December 3, 2009 – 8:10 pm
[Amos Coal Power Plant, from Mitch Epstein’s fantastic series American Power] Adrian Lahoud has a lengthy post on infrastructure and urbanism at Post-Traumatic Urbanism; the post is well worth reading. A handful of somewhat scattered comments on it follow. I strongly agree with the emphasis on “complex urban interdependencies”, in addition to “physical artefacts” of […]
November 11, 2009 – 7:02 pm
You’ll want to read all of Dan Hill’s post on his involvement in the design of The Cloud, a proposal for “a new form of observation deck” overlooking London and its new Olympic stadium. The proposal draws upon a number of fascinating themes, including urban informatics, cloud computing, weather, crowd-sourcing, and “re-industrial” cities: Data is […]
October 19, 2009 – 12:20 pm
[“Subdivision: Sunshine Acres”, by Ross Racine.] Thomas Sugrue, in a Wall Street Journal article on the American culture of home ownership from August: Every generation has offered its own version of the claim that owner-occupied homes are the nation’s saving grace. During the Cold War, home ownership was moral armor, protecting America from dangerous outside […]
October 16, 2009 – 12:52 pm
From the description of the above video at PopSci: Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond […]
October 16, 2009 – 11:11 am
A New Urbanist (edit: see comments for update) proposal to channelize the Anacostia and extend a modified version of the L’Enfant Plan to its newly narrowed banks, summarized here, is attracting a bit of attention here in DC (also here, here, and here). 1As commentator “Capitol Dome” notes at Greater Greater Washington, the plan proposes […]
October 15, 2009 – 9:34 am
[The Lackawanna Eight, windmills located in Buffalo on the former site of a Bethlehem Steel facility; background via bing maps] A partnership between the EPA and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is looking at the advantages of re-purposing contaminated sites as production sites for wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power (dull report here and slightly […]
October 14, 2009 – 9:33 am
A conversation worth following: the original piece is Matt Jones’s “The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future” at io9, in which Matt draws connections between Archigram, the architecture of science fiction and comics, ubiquitous computing, and the future of mega-cities. Varnelis responds, arguing that Jones’ rhetorical adoption of Archigram inadvertently reveals an absence […]
By rholmes
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Also posted in architecture, asides, readings
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Tagged a456, archigram, bldgblog, criticism, io9, kazys-varnelis, lebbeus-woods, speculative-architecture, things, utopias
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October 13, 2009 – 10:04 am
I see that Dan Hill put the post from the Toward the Sentient City exhibit up at City of Sound, and that version improves on the version at Toward the Sentient City by including links and images. Reading Hill’s post again, I noticed a couple paragraphs that bear on the post below regarding architecture and […]
October 12, 2009 – 2:19 pm
You should read Adam Greenfield’s post “Towards Urban Systems Design”, which includes some response to my brief note on Dan Hill’s post at Towards the Sentient City. A couple items from Greenfield’s post below that I’d like to respond to, in reverse of the order in which they appear in the original, because that’s convenient […]
October 8, 2009 – 9:28 am
[apartment blocks in Zibo, via google maps] A photo essay on the Chinese city of Zibo, in four parts (Zibo I, Zibo II, Zibo III, Zibo IV — best viewed in IE/Safari/Chrome, as some script there tends to upset Firefox), from Moving Cities, who are doing some fascinating research on urbanism in China. Zibo is […]
October 2, 2009 – 2:56 pm
Infrastructurist has a round-up of some of the projects selected by Chicago to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Burnham and Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The projects, roughly themed as “big”, “bold”, and “visionary”, are organized into six categories: big plans, catalysts, public spaces, the lake front, towers, and transportation. Notable winners include Urbanlab’s plan to […]
October 1, 2009 – 4:41 pm
[screenshot from Utopia, a rather unique game that blended SimCity-esque urban development with a proto-Starcraft model of realtime combat management in a science fiction setting] Getting quite close to the (October 9th) release date for Cities XL, which is at least moderately interesting to those of us (I’d imagine a fair percentage of designers in […]
September 29, 2009 – 1:45 pm
Adam Greenfield wrote a post about a week ago using Berlin’s Allianz Arena as a test case for a general shift in urbanism from “constant” to “variable”, which is one of the shifts he’s previously identified as composing a condition he calls “networked urbanism”. Greenfield speculates about how the Arena’s current, relatively limited ability to […]
September 29, 2009 – 12:17 pm
[Black volcanic sand desert in Iceland, via flickr user meiburgin.] Back in August, while on vacation, I read David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System. A pair of geographies he invented, the suburb of East Corinth and the Great Ohio Desert, particularly fascinated me, as they demonstrate how ordinary ideas (the urban […]
September 23, 2009 – 4:14 pm
There’s a discussion about the economics and politics of urbanizing suburbia taking place between economics bloggers Ryan Avent and Tyler Cowen right now (if you’re not familiar with the two, Avent is roughly liberal and Cowen is roughly libertarian, though both are more or less independent thinkers). It begins with this Washington Post article which […]
September 14, 2009 – 11:48 pm
In a recent back and forth between myself (Stephen) and Rory Hyde in the comments of On Finance, Rory noted: To zoom out even further, are we just talking about ‘context’? To understand the context in architecture normally means literally to understand the site context – the two terms are used interchangeably – but as […]
September 10, 2009 – 1:41 pm
A fascinating talk by Danah Boyd, transcribed at alternet, first presenting the evidence of class divisions in social media, and then addressing what the implications of that presence are: How many of you currently use Facebook? [90 percent-plus of the audience raises their hands.] How many of you currently use MySpace? [A few lone figures […]
August 13, 2009 – 3:12 pm
Though I’m on vacation at the moment, I thought I’d chime in with a couple comments on our reburbia entry (posted by Stephen below) and perhaps articulate more fully some of the thoughts behind it: 1. We were as interested in articulating a series of comments on the relationship between designers and suburbia as we […]
August 12, 2009 – 2:56 pm
Here is a little something Rob and I put together for the Re-burbia competition. Our entry asks the questions: What if the challenge suburbs face is not that they over-consume land, but have too little? How could an infusion of new land simultaneously (and paradoxically) mitigate some of the issues caused by the under-utilization of […]
As long as I’m on the subject of urban parks that serve as components of flood management systems, I ought to mention the recent Buffalo Bayou Promenade in Houston, which is not only an admirable and forward-thinking project from a city not known for its innovative ecological design (though they have built a rather seductive […]
