ecological-urbanism-at-gsd – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: ecological-urbanism-at-gsd

November 20, 2010 – 5:00 am

territories of urbanism

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 [...]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
November 17, 2010 – 12:00 pm

fracture-prone

[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 [...]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (13) | Permalink
May 8, 2009 – 2:53 pm

insert and instigate

A couple exceptionally fresh projects slipped into the ASLA awards this year (which were just released yesterday), both by CMG Landscape Architecture of San Francisco: “Panhandle Bandshell”, a temporary structure, composed entirely of recycled materials, erected in cooperation with the design collective Rebar. “The Crack Garden”, which Pruned has an excellent post on, under construction. [...]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture | Also tagged , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
April 27, 2009 – 9:14 am

verbal cartoons

Suggested additional Ecological Urbanism conference cartoons for Klaus, roughly in the spirit of Dan Liebert: 1. Koolhaas standing before his firm’s crudely diagrammatic proposal for European energy production: “We still haven’t moved beyond the harmless arrows… [Piano is] either outrageously innocent or deeply calculating” 2. A pie chart. In red: the percentage of time devoted [...]

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April 21, 2009 – 10:56 am

slave labor and ecological urbanism

Finally got around to reading the article that Becker posted on Dubai; it is very disappointing that these problems were glossed over/not presented at all during discussion of Masdar (which is not in Dubai, but another one of the Emirates, Abu-Dhabi) and Dubai at the Ecological Urbanism conference, particuarly since (a) the discussion of Masdar [...]

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April 10, 2009 – 8:46 am

on koolhaas at ecological urbanism

I’m afraid that this cartoon is exactly right: Koolhaas’ keynote address at the Ecological Urbanism conference was a joke (on the attendees?). But, then, a very cynical person might say that this is typical, rather than atypical, of his recent work. Fortunately some of the other presentations were much better.

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April 9, 2009 – 2:08 pm

ecological urbanism conference, briefly

Reactions to last weekend’s Ecological Urbanism conference at GSD that are worth reading include: GSD student blog, Varnelis on informality, and Javier Arbona on the (mis)application of the term ‘ecological’ to architecture.

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Comments (1) | Permalink