incremental-urbanism – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: incremental-urbanism

February 27, 2011 – 2:23 pm

400 years of 124 Green Street

Go read this micro history of a block in New York City: We usually analyze Development at the national level. Why not other levels? At the other extreme, here is a short and surprising illustrated history of one city block […] Its history had been a series of unexpected events involving many actors, from Nicholas […]

By Stephen | Posted in asides, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Also tagged , | Comments Off on 400 years of 124 Green Street | Permalink
September 14, 2009 – 11:48 pm

dialogue: finance, context, scale, and intervention

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 […]

By Stephen | Posted in dialogue, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
August 12, 2009 – 2:56 pm

mammoth suburban land infusions

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 […]

By Stephen | Posted in landscape, speculative-architecture, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Also tagged , | Comments (10) | Permalink
July 7, 2009 – 1:20 am

my dreams, squashed

If you folks haven’t already seen it, I can’t recommend this article on Will Allen, founder of Growing Power and a ‘street farmer’ in Milwaukee, highly enough.  I’m not even going to pull a quote from it – just go read the whole thing.  Given a choice between having the career of Rem Koolhaas, or […]

By Stephen | Posted in urbanism | Also tagged , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
May 31, 2009 – 2:21 pm

on finance

I found this project by Andrea Brennen, which Rob highlighted here, incredibly refreshing.  Considering the vital role money plays in Getting Stuff Built, discussion of financing and its repercussions is absurdly rare in critical discourse on architecture and urbanism.  This is problematic – it’s not as if designs are hatched in a capital vacuum, funding […]

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, finance, infrastructure, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (11) | Permalink
May 10, 2009 – 9:04 pm

49 utopias

I agree with all this. Big Bang Urbanism – what a great term.  Those ground up utopian visions are the lifted trucks of the architecture world – often technically proficient, yet generally ridiculous, public displays of ‘boldness’ or ‘vision’.  (Sadly, this isn’t a problem only suffered by select urban schemata, coughcalatravacough.) A couple of weeks ago, I […]

By Stephen | Posted in the-city-we-have, urbanism | Also tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink