How do you make yourself at home in a cauldron filled with demons? I’m quoting the founder of Soto Zen, but the question was also posed at a recent San Francisco summit. > Read More
The first Urban Symposium event, as a part of StoreFrontLab Season 2, kicked off with a full room of people, each with a party hat on and margarita in hand. > Read More
This month TraceSF introduces City Makers, a new salon series at StoreFrontLab. Hosted by Amanda Loper of David Baker Architects and Emily Gosack of Jensen Architects, City Makers grew out of a desire to hear more from the women at the forefront of City Making. John Parman, a founding editor of TraceSF, spoke with Amanda and Emily about the series, which opens on October 28 with Laura Crescimano, a principal of SITELAB urban studio.
Heidelberg, one of Europe’s oldest university towns, is looking at its future. Here’s a firsthand account of what’s ahead and what it might means for university towns here. > Read More
Will San Francisco follow through on its carefully laid plans to accommodate a growing population, or will it continue to fight the same battles time and time again?
Our experience of the present is shaped by our understanding of the past. By ignoring the urban narratives of monuments, structures, city parks, memorials…what messages are we missing for the present? > Read More
Will San Luis Obispo (SLO) County remain predominantly agricultural, or will it sink into the same morass of rural sprawl that took out Orange County? It could go either way, but there’s still hope if we act now. > Read More
Muji finally opened in San Francisco late last year, ending a low-grade yearning that has nagged local devotees since the Japanese chain landed in New York in 2007. But unlike the fanfare that greeted Uniqlo, another Japanese brand that debuted here last fall, Muji’s arrival was more akin to sneaking in the back door—literally. > Read More
For the past few decades, Market Street has been an illogical disconnect in San Francisco, where the confluence of its not-quite-intersecting streets and abrupt diagonal grid shifts have evolved radically different but adjacent streetscapes. > Read More
Enrico Moretti’s new book about where knowledge industries cluster has implications for the economic future of all cities, and the future of their built environments. > Read More
Andrew Faulkner reports on a recent brainstorming session that anticipates the upcoming Urban Protoyping: San Francisco festival. > Read More
Earlier this year, Salesforce’s seemingly sudden decision to abandon plans for a new 2-million-square-foot campus at Mission Bay raised immediate concerns about San Francisco’s already tightening office market—and some murmurs of relief. > Read More
Think local, buy local—we are currently experiencing a surge in assertions of independence from the global supply chain. > Read More
The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, adopted in late December 2008, states that “San Francisco is a special place because of the way in which it has always balanced preservation with change.” It is true that despite generations of natural and manmade disasters, demographic shifts, and radical economic realignment, San Francisco has managed to hold on to its essence as a place that “doesn’t look or feel like anywhere else.” > Read More
It remains nearly impossible to escape architecture, urban design, or planning education in the United States without hearing the name Pruitt-Igoe, even forty years after the St. Louis housing project’s demolition in 1972. > Read More
Playing to a big, friendly crowd, Rice Professor Lars Lerup acknowledged his Berkeley roots in a lecture on Wednesday night, 7 March, centered on his new book on the Houston cityscape, One Million Acres & No Zoning (Architectural Association, 2011). > Read More
It didn’t take the mortgage meltdown to make clear that residential patterns affect individual, societal and environmental health. And the crash only made the ruinous implications of conventional sprawl development harder to ignore. Now an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art asks how architecture and planning might ameliorate those consequences, proposing alternate ideals of home and imagining buildings and places to express them. > Read More
The 1811 plan mandating an orthogonal street grid helped make Manhattan a paragon of urban form. Today we take rectilinear New York for granted, and love its vitality. An exhibition reveals both prescience and problems in the grid’s rich history.
Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, urbanist, writer and Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UC Berkeley. His recent book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, unearths the truly fascinating story behind the design of the Apollo spacesuit, which has surprising relevance to architectural and planning discourse, particularly in the Bay Area. > Read More