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Harvard GSD awarded the 13th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design to The High Line in New York. The Green Prize committee awarded the $50,000 prize to the Friends of the High Line for their continued stewardship behind the project, which has long been hailed as a model example of urban... View full entry
How do you restore community? Do you honor local context? Or do you bulldoze everything and try to start again? Few places embody that choice more starkly than Botanical Heights, the St. Louis neighborhood formerly known as McRee Town. Looking east from Thurman Avenue, one sees gated blocks of... View full entry
Last week FixNation and Architects for Animals joined forces to raise funds for FixNation’s critical charitable services for Los Angeles’ homeless cats, including spaying and neutering (check out the projects from last year). To raise awareness cat shelters were designed and constructed by... View full entry
In this article on the Huffington Post, Lance Hosey writes about the horror of watching white surpremacists marching in the Charlottesville Downtown Mall on August 11th and 12th of this year. The Mall, which was significantly redesigned in the 1970s, serves as a unavoidable visual reminder of the... View full entry
A crowdfunding campaign has been launched for the latest civic development in North London; the Camden Highline. For years, the disused railway has been talked about among local residents, with many wanting to see a little bit of New York in Camden Town. Image Courtesy of Camden Town... View full entry
Today we finish off our series of conversations, or "Mini-Sessions", with architects and designers in LA and Detroit, sharing our conversation with Lorcan O'Herlihy. Lorcan is an Irish-American architect, with offices in Los Angeles and Detroit. His recently published book, Amplified Urbanism... View full entry
To snap a photo of the Hollywood sign, tourists have clogged hillside streets and hiking paths, spurring battles in Hollywood Hills neighborhoods and in court over how people should be able to access the iconic landmark.
Now Mayor Eric Garcetti has floated an alternative: Building a gondola to ferry visitors to the beloved sign.
— The Los Angeles Times
Instead of having to evade trespassing laws (or take the long way around), those who want to visit the Hollywood sign up close may be able to simply take an aerial gondola lift if Mayor Eric Garcetti's recent remarks become a reality. As this article notes:Garcetti spokesman George Kivork said in... View full entry
“You are not a profession that has distinguished itself by your social and civic contributions to the cause of civil rights, and I am sure this has not come to you as any shock. You are most distinguished by your thunderous silence and your complete irrelevance.” — NEXT CITY
"We have fallen short and Mr. Ivy, in this instance, does nothing to belie the concerns of the membership. It is all too easy for us to be cynical and skeptical at times like these, when the more precise tool (and one we are built for) is to be critical and creative. The AIA made a mistake and has... View full entry
Although Cleveland often serves more as a punchline than a solution (the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 due to pollution), a climate change conference convened by the United Nations and currently being held in Quito, Ecuador sees new potential in the city. As StreetsBlog reports, if Cleveland... View full entry
[T]he city of Bao'an in Shenzhen is setting its sights on revamping the 30 kilometer, 12-lane G107 highway...By rethinking the notion of a highway and envisioned with a series of utopian-like renderings, [Avoid Obvious Architects + Tetra Architects & Planners] proposed “a smaller, more fluid, multi-layered thoroughfare that will be a spectacular starting point of growth for an organic smart city.” — Bustler
Here's a preview of their proposal:Find more of the project on Bustler. You can also watch the video below. View full entry
“I believe it’s important for all ages to interact on a day to day basis. It...hopefully removes the labelling of people as ‘elderly’ or ‘past it’ and the self-fulfilling behaviours that are often generated by this.”
“Cities need cross-generational activities...People living alone of whatever age can become isolated, lonely and then mental health problems can develop.”
“Teach young people that we are not going to move over, nor do we have to.”
— The Guardian
How do you define an age-friendly city? Share in the comment section below.More on Archinect:Nation's first combined housing complex for LGBT youth and seniors coming to HollywoodLoneliness is on the rise throughout the world's citiesMidwest developer planning shared residence for seniors and... View full entry
A new year, a new set of winners for the 2016 AIA Institute Honor Awards. Held annually, the awards are considered to be the profession’s highest recognition for projects that best exemplify design excellence in the categories of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Regional & Urban... View full entry
The Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health is planning to launch a new, biannual journal in early 2016.
This online journal will help address the challenge of there not being many journals explicitly publishing research on the links between urban design and mental health right now. [...]
Do you have a relevant research paper, case study, review, comment piece, photograph, book review or other relevant content, (or a good suggestion for the journal's name)? If yes, please submit
— urbandesignmentalhealth.com
Interested in submitting? Here's the details from the Urban Design / Mental Health website:This journal is not currently peer-reviewed. Editorial decisions will be made by Layla McCay (UD/MH Director) and Itai Palti (UD/MH Fellow and Guest Editor of the edition). The journal will be open-access... View full entry
The sensory limitations of these vehicles must be accounted for, Nourbakhsh explained, especially in an urban world filled with complex architectural forms, reflective surfaces, unpredictable weather and temporary construction sites. This means that cities may have to be redesigned, or may simply mutate over time, to accommodate a car’s peculiar way of experiencing the built environment... — Geoff Manaugh on The New York Times
"...The flip side of this example is that, in these brief moments of misinterpretation, a different version of the urban world exists...If we can learn from human misperception, perhaps we can also learn something from the delusions and hallucinations of sensing machines. But what?"As self-driving... View full entry
boring environments can generate stress, impulsivity, lowered levels of positive affect, and risky behaviour. [...]
based on well-understood principles of neuroplasticity and on what is known of the effects of deprivation and enrichment in other more extreme settings ... there is every reason to believe that these sterile, homogeneous environments are exerting a measurable effect on our behaviour [...]
Given this, the prudent design of city streets and buildings is a matter of public health.
— aeon.co
More on the intersection of urban design and mental health:How urban designers can better address mental health in their work, according to a new think tankMindy Thompson Fullilove is a psychiatrist for citiesPreventing disease and upholding public health through architectureIt's official: trees... View full entry
