February 11, 2011 – 12:58 pm
I’ve been reading the blog Market Urbanism quite a lot recently. Writing recently about “the problem with “public” transportation” (and after noting the frequent use of ‘public transit’ where the broader ‘mass transit’ would be more appropriate), they argue: …although the [New York] Subway was heavily subsidized by the government, the truth is that it [...]
February 1, 2011 – 6:00 am
[SPL's open-pit salt mine in the Tarapacá salt flats, via Google Maps.] In December, after we began our winter hiatus, Urban Omnibus posted ran a fantastic post by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, “Geologic City”, which briefly summarized several of the much longer “Geologic City Field Reports” which have run on the Friends of the [...]
January 5, 2011 – 6:00 am
[Fantastic Norway's 2005 installation "Polar Night", built in the Arctic town of Bodø. A total of 40 daylight lamps -- bulbs of the sort which are designed to simulate natural sunlight and used in therapy -- were attached to fiberglass panels, lighting a public square during the polar night, and producing an event which attracted [...]
December 2, 2010 – 6:47 pm
Jim Rossignol (video game journalist, blogger, and occasional BLDGBLOG contributor, among other things) recently announced the start-up of an independent game development studio, Big Robot, as well as the first two games that studio is developing. I’m particularly excited by the second he’s described, which is currently (though likely not finally) titled “Walking City”. (That [...]
November 30, 2010 – 12:44 pm
Esquire profiles Janette Sadik-Khan in their series The Brightest: 15 Geniuses Who Give Us Hope. Although it initially seems curiously focused on her personality instead of her accomplishments, the piece makes a convincing case that the two are inseparably linked, and as such, is a good example of the political and social acumen that designers [...]
November 29, 2010 – 3:14 pm
At the end of October, Hillary Brown — founding principal of New Civic Works, a consulting firm which “promotes the adoption of sustainable design principles for buildings and infrastructure”, as well as a professor of architecture at the City College of New York — published an article on Places entitled “Infrastructural Ecologies: Principles for Post-Industrial [...]
November 22, 2010 – 1:39 pm
In the comments on “fracture-prone” — where I argued that the set of political measures that New Urbanists tend to focus on are a necessary component of the urbanist’s operating toolkit, but not nearly sufficient — Carter says: I’d be interested to hear your ideas on other types of tools should be used to tackle [...]
November 20, 2010 – 5:00 am
On Urban Omnibus, Genevieve Sherman recaps last Saturday’s afternoon panel from Harvard GSD’s 50th anniversary party for their urban planning program. The panel that Sherman recaps is of particular interest because it featured Andres Duany, whose harsh criticism of the GSD’s direction in Metropolis is one of the recent shots fired by New Urbanists in [...]
November 17, 2010 – 12:00 pm
[An image from Mark Luthringer's "Ridgemont Typologies"] In an excerpt on Slate from his latest book (Makeshift Metropolis), Witold Rybczynski asks the question: what kind of cities do we want? Judging from the direction that American urbanism has taken during the second half of the 20th century, one answer is unequivocal—Americans want to live in [...]
October 27, 2010 – 5:00 am
[Murmansk in polar night, photographed by flickr user euno.] The Wall Street Journal recently ran a fascinating excerpt from geoscientist Laurence Smith’s new book, The World in 2050, which looks at how four global “megatrends” — “human population growth and migration; growing demand for control over such natural resource ‘services’ as photosynthesis and bee pollination; [...]
October 26, 2010 – 6:21 am
[Plant compatibility diagram, from Visual Logic's "Backyard Farm Service.] One of the unfortunate things that happens with competitions is that the best entries are often overlooked by the judges, and the ideas encapsulated in those entries then missed. There are notable exceptions to this rule, like the OMA entry to the Parc de la Villette [...]
October 8, 2010 – 3:23 pm
[An abandoned portion of the "Golden Gate Estates" -- a massive land scam promoted by a Florida developer in the 1960's -- whose miles of canals and roads would have been the infrastructure for the largest subdivision in the United States if the land hadn't been utterly unsuitable to development. The problem, of course, is that [...]
October 7, 2010 – 7:38 am
[Screenshot from "Magnasanti"] Vincent Ocasla’s “Magnasanti” is a SimCity with six million inhabitants, which Ocasla argues represents the maximum possible stable population achievable within the game. A winning solution, he says, to a game without any programmed conditions for winning. Ocasla, a Filipino architecture student, spent four years constructing the SimCity — building the SimCity [...]
September 16, 2010 – 6:27 am
Writing for The Atlantic‘s Technology channel now, Alexis Madrigal makes a simple but important argument about how cellphones and other mobile devices, by enabling new ways of life, are affecting the form and density of cities: …the latest network to overspread our country — the wireless electromagnetic one — is just not fully compatible with [...]
September 15, 2010 – 12:02 pm
[A portion of the port of Tianjin -- radically determined by the requirements, conventions, and techniques of international shipping; bing maps] Writing for Current Intelligence, Serial Consign‘s Greg Smith (and guest co-writer Jordan Hale) discuss the history of standardized shipping containers, how that history has shaped the urban form of seaports such as Tianjin (and [...]
September 13, 2010 – 4:43 pm
As a coda to our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, mammoth spoke with Kazys Varnelis, editor of that book, about how the infrastructural city and “network culture” are related, what the contents of an imaginary new chapter for The Infrastructural City might be, and the future of architecture in the wake of global economic [...]
August 27, 2010 – 11:53 am
[Omega/Cinema Props' C.P. Three, at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Bronson Avenue; via bing maps] At some point, presumably, continuing to open our commentaries on The Infrastructural City by noting that the chapter of the week — in this case, Robert Sumrell’s “Props” — reads significantly different from the other chapters will ring [...]
August 19, 2010 – 1:23 am
[Sorting facilities at Port of Singapore in the foreground, downtown Singapore in the background; via flickr/Storm Crypt] Having mentioned Parag Khanna’s paean to a dawning age of mega-cities, I ought to also mention journalist Joel Kotkin’s article in the same issue of Foreign Policy, which argues — in near direct opposition — that (a) the [...]
August 18, 2010 – 12:23 pm
Will Wiles writes about the veneration of Jane Jacobs by New Urbanists, delving into his own history of reading Jacobs and coming back out with a series of well-made points, from the realization that battling over the legacy and proper reading of a single urbanist like Jacobs is rather unhelpful, to noting that proximity to [...]
August 17, 2010 – 10:11 pm
[Housing in Hong Kong, from photographer Michael Wolf's series "Architecture of Density"] In the latest Foreign Policy, Parag Khanna argues that the city is increasingly becoming a more important geopolitical entity than the nation-state: The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age [...]
