Urban Neighbourhood

The 3D Plan View

From military application to building design competition, one of the latest innovations in presenting geographic and building data are 3D plans created by Zebra Imaging. A constant issue when it comes to presenting design idea`s is how to have others see them the way you do. How do you have an average person conceptualize how the design is supposed to look embedded within the city. Well there is help using new technology from Zebra Imaging.

Zebra’s holographic images are unlike anything you have ever seen. The image literally “floats” in the air. You will be tempted to reach into the image with the expectation that you will touch the object being presented. You can move around the image to view it from a wide variety of angles with no special glasses or other viewing aids. S

A Tour Through Steve Jobs Abandoned Mansion

Photographer Jonathan Haeber has a great blog over at: Bearings that chronicals abandonments and other historic forgotten properties.

One of the entries that he accessed is the Jackling house a historic mansion in Woodside, California, designed and built for copper mining magnate Daniel Cowan Jackling and his family by the noted California architect George Washington Smith in 1925. Johnathan was able to access the Jacking House which is currently owned by apple big boss Steve Jobs. He takes a  series of rare, photos of the slowly decaying mansion, which has now been abandoned for over a decade.  Jobs has been trying to get permission to knock the building down so that he can put up his own ihouse (or something like that) while local preservationists have been trying to preserve the structure.  The battle is ongoing. But for now take a look at some of the great photos!

To see more prictures of the structure take a look at Jonathan`s blog.

Building Sketches

A Prayer for the Animals and Earth

Street Art painted on the back of a garage on Rue Maria in Saint Henri , Montreal Quebec.

Montreal 2025

A copy of the Montreal 2025 part of the city of Montreal’s counter proposal to Transport Quebec’s $1.5-billion Turcot redevelopment project.
Présentation médias_2010-04-21

Panel Gallery

Neighbourhood News April 20th – Rethinking Cities

A look at ways that people are suggesting that we make our cities better.

Brookings

April 14, 2010 —

Host: Why the focus on metros?

Bruce Katz: Metropolitan areas in the United States and here in Europe really concentrate all the assets that drive prosperity and will drive economic recovery. So the top 100 metropolitan areas in the United States — these are the big cities and the suburbs that surround them — sit on only 12 percent of the land mass, they house two-thirds of the population, they generate about three-quarters of the gross domestic product.

But when it comes to the assets that drive prosperity, they’re about 94 percent of venture capital in the United States, they’ve got all the talented workers, those with graduate degrees, the engineers, the scientists. They’re our freight hubs, rail and air, and they have that quality of place that really attracts, particularly, the younger generation. So they pack a really powerful punch. But the United States tends to think of itself as a network of small towns. It really doesn’t think of itself as a powerful metro nation. So to a large extent the country nor the states, because we are a union of states still in many respects, don’t really leverage the assets in these places. Take me to the article

Project for Public Spaces

Transformative Times: Earth Day 1970, Placemaking, and Sustainability Today

40 years ago this week, I coordinated the first Earth Day celebration in New York City. The city had never seen anything like it.

We were laying the groundwork for a new way of looking at the world—expanding the public’s thinking beyond the limited vision that characterized fields like industry, economics, science and politics to embrace a much larger view of the whole planet.

Earth Day transformed New York—literally. To draw attention to protecting the environment in cities, we turned Fifth Avenue into a “place” by eliminating traffic from 59^th Street to Union Square.  People poured out of offices and apartments to walk down the middle of the most important street in New York on a beautiful spring day. (This was five years before I founded Project for Public Spaces, but you can see the idea was already germinating.)

It was a lot of fun for everyone, but also a potent symbol that this new movement could bring great, positive changes to our lives.  And ideas born on the first Earth Day are beginning to come to fruition today, with the closing of portions of Broadway and the New York City Summer Streets Program which PPS helped bring about.

Union Square Park was the site of the main Earth Day celebration with an enormous stage set up for speakers, prayers and music. Booths promoting ecological awareness spread throughout the park. Bliss and the promise of a better world were in the air, along with whiffs of pot in a few isolated corners.

Under the Expressway

A view towards the underside of the Autoroute Jean Lesage after the Echangeur Turcot. Taken as part of a photo survey for a project I worked on to redevelop the Turcot Yards, that included a redesign of the Turcot Interchange and Highways 720 and 15.

Slow As A Beard!

'Slow As A Beard'

Graffiti with a turn of phrase about the time factor involved with beards. Seen painted on the Jersey barrier on the edge of the parking lot next to the St Henri Metro station in Montreal.

Drainage Ditches as Green Space.

Back when I lived in Ulsan 울산 South Korea I had a studio apartment for the first ten months next to a drainage ditch. About the only time of the year that the ditch was pretty was during Cherry Blossom week, the two weeks that the trees exploded into bloom that was a welcome change from Yellow Sand week. I often thought that it would be great if there was a path that ran down the side and maybe a little landscaping. Well it turns out that the city eventually came up with the same idea, though I have a feeling that the project in Seoul had a lot to do with it.

Thanks to a friend of mine who is currently residing in Ulsan we can see the second life of this former spillway. Cherry Blossom is still when its at its best but now it also  looks pretty good rest of the year. Photo by Deirdre Madden. Check out some of Dee’s city profiles here at Urban Neighbourhood.

Welcome to Alpha Dome City

Welcome to Alpha Dome City ‘알파ㆍ돔 시티(αㆍdom city)’! It is a mixed use commercial and residential project that at first glance looks like one massive building. Alpha Dome City a project with an opening 5 trillion won (4.5 million US/CAD) price tag is under construction in Kyung ki do – sung nam si bun dang gu pankyo dong,  near the intersection of the Pankyo Expressway and the Seoul Outer Ring Highway. The project is by commission of the Pangyo Mutal Fund Administration in partnership with Lotte Engineering and Construction Consortium who will be the project manager for the Alpha Dome. Korean news puts the total number of companies involved in the consortium at 16. The project will have a mixed media centre (read movie theatre) department stores, (no doubt Lotte Department Store will make an appearance) discount stores, a hotel, galleries and other facilities, along with approximately 946 residential units. The project team indicates that the development will take lessons from Germany’s Sony Centre, and Le Defence, France.

The Korean National Housing Corporation will have a number of units in the development, indicating that the project will have a number of low cost rental units and housing for sale pursuant to the Korean National Housing Corporation’s mandate to  provide affordable housing to low-income households and also to stabilize residential property prices through the large-size housing supply.

알파 돔

In korean news a member of the project team explains the significance of the name: Alpha (α) as the first letter of the Greek alphabet ‘to No. 1′, ‘first’, ‘the light of the strong astronomical constellation of stars’,’ The most important part ‘, is central to the vision for the site. S

The Most striking aspect of Alpha Dome City ‘알파ㆍ돔 시티(αㆍdom city)’ is, well the Dome. The project is a number of commercial and residential blocks spread over a couple city blocks, with the dome as a pedestrian accessible linking structure. The dome with plans for cultural exhibition facilities in this ‘sky gallery’. The Dome itself with have multiple cuts through the roof structure to allow light to penetrate into street scape within. Inside the development preference will be given to bicycle and pedestrain traffic as the part of the new naturalism movement in Korea.  Special thanks to Chung Eun Young for research assistance.

Futurama – your dream stagecoach.

On Sunday March 8th 2010 Jeremy Dean made New york City history by taking his converted Hummer entitled Futurama out for a spin. Entering Central park in New York at 69th St. and Central Park West (at the old Tavern on the Green location) Dean had his hand crafted vehicle pulled by two white horse aptly named Duke and Diesel.

Dean has taken a gas guzzling 8 mile-per-gallon HUMMER H2, a symbol of extravagance, and converted it into a working horse drawn cart. Dean has pimped it out with silver chrome, working LED lights and a booming audio and video system. He calls this piece the CEO Stagecoach.

Location View: Jeremy Dean, CEO Stagecoach, Central Park, New York, NY. 2010
videographer Gareth Paul Cox, editor Diego del Sol
video courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.

to view more on this project please visit: http://www.creativethriftshop.com