Amelia Taylor-Hochberg featured Orhan Ayyüce’s interview with "The Wire" actor Bob Wisdom from LA Forum's summer issue, in Screen/Print #45. Therein, the two spoke of the show’s depiction of race and crime in American cities, as well as the actor’s own observations on east vs. west coast... View full entry
Penn Station is much more than a transportation center. As the heart of the Northeast Corridor rail system, it has the potential to link downtown to downtown along the Eastern Seaboard in a way far more economical, expedient and environmentally sustainable than air travel.
But while the governor’s recently announced plan is a step toward this goal, more must be done. What we propose in addition is a completely new commuter station on the site of Madison Square Garden
— nytimes.com
The proposed plan for Penn Station's redesign comes by way of Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism. Previously, Chakrabarti was the director of Manhattan's Department of City Planning under former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, where he also... View full entry
The name of Herzog and de Meuron's proposed new development for downtown Los Angeles' arts district, 6 AM, seems like an hour/mindset that most of its current residents experience only because they stayed up much too late. But no one can stop the dawn of high-concept gentrification from breaking... View full entry
Spiro Kostof, concluding his history, tells us we need "to come to terms with our past and to take shelter and find pride in the continuities of time and place. This is not alone a professional imperative. All of us—architects and users, environmental policymakers and consumers of such... View full entry
The Obama administration Monday is calling on cities and counties to rethink their zoning laws, saying that antiquated rules on construction, housing and land use are contributing to high rents and income inequality, and dragging down the U.S. economy as a whole [...]
The White House published a “toolkit” of economic evidence and policy fixes to help local political leaders fight back against the NIMBYs that tend to hold sway over municipal zoning meetings.
— Politico
In related news:Take a VR tour of Yosemite National Park with President ObamaObama chooses Jackson Park as the site for his Presidential CenterStonewall Inn formally declared as national monumentTod Williams Billie Tsien Architects selected to design the Obama Presidential Center View full entry
In an effort to curb air pollution, the city council of Paris has approved a controversial plan to pedestrianize the 3.3 km road that runs along the Right Bank of the Seine River. Stretching from the Tuileries Gardens to the Henri-IV tunnel near the Bastille, the road is currently used by some... View full entry
A year ago, former England captain Rio Ferdinand, West Ham United skipper Mark Noble and ex-Brighton striker Bobby Zamora [unveiled] their Legacy Foundation – a regeneration charity with a plan to build a series of social and privately rentable housing schemes, backed by private investors.
The stars (all three of whom have played for West Ham) are coming back to present their first project, worth £400m, to build 1,300 homes on a 22-hectare site in a run-down area in Houghton Regis near Luton.
— the Guardian
For more on housing-related issues in the UK, follow these links:As a new class of super rich investors displace the traditional elite, average Londoners are pushed further and further outside the city limitsAlmost half of Londoners support limits on building heightBrexit will put even more strain... View full entry
high-intensity LED streetlights ... emit unseen blue light that can disturb sleep rhythms and possibly increase the risk of serious health conditions, including cancer and cardiovascular disease. [...]
Some [researchers] noted that exposure to the blue-rich LED outdoor lights might decrease people’s secretion of the hormone melatonin. Secreted at night, melatonin helps balance the reproductive, thyroid and adrenal hormones and regulates the body’s circadian rhythm of sleeping and waking.
— washingtonpost.com
While the American Medical Association cautions cities to re-evaluate their use of high-intensity LED lights for health reasons, others have pointed out that most televisions and computers also emit the blue light wavelength found to be potentially harmful. Aside from human health concerns, LEDs... View full entry
On Tuesday, an agreement was reached between West Side elected officials and the Port Authority that said the agency would expand the planning process for a new $10 billion bus terminal with more local input. And just today they’ve revealed the five proposals that were submitted to a design competition to replace the currently loathed site. — 6sqft
Big-name firms Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, Arcadis, AECOM, Perkins Eastman, and Archilier Architecture Consortium provided proposal, a number of which take on swooping forms and boast green roofs. View full entry
“Village” may not seem like the right term for a cluster of tenement-style walkups that can house more than 100,000 people. Chengzhongcun hang onto the name partly because of the familiarity evoked by the traditions and small-scale businesses that thrive among their migrant populations, and partly because when modern Shenzhen began growing, these places really were just villages in the middle of the city. — foreignpolicy.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:A tragic tale of live-and-let-die development on Shanghai's Street of Eternal HappinessAi Weiwei calls modern Chinese architecture 'fatalistic'Take a look at the rapid urbanization of China's Pearl River Delta View full entry
How many lives could be spared, the researchers then asked, if the city planted more trees and grass, replaced dark asphalt and concrete with light-colored and reflective roofs and pavement, and cut back on the excess heat seeping out of buildings and the tailpipes of cars and buses? — The New Yorker
Madeline Ostrander visited Louisville Kentucky, to learn how one city is trying to cool it. With an increase in urban deforestation, extreme heat waves and global climate change, the urban heat-island effect is now a concern for politicians and non-profits. Not just researchers... View full entry
“Ask any Los Angeles resident about L.A.’s greatest challenges and the answer will most likely include: ‘traffic’,” begins David E. Ryu, the L.A. City Councilman for the 4th District, in a call for the rapid implementation of autonomous vehicles in the city.Citing their potential to... View full entry
Back in May, Foster + Partners unveiled their design for the Droneport, a modular shell-like structure that is constructed with local labor from earthen bricks and thin compressed tiles to create loading areas for food and medical-aid bearing transport drones. A version of the Droneport was built... View full entry
Bjarke Ingels has found the elusive silver lining in global sea level rise and the European affordable housing crisis in the form of "Urban Rigger," a series of inexpensive student housing complexes that are designed to float in the sea, especially in those cities which have dense urban cores next... View full entry
There is something romantic about the idea of a holdout, a David to the big developer's Goliath, a protagonist for whom home matters more than money, a solitary survivor. In the Pixar movie "Up," the holdout is the hero. In the real-life Seattle version of the story that reportedly inspired the film's premise, an elderly woman who refused to sell her home became — along with her home itself — a city icon. — washingtonpost.com
In practice, though, modern cities grow out of older ones in large part through the unglamorous process of parcel assembly — of fitting together the once-smaller pieces of the city, "Tetris"-like. And while the result often produces fantastically bizarre neighbors, cities can't... View full entry