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Deep in the Transylvanian countryside lies an ancient salt mine dating back over two millennia.
Today Salina Turda has become an unlikely tourist attraction, with thousands of visitors descending its vertical shafts each year to play mini-golf, go bowling and row around its underground lake. [...]
British photographer Richard John Seymour recently travelled to Salina Turda in his quest to document human-altered landscapes.
— thespaces.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Chinese Fun: Photographer Stefano Cerio captures the eerie side of empty amusement parksOdd beauty: downtown São Paulo through the lens of Felipe RussoPhotographer captures the beauty of Beirut's architecture View full entry
We all want our cities to be greener, but it is often quite hard to grow trees in a concrete environment. So, why not turn to waterfronts or lakes to place trees? Rotterdam will get its first ‘bobbing forest’ in 2016: a collection of twenty trees that are floating in the Rijnhaven, a downtown harbor basin. [...]
After experimenting with a sample tree last year, an entire floating forest of twenty trees is scheduled to be ‘planted’ on March 16, 2016.
— popupcity.net
Related Archinect news:It's official: trees are good for your healthRotterdam considers paving its roads with recycled plasticFollow the yellow wooden road into Rotterdam's new Luchtsingel pedestrian park View full entry
Perkins Eastman is taking two of the best-loved urban land-use stories of the Bloomberg era—the High Line and Times Square—and combining them into one.
The Green Line extends the logic of changes that have already taken root along the limited stretch of Broadway running through Times Square. [...] proposal builds on the work of Jan Gehl and Snøhetta, the architects who pedestrianized Times Square. Yet it also echoes the High Line by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
— citylab.com
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.(Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect... View full entry
Within the green open spaces of Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut stands the new arts and community center, the River, which finally opened its doors to the public today. The Grace Farms Foundation selected SANAA to design the building in 2010, not long before Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa... View full entry
[Botany professor Paloma Cariñanos] found it surprising that the design of these green spaces thought about landscaping, climate, and fashion criteria, but didn't think about pollen problems.
[She] says that in the future, urban green spaces 'will become 'comfort islands' inside 'urban heat islands.''...Cariñanos and her team stress that their research is a tool for planning and prevention. They hope that other cities will be able to use their methods to prevent high allergen levels.
— phys.org
You can read more of Cariñanos' team's research in the Journal of Environmental Quality.More on Archinect:Welcome to the jungle: Sou Fujimoto lectures on applying natural infrastructure to urban designDelhi’s air pollution is worse than Beijing's. A new app measures the air quality in real... View full entry
Called Lysningen or ‘The Clearing’, it has been designed by the Bergen-based architects 3RW. [...]
“It is actually much better than I had thought,.” [Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the general manager of Utøya,] said. “The frame around the woods and the silence of nature, makes it feel like a well.”
— thelocal.no
On July 22, 2011, on the island of Utøyah, a lone gunman named Anders Breivik attacked a youth summer camp run by the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League (AUF), killing 69 people. Today, on the fourth anniversary of the attack, a memorial to the victims officially opens on the island. Known as... View full entry
These have been boom times for companies that rip out lawns and replace them with drought-tolerant landscaping, but now their business might be drying up.
The Metropolitan Water District said Thursday it would no longer offer rebates to entice homeowners to get rid of their lawns because the agency ran out of money much sooner than it expected.
That is bad news for [...] landscape contractor in Los Angeles. Grass removal has become about 40 percent of his business, driven by the rebates.
— scpr.org
As a result of the sudden end of the government incentives, some Los Angeles landscape contractors, that had made turf removal their main business in the past months, began laying off staff. The LA Times reports: "Turf Terminators, which ballooned from a staff of three to more than 450 over the... View full entry
In a new paper published Thursday, a team of researchers present a compelling case for why urban neighborhoods filled with trees are better for your physical health.
[...] they found that “having 10 more trees in a city block, on average, improves health perception in ways comparable to an increase in annual personal income of $10,000 and moving to a neighborhood with $10,000 higher median income or being 7 years younger.”
— washingtonpost.com
"We focused on a large urban population center (Toronto, Canada) and related the two domains by combining high-resolution satellite imagery and individual tree data from Toronto with questionnaire-based self-reports of general health perception, cardio-metabolic conditions and mental illnesses... View full entry
Since the capping and closure of Fresh Kills’ five mounds, this 2,200-acre expanse of wetlands, marshlands, dry lowlands, forests, and grasslands has evolved into an unusual combination of natural and engineered beauty. — urbanomnibus.net
Originally a patch of creeks and marshland on the western shore of Staten Island, the area now known as Fresh Kills became a major landfill for New York City in 1948, once Robert Moses bought the land for housing development. His plan was to solidify the marshland with waste for a few years, and... View full entry
[...] has ordered a review of the procurement process for London’s garden bridge design after the Architects’ Journal revealed apparent irregularities in the tendering process. [...]
Heatherwick’s £173,000 fee was more than three times more expensive than the £49,939 offer by Wilkinson Eyre, and more than 11 times that of the £15,125 offer by Marks Barfield.
[...] cost of the project could fund 30 new London parks or 30 times the amount of open space the bridge would provide.
— theguardian.com
Previously View full entry
For decades, tourists have been coming to Southern California's Coachella Valley, drawn by spectacular mountain vistas, great weather and lush landscapes.
Those landscapes have been, for the most part, man-made — an artificial oasis in a land of desert. [...]
As California enters a fourth year of drought and state and local water officials unveil a series of conservation dictates, at least some hotels in the valley — big and small — have begun launching water conservation measures.
— USA Today
Have an idea for how to address the drought with design? Submit your ideas to the Dry Futures competition! View full entry
The New York-based World Monuments Fund announced [...] that Joshua David, the co-founder of New York’s High Line—a major urban regeneration project that has inspired similar initiatives in places such as Paris and Philadelphia—will succeed Bonnie Burnham as president of the non-profit heritage preservation organisation. Burnham is to retire in November after 30 years in the post. [...]
David announced in late January that he was stepping down as president of the Friends of the High Line.
— The Art Newspaper
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.(Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect... View full entry
“The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley,” an exhibition at the Center for Architecture, shows how modern landscapes often make a better case for modernism than the architecture itself.
Over a span of 60 years, Kiley (1912-2004), a founding father of modern landscape design, worked for the best architects around, among them Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He was fully versed in architecture’s modernist strategies and overriding focus on form and abstraction.
— wsj.com