Homes 2500 years ago
This may have been your house 2500 years ago [video link].
This may have been your house 2500 years ago [video link].
The plans included the construction of two main boulevards, 120 meters (131 yards) wide and running cross-shaped through the city, lined with a number of gigantic buildings, halls, squares and triumphal arcs. If Hitler had triumphed in the War, Berlin would have looked quite different. Of course, so would have the rest of the world.
The great medieval temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia was once at the centre of a sprawling urban settlement, according to a new, detailed map of the area.
I remember visiting Chandigarh and being saddened by the level of security at the Capitol Complex. Le Corbusier’s sculptural buildings were sandbagged and protected heavily with machine-gun toting security guards. The vast expanse of the central plaza between the Assembly Building and the High Court was interrupted by a barb wire fence that looked not [...]
One of my favorite buildings, The Guggenheim Museum i currently undergoing renovation. Stripping away the paint has revealed an interesting detail. The original sign was started out a little higher than it is at currently. Design Observer informs us that Frank Lloyd Wright, the building’s architect always tied in the lettering on a structure to [...]
The legacy of Jane Jacobs and importance of her work is often doubted by market-based economists. Although I too [for most part] support the market mechanism, I also believe that at certain points, there are other arguments for promoting a cause other than brute efficiency. Jane Jacobs’s seminal work, The Life and Death of Great [...]
The Empire State Building is 75 today. I love this quote: “You know, man is the only animal clever enough to build the Empire State Building and stupid enough to jump off it!”
Jane Jacobs died early this morning at age 89. She was the author of the influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities written in 1961 [via]. She was primarily responsible for calling for a revision in planning methods that had encouraged sprawl and environment-unfriendly behavior. She took on Robert Moses, ‘master builder’ [...]