Archinect - News

Ten years after opening, Morphosis' San Francisco Federal Building is not a crowd pleaser

2017-07-18T13:02:00-04:00

Neighbors have complained about the plaza for years, calling it an unsafe blight. The frustration is shared by Maria Ciprazo, the federal architect who oversaw the process that in 1999 awarded the project to Mayne and his Southern California firm, Morphosis.

In this article, the San Francisco Chronicle takes issue with Morphosis' Federal Building, noting that its plaza has not become the cultural hotspot much hyped by developers at its opening in 2007:

But when we view the complex in hindsight, it didn’t transform the local architectural scene. It’s a flash of isolated drama. Look no further than the three residential slabs that have been built on the block since then, each a box with no higher aspiration than to satisfy the developer’s bottom line.

As for the social agenda — to create a neighborhood haven — the plaza and its corner cafe have come up short on all fronts.

How should cities prepare for a driverless car future? Here are six tips

2017-03-14T20:47:00-04:00

The days of driving your own car are coming to a close: as many as seven million driverless cars could be making their self-directed way around major urban hubs across the U.S. within the next few decades. So what should cities do to keep up with these changes? This white paper by Arcadis gives six tips for city planners to prepare for the automated onslaught:

A study by transportation, economics and urban planning experts has found that ridesharing and ridesourcing services using autonomous vehicles (AV) could shift millions of drivers away from personal cars in major U.S. cities.

“Driverless Future: A Policy Roadmap for City Leaders,” the study prepared by Arcadis, HR&A Advisors and Sam Schwartz Consulting, shows that the move to ridesharing and ridesourcing services that don’t have a driver could cause a shift of up to 60 percent (3.6 million cars) from traditional to autonomous vehicles in the New York metro area alone over the next 15-20 years.

The Los Angeles metro area could see...

I Melt With You: "Indoor City" installation explores dissolving spatial boundaries in an era of climate change

2017-03-14T17:44:00-04:00

With layered narration from writers and the input of a climate scientist, the 40-foot long table installation known as "Indoor City" designed by Founder Rome Prize Fellows Phu Hoang and Rachely Rotem (MODU) with Jonathan Berger, Hussein Fancy, Christoph Meinrenken, Jack Livings and Matthew Null, tackles the dire conceptual heft of designing for massive systemic weather change.

By placing carbon ice on the installation, the idea is to track how divisions between urban spaces and the environment release more carbon dioxide into the air, thereby creating more stress on the environment (and making the urban spaces quite unpleasant to live in as a result). The project advocates for a more integrated design concept while allowing visitors to enjoy what amounts to a trippy installation. Here's a video of the installation, which is part of the 2017 Cinque Mostre show and will be viewable in person at the American Academy in Rome until April 4th:

Watch a meditative and breathtaking aerial survey of the L.A. River

2017-01-05T14:26:00-05:00

Only one thing is certain now that Frank Gehry has undertaken the plan to revitalize the LA River: in the future, it will be different.

Check out Archinect's extensive coverage of the LA River Redevelopment, including interviews with major players like Mia Lehrer via the Next Up series...

This elegant aerial video by Chang Kim captures the current state of the concrete-channeled river, offering not only a meditative journey over freeway overpasses, opportunistic scrub brush and litter-choked rivulets, but a lush historic record of what this city's main water artery was, whatever it may eventually become. With a spare piano soundtrack composed by Nils Frahm, the video comes in at just under five minutes:

Los Angeles' urban core is full (unlike most other major U.S. cities)

2016-08-25T13:39:00-04:00

This isn't your grandfather's urbanization: population figures in major U.S. cities, which on the whole are on the uptick after declining in the 1960s, are adding residents not to their already built urban cores but rather in the form greenfield sprawl, which makes use of farmland and lightly developed suburban housing tracts. The big exception? Los Angeles, whose urban core Slate pronounces full. Here's more detail from the piece:

A new and illuminating analysis by Yonah Freemark, a project manager at Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council and the author of the Transport Politic blog—well worth reading in full—reveals some important trends in the past half-century of city-building...

“The average of the 100 largest cities grew by 48 percent overall,” Freemark notes. “Yet the average city also lost 28 percent of its residents within its neighborhoods that were built up in 1960.” That’s not just true in Youngstown and Detroit, post-industrial Rust Belt cities that have struggled with...

Do cities make you go crazy? On the link between urban living and psychosis

2016-07-20T13:08:00-04:00

The link between psychosis and city living was first noticed by American psychiatrists in the early 1900s who found that asylum patients were more likely to come from built-up areas. This association was sporadically rediscovered throughout the following century until researchers verified the association from the 1990s onwards with systematic and statistically controlled studies that tested people in the community as well as in clinics.

While the data shows a clear link between city living and schizophrenia, the correlation doesn't hold for other mental health afflictions like depression. This signifies that the city doesn't necessarily have a general detrimental effect on well-being. And there's no conclusive proof that the city causes psychosis, even if there's clearly some relationship going on.

For more public health matters related to urban life, check out these links:

Take a look at 'Spatial Bodies', a surreal vision of urbanity

2016-07-13T13:43:00-04:00

Spatial Bodies was created by AUJIK, a self-described "mysterious nature/tech cult," with music composed by Daisuke Tanabe. Filmed in Osaka, Japan, the video is "the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self replicating organism," according to the description on Vimeo.

"Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature," read the description. "A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos."

According to their Vimeo page, AUJIK has been around since the 1990s, "quietly [spreading] across video platforms featuring proposed active members and fabricated histories."

Check it out below:

Spatial Bodies from AUJIK on Vimeo.