Urban Planning Blog

Thoughts on Urban Planning and Design

Category: innovation

Buckminister Fuller's Dymaxion House

“If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that [...]

Vertical Urbanscape

Presenting five designs for sustainable and urban farm towers that might revolutionize agriculture.

Portable Architecture

Trailer homes always have had a bad rap in architecture. But recent innovations especially with respect to post-disaster emergency housing has led to some beautiful and innovative creations.

A personal mobile library

Now if I had one of these, I would grow roots in this thing. Really innovative [via Boing Boing].

Reaching Beyond

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.” —Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises Looking beyond our usual perspectives can not only be enlightening but [...]

A Door Handle

Shake hands?

Wired Living Home

WIRED and LivingHomes—a pioneer in green, prefabricated development— will open the doors to the first ever WIRED Home, a showcase of the best in sustainability, technology and design.

Camouflaged Home

Fancy living in a camouflaged home? You might want to check out this home’s tree-lined walls. Literally.

Soundproofing your Apartment

For a while I lived with a ‘rocker’ roommate who had drums, electric guitar, and the works and regularly practiced his art. He was considerate enough to pipe down when I asked him to and I actually even enjoyed some of it. But I wasn’t sure our neighbors appreciated it much. Heck, we even got [...]

Storage Under the Stairs

Technically this is a blog related to urban planning but at heart, I’ve always been a designer and absolutely love innovative and creative solutions to everyday problems. Unclutterer mentions that this idea was first implemented on yachts where space is at a premium. When I first saw the ‘storage under the staircase’, my first thought [...]

Urban Planning Lectures Podcasts

At any given time, there are many quality lectures going around on university campuses across the nation. But grad school life is such that you scarcely get time to get done with your classes, assignments, and research and generally miss out on being exposed to great work right on your campus. I try to get [...]

The wonder of Google Earth

Graphical tools have always benefited urban planning and helped it bring closer to the masses. A picture is worth a thousand words – cannot be more relevant when used for planning purposes. Explain the various zoning codes and restrictions in verbose language and legalese, you will only get blank stares from a bored audience; pop [...]

Beautiful Subways of the World

After reviewing subway logos last week, we turn our attention to actual subway structures which can be a work of art in itself. There is surely something about bagging a public transit terminal design contract that makes architects go whoopie! They tend to stretch their imaginations, work in collaboration with artists and structural engineers, and [...]

Feedback before Experience

In the brick-and-mortar realm, the plan is for the first Aloft inn to open sometime in 2008, catering to active, urban 30- to 50-year-olds. But the real-world lodge will be preceded by a 3D cyberversion designed to prompt feedback from virtual guests and help guide the earthbound endeavor.The development is a collaboration involving brainstorming sessions, [...]

Space Hotel

Wouldn’t you kill for a view like that? Well, except you don’t have to. A company of architecture of Barcelona and a group of aircraft engineers of Florida (EUA) are developing a prototype of room of space hotel, baptized like Galactic Suite, so that the tourists and astronauts who are decided to travel to the [...]

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