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
Shortlink http://q.gs/ERpvY
Knowledge City: Rethinking HeidelbergMichael Willis
Berlin architect Professor Michael Braum led off the first day’s session. Photo: Michael Willis
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
Shortlink http://q.gs/ERsCH
Help Wanted (But Maybe Not Here)Jonathan Lerner
Patents per capita, by metropolitan area. Map by Mike Webster, courtesy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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
Shortlink http://q.gs/ERw6w
Ghost StoryBrad Leibin
Opening day at Pruitt Igoe. Photo via http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/urban-history/
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
Shortlink http://q.gs/ES1df
Lars Lerup at Wurster HallJohn Parman
Lars Lerup explaining his analysis of the Houston cityscape. Photo by John Parman.
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
Shortlink http://q.gs/ERrGs
Dreaming of HomeJonathan Lerner
Architectural model, plan view, for MOS’s "Thoughts on a Walking City" project for Orange, New Jersey. Photograph courtesy of James Ewing. © 2011 James Ewing.
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
Shortlink http://q.gs/ERqkx
Mash-up at Right AnglesJonathan Lerner
Randel Farm Map no. 55, vol. 1, p. 16, showing 101st to 109th Streets, from Third Avenue to the East River, July 21, 1820. Used with permission of the City of New York and the Office of the Manhattan Borough President.
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.
Shortlink http://q.gs/ERrGl