01 February 2011

Betaville

















Betaville ..."is an open-source multiplayer environment for real cities, in which ideas for new works of public art, architecture, urban design, and development can be shared, discussed, tweaked, and brought to maturity in context, and with the kind of broad participation people take for granted in open source software development..."

collaborative design, effective design before, during the design process...not just after.


Urban Omnibus interview

24 January 2011

The multi-programmatic parking garage


















A High End Miami Beach Parking Garage

This recently opened parking garage in Miami designed by Herzog & de Meuron, features a high end boutique, a roof top penthouse and 360 degree view event space....and parking of course. Nice thinking, but too bad it only caters to one portion of the city...

Wildlife Crossing















From New York Times: Design picked for Wildlife Crossing by Matthew Wald

"On Sunday, a nonprofit group announced the winner of a competition to design such a crossing: Michael Van Valkenburgh & Associates, a landscape architecture firm with offices in New York City and Cambridge, Mass. The design team, associated with the national construction firm HNTB, submitted a proposal for a bridge made of lightweight precast concrete panels that are snapped into place and covered with foliage."

16 December 2010

Cities, lessons and modern versions...

From: Lessons for a Modern Chicago, New York Times, James Warren

"An estimated 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. The fittest to survive, the consensus goes, are those metropolitan areas — not just cities — that can combine talent, capital, innovation and cooperation in plotting organic strategies for growth, and not just steal businesses from elsewhere."

"...A new ranking of metropolitan economies, based on employment and per-capita income growth, shows American cities plummeting as Asian and Latin American cities rise. In the past year, only one American city, Austin, Tex., was in the top 35, with Chicago ranking 82nd among 150 metro economies worldwide and trailing 30 cities in the United States.

Panels exploring the revivals of Barcelona, Munich, Seoul and Turin underscored that success involved a determination to work with local, state and federal governments; to internationalize economies; to innovate to revitalize traditional industries; to upgrade workers’ skills with technical training; and to shift to a green economy while boosting investment in high speed rail..."

"...Emily J. Harris, program director for Chicago Metropolis 2020, found the big takeaway from the conference was that economic development strategy must depend on innovation “and not trying to attract firms from elsewhere.” Growth must come from within, the strategy used in Turin, Italy’s Detroit, which parlayed a declining auto sector’s technical savvy into powerhouse design and aerospace centers."

KSA's new cities
















New Economic Cities planned for Saudi Arabia...
more here at NY Times article:

09 November 2010

Service Design















Service Design: “Service design addresses the functionality and form of services from the perspective of clients. It aims to ensure that service interfaces are useful, usable, and desirable from the client’s point of view and effective, efficient, and distinctive from the supplier’s point of view.”

"Developing more sustainable societies will require getting the increasing urbanization of global populations right. Cities, because of their density, afford substantial eco-efficiencies. However, as a result of their ill-considered 20th century development, cities are yet to deliver on that promise. So cities need to be significantly, and rapidly, retrofitted."

"Some examples of their deliverables are: service assessment, needs analysis, service blueprint, customer journey maps, ethnographic studies, concept sketches, mock-ups, feasibility study, business plan, communication strategies, etc.


Moreover, as described by Joe Heapy from Engine in an article called “Make Yourself Useful,” designers are working more and more within organizations to transform their innovation practices and organizational models. In this case, the design deliverables are changing from finished design ‘products’ to ‘knowledge transfer’ activities such as the formalization of innovation processes, pilot projects, training sessions or design toolkits."

04 November 2010

Hybridizing Art and Energy
















The Land Art Generator Initiative announces its submissions and finalists for their Abu Dhabi based competition for artists to merge sustainable energy production with art.

The NYTimes provides a nice write up
..."Its aim is to help participants to develop and ultimately attract investment to construct power-generating plants that are aesthetically and functionally integrated into the landscape.
The contest was established by the husband-and-wife team of Robert Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian, whose firm Studied Impact is focused on the environmental effects of design...."

They plan to hit NYC next!

30 October 2010

Sanitation!












The competition is on! Make Sanitation Sexy.
The Search for the Obvious is a great site acknowledging our built environment.

"We believe in the power of creativity to better the world. Instead of seeing problems, a creative mind sees obvious solutions. Look around you and you'll find all sorts of solutions to problems that once seemed impossible. Now Acumen Fund needs YOU to help change how the world is addressing poverty by showing that there's a better way."

24 October 2010

Collaborative Consumption
































Book: What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented in ways relevant to the Facebook age.

Underdome

















Underdome:  a project that identifies a range of positions on energy and public life and assigns to each a corresponding architectural icon.

"The guide’s taxonomy covers the political, spatial, and cultural dimensions of energy, and revolves around four main topics: “Power” asks how governments, corporations, organizations and individuals have the potential to restructure energy performance. “Territory” asks how energy transforms and is transformed by the changing networks of today’s metropolis. “Lifestyle” asks what kind of norms and behavior energy performance schemes imagine. And lastly, “Risk,” as a kind of meta-category that cuts across these other fields, asks how we weigh priorities among a diverse set of interests and contingencies."

interview here

Mapping your path






















In celebration of the 106th birthday of New York Cities subway system, The New York Times posted a great interactive website that asks people to create their own maps of how they get around using the Subway system. Above, Milton Glaser's own "mental map" of NYC.

20 October 2010

Resilient City Design Competition

http://www.resilientcity.org/

"ResilientCity.org is a not-for-profit network of architects, urban planners and designers, engineers, and landscape architects focused on developing creative, practical, and implementable planning and building design strategies that help address one of our century's most important challenges: namely, dealing with the significant future problems that will be associated with the impacts of climate change and energy transition in the context of human settlement"

19 October 2010

Small-House Utopia
















The Home for the New Economy was announced at the International Builders’ Show. So interesting to see the building climate change in what seems like a blink of an eye.

Nice write up about it all by Andrew Rice here