.”

Allison Arieff (editorial director at SPUR and former Dry Futures judge) has some questions for Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies) after a propulsion test demonstration in the Nevada desert. While the company has managed remarkably fast developments in its tube technology for such high-speeds as the Hyperloop demands, it's nowhere near reality – and Arieff clearly articulates the (many) remaining concerns of such technology, after mere feasibility.

Related on Archinect:

Reinstating "awe" in America's infrastructure

2016-02-15T13:18:00-05:00

American infrastructure is deferred home maintenance on a massive scale. We just keep putting it off until something major — and often catastrophic — happens, and then it ends up costing twice as much [...] A century later, we’ve lost our collective faith in the power of great projects like the Golden Gate, not to mention our trust in the government to fix a pothole on time and on budget, let alone create an inspiring bridge. How can we restore that faith in possibility?

Allison Arieff, editor and content strategist for SPUR (and former judge for Archinect's Dry Futures competition), pens this piece for the Times calling for infrastructure to reprioritize the "bold and courageous," with a look at a few awe-inspiring urban infrastructure projects around the country (both built and yet-to-be-so), including those around the L.A. River and Hyperloop.

For more on the U.S.'s problematic infrastructure:

Will LA's building boom produce beloved icons or hated eyesores?

2016-01-12T14:26:00-05:00

L.A. has always been a place of experimentation, but now it appears to be in an architectural arms race, a competition to build the tallest, shiniest, and weirdest buildings. Adding to some Angelenos’ trepidation is how many of the projects popping up around the city are museums—built to last for 40 years or more, which is an eternity in a city known for knocking things down.

Related:

Meet the jury of Archinect's "Dry Futures" competition: Allison Arieff of SPUR

2015-08-20T18:20:00-04:00

Allison Arieff is the editorial director of SPUR, an urban planning advocacy non-profit based in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. Known in full as San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, SPUR is primarily focused on improving urban planning efforts and policy in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are excited and honored to have Allison as a jury member for our Dry Futures competition.

Previous to her role at SPUR, Allison served as editor in chief at Dwell magazine, which she helped found back in 2000. She is also a contributing writer to the Atlantic’s CityLab, the New York Times and SPUR’s The Urbanist.

Her work with SPUR and Dwell have brought popular attention to sustainable design initiatives and policy, and as a resident of San Francisco, she is well aware of the strains the drought has put on the state. But based on her work with local government and planning officials, she's also seen time and time again how inefficient or straight-up nonexistent our laws regarding water co...

What Tech Hasn’t Learned From Urban Planning

2013-12-16T17:59:00-05:00

The tech sector is, increasingly, embracing the language of urban planning — town hall, public square, civic hackathons, community engagement. So why are tech companies such bad urbanists?

Driven Away: The Role of Urban Planning in a Car-Dependent Society

2013-07-26T17:46:00-04:00

“Ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are far away from everything.” And it is this observation that for me epitomizes the problem of the driverless car — it’s the worst kind of solutionism. By becoming so enamored with how technology might transform the car, we’ve neglected to adequately explore how getting rid of cars might transform how and where we live. We’d do well to heed Gorz’s exhortation to “never make transportation an issue by itself.”

It's a given that America continues to be a car-obsessed society despite the more painstaking reality of driving a car in many major cities of today. In The New York Times, editor Allison Arieff of SPUR points out that the U.S. is still fixated on selling, using and enhancing the car when commuters are carpooling more and buying fewer cars.

Furthermore, Arieff gets to the root of the problem by pointing out the negative impacts that a car-dependent culture has on public transportation and the even more complex issue of urban sprawl--both which are in need of more attention and innovation. As Arieff mentions in her article, cars aren't what make up the city--it's the city itself. Taking that into account, urban planners have a crucial role in making the Land of the Free less dependent on the car.

Do you agree with Arieff? What's your take on the issue? Feel free to share your opinion in the comments below.

Allison Arieff declares "Prefab Lives!"

2013-05-24T12:50:00-04:00

B2, a 32-story tower that is part of a 1,500-unit, mixed-use complex designed by SHoP Architects for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, will soon be the tallest modular building in the world. nARCHITECTS recently won adaptNYC’s competition to design a micro-unit apartment building, and will see its concept transformed into a 10-story building by 2015. It will be the first multiunit building in Manhattan to be built with modular construction.

A Conversation With Allison Arieff, Writer and Editor on Sustainability

2011-10-12T18:44:47-04:00

Arieff discusses how sustainability issues -- climate change, peak oil, declining resources -- suffer when they're thought of as trends; why Julius Shulman deserves to be in a sustainability hall of fame for his photographs showing how architecture is about buildings and people; and why, after years at the top of Dwell's masthead, she's done writing about gorgeous Italian closets and kitchens.

Conceptual Suburbia: A Design Project Descends on Levittown

2011-05-06T19:22:35-04:00

There is no more iconic suburb than Levittown, the postwar planned community built by the developer William Levitt in the late 1940s, so it is understandable that in launching Open House, a collaborative project to imagine a “future suburbia,” the Dutch design collective Droog in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects would make it the focus of their inquiry.