High Speed Rail News

Siemens is expanding its land holdings at its U.S. manufacturing plant to make sure that it has the capacity to meet future demand for High Speed Rail trains, It has purchased 20 acres of land adjacent to its train-making facility in Sacramento that sits on a 34-acre site. The company has made trains that run in Germany, China, Russia, and Spain. (CNN)

The Central Japan Railway Co. says it will throw its hat in the ring with other foreign companies in competing to develop the high-speed railway line earmarked for Florida, and suggests that it may partner with General Electric. (TampaBay)

The state Joint Finance Committee of Wisconsin voted 12-4 to confirm the states acceptance of the $810 million federal grant, to be spent on a 85 mile long high-speed rail line between Madison and Milwaukee. The vote was passed along partisan lines with the Democrats for and the Republican’s against. (BusinessWeek)

So Michigan has $244 million dollars allocated to construction of the of the Detroit-Chicago high-speed rail corridor, one  columnist from Freep weighs in on why the state should be happy it got so little — if they’d given more, then the they would have to figure out how to actually pay for the rest. (Freep)

OceanScope

Much has been made of re-purposing shipping containers for other uses, the Korean designers over at AnL Studio have come up with an observatory made out of them in Songdo New City, Incheon, South Korea.

The new observatory is called OceanScope, and was designed for Songdo New city as part of the city’s mandate to be a new forward looking sustainable city. The structure has three containers placed at different angles placed at ten, 30 and 50 degrees so that visitors can ascend and look out  over the harbour.

In Korea old containers are often re-purposed and used as shelters in many rural areas in Korea because of their inexpensive cost. The problem however is that use of many of these temporary re-purposed containers don’t blend in with their surroundings and contribute to visual pollution.

The OceanScope is a response to an initiative from the Mayor of Incheon City, who is in charge of Songdo New City. Incheon is one of the biggest harbours in Korea and thus has a plethora of cast off shipping containers to work with. The Mayor challenged designers to tap the potential of unused containers for practical re-use in public spaces and to provide the bleak containers with a functional aesthetic that could be assimilated within rural and urban environments.

Fact Sheet

Project name : OceanScope
Client: Incheon Metropolitan City,Korea / Cho Dong-Am, Ahn Young-Sik
Program: Public Observatory
Location: Songdo New City, Incheon, South Korea

Architect & Designer: Keehyun Ahn, Minsoo Lee
Planning & Producing : Chang Gil-Hwang, Kim Yong-Bae

Photography by Park So-Young and Chang Gil-Hwang.

Roadside Fries

A street artist in Seoul leaves an impromptu installation on the side of an alley in Seoul. Photo by Nathan Hudon

Lumitectura

Lumitectura from barno on Vimeo.

A music video about the relation of light, music and architecture.

Music by Saltillo
“The Opening” from the album Ganglion.

Real estate lotteries, bidding wars, and tax audits in New Songdo

The Prau is a mixed-use office-apartment building going up in the New Songdo free economic zone in South Korea. The instant smart city being built by Gale International, Cisco and other partners. Kolon construction is another of the partner firms involved in New Songdo and has built one of the most fiercely speculated on residential towers in the last couple of years. One of the unique things about the Korean real estate market is the lottery. Due to intense population demands and real estate speculation most affordable housing, or price stabilized housing is handed out using a lottery system. Put down your deposit and wait to see if you get lucky.

The Prau attracted a flurry of interest due to its relative low cost compared to other developments in the New Songdo area. Each Pyeong, (3.3m²) is priced at 6.5 million won which is about $6954 which is about 3 million won less then equivalent properties in near by buildings. The smallest units in the development at  55.98m² are expected to sell for about 65 million won or 56,705.742 USD. The units are especially hot because they are eligible for immediate resale because they are not in one of the ‘speculative areas.’ In the ‘speculative areas’ residents are not allowed to resell apartments that have not been occupied. Overall 257,706 people applied for the lottery of the 27 smallest units, (those under 66m²) with a required deposit of 5 million won. S 597,192 people applied in total for the 123 studio apartment/officetels.  As the building is a mixed apartment/officetel the units can be used as either residences or offices.

According to the Korea Times the National Tax Service intends to audit the 123 people who won the lottery for units in the building to hunt down speculative buyers and sellers. The government sent tax officials out to monitor the streets around the construction site and the showroom to monitor back-door sales of property rights.

“We decided to launch meticulous tax audits as the Songdo officetels can encourage speculative investment on the real estate market, which has been stabilized recently’’ S

Washington 2054

What does the city of the future look like?

James Clyne gives us a look at his vision for the future with some stills from Minority Report.  The concept for what Washington DC looks like in the background cityscape is a series of hyperstructures that nestle up to the Patomac.  It look green and shiny and it is hard to really grasp the amount of structure/infrastructure required for a  city/building of this scope. The it’s a future that is any developer’s most glorious dream for construction prospects over the next 44 years.

Stay tuned for other artists visions of what the future brings in the weeks to come.

KIDZ GET THIS

Stencil work captured on the side of a building in Seoul. Photo by Nathan Hudon

The University as a City-Builder

As a part time student at an urban university I see first hand the difficulties that an urban university can have fitting in with the surrounding city fabric. Two years ago Ryerson University declared its intention to become a city builder and work to improve its interface with the surrounding urban environment as well as be a catalyst for improvement and revitalization.

The Globe and Mail
ELIZABETH CHURCH

EDUCATION REPORTER

From Thursday’s Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 12:00AM EST Last updated on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2010 3:28AM EST

Ryerson University is looking to take its place on the Yonge Street strip, tapping a team of local and international architects to present a new face to the city.

Toronto-based Zeidler Partnership Architects and Snohetta of Oslo, Norway, will design the school’s new student learning centre on the former Sam the Record Man site. The duo’s combined portfolio includes libraries in small town Ontario and in world centres. Snohetta, named after a mountain in Norway said to be the site of the legendary Valhalla, is best known for its design of the massive Alexandria library in Egypt, which draws nearly 10,000 daily visitors.

The Yonge Street building will be of a smaller scale – an estimated 10 storeys tucked between storefronts, busy thoroughfares and the existing library, but the vision is grand.

“The student learning centre will be a transformative building for the university and the city,” said Ryerson President Sheldon Levy.

Read More!

Toys

Over at KubatON.com. Taking time to lean out of the window and play with the cars in the parking lot below.

The Urban Umbrella

Another young south Korean, Young-Hwan Choi has come up with an innovative and winning proposal for protecting pedestrians on our city streets. The last one involved plasma lasers and other high tech futurism, but this one is rather remarkable in its simplicity and immediate practicality.

Most people don’t really think of them but the wood and metal rod pedestrian sheds that protect pedestrians as we walk past construction sites are yet another part of the city. In New York contractors are legally required to keep the sidewalks clear and pedestrians safe. Most of the time these sheds are dark and unpleasant to walk through.

The city of New York wanted to do something about this so they sponsored a design competition to see who could build it better. Young-Hwan Choi built it better and now has $10,000 and a comitment from the city of New York to build a mock up and potentially take it into production.

“I tried to think, ‘What is wrong with this scaffolding?’ It’s complicated. I thought the structure should be simplified.” S

The Urban Dinosaur

Tyrannosaurus Rex spotted in a park in Seoul.

The Tote

by Serie Architects

The Tote is a series of renovated pavilions at the Mumbai Race Course that have been converted to a wine bar, restaurant, pre-function and banquet facilities. The goal of the project was to maintain the shell of the pavilions themselves but to give them a new interior. The Tote is a heritage structure and in its past hosted bookies and hopefulls trying their luck on the races.  The project sought to maintain the roof profile for three quarters of the pavilion structures and preserved the full roof for the other quarter. From the outside the Tote pavilion maintains its colonial facade, but when you pass through the doors it is like passing into an enchanted forest, its almost like you fell  into Narnia. Up in the ‘branches’ there are strategically placed skylights in abstract shapes that mimic the effect of sunlight breaking through foliage.

One of the most striking aspects of the site isn’t so much the buildings themselves but the Rain Trees that surround it. The Rain trees cover the open spaces around the pavilions and providing shade and extensive outdoor space that can be utilized for events and programming. These mature Rain Trees influenced the design of the steel support trusses which echo their shape. This, combined with the expansive glass creates a transparency between the indoor and outdoor spaces and and meets the firm’s goal of a ‘continuously differentiated space’ with no clear boundary into the conservation building. The branches af the support trusses are also differentiated depending on their location within the pavilions.

“Therefore each dining program (wine bar, restaurant, pre-function, and banquet facilities) is captured within a different spatial volume, defined by the variable degree of the branching structure, the structure branches into finer structural members as it approaches the ceiling.  When the branches touch the ceiling, the ceiling plan is punctured with a series of opening corresponding to the intersection of the branches with the purlins and rafters. These openings become light coves and slits. “

Juxtiposing the lightness downstairs the 40ft long bar upstairs has dark chocolate wood pannels that give the impression of looking at a folded orgami figure or kaleidoscope.  The original cubbyhole betting windows, were left.

The Transparent City

Photographed by Michael Wolf.

Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be on the other side of the plate glass window? What would it be like to be on the outside looking in?

A new book of Urban Photography by Michael Wolf takes a look at the city from the outside in.

Chicago, like many urban centres throughout the world, has recently undergone a surge of new construction, grafting a new layer of architectural experimentation onto those of past eras. In early 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Photography‚ with the support of U.S. Equities Realty, invited Michael Wolf as an artist-in-residence. Bringing his unique perspective on changing urban environments to a city renowned for its architectural legacy, Wolf chose to photograph the central downtown area, focusing specifically on issues of voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux.

Pick up the book over at  aperture foundation

Building the Urban Network

I came across an interesting article the other day while surfing the interweb about the future of new city building in Asia, (which is one of the few places in the world where cities spring up from scratch). In this age of bundling and value add ons comes a different vision of what a city is, how to make them more efficient, how they should be built, and how a couple of companies think they should be built. Estimates put spending on global infrastructure at $35 trillion over the next two decades and the new city market itself is likely to be worth at least $500 billion in the next ten years. How’s that for a growth industry?

Fast Company

Cisco’s Big Bet on New Songdo: Creating Cities From Scratch

By: Greg LindsayFebruary 1, 2010

The world is bracing for an influx of billions of new urbanites in the coming decades, and tech companies are rushing to build new green cities to house them. Are these companies creating a smarter metropolis — or just making money?

Stan Gale is exultant. The chairman of Gale International yanks off his tie, hitches up his pants, and mops the sweat and floppy hair from his brow. He’s beaming like a proud new papa, sprung from the waiting room and handing out cigars to whoever happens by. Beckoning me to follow, he saunters across eight lanes of traffic toward his baby, delivered prematurely days before.

Ten years ago, Gale was a builder and flipper of office parks who would eventually become known for knocking down the Boston landmark Filene’s Basement and replacing it with a hole in the ground. But Gale’s fate began to change in 2001 with a phone call from South Korea. The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea’s banks and its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.

New Songdo City won’t be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on the 100-acre “Central Park” modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan’s. Climbing on all sides will be a mix of low-rises and sleek spires — condos, offices, even South Korea’s tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park’s canal, we hear cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I ask whether he’s stocked the canal with fish yet. “It’s four days old!” he splutters, forgetting he isn’t supposed to rest until the seventh.

As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there’s a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It’s an “international business district” and an “aerotropolis” — a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it’s supposed to be a “smart city,” studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its “Smarter Planet” religion.

Being seriously ahead of the curve explains why Gale had such a hard time finding a tech partner to bring this dream to fruition. First in line was LG, one of Korea’s homegrown conglomerates. None of its ideas had made it past the prototype stage. Next up was Microsoft, which signed a deal giving it carte blanche to mold the city in its image. “Designing an entirely new city from the ground up provides a unique opportunity to create an ideal technological infrastructure,” Bill Gates boasted. But before he could even measure for drapes, Gale decided a plumber would be a better fit and threw Microsoft over for Cisco.

Last spring, the networking giant became New Songdo’s exclusive supplier of digital plumbing. More than simply installing routers and switches — or even something so banal as citywide Wi-Fi — Cisco is expected to wire every square inch of the city with synapses. From the trunk lines running beneath the streets to the filaments branching through every wall and fixture, it promises this city will “run on information.” Cisco’s control room will be New Songdo’s brain stem.

And that’s just the beginning. No longer content to sell just plumbing, the company is teaming up with Gale, 3M, United Technologies (UTC), and the architects of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) to enter the instant-city business. At a Cisco event near New Songdo last summer, Gale stunned the room by announcing plans to eventually roll out 20 new cities across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. In the spirit of Moore’s Law, he says, each will be done faster, better, cheaper, year after year.

Cisco calls this Smart+Connected Communities initiative a potential $30 billion opportunity, a number based not only on the revenues from installation of the basic infrastructure but also on selling the consumer-facing hardware as well as the services layered on top of that hardware. Picture a Cisco-built digital infrastructure wired to Cisco’s TelePresence videoconferencing screens mounted in every home and office, with engineers listening, learning, and releasing new Cisco-branded bandwidth-hungry services in exchange for modest monthly fees. You’ve heard of software as a service? Well, Cisco intends to offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities — water, power, traffic, telephony — into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident’s bill.

Read More!

Downtown Oklahoma – a budding tale of uban renewal.

YES for MAPS | MySpace Video

The city of Oklahoma has had some great news recently, two differrent energy companies have decided to construct or revamp their headquarters in the core. Sandridge and Devon Energy Corporation have both announced plans to move their operations into the downtown.

Devon Energy broke ground on its 50-story tower in October for its tower and the building is among the tallest under construction in America.  The new headquarters building will also be the state’s tallest building when it opens in 2012. As part of their construction plans the company is also contributing to $140 million worth of upgrades in the downtown, including new sidewalks, bicycle lanes and two-way streets. The company is also pretty with the current construction climate.  “It’s a great time to build a building. We can get it done faster and cheaper than during the boom,” said Larry Nichols, Devon’s chief executive. “We’re ahead of schedule and under budget.”

Devon’s building, however, is not the only construction project in Oklahoma City. In December, city voters approved a $777 million tax package for a 70-acre central park, streetcar system, convention centre, boating facilities, aquatic centers, and trails that will be built over the next nine years.

“It’s the best possible example of how a populace must tax themselves if they want public works,” says Rogers Marvel principal Rob Rogers. “I just wish we would recognize that nationally.”

When the city of Oklahoma bottomed out in the 90s, voters approved the Metropolitan Area Projects Plan (MAPS) as a means to finance the reconstruction of downtown. The MAPS initiative was the first-of-its-kind one-cent sales tax, it had a strict time limit of five years. Though voters later agreed to extended it. MAPS raised $360 million through taxation and was assisted by more than a billion dollars in private investment which went towards building a new central library, a minor-league ballpark, the Bricktown entertainment district, and other public works. Later a second “MAPS for Kids,” was implemented for city schools, and a third MAPS initiative, the previously mentioned $777 million package, was passed by voters in December. This one for the “Core to Shore” plan, which will rerouting the I-40 elevated expressway that cuts through town and expand the downtown toward the Oklahoma River.

The other booked to the downtown renewal came through the unveiling of Sandridge’s plans for a $100 million expansion of its downtown headquarters across three city blocks. What is different about the Sandridge plan however is that their plans include a renovated 1960s Pietro Belluschi tower, and a renovated Braniff Building–built in 1923 by the brothers who started the airline that the building was named after.

Sandridge’s plan goes against local practice by reusing existing buildings, rather then heading for a corporate campus out in the suburbs. The CEO of Sandridge, Tom Ward was a major reson the company stayed downtown when most of its employees wanted to head for the hills. Ward found the suburban campus plans were both too expensive and too inflexible for his growth plans and his desire to take the company from 600 to 1,500 employees.

“Their first response was that it was going to be a longer commute, and the idea was not one they embraced originally,” Ward says. “And then the Thunder came to town and a lot of things started changing.” (Ward incidentally owns a minority stake in the Oklahoma City Thunder).

If there is one thing that can be learned from downtown Oklahoma it is that resident iniatives like the MAPS program supported by private investment can make a difference in the vitality of our cities.

“If you’re an urbanist, vacancy of any kind is super tough,” said Rogers. “So the decision to go downtown and be a part of the city, to redevelop and reuse, is fundamentally about reinvigorating downtown. Everybody talks about being green, but one of the greenest things you can do is simply reuse things.”

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