The Land Art Generator Initiative just announced the winner of its 2012 design competition moments ago in New York City. "Scene Sensor", designed by artists James Murray and Shota Vashakmadze, is a striking piezoelectric energy-generating art project designed to be installed above and below the surface of the Staten Island park. — Inhabitat NYC
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture is pleased to announce that it has completed a master plan for Chengdu Tianfu District Great City, a self-sustaining, environmentally sensitive 1.3-square-kilometer satellite city scheduled to begin construction this fall on an approximately... View full entry
Two winning projects and one special mention have recently been announced in the first competition cycle of POST+CAPITALIST CITY, #1Shop. This international ideas competition called for proposals which re-think the concept of the shop, the way we consume, and a city with alternative shopping systems and shopping culture—from small interventions up to global concepts. — bustler.net
If you are interested in participating in the most current competition cycle of POST+CAPITALIST CITY, #3Live which launched earlier this week, click here for more details. Submissions for #3Live are due by January 15, 2013, and the results will be announced in mid-February on Bustler. View full entry
“Google didn’t exist 25 years ago, Facebook didn’t exist 25 years ago, even AOL didn’t exist 25 years ago,” Cornell's Andrew Winters said recently. “The challenge is how do you create a tech campus today that is still flexible enough to grow and evolve for the next 25 years?” — New York Observer
Cornell unveiled its plans for a brand new 12.5-acre tech campus on Roosevelt Island today. The master plan is by SOM and Field Operations, the first academic building is by Thom Mayne and includes a giant two-acre solar array meant to help the structure achieve net-zero energy consumption. View full entry
In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles. Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the board Biophilia. ↑ Cabbagetown Garden in... View full entry
It has been so popular that other cities are following suit, with plans to replicate the formula in London. What is the secret of its success? — BBC News
Following the success of NYC High Line park/project, cities around the world from: London, Chicago, Philadelphia and Rotterdam are looking to replicate their own versions. Robin Banerji reports that some are even hoping to use "more besides disused railways". She also touches on some of the... View full entry
Inadequate sewage systems and the lack of toilets in much of the developing world have created a major public health and environmental crisis. Now various innovators are promoting new kinds of toilets and technologies that use little or no water and recycle the waste. — e360.yale.edu
Grab a helmet and check out these 15 cities where drivers use all five fingers when they wave at you. — cnn.com
Top cities include Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Boulder, Chicago, Davis, Ottawa, Portland, San Francisco, Beijing, Cape Town, Bogota and Perth. View full entry
Conditions of scarcity demand new ways of thinking, an expansion of the role of the architect and designer outwards in order to function more broadly and imaginatively as spatial agents. In contrast to the regimes of austerity ... the territory of processes and networks opened up by scarcity is far more conducive to creative intervention. It is here that scarcity — which can seem at first a bleak prospect — can become the inspiration and context for constructive and transformative action. — Places Journal
What is the difference between scarcity and austerity? On Places, Jeremy Till contrasts the political ideology of austerity — imposed reductions of public services and social benefits — with the physical condition of scarcity — the measureable dwindling of finite resources... View full entry
Though unemployment is widespread among designers and architects, there exists a world of products, places and processes in desperate need of redesign. Imagine if designers — uniquely trained to listen and observe, and to improve the way things function, feel and look — were, like the Enterprise Rose fellows, embedded in schools, nonprofit organizations, health clinics, religious institutions and government offices, where they could experience community needs and behavioral patterns firsthand. — John Cary and Courtney E. Martin (NYT)
Designed by Brighton-based architect Duncan Baker-Brown, it will be built on the University of Brighton's campus in the city centre from waste and surplus material from local building sites and other local industries.
The walls will be made of waste timber products. Ply "cassettes" containing waste material will be slotted in between the timber structure. These cassettes will be removable so that new building technologies can be added easily.
— guardian.co.uk
Johnson, a design partner in the New York City office of architect NBBJ, estimates that by 2060-70, skyscrapers will not only produce more energy than they use, they will produce food. — enr.construction.com
Vancouver hosted a fascinating hybrid of public spatial art and waste material upcycling in its downtown area this summer: Pop Rocks, a temporary installation that covered a full city block. The project is fabricated entirely from post-consumer and post-industrial waste from the metropolitan Vancouver region. — bustler.net
The installation, an equal collaboration between Matthew Soules Architecture and AFJD Studio (Amber Frid-Jimenez & Joe Dahmen), engages tactically with these materials to produce soft forms that extend the typical range of active and passive social activities, fostering unexpected social... View full entry
The problem is, that I think the rise of tactical urbanism actually reflects the paralysis of city-wide and systems-focused efforts...Tactical urbanism is cool; but the enthusiasm with which we’ve all embraced it is a tell for what we don’t talk about, which is fundamentally broken city governance. — Alex Steffen
With the recent focus on all things tactical, urban and interventionist, Alex Steffen has been thinking about what it all means. Prompted (at least in part by Adam Greenfield’s extremely interesting notes on Ed Glaser’s Triumph of the City) he has begun to wonder how one could go... View full entry
Masdar City is a project in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Its core is a planned city, which is being built by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, a subsidiary of Mubadala Development Company, with the majority of seed capital provided by the government of Abu Dhabi. Designed by the British architectural firm Foster and Partners, the city will rely entirely on solar energy and other renewable energy sources, with a sustainable, zero-carbon, zero-waste ecology.
