Urban Planning Blog

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

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.

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

“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 also mighty useful for sections of populations that have escaped our attention thus far. The National Design Museum in New York is hosting a Design for the other 90% exhibit. Another set of designers called themselves Designers without Borders. Interesting stuff [via].

Shake hands?

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.

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

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 the cops sent to us once for a noise violation. So how do we go about avoiding that?

Alexander  Gelfand and his percussion-crazy wife found themselves in a similar predicament when neighbors vowed to boot them out of their New York apartment. But they decided to be proactive and soundproof their apartment. They sure have some interesting suggestions and I had never heard of green glue or mass-loaded vinyl before. But of course, it didn’t come cheap:

Our total labor and sheetrock costs were around $4,000, with an additional $3,000 for materials. (We also invested $1,000 to have fiberglass insulation pumped into our walls to give the apartment a smidgen of sound isolation before the real work began.)

So unless you are really serious about your percussion skills, it may not be worthwhile. And of course, your spouse must love it too. There is no way to soundproof a marriage.

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 was - how cool is that! This solves the problem of trying to find a place for your shoes near the place where you actually wear them. Isn’t it tedious to haul in your shoes from some inside closet to near the door where you wear them before heading out? I wonder why no one thought of this before with all that space under the stair and the rise of the staircase doubling up as a drawer.

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 around to attending the lectures at our own College of Architecture and the George Bush Presidential Library’s Distinguished Lecture series but have lately been unable to do so (after my classes, I keep telling myself.) Most of the time, the problem is time clashes or the hassle of getting to the venue.

But now, thanks to innovative technologies like podcasts and webcasts, such lectures can be made available to a larger audience. “Podcasts of presentations from Virginia Tech’s New Metropolis Lecture Series are now available, free of charge, from iTunes. Sponsored by the University’s Urban Affairs and Planning program in Alexandria, Va., the lectures focus on cutting-edge topics and ideas about metropolitan development in the United States and abroad. Featured speakers have a broad regional, national and international reputation in scholarship, research, and policy” [via email from Shannon.]

The schedule for lectures at Virginia Tech is available here and the podcasts are available a day after the lecture. Although most lectures were held last year, the podcasts I believe are available now. Upcoming lectures include:

March 28, 2007
The New Revolution: Form-based Codes
Peter Katz, author of The New Urbanism; Toward an Architecture of Community

April 25, 2007
The Status and Future of Public Transportation in the U.S.
William Millar, President of the American Public Transportation Association.

I love Peter Katz’s work and always wanted to sit in on his lecture. Well, now I can, from the comfort of my home on a lazy weekend. I hope other schools jump on this bandwagon and offer a podcast version of their lecture series.

[tags]podcast, Urban Planning, lecture, series, university, planning, Virginia Tech[/tags]

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 in a colorful map, people suddenly wake up and begin to show interest; project a animator on a large screen, they might even begin to cheer you.

Google Earth is somewhat like the last scenario except it can reside on desktops in every home and gratefully, it is free. Devised and released initially as game for virtual reality hobbyists who enjoyed the fly-overs and zooming into the globe to take a look at their homes from above. Google Earth even worried people when the Indian government cited security concerns over the vast availability of satellite data to the general public. But eventually benefits of Google Earth have begun to surface (no pun intended). Google Earth was especially useful in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that allowed relief workers to get a better understanding of the flooded areas and accordingly organize help. More recently, two Google Earth hobbyists helped Surat’s municipal corporation to identify flooded areas and rescue hundreds of people.

In the research field, Geographic Information Sytems (GIS) has always held sway in bridging the gap between planning and graphical interface. But often, GIS has seemed too complex for researchers and have kept the potential of GIS largely untapped. Google Earth just might be the testing ground before people move over to GIS for more detailed analysis. In fact ESRI, the leading GIS software provider is now developing a revised version of its ArcGIS program including a virtual globe that would be accessible through the Internet. Other scientific pursuits taking advantage of Google Earth involve study of spread of diseases like bird flu, demographic information including crime statistics, geological studies, environmental studies that involve tracking animals over a large area.

Google Earth may not seem much at the first glance but the open ended nature of the software lets those who dabble in it to discover hidden gems and devise their own adaptations for scientific pursuit.

[source: The Mapping Revolution]

Technorati Tags: Google Earth, regional science, science, GIS, graphics, planning, ESRI, ArcGIS, GIS

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 turn out really interesting pieces of work. You can even imagine these structures to be completely functional first and yet amazingly captivating. This design by Santiago Calatrava for the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) terminal at the World Trade Center (WTC) site in Lower Manhattan is already creating a buzz:

Although airports can be pretty dramatic, for now we turn our attention to subways. See more pictures here. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: subways, metro, architecture, beautiful structures, art, World Trade Center, Santiago Calatrava

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, weekly conference calls and the e-mailing of images back and forth between Starwood, ElectricArtists and The Electric Sheep Company, the 3D-design company ElectricArtists chose to build the cyberversion of the Aloft.

Interested parties, real and avatar, can get an early glimpse of the cyberinn at the virtualaloft blog. Electric Sheep is maintaining the blog to track progress and provide a glimpse into the digital construction process of scripting and graphics [source].

Is this SimCity for real or simply taking the feedback loop a bit too far?

Technorati Tags: hotel, user behavior, Second Life, Starwood Hotels, virtual reality

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 space have a site where to lodge.

Read more.

Technorati Tags: space, hotel, technology, Galatic Suite, architecture

After I wrote about iPod-powered walking tour narrations offered by a Cleveland-based website, we can get more lazy and get a video tour instead. TurnHere is collecting reader-submitted videos of neighborhoods all over America:

Want to become part of our certified professional network? Send us a 90-second video about a place—-a neighborhood, a landmark, a bar, a street or trail.  Use an interesting local narrator.  Entertain and inform us. (Watch the films on the site for an idea of our style and format.)  If we like your video, we’ll put it up on TurnHere.

You could spend hours (well, if we have a ton of them) watching these interesting videos or you could be walking for real down there. Well, until I get enough money to travel around simply to experience a sense of a place, I’ll stick to this cool website. But I wonder how much can you really cram into 90 seconds. I don’t want a MTV-style music video of my neighborhood.

Technorati Tags: video, neighborhood, America, suburbia, video tour