Recently I have made a number of posts regarding green buildings and the paradigm shift which will be necessary if we are even going to have a truly green architecture (see posts here and here). I bring this up again because i recently read two different articles online from two different architectural professionals from two different cultures, Martha Schwartz – a Boston & London based landscape architect and Harald Bodenschatz – a professor of Sociology and Planning in at the Technische Universität in Berlin and they both discuss similar goals for a more environmentally friendly development. Schwartz focuses on the urban landscape and its development (or lack thereof) currently as opposed to in a truly green environment, and Bodenscahtz focuses on the development of inner cities and suburbia as sustainable growth tactics and in such a way to help the European city thrive. While neither of these articles explicitly states my previously argued hypothesis (that in order to be a truly sustainably designed society we need to increase our population densities and thus maximize our transportation schemes), both provide intellectual support to my arguments. Without a new 21st century version of urban renewal – one which is culturally, environmentally and [...]
This past Sunday, The New York Times ran an article about bike sharing coming to DC (as did The Washington Post and The Associated Press.) I find it interesting that I had, not 4 days sooner, blogged about the Parisian and Viennese bicycle sharing programs.
The program, named SmartBike DC, is only currently going to be implemented in the North West of the District; the article mentions that there will only be 120 bikes and 10 stations in the system, but that it is hoped that it will grow to over a 1000. I applaud this move by the district and its partnering with clear channel which has made this a possibility. More government services should look to this as a test of private sponsorship as an alternative to privatization. In addition, I hope more bikes and racks are swiftly forthcoming, the more capacity this system has the greater the ridership and impact it will have.
Horns honking, cabbies swearing, streets filled with a slow moving mass of metal particles, pedestrians choking on exhaust fumes: Traffic. Nothing says Urban center like a heaping helping of fossil fuel consumption, or does it? Paris and Vienna have both rolled out free short term bicycle rentals (albeit at different scales) as a social experiment and attempt to reduce reliance on automobiles and ease traffic within the urban centers of these two European Cities.
Whether you know it by name or not, most of America has at one time or another come into contact with New Urbanism. This anti-modernist anti-sprawl post-modern offshoot which has been with us for almost 30 years, since the development of Seaside, Florida in 1980 held a conference in Old Town Alexandria, VA. If you understood the nature of New Urbanism, the fact that their conference was being held in one of the oldest downtowns in virginia is quite the irony.
New Urbanism stands for the creation of artificial suburban (and sometimes urban) downtowns and mixed use communities, something, which like the path to hell, is paved with good intentions. The problem I have always had with the New Urbanist movement is its non-organic nature. Communities get branded before they are built; house styles and strict zoning rules are pre-planned and approved by designers preventing any straying from the ideal image from entering the perfect new (sub)urban town. They also stand in direct opposition to Modernism; instead of drawing on both the strengths and weaknesses of modernism, they look to its failures and piece together historical pastiche architecture in an attempt to meet the needs of the present. Which is ironic, considering that modernism’s creed was to disregard all architecture that came before it to re-discover the natural forms of building.
Planetizen has an article about a new online mapping website by CNT that tracks housing prices and transportation costs as a function of the geographic median income. While I am leery that this information will always skew in favor of the urban centers, I do think that this website starts a dialogue about why the housing crunch is affecting so many people. When you overlay the data of housing costs and transportation costs in Northern Virginia alone, its easy to find areas where the total monthly average expenditure is approaching 50%. In a healthy economy this would be dangerous, but in our unstable tables this is a scenario rife for trouble.
Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, Little boxes, little boxes, Little boxes, all the same. There’s a Chinese one and a Indian one And a Turkish one and a Koreon one And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky And they all look just the same — an adaptation of Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds Suburbia, the American innovation/scourge, like many other parts of American culture appears to appeal to the rest of the citizens of Planet Earth as much as it does to us. According to an article by the nation’s coloring book USA Today world leaders are looking to the American suburb to learn how to better manager their own growth and development. At first glance this seems to be a cause for concern. American suburbs are not perfect, far from it, they contribute to petroleum consumption, energy waste, land waste, and material waste. But they also allow better air quality, education, an escape from noise and light pollution, and an overall appearance of an better quality of life. And luckily, this dichotomy is why other countries are studying the American model. They are not copying us wholesale, instead they are editing and adjusting our [...]
Curbed has an article about an early 20th century façade being torn down in Manhattan to put up a glass box (apparently, this project has been in the works for some time, but is just starting construction, see this other article for before and after pictures of the overall building). The preservationist in me cries out in disgust.
This building is a great example of early 20th century architecture. The chicago style windows fitted between corinthian columns and thinner windows above that emphasis the vertical nature of this early 20th Century skyscraper scream pre-Modern to me. In an other time, the loss of a fabric building like this wouldn’t even be a story, but in the age of historic preservation and with New York City rekindling its romance with glass and steel it begs me ask the question: Do famous buildings, like famous people, deserve celebrity treatment, or is the fabric of a city an integral part of its cultural landscape worth preserving just as much as its standouts?
So it looks like another one of the major Lower Manhattan re-building efforts is facing budget problems. Santiago Calatrava’s path station entrance may be looking at a major value engineering effort in so much that it may be another architect’s rein-visioning of the station, according to an post on Curbed.com. This is bad news for the neighborhood, first the Freedom Tower has yet to start construction (lets not even talk about the deisgn process) then the Fulton Street Transit Hub is looking at ways to work their budget, now this. All of this makes me wonder, has the New York City development community been a victim of the most American of financial flaws – spending beyond their means? Or is this a case of bureaucratic inaction catching up with rising construction costs and inflation? Either way, I think that this is a specter of what is to happening across the board with American projects, I see it in my own office as well. Clients either commission Coach tastes on a Canal Street Budget, or they get massive sticker shock when they see their cost estimate and throw a ton of money into value engineering exercises which end up sucking part of the cost-value of the project away.
In my fourth year of Tulane I discovered one of the little known great secrets of New Orleans, the vietnamese market in New Orleans East and Dong Phuong Bakery on Chef Menteur Blvd. That first trip, we left the Willow Street Leadership village at 6am; when we got to the market it was just barely light. In that gray dusk, I felt transported unto another place, this was not the New Orleans I knew, nor was it even a part of the US as far as I knew. The sounds and smells were all so different, so alien.
If you can’t be London, why not be Paris? At least that’s what NYC seems to think according to an article in New York Magazine. The article discusses that with the failure of the congestion surcharge, New York City officials are looking towards the changes that Paris has made since the turn of the century (from 20th to 21st) to be a more resident/pedestrian friendly place; specifically Paris-Plage, bike sharing and the new bus lanes and routes. It appears that NY may be looking at making some streets pedestrian only during the summer, and adding more bike routes. Having lived in Paris for a summer, I believe that parts of New York City that the are the most talked about – lower manhattan and midtown – are already as Paris-like as they can get; It is the outer boroughs that need to be brought up to speed. The reason for this is mass transit. The Métro is extensive within Paris much as it is in Manhattan (though the Métro does seem to run more trains it closes at 2am). This allows rapid movement within the city for pedestrians, sometimes it can be faster than driving. In addition, nothing short [...]