I do not think the arena’s architecture should relate better to the context. The immediate context is the developer Forest City Ratner’s two cheaply clad, faux-historicist malls across Atlantic Avenue. The larger context is the lowrise brownstone neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. To relate to the first would be depressing; to relate to the second, impossible. The real building is an exact analogue to the renderings of this site, which... blur and dematerialize the neighbors. — newyorker.com
The long-awaited final section of the High Line broke ground this morning. Mayor Bloomberg and Friends of the High Line kicked off Section 3, a.k.a. "The High Line at the Rail Yards," which will follow the rails from 30th to 34th streets to the north and south and from 10th to 12th Avenues east and west. When completed, the newest section will flow in seamlessly with the rest of the elevated park's design and will feature new benches, tables, and a children's play area. — Inhabitat
The third and final section of the High Line broke ground today. View full entry
Architecture, the most public of endeavours, is practised by people who inhabit a smugly hermetic milieu which is cultish. If this sounds far-fetched just consider the way initiates of this cult describe outsiders as the lay public, lay writers and so on: it's the language of the priesthood. And like all cults its primary interest is its own interests, that is to say its survival, and the triumph of its values – which means building. — guardian.co.uk
The larger irony is that in calling for a huge new mosque in the tradition of Sinan, Erdoğan may be missing the more fundamental lesson of the Ottoman architect’s work. As Bruno Taut, the German architect who emigrated to Turkey to flee the Nazis, argued, Sinan was himself a proto-modernist whose ability to create extraordinary beauty from novel engineering had more in common with twentieth-century German functionalism than earlier Islamic architecture. — The New York Review of Books
In a politically analytical article in New York Review of Books, Hugh Eakin examines the power policies of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and his ambitious plan to crystallize the country's image and political agenda via a single building. A large new mosque in classical Ottoman... View full entry
Phil Boucher is a self-described “architecture nerd.” And while part of that means marveling and photographing the beautiful buildings around Boston, it also means recreating the entire city as accurately as possible in the video game Sim City 4. — wbur.org
It's not that I'm disappointed in New York, not at all. I love walking Manhattan's grid system, but now that I've seen Armelle Caron's bottom-up version of Istanbul, all those crooked, lopsided, curvaceous streets, going off in so many directions, I can't help wondering, what would it be like to wander there? Would I be constantly lost? Would every turn be an adventure?
Suddenly I can't help it. I want to go.
— npr.org
The park...was conceived four decades ago. The visionary architect who designed it died in 1974. The site...remained a rubble heap while the project was left for dead. But in a city proud of its own impatience, perseverance sometimes pays off. — New York Times
If Nychaland was a city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous in the U.S., bigger than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of Cincinnati. Despite these prodigious stats, the projects remain a mystery to most New Yorkers, a shadow city within the city, out of sight and mind, except when someone gets shot or falls down an elevator shaft—just these bad-news redbrick piles to whiz by on the BQE. — NY Magazine
Mark Jacobson visits New York City’s various housing projects, which are he argues the last of their kind in the country. He also suggests that they may be on their way to extinction. View full entry
In 1948 Le Corbusier was retained by the municipality of Izmir (my home town) to develop a visionary master plan for the city. He disregarded the historic core of Izmir which is laced with artifacts and buildings as old as 3500 years old and eventually was forced to resign from the job and most... View full entry
Their singular issue is affordable housing, of which there will be some 150-units. The sticking point is that those apartments will only be reserved for low-income tenants for 35 years. The board wants permanent affordability, instead. “As a community board, we are supposed to do the best we can to preserve and maintain our communities and keep them going,” Mr. Nolan said. — observer.com
Capital Cities Planning Group (CCPG), an Anglo-American team including Gillespies, John Thompson & Partners and Buro Happold, has won a prestigious competition to plan the future expansion of the City of Moscow, Russia. The international jury [...] awarded two prizes; one to CCPG led by US-based Urban Design Associates for the design and planning of the new Federal District, and the second to Antoine Grumbach & Jean-Michel Wilmotte of Paris for the overall planning of Moscow. — bustler.net
Recently MovingCities went scanning the thematically and sketchy styled satellite towns [a Dutch, Nordic, Italian, Spanish, British, German, Canadian and even Chinese one] dotting the periphery of Shanghai. The text, published earlier in Bauwelt, can now be read online. A few extracts: Where in... View full entry
It's common when we discuss the future of maps to reference the Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map of the entire world. It seems like a ridiculous notion that we would need a complete representation of the world when we already have the world itself. But to take scholar Nathan Jurgenson's conception of augmented reality seriously, we would have to believe that every physical space is, in his words, "interpenetrated" with information. All physical spaces already are also informational spaces. — theatlantic.com
Drawings showing a futuristic raised glass open-top tunnel, that have drawn comparisons with New York's High Line, could become a reality as soon as 2015.
Sam Martin, 43, the landscape architect who came up with the idea with a colleague two years ago, said discussions between the Mayor and Network Rail were 'going well' since an initial meeting in May and that feasibility studies over potential sites were already underway.
— dailymail.co.uk
A coalition of environmental activists and community advocates has mounted the first major legal challenge to a planned downtown [Gensler-designed] Los Angeles NFL stadium, filing a suit Thursday that says a state law intended to assist the project is unconstitutional. — latimesblogs.latimes.com
