“This corridor of shame that I call Van Ness and Market is just a spectacular example of failed urban planning.” [...]
“In the built environment, as one writer puts it, all our warts and our glories are there,” says Paul Groth, an architectural historian at UC Berkeley. “You can tell how we’re treating our fellow humans in the built environment. It really is an autobiography.”
So, what does Groth think our current architecture says?
“Greed.”
— KQED
Related: San Francisco is quick to poke fun of Snøhetta's new One Van Ness tower design View full entry
Manhattan may be a bustling metropolis filled with busy people rushing off to work, the theatre, restaurants and the myriad attractions the city has to offer. A replica in China, complete with knock-offs of Rockefeller Center and the Hudson River, is missing that one key element that makes New York, New York: the people. [...]
“All of these tall buildings just appeared,” one local man recently told CTV News.
— ctvnews.ca
Previously: China’s replica of Wall Street is full of half-built, deserted skyscrapers and floods regularly View full entry
Al describes CityCenter as the product of “the Bilbao effect: the notion that buildings designed by celebrity architects bring in tourists, and in particular a higher-end type of visitor”. MGM’s version was to bring in name-brand architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Helmut Jahn and Norman Foster [...].
“It goes against the casino design convention,” Al says, “by having towers that let in natural light and meet the street the way buildings do in other cities” – with retail spaces, not gaming.
— theguardian.com
His risk-taking real estate is a microcosm of the tumultuous process of Israel-Palestinian peace-making and the web of complex relationships in the occupied territories. — BBC News
Lyse Doucet and Jane McMullen report in from a totally new city made from scratch in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. View full entry
Could the answer to London’s congestion be a network of subterranean cycleways? A new project from design firm Gensler suggests that maybe – just maybe – it might. Dubbed the London Underline, the project would turn London’s abandoned tube tunnels into living streets beneath the city. [...]
London Underline is being taken seriously enough in some quarters. Earlier this week, it won the Best Conceptual Project gong at the London Planning awards.
— theguardian.com
The current ferry plan will cost $55 million, with plans to expand to Coney Island and Stapleton in Staten Island once more money is secured. Additionally, service will be restored to the Rockaway ferry, which was put in place in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy wiped out subway service to the area. — 6sqft
On Tuesday, Mayor de Blasio gave his State of the City address where he announced plans for a new, city-wide ferry service that will serve neighborhoods including the Lower East Side, Astoria, the Rockaways, Sunset Park, Brooklyn Army Terminal, Bay Ridge, Red Hook and Soundview, among others... View full entry
The Vecino Group of Springfield, a developer based in Springfield, Missouri, is proposing intergenerational housing as a long-term sustainable solution. Inspired by a similar project in Portland, Oregon,, Vecino hopes to build a 60-unit affordable housing project in Tulsa, with 30 units designated for people aging out of foster care and 30 set aside for local seniors.[...]
“Your hope is that your next door neighbor becomes your surrogate family. That would really be the hope”
— nextcity.org
By shutting down New York City’s subways, commuter rail, and roads for this week’s storm-that-wasn’t, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) made the right call. [...]
The city has learned the hard way that the best way to keep people off the streets is by shutting down mass transit. [...]
Preemptively shutting down subways before Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 worked well in keeping people home.
— city-journal.org
The Urban Land Institute (ULI) recently published a report titled "The Macro View of Micro Units", which shares the latest findings in the revived trend of micro dwellings in the United States. The report arose from a ULI Foundation research grant that the Multifamily Housing Councils received in... View full entry
While American airlines carry more than 700 million passengers annually, nobody wants to fly out of his own backyard. Nobody that is, except the citizens of Ontario, California. [...]
Ontario wants as many of those potential 30 million passengers as it can get. And it has been pleading, negotiating and suing for the right to do so. [...]
“The Ontario Airport is the largest economic engine in the Inland Empire ... It generates jobs, revenue to the city and to the entire region"
— nextcity.org
Boris Johnson today confirmed he would build Europe’s longest segregated urban cycle lane through central London after delays likely to be suffered by motorists were reduced.
The Mayor approved the “Crossrail for bikes” protected route through Parliament Square and along the Victoria Embankment and Upper Thames Street after it won overwhelming public support.
— standard.co.uk
Is this the promising future of Giza 2030? What is the status of Giza 2030 after the Egyptian Revolution in 2011? Would it be a curse or a blessing if I were from Giza? And my message to the current Egyptian regime is this: if this is the future of Egyptian cities, please leave the situation as it is. — thisbigcity.net
Related: Photographer documents Egypt's monumental housing developments in the desert View full entry
To make matters more turbid, the nightmare of coastal reclamation occupies an imaginary and regulatory space created by several misunderstandings about territory itself. These become urgent against both the backdrop of our “oceanic” moment and the apparent dissolution of that idyll of 19th- and 20th-century geopolitical thought, the grounded state. — Harvard Design Magazine
Joshua Comaroff writes about contemporary sand/geo-politics, land reclamation, "sand wars" and secular(ism). View full entry
In 1969 Reyner Banham in his book The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment marked the shift between the concept of interior to that of an artificial environment. Technology and new human needs in fact had become an integral part of architecture, defining a new paradigm to describe indoor... View full entry
Should a storm, flood or rising sea levels hit the Danish capital again, the bucolic mini-parks will turn into water basins, the hills essentially functioning as the sides of a bowl. Thanks to a new pipe system, the squares will even be able to collect water from surrounding buildings’ roofs. Surrounding streets will, for their part, be turned into “cloudburst boulevards.” — Al Jazeera
