IN the future, perhaps our time will be known as the first decade of the Bicycle Wars, with righteous armies fighting over traffic lanes, bike paths and sidewalks, indeed over the very purpose of the streets themselves. Like many wars, it’s a question of territory, and the pedestrian has been losing for years.
[Link to The Pedestrian Loses the Way]
The increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities. The recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010.
Central cities are no longer the growth centers of poverty. Will these mean that the inner cities are experiencing rapid gentrification more than ever before?
A Wright house isn’t a building, it’s a philosophical text about family, nature and landscape. An inglenook is important — it draws family and friends into conversations. Views into the surrounding landscape are important — they connect us to nature An Apple product isn’t about buttons and screens, it’s about eliminating barriers between the user and what the user chooses to care about when using the device.The proof that Frank Lloyd Wright cared is that he sold houses in every decade from the 1890s to 1960s. The proof that Steve Jobs cared is not found in the fact that Apples sells millions of products, but that Apple sells millions of its products to people who already own Apple products.
[Link to Frank Lloyd Wright Did Care]
In addition to the typical traffic congestion caused by daily commutes and gridlock from construction and accidents, reports have estimated that over 30 percent of traffic in a city is caused by drivers searching for a parking spot.
[Link to IBM Global Parking Survey: Drivers Share Worldwide Parking Woes]
Milwaukee’s newest trendy neighborhood is likely to become one of its best, and almost certainly its greenest. The Brewery, an environmentally sensitive restoration and adaptation of historic structures among the decaying wreckage of the former Pabst Brewing Company, is already home to striking residential lofts, a great beer hall, a range of offices, Cardinal Stritch University City Center, and a small urban park.
[Link to Green neighborhood in Milwaukee]
Mr. Garrett died last week at 74, just short of the 25th anniversary of Burning Man’s founding.But his handiwork will be on display to thousands as the yearly festival begins Monday. Mr. Garrett arranged the grounds, called Black Rock City, in a series of concentric semicircles. At their center is the Man, a giant effigy meant to be immolated on the last night of the weeklong gathering.
Until then the Man is to Black Rock City what the Empire State Building is to Manhattan: a locating device and a reassuring beacon.
[Link to Rod Garrett, the Urban Planner Behind ‘Burning Man’]
The Visitors’ Centre derives from a modernist tradition of pavilion-building that channels the Glass Boxes of Mies and Johnson. It employs many syntactical elements- a raised plinth, deep roofs on both sides to provide shade; the overhead plane held up by slim shining supports used sparingly, a sheltered glass enclosure of indeterminate function. The architecture gains significance by not kowtowing to the visual fakery that is the bane of most buildings that come up in the vicinity of important older structures.
[Link to A clean, well-lighted place]
But the culture of Foster and Partners (as it was then called) was different from firms in Silicon Valley with one notable exception – Apple, the place that combined geek business inventiveness without its reputation for poor aesthetic sensibility. Perfecting the model of selling design that is compatible with big business, Foster simultaneously grew one of the largest architecture practices in the world while still winning awards for design excellence. The secret was to design buildings like the limited edition, invite only Porsches that Foster drove and fellow Porsche drivers would commission them.
More alike than you would imagine.
[Link to Norman Foster and Steve Jobs]
The benefits of living close to other people are evident even to hunter-gatherers. Though their societies have changed over the millennia, studying characteristics of present-day hunter-gatherers can let us peer into the past. That’s what was done by three anthropologists—Marcus Hamilton, Bruce Milne, and Robert Walker—and one ecologist—Jim Brown. In the process, they seem to have discovered a fundamental law that drives human agglomeration. Though their survey of 339 present-day hunter-gatherer societies doesn’t explicitly mention cities, it does show that as populations grow, people tend to live closer together—much closer together. For every doubling of population, the home ranges of hunter-gatherer groups increased by only 70 percent.
[Link to Density is Natural]
The completion of the skyline in Battery Park City comes at a crossroads moment for the neighborhood, which was conceived in 1968 by the State of New York as a way to redevelop a moribund shipping area. Trade Center dirt later filled in rotting piers, though it was not until the 1980s that construction really ramped up. Today the area has 34 residential buildings and a population of 13,000.