Of windy cities, neighbourhood development and construction gone wrong.

Blair Kamin talks fusing modern with traditional: An expansion Done Right.

In the Toronto Star Christopher Hume gets excited about a waterfront proposal.

Do you prefer the edgy or the grand, and where do you want your cultural institutions? its A Tale of Two Downtowns.

Don’t you just want to hug a designer? How Designers Banded Together to Remake New York’s Libraries.

What could possibly go wrong with a government contract? Find out in the tale of Government Square!

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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.

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)

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!

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!

Some call it the ‘subway to nowhere.’ Mel Lastman knows better

(Published by National Post on August 12, 2000 1:31 PM)

Malcolm Kelly
National Post

Walking eastward down the quiet westbound tunnel of Mel Lastman’s “Subway to Nowhere,” still two years away from seeing its first official train in mid-2002, a thought suddenly strikes: Despite its now well-known nickname, the new Sheppard Avenue line does indeed go somewhere.

At a cost of $932.9-million, the subway goes to Fairview Mall. And it goes to the North York General Hospital and Seneca College’s Leslie Campus.

And to the Bayview Village Shopping Centre, Michael of Willowdale’s Hair Design and the Altima Dental Centre.

It goes to a pair of Esso stations and a Shell station. And to Ikea.

It’s Mel’s Subway to a Shopping Mall.

Was the Mayor out of his mind when he proposed this? Or was he smarter than the rest of us?

Jump to this article

The story of Fiddler’s Castle on Honeycrock Farm in Salfords England has been going on for years now. We first highlighted the story back in July 2008 and that post continues to be one of the highest traffic drivers to the urbanneighbourhood.com. Yesterday the Homes From Hell episode that featured the story of Fidler’s Castle must have been shown again because there was a spike of almost 1000 people who visited for that very reason. Because of all the interest we decided to do some more research and see if we could find any news.

On November 19th 2009 Mr Fidler went before the British High Court in a bid to convince High Court Judge Sir Thane Forbes to overturn the decision of the government planning inspector who ruled that the structure had to be torn down in May of 2008.

The key aspect of the case revolves around a decision as to when the construction of the house was “substantially completed”. Mr Fidler and his counsel argue that the home was finished in 2002 when Mr Fidler and his family moved into the building and no further modifications were made to the structure for the next four years.

Planning law in the Reigate & Banstead Borough states that if a property is “substantially completed” for four years, it is legally allowed to exist.

In 2006 four years after construction of the house itself was completed Mr Fidler removed the barricade of straw bales and tarpaulin, believing that since the building had been completed for four years it should be granted planning permission.

Image by Flickr User Pilgrimbridgeclub

The government planning inspector argued otherwise finding that “the removal of the straw bale disguise constituted part of the building works” and as a result the inspector found that Mr Fidler could not rely on the four year immunity period which starts from “substantial completion,” and the Reigate & Banstead Borough Council issued a demolition notice.

Mr Fidler’s appeal, launched on the 19th of November centres on the question of when exactly the castle was “complete.” The town argues that the removal of the hay bales was a substantial part of construction, the lawyers for the Fidler family argues that it was not. “The appellant’s case is that the removal of the bales was not part of the building operation against which the enforcement notice was directed.” The Fidler’s argue that the removal of the straw bales was a separate operation and as such doesn’t breach planning control. Consul argued that the building was “substantially complete” more then four years earlier in 2002 when the family moved into the home and that “no other reasonable conclusion is possible… construction was complete and it was in occupation… the removal of the bales cannot even be classified as part of a building operation. The decision was wrong in law and should be quashed”.

Image by Flickr User Pilgrimbridgeclub

High Court Justice Thane Forbes Stated “The key point in your case is whether the inspector was right to conclude that the removal of the bales and the tarpaulin formed part of the building operation.”

At the end of the two days of arguments before the High Court Justice Forbes reserved judgment and is expected to give his decision in writing soon.

Of course even that may not be the end of it, Robert Fidler has already stated “We are determined to take this all the way to the top. We are quite sure that ultimately we will win”.

Image by Flickr User Pilgrimbridgeclub

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A Tale of Two Cites

Its a tale of two cities and two ways of designing them Seattle and Vancouver are both considered to be good urban models, each with their own issues, but overall they are design and planning styles that many other cities seek to emulate. In this addition of neighbourhood news we take a look a a set of media where spokespeople from either city spoke out in favour of the other.

Crosscut

The Great Vancouver vs. Seattle Debate

Two of the region’s civic heavyweights squared off at the Seattle Public Library on June 18 to settle the issue about which of Cascadia’s two biggest cities has the best built environment, Seattle or Vancouver, BC. It was a rematch of a debate conducted earlier in the week in Vancouver, sponsored by VIA Architecture, which has offices in both cities.

Making the pro-Vancouver case was Seattle’s Peter Steinbrueck; arguing for Seattle, Vancouver’s Gordon Price. Both are devoted sustainability advocates, both have spent years on their respective city councils. Steinbrueck is an architect who has taught at the University of Washington; Price heads up Simon Fraser University’s City Program and writes and lectures about urban planning. The shorthand introduction that Seattleites could relate to: “Gordon Price is the Peter Steinbrueck of Vancouver,” said moderator C.R. Douglas. Let’s just say the debate was between two apples arguing about which town had better oranges.

The debates focused on the positives of each city, and tended to prove the adage that the grass is always greener on the other side of your neighbor’s fence. Instead of rehashing (you can find one or both debates on Twitter feeds, a webcast and the Seattle Channel), I thought I would digest it by providing a list of the “pros” for each city that came up, with Steinbrueck mostly speaking for the Vancouver side of the equation and Price for the Seattle side. And then a couple of summary “con” comments on major downsides.

The gist for architects, planners, policy-makers, and citizens is that, as Robert Burns said, seeing ourselves as other see us is a gift that helps us question cherished assumptions.

Seattle urbanophiles, for example, love to tout Vancouver’s skinny towers as the end-all of downtown living and something to emulate. Price, on the other hand, found much to envy in Seattle’s risk-taking architecture and individualistic neighborhoods, and much mediocrity in Vancouver’s look-alike high-rises. READ MORE

Via Architecture

A Royal Row

You may or may not be aware that recently the Prince of Whales sent a letter to the Qatari Royal Family requesting that they withdraw the plan they had previously selected for a site called the Chelsea Barracks  and take it to open consultation to come up with a plan that was in his opinion more suited to the character of the surrounding neighbourhoods. The Qataris then took the stunning step of not just revising the plan, but ditching the whole thing. Much to the delight of some… the prince and most of the surrounding residents… but to the absolute horror of others… architectural firm that lost the business, headed by Lord Rogers of Riverside (an unelected member of the British Government) and other modernists in love with the design. Now the screaming has begun, and the Prince is being charged with overstepping his authority by the deposed Lord Rogers.

“The prince always goes round the back to wield his influence, using phone calls or, in the case of the Chelsea Barracks, a private letter. It is an abuse of power because he is not willing to debate. He has made his representations two and a half years late and anyone else would have been shown the door. We should examine some of the ethics of this situation. Someone who is unelected, will not debate but will use the power bestowed by his birthright must be questioned.”

The Super Creative Plan by Lord Rogers

Personally while I can understand the need to bitch by the looser in this case it should be noted that the first master plan by Lord Rogers wasn’t exactly a gem of public consultation, and didn’t have the support of the surrounding residents. Plus to some it extent what good is it to be a prince if you can not write a letter telling other Royal Families what you think about things? Then Lord Rogers goes on to insult the Qataris by suggesting that “the Qataris never sorted out the difference between royalty and government.” Suggesting that they somehow had no idea that Prince Charles isn’t actually in charge of anything, that the Prince tricked them into thinking that he had some sort of power. Right…. so Lord Rogers is suggesting that the Qataris have no idea how the legal system and system of governance works in England? Because they don’t have TVs and Access to the Internet? Because they don’t have their own giant legal team who knows this stuff? PLEASE!  Try to accept your loss like a real Lord, Mr Rogers. Have a little dignity, and try not to insult the intelligence of one of the largest development corporations in the world. Or its unlikely they will be knocking on your door for any new contracts any time soon, and as one of the articles puts it, “Rogers has been paid millions, so I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him.”

The Wall Street Journal

Prince Charles Tears Down Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood

In front of the Palace of Westminster, the so-called Mother of Parliaments that is the heart of the British democratic system, stands a well-tended bronze statue of broad-belted, big-booted Oliver Cromwell. He was the “Lord Protector” who ruled during the short-lived republic that followed the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I. Cromwell might be excused a wry smile right now because another royal Charles is, some say, challenging the dearly held British principle of a constitutional monarchy. And all because of a row over architecture. Prince Charles, a vehement antimodernist, is up to his old tricks again.

The row has now escalated, with an English Baron — Lord Rogers of Riverside, better known as the architect Richard Rogers — calling for an official tribunal to examine the role of Prince Charles in state affairs. Mr. Rogers is incandescent with rage, and no wonder. It has emerged that the prince personally wrote to the Qatari prime minister (himself of royal blood) to ensure that a £6 billion ($9.85 billion) Rogers-designed housing development in the upmarket London enclave of Chelsea was withdrawn by its developer.

That developer, Qatari Diar, happens to be a company owned by the Qatari royal family. Prince has therefore spoken unto prince, ignoring the usual planning-approval process, the British government — everybody. Charles’s letter — the substance of which has been leaked, though not the actual text — decried the Rogers design. The neoclassical style of another architect, Quinlan Terry, was much more preferable, Prince Charles said. Last week Qatari Diar duly dropped Mr. Rogers like a hot potato, just as the architect’s design for the former Chelsea Barracks site was being recommended for approval by both local planners and the various national architecture and conservation agencies. Read More

Building

Only Charles has kept his dignity on Chelsea Barracks

The quiet dignity maintained by Lord Rogers for the past few months while all and sundry speculated about his doomed Chelsea Barracks scheme was comprehensively shattered this week, as you may have seen reported here and there.

In a hissy fit of architectural proportions, His Lordship took to the airwaves on Tuesday to accuse Prince Charles of “unconstitutional meddling”. Rogers added insult to injury in that day’s Guardian, muttering about “abuses of power” and calling for a public inquiry to examine the Prince’s role in constitutional society. Harsh words from the mild-mannered Rogers, but given the way in which he and his practice have been treated on this perhaps you can’t blame him for throwing his toys out of the pram in such a fashion.

The design team was, I am told, assured of its position on the scheme by Qatari Diar no fewer than ten days before they unceremoniously withdrew the proposals from planning. Rogers was informed of the withdrawal just a single hour before the rest of us were. Curiously though, the Evening Standard knew enough to predict such a thing would happen the evening before. This has been a story dictated by private briefings from all manner of interested parties. No wonder none of us had the faintest idea what was going on.

One thing is clear, though. Throughout it all, Prince Charles has remained tight-lipped as to the nature of his “intervention”, as that is what we are calling it. An intervention is something that an alcoholic’s family and friends carry out to stop them from abusing their health. Perhaps the Prince sees himself as the kindly, benevolent figure preventing Chelsea from taking to the intoxicating liquer of modernism. We don’t know. Clarence House has steadfastly refused to confirm or deny any involvement by the Prince on Chelsea Barracks. As far as I am aware, the Prince has not mentioned either Lord Rogers or the development by name at any point in this whole furore. Read More

Forbes

Richard Rogers Gets Fired

Architect Richard Rogers is in a steaming bate. He’s really very cross. There he stands, on the cusp of 76, a long and windy career in modernism behind him.

He has been feted by breathless peers and is quite the most modish and prosperous of intellectual Center Lefties in Western Europe. And yet he has just had his year ruined by two royal families.

Stamp, stamp, stamp go two little booties. Curses hurtle through the air. Kyboshed by hereditary princes! Lord Rogers of Riverside, an unelected member of the British Parliament, cries that it is an undemocratic outrage.

Having worked for months on a 3-billion-pound building proposal in central London’s former Chelsea Barracks, Rogers learned last week that the developers have pulled out of the glass-and-steel scheme at the 11th hour.

Why? Because Britain’s Prince Charles did not like the look of the thing.

The prince, whose traditionalist views are well known, wrote to one of the development’s leading financiers. We do not know the exact wording because the letter was private. It is understood, however, to have expressed horror at the aesthetic damage the shiny, angular Rogers design would have done to one of London’s more architecturally conservative quarters.

The recipient of the letter, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani, is not only prime minister and foreign affairs minister of the Arab emirate of Qatar but also a member of that prosperous territory’s royal family. We can only imagine what happened. A flunky, bowing low, intones: “A hand-written letter for you, O Sheikh, written on the notepaper of Clarence House, London residence of the Prince of Wales.” The Sheikh strokes his luxuriant moustachings, plops another date into his mouth and licks his sticky fingertips before breaking the seal on the English Basildon Bond envelope. Read More

BDonline

Chelsea Barracks Developer Draws up New Shortlist

Chelsea Barracks developer Qatari Diar is preparing to invite a dozen practices including SOM, Allies & Morrison, Edaw and Demetri Porphyrios to pitch for its revised masterplan.

Firms will shortly be asked by the Middle Eastern developer if they are interested in coming up with alternatives to the abandoned Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners design with a view to selecting a shortlist of no more than six practices and choosing a winner by the end of the year, BD understands.

But the architects will be under pressure to refuse to take part after Labour MP Ken Purchase tabled an early day motion on Tuesday calling for a boycott.

Qatari Diar has approached consultants including Cabe and the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment for unpaid advice. And a source close to the developer said it was keen to “crack on” with a new scheme.

“It is on the cusp of approaching firms to form a long list of possible bidders,” the source said. “Some will say no from the off but others will have a look.”

Despite its ejection from the project, Rogers Stirk Harbour is believed to have been paid between £10 million and £20 million for its work on the scheme, originally for developer Christian Candy’s CPC Group.

“Rogers has been paid millions, so I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him,” the source added. Read More.

Unpaved Paradise and Get Rid of that Parking Lot

Design by Field Operations and Diller Scofidio +

New York Magazine

Elevated

The High Line’s levitating parkland has been so long and so rapturously anticipated that the nine-block segment that opens this week can hardly compete with its own story. The tale is a triumph of urban salvage. A pair of young preservationists falls in love with a weedy, ironbound rail bed threading its way above the streets of West Chelsea and the meatpacking district. Owners of the lots it crosses want to tear it down. Finally, through the miracle of persuasion, the elevated railway is converted from eyesore to amenity. But wait: There’s the real-estate subplot! Developers use the little park to leverage their most wild-eyed ambitions. City officials rewrite the zoning, values climb, and architects arrive from the far corners of the realm.

At this point we find ourselves with two distinct High Lines. One is a quiet passeggiata of deliberately rough design, the other a larger district of new art and fresh development. A year ago, the condos popping up along Tenth Avenue were a visible expression of consumer confidence. Cocky buyers were spending $2,000 for each square foot of as-yet-nonexistent floor space and a hundred times that much for a patch of colored canvas with which to adorn their future walls. (The world has changed; the apartments keep on coming, whether they’re wanted or not, and who knows if anyone will be buying art to furnish them?) Read More

The Real Deal

Times Square Goes From Pavement To Park

ratherbebiking

(Source: ratherbebiking on Flickr)

In those humble, semi-comical lawn chairs that are newly strewn across Broadway at the intersection of Times Square, you are witnessing the future of New York City and, indeed, the future of the city itself as a human institution

As of last week, the Bloomberg administration made good on its promise to close Broadway down, at least provisionally, from 42nd to 47th streets (and also from 33rd to 35th streets). In part the pilot project is intended to relieve congestion by redirecting vehicular traffic to Sixth and Seventh avenues. (The mayor has yet to decide whether the pedestrian mall will be permanent.)

But more vitally, it is a recognition of how cities are evolving on our post-industrial planet. For the first time in history, urban-ness has become its own reward. People come to cities not for their careers, but for the sheer pleasure of urban experience. And though it is well known that New York was the first city to enter the modern age, it is no less true that it is the first city to have entered the post-industrial age. Read More

Critical looks at the future of city building.

The Washington Post

In Va., Vision of Suburbia at a Crossroads

Targeting Cul-de-Sacs, Rules Now Require Through Streets in New Subdivisions

Virginia is taking aim at one of the most enduring symbols of suburbia: the cul-de-sac.

“Cul-de-sacs are the safest places in America to live,” said Mike Toalson, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Virginia, which opposes the new rules. “The first lots sold are often on the cul-de-sacs because they are safe.” As for developments with single entrances and exits, Toalson said, such configurations ensure that all traffic is local, neighbors watch out for each other and speeds are kept down. “Crooks look for multiple exits.”

Prince William County residents Brian and Donna Goff chose to raise their children in a cul-de-sac life. They live on Vixen Court, one of seven cul-de-sacs in Bridlewood Manor, a subdivision in Bristow. “You’ve got a family atmosphere. It stays quiet here,” said Brian Goff, 42. The couple, who have two young children, have lived in the cul-de-sac for nine years.

The changes come as cash-strapped states and localities can no longer afford the inexorable widening of secondary roads that are overburdened with traffic from the subdivisions, strip malls, schools and office buildings that feed into them. The system forces drivers to enter these traffic-choked roads to go even 50 yards or so to the neighborhood coffeehouse or elementary school. North Carolina and Portland, Ore., are moving on similar fronts.  Read More.

NYTimes

Reinventing America’s Cities: The Time Is Now

THE country has fallen on hard times, but those of us who love cities know we have been living in the dark ages for a while now. We know that turning things around will take more than just pouring money into shovel-ready projects, regardless of how they might boost the economy. Windmills won’t do it either. We long for a bold urban vision.

With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.

Such policies have caused many of our urban centers to devolve into generic theme parks and others, like Detroit, to decay into ghost towns. They have also sparked the rise of ecologically unsustainable gated communities and reinforced economic disparities by building walls between racial, ethnic and class groups.

Correcting this imbalance will require a radical adjustment in how we think of cities and government’s role in them. At times it will mean destruction rather than repair. And it demands listening to people who have spent the last decade imagining and in many cases planning for more sustainable, livable and socially just cities. Read More

Hey Curator, Whats the deal?

Dallas News
Austin’s Blanton Museum shows ‘Birth of the Cool: California Art Design and Culture at Midcentury’

AUSTIN – Atomic design, Eames era, midcentury modern: The post-World War II art and architecture that embraced the future is known by all these names. At the Blanton Museum of Art, more than 200 of the very best examples are on display in an exhibition called “Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury.”

Here is the creative intersection among artists, architects, musicians, industrial designers and filmmakers that spawned hard-edged abstract paintings, glass and steel houses, jazz music, fiberglass and plywood furniture, and graphic arts that are considered some of the foundation stock of American modernism.

The title “Birth of the Cool” comes from a 1949 Miles Davis album. You can admire this cover design among a wall of jazz album covers and a series of stunning black-and-white photographs by William Claxton of Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, June Christy, Gerald Mulliganand Sonny Rollins as you sit in an Eero Saarinen tulip chair in a Blanton gallery.

Swivel slightly and view an enormous photograph of Charles and Ray Eames’ and Saarinen’s Case Study House #9. It was designed for Arts and Architecture magazine publisher and visionary John Entenza, who anticipated the need for affordable housing at the end of the Second World War and asked the most innovative architects of the time to design modern, easy-to-produce family homes.

Initially the houses were only realized on the pages of the magazine. Eventually 36 were built in Southern California, and as a group they are considered by many to be the most important contribution to American modernist residential architecture. Unfortunately, they never found a mass audience or builder willing to bankroll an entire subdivision. The few that still exist are fiercely protected by their owners and revered by architectural historians. Read More

Mlive.com

Grand Rapids Art Museum swaps Eero Saarinen architecture exhibit for smaller show to save money

GRAND RAPIDS — The tough economic climate has led the Grand Rapids Art Museum to revise one of its exhibitions planned for this summer.

A major retrospective of work by architect and designer Eero Saarinen organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York has been canceled. It will be replaced by a smaller show of work by Eero Saarinen and his father, Eliel Saarinen, a mid-20th century Finnish-American designer. The collection comes from the Cranbrook Art Museum in the Detroit Area.

Canceling the larger touring exhibition and replacing it with a smaller special loan installation was a cost-cutting decision, said museum director Celeste Adams.

“We are managing challenging economic times and are being careful about committing to the costs associated with large exhibitions right now,” Adams said.

The original exhibition “Shaping the Future,” scheduled to open June 2, would have occupied 6,000 square feet in the museum. Currently, it appears in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis through April 27. Read More

Ozarks First

The New Yorker

Toddlin’ Town: Daniel Burnham’s great Chicago Plan turns one hundred.

Rendering of Burnham's vision for Chicago

Burnham was famous for the dictum “Make no little plans,” and Jules Guerin’s alluring watercolor renderings in the published “Plan of Chicago” gave this vision an ethereal cast.
In the mid-eighteen-nineties, Daniel Burnham, then the most prominent architect in Chicago, met with a young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright. Burnham had been impressed by Wright’s talent but felt that he could use some seasoning. He offered to pay Wright’s tuition at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, to support his family, and to give him a job when he returned. Wright turned him down. It was one of the few times that Burnham, who was probably the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced, didn’t get his way, and he told Wright that he was making a mistake: the Beaux-Arts style, of which Burnham was a leading exponent, was taking over the country, and Wright was deluded if he thought that his modern approach, with its open spaces and horizontal lines, would ever amount to much.

Burnham and Wright went their separate ways, but their paths kept crossing, because if you had anything to do with American architecture around the turn of the century you inevitably ran into Burnham. He designed the Flatiron Building, in New York; Union Station in Washington, D.C.; Orchestra Hall in Chicago; Selfridges department store, in London; and more banks and office buildings than you could count. He got the train tracks that had despoiled the Mall in Washington for much of the nineteenth century removed and headed a Washington planning commission that, among other achievements, set the location for the Lincoln Memorial. Most important of all, a hundred years ago, in 1909, Burnham completed work on a document with the unassuming title “Plan of Chicago” that remains the most effective example of large-scale urban planning America has ever seen. Assisted by the young city planner Edward H. Bennett, he laid out the shorefront of Lake Michigan, quadrupling the amount of parkland and thus insuring that the lakefront would forever be public open space. He created the Magnificent Mile, the double-decker roadway of Wacker Drive, and the recreational Navy Pier, which extends into Lake Michigan. Envisioning Chicago as the anchor of an enormous region, he drafted a rough outline of highways to connect the city to the places around it. Quite simply, Burnham determined the shape of modern Chicago. Continue Reading

Two Wheeled News

The Courier Journal

City aims to build center for bike commuters

The city is seeking federal money to develop a large bike station intended to encourage more bicycle commuting into downtown.

If the request for $1.3 million in federal Department of Transportation aid isn’t approved, the city will try to find other sources of money to help construct the facility on city-owned land somewhere downtown, said Chris Poynter, a spokesman for Mayor Jerry Abramson.

“We’ve been discussing the project for several years, and now we’re ready to move forward,” said Poynter, adding that the city hopes to have a design by year’s end and start construction once it is funded. “We’d like to have it built yesterday.”

Poynter said the intent is to have secure parking for bicycles, as well as lockers and showers to accommodate commuters who need to change into good clothes for the work day. A bike shop with rudimentary sales and repair services could also be part of the station, which would be close to bus lines, he said. Read More

Gotham Gazette

Bike Lanes Run into Opposition

Protesters showed up in clown suits. Their opponents threatened to barricade a major thoroughfare with school buses. A respected community board member was fired from her leadership post. The debate has involved lost jobs, injury — and even sex.

The source of all this controversy and activism? A bike lane.

With concerns about pollution, congestion and energy consumption, encouraging people to cycle instead of drive could be seen as a kind of motherhood and apple pie issue. But as the Department of Transportation greatly expands New York’s bicycling lanes, it has encountered opposition from local small manufacturing businesses, the Hasidic community and shop owners, among others.

“We would never have predicted that bike lanes could provoke so much upset,” Gowanus Lounge once observed after a community meeting on bike lanes, adding that a member of a local civic group said the issue “led to the most contentious meetings they have experienced, including discussions of Atlantic Yards.”

Some of the controversy undoubtedly stems from the frenzied competition for New York’s streets with motorists, cyclists, trucks, pedestrians, skaters and baby strollers all jostling up against each other for safe passage. Some critics, though, say the city, in its drive to expand bicycling, has not always consulted sufficiently with the affected communities . Read More