architecture - Yule Heibel on Diigo

Welcome to Vancouver 2.0 :: Photo Essay :: thetyee.ca

It starts as a photo-essay, but this being the Tyee, the comments muscle their way in to center stage, too. (An aside: I'm getting fed up with all the negative commentary that craps all over all newspaper - including Tyee and my local paper, Times-Colonist - articles that allude to anything creative, innovative, or full of change. It brings out all the usual suspects, who waste no time burying a good idea under cyncism and negativity. Ugh.)

Tags: thetyee, vancouver, eco_density, architecture, green_buildings, futurismo on 2009-04-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Susan Sontag and Philip Johnson - myarchN

Susan Sontag chatting with Philip Johnson in NYC's Seagram Building. Johnson makes NIMBY noises about how his view will be blocked when a surface parking lot across the way finally gets redeveloped. Too funny. (This video is from ...?, the 60s.)

Tags: video, philip_johnson, susan_sontag, seagram_building, nyc, architecture, nimbyism on 2009-04-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Greg Lynn | Profile on TED.com

Portal page to Greg Lynn's TED talk.

Tags: greg_lynn, ted_conference, architecture, calculus, video, symmetry on 2009-01-18 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (2) -About

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Exchange Morning Post: "Greg Lynn: How calculus is changing architecture"

Questioning symmetry:
QUOTE
Greg Lynn talks about the mathematical roots of architecture -- and how calculus and digital tools allow modern designers to move beyond the traditional building forms. A glorious church in Queens (and a titanium tea set) illustrate his theory.

Greg Lynn is the head of Greg Lynn FORM, an architecture firm known for its boundary-breaking, biomorphic shapes and its embrace of digital tools for design and fabrication.

Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.
UNQUOTE

Tags: exchange_morning_post, greg_lynn, ted_conference, architecture, calculus, video, symmetry on 2009-01-18 -All Annotations (3) -About

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Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.

A series of revelations about building practice -- "Vertical structure is overrated"; "Symmetry is bankrupt" -- helped Lynn and his studio conceptualize a new approach, which uses calculus, sophisticated modeling tools, and an embrace of new manufacturing techniques to make buildings that, at their core, enclose space in the best possible way.
Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.

A series of revelations about building practice -- "Vertical structure is overrated"; "Symmetry is bankrupt" -- helped Lynn and his studio conceptualize a new approach, which uses calculus, sophisticated modeling tools, and an embrace of new manufacturing techniques to make buildings that, at their core, enclose space in the best possible way.
Greg Lynn talks about the mathematical roots of architecture -- and how calculus and digital tools allow modern designers to move beyond the traditional building forms. A glorious church in Queens (and a titanium tea set) illustrate his theory.

Greg Lynn is the head of Greg Lynn FORM, an architecture firm known for its boundary-breaking, biomorphic shapes and its embrace of digital tools for design and fabrication.

Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.

Asian Designers Are Schooling American Architects--Here's How

A bit of a fluff piece (this is the "printable" page - FastCompany has so much annoying flash & crud on its front pages), but there's an interesting thought about *im*permanent architecture here.
QUOTE
One of Ma's core ideas -- the impermanence of architecture -- has particular appeal for anyone who would be happy to see Los Angeles' relentless sprawl bulldozed. Ma, 43, views today's Western architecture as a descendant of the Greco-Roman tradition, which is all about building in stone and erecting things that are intended to last forever. (Which makes it all the more amusing that he's an occasional collaborator of Koolhaas, creating mind-bending buildings, such as Beijing's CCTV headquarters, that look as if they might fall down.) Clearly a son of modern China, he questions the West's preservationist reflex. "Everything has a life cycle, as should buildings," he says. "Preservation is an action in sacrifice of future possibilities. The future needs its own space."
UNQUOTE

Tags: fast_company, architecture, los_angeles, asia on 2009-01-08 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Modular Kit Houses-PreFab Housing Modular Construction,Manufactured Homes

Portal page for a number of outstanding in-progress prefab/ modular housing projects.

Tags: architecture, prefab, modular, housing, manufactured_housing on 2009-01-07 and saved by 12 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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NYT: No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Innovative ‘Passive Houses’

The New York Times gets & spreads a clue about Passivhaeuser.

Tags: nyt, passivhaus, ecology, passive_heating, architecture, germany, buildings, darmstadt on 2008-12-29 -All Annotations (5) -About

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And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met "green" building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. "When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way," he said.
Add Sticky Note
- heat exchangers are relatively better known in Canada, though - I think...?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-12-29
"We've found it's very important to people that they feel they can influence the system," Mr. Hasper said.
In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.
But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.

The Glass Stampede: A Building-by-Building Survey of New York's Last Great Architecture Boom, by Justin Davidson -- New York Magazine

Looks to be a great & informative article, but it's annoying that New York Magazine spreads these pieces over so many many pages. File under "will read later"?

Tags: nyc, architecture, buildings, critique, nymag, justin_davidson on 2008-12-03 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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"Is a little history worse than none?," by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com)

Hume looks at facadism - when it works, and when it doesn't.

Tags: thestar, christopher_hume, heritage, preservation, architecture, facadism, toronto on 2008-11-30 -All Annotations (5) -About

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- - example of facadism at its worst
  posted by lampertina on 2008-11-30
Every major city – Paris, Dublin, New York – does it. It's just that Toronto does it so often.
"We have a lot of façadism in Toronto," admits one of the city's leading heritage architects, Michael McClelland. "And almost no one likes it. But it's indicative of Toronto's political climate. Though it's easy to deride façadism, what do these people propose in its place? People who simply dismiss it don't understand. It's often the agreed-upon compromise."
It has also become an acceptable method of balancing civic growth and architectural history. And despite the obvious drawbacks, it's a strategy that can work.
"What really bugs me is that people make a fuss about how clever we are at recycling the little things, yet it would never occur to us to recycle whole buildings. People merrily do away with whole buildings but feel good because they religiously recycle all the little things around the house. Recycling a building the size of Riverdale Hospital is the same as recycling 72 million pop cans."
It's a conundrum: How do you do this ethically? How do you provide a sense of historical development?"

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Inhabitat » Herzog and de Meuron’s Stunning Triangular Skyscraper

Photos & text about the planned 200 m. tall triangular skyscraper (called Le Projet Triangle) by Herzon and de Meuron, for the Porte de Versailles in Paris. Allegedly so slim that it will hardly cast a shadow, it will also incorporate solar and wind power components.

Tags: herzog_demeuron, paris, architecture, starchitecture, skyscrapers, inhabitat on 2008-10-08 -All Annotations (5) -About

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Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York

Andrew Blum's article describes Cellophane House, a 5-storey prefab going up in Manhattan at the corner of 53rd and Sixth.

Tags: prefab, wired_magazine, andrew_blum, architecture, nyc on 2008-10-03 and saved by 4 people -All Annotations (3) -About

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Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.
Prefab is "modernism's oldest dream," curator Barry Bergdoll says. Since the industrial revolution, architects have been in thrall of the idea that houses could be built in factories, like any kind of widget. But reality hasn't been extremely cooperative. Whether because of conservative public tastes, unachievable economies of scale, or designers' less-than-stellar business acumen, their utopian visions have mostly remained fantasies.
But the strange subdivision next door to the museum suggests that prefab's time has finally come. The difference now is bits, not bolts. "Digital fabrication has become one of the key flash points for architects thinking about the way things are made," Bergdoll says as we tour the houses. On an upper floor of Cellophane, two riggers saw a crossbeam amid a flurry of sparks. (It was fabricated too long.) Nearby, a team of MIT students hammer at a cottage made of computer-cut plywood with grooves and joints ready to be fit together like puzzle pieces.

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How Buildings Learn | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration

PSFK's Piers Fawkes writes an entry that provides the links (now available on Google Video) to the BBC series, "How Buildings Learn," by Stewart Brand. In addition to the six parts (each ~30 min. long), Fawkes includes some choice quotes.

For those who know and appreciated Stewart Brand's book, this series is a great addition.

Tags: psfk, piers_fawkes, architecture, stewart_brand, buildings, television, bbc on 2008-08-09 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Emotional Architecture - Using Psychological Profiles to Design Houses - NYTimes.com

At some level -- perhaps because this article is about residential architecture in what looks to my eyes like an 80s "Dallas" (TV show) model (i.e., very expensive custom McMansions -- emphasis on "custom" and "expensive") -- the article gives me a "yuck" reflex. At the same time, there are some links and points I need to take a closer look at, and try to think about this in terms of urban design vs. in terms of very privileged people having shrink sessions with architects by commanding super-sized SFHs.

Tags: nyt, architecture, residential on 2008-08-01 and saved by 23 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The idea of an emotional architecture is not a new one; it has long been the counterbalance to another fundamental architectural principle, that of “rational” space. Karrie Jacobs, an architecture writer and the author of “The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home” (Penguin, 2007), said she thought emotional architecture was a redundancy, like emo rock. “I mean, if architecture isn’t emotional, what good is it?” she said. “This may be a minority opinion, since many Modernists liked to think of themselves and their buildings as utterly rational, but I think that all good architecture, no matter the style or period, has emotional power.”
Interestingly, the Modernist architect Richard Neutra practiced a method similar to Mr. Travis’s, extracting detailed biographies from his clients in a take-home questionnaire, said Alice T. Friedman, professor of the history of American art at Wellesley and the author of “Women and the Making of the Modern House” (Yale University Press; 2006).
“It shows real forward thinking, but I don’t know how realistic that is,” said Toby Israel, author of “Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places.” Ms. Israel is an environmental psychologist in Princeton, N.J., who, like Mr. Travis, helps clients reach “emotional goals” through the décor and layout of their spaces; a lot of her work deals with childhood memories of place. Her method uses one-on-one sessions, like therapy, usually three three-hour marathons, she said, that she conducts herself.
“I totally accept that the story of a house is the story of a life,” she said. “But interpreting that story is not just a science, but an art.” She said it sounded like Mr. Travis was an artful interpreter — clearly “a connector,” she said — and she wondered why he would want to develop his method beyond his client base.

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architecture for hertzian space | varnelis.net

Fascinating essay by Kazys Varnelis, which takes as its jumping off point the potential discrepancy between designing for "hard" stuff (whether factories, industrial production, or ...architecture/buildings) vs. designing for networked stuff and software and mobile technologies. After this initial set-up, Varnelis then quickly goes into describing some very specific site- and urban-intervention type projects that subvert the "hard" aspects of planning & building via software/ new technologies. The former points are not that difficult to address, using predictable interventions and affordances (see my notes/ annotations), but the latter are mind-blowing and difficult to contain within predictability.

Tags: varnelis.net, futurismo, architecture, urban_design, portals on 2008-07-17 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Krushchev promised to outdo the industrial production of the United States within two decades. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had achieved that goal, producing more steel, more cement, more oil, more fertilizer and more pig iron than its Cold War rival. At the same time, however, the USSR utterly missed the revolution in information technologies.
the PC revolution simply never came in a country tied to a paradigm of information centralized under government control.
Add Sticky Note
- "information centralized under government control" could be corollary to this article's later description of the Windows on the World project, which subverts "information centralized under city planning departments"...?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17
Today, however with the boom on the wane, we ask what does this pursuit of the material have to do with the increasing dominance of immaterial forces in everyday life? Is architecture—much like the Soviet Union in the early 1980s—pursuing the wrong path utterly?
Coinciding with the twin cultural ruptures of the dot.com crash and 9/11, Apple turned toward a studied minimalism, to designs that harkened back more to the Ulm School minimalism of Dieter Rams instead of conjuring a vision of the future. Dispensing with the notion that design is primarily a question of unprecedented form, these devices simply get out of the way so that individuals could use them.
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- "...get out of the way so that individuals could use them" is key, and in good urban buildings this might be matched by buildings that do a good job in how they "meet the street," creating / designing spaces or interactions that are good for people to use, so that it's not about the building as such, but about the user (pedestrian, urban dweller).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17
The iPhone
Add Sticky Note
- - note that this, like so many other devices crucial to our networked world, is a *handheld* device. See comments/ highlights further down...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17
Compare this to how today’s top architects think of computation in design, using advanced software to make ever-more-complex forms. The only debate seems to be whether these forms should be produced by scripts or whether they should be tweaked by hand to achieve a desired effect. This pursuit becomes an architectural equivalent of Moore’s law as each avant-garde designer tries to outdo the competition with a project previously impossible to build or model. Ultimately such a condition is unsustainable, producing research that has little day-to-day application and misses the point of a radically changed urban condition as much as the Soviet Union missed the PC revolution.
Add Sticky Note
- Immediately at the end of this highlight, Varnelis gets into Hertzian space, but I want to add the following before we leave the concrete world of city streets...
  Remember that iPhones/ iPods, etc. are all about the human hand: these are HANDheld devices. But then, for purposes of design, consider that the human hand is but synecdoche for the human being: these devices, manipulated by our hands, recreate our whole (virtual) being, from here to there. So, while they're designed for my hand, and I use only my hand to interact with them, they transmit, however, all of me (human being), albeit altered digitally, and conveyed in bits and pieces (or bytes and postings).
  
  Architecture might take that aspect of good handheld design: it can design for humans (whole body); it can focus on the street / pedestrian interaction, on how people enter and exit the building, and how people use the building once they're inside; and it can focus on how people perceive the building from the outside (by using biophilic design principles and evolutionary psychology).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17
For beyond corporeal space, we increasingly also live in Hertzian space, a cloud of electromagnetic radiation that bathes us in information.
What might an architecture that actively engaged Hertzian space look like?
Two examples tentatively suggest ways in which urbanism might take into account our radically changed environment. The first of these forces us to confront the invisible forces in our environment. The second proposes to warp the very fabric of the city.
In Osman and Omar Khan’s project “SEEN-Fruits of Our Labor,” the designers crafted an 8’ tall, 4’ wide black acrylic screen, reminiscent of the 2001 monolith or perhaps a massive iPhone (the iPhone was actually released a year after the first installation) and installed it in front of the San Jose Museum of Art.
As the mysterious object incited viewers into photographing it, viewers saw a message that otherwise existed only in Hertzian space, invisible to the eye, on their camera screens. Repeated photographs yielded new messages and, as viewers stood in front of the monument with their cameras, the experience spread virally.
By hiding the messages in plain view, however, the designers subtly expose our own complicit relationship to conditions that we prefer to keep invisible. The project does not so much make visible the invisible as force us to engage in it. We can’t help but ask what mysterious forces—Hertzian or economic—permeate the city?
Robert Sumrell and I produced the second piece, “Windows on the World” at AUDC, an architectural and urban research think-tank in 2005.
We were captivated by an earlier work done in November 1980 entitled “Hole in Space” by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. A “Public Communication Sculpture,” Hole in Space turned two walls, one at Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and another at New York’s Lincoln Center, into two-way portals. Video cameras transmitted images from each site to the other where they were beamed, full size onto walls. Microphones and speakers facilitated audio transmissions.

Hole in Space lasted three nights. During the first night, encounters were casual and accidental. Many of the first visitors did not believe it was live or thought that the ghostly black and white spectres on the wall were actors on a nearby set. Disbelief soon gave way to the creation of a new social space, to the invention of games and the telling of jokes. As word spread, separated friends and family made arrangements to meet through the portals on the second evening. On the third night, after Hole in Space was featured on television news, so many people attempted to participate in this shared human experience that traffic ground to a halt and the experiment was forced to end by the authorities. Incredibly, Galloway and Rabinowitz's project is all but forgotten today.
Add Sticky Note
- The Kit Galloway/ Sherrie Rabinowitz project, "Hole in Space," could well be an example of something that was too early, too ahead of its time...? Although, what's really interesting is that it was so popular: there was a hunger for it, but at some level the technological infrastructure wasn't there, or was too cumbersome / clunky to allow it to manifest in such a way that people gridlock didn't cause shutdown?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17
AUDC suggested that more than ever we need to radically reconsider the already existing. We accept the scale, setting, and privatization of telematic communication too easily and have ignored the fact that these conditions limit the ways by which we communicate.
Windows on the World proposes to site multiple portals in multiple cities to create a true world planetary network, based not on capital and planning but on chance encounters. Remixing Hole in Space and Guy Debord’s map of the “Naked City,” we propose a telematic dérive, with each portal becoming what the Situationists called a plaque tournante, a center, a place of exchange, a site where ambiance dominates and the power of planners to control our lives can be disrupted.

Windows on the World operates outside of commerce and planning. There is no advertisement. The project is at its strongest when it is by chance. Some portals are temporary, even hidden. Others are improbable or difficult to access. In a back alley in Prague is a portal to a zoo in Sao Paolo. From a dangerous street in the Bronx, a door opens onto the Champs-Elysees. Another portal, in Zurich, looks out onto a busy railroad yard in Rotterdam.

Expenses are relatively small: each portal needs only a video projector, amplifier, speakers, microphone, webcam, computer, and a wireless link. Portals will be operated by groups following the model of, and in conjunction with the free wireless community networks that have sprung up worldwide. Connections can be easily made with free software and public servers.
Eventually portals would be everywhere. The result would be a new city, a psychogeographic remapping of the Earth according to our desires

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Architecture of Change - Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment (PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”)

Ping Magazine interview with Berlin-based Kristin and Lukas Feireiss on their book, _Architecture of Change - sustainability and humanity in the built environment_, regarding the "conscious contradiction in the title — changing and sustaining. But how can I change and sustain at the same time? This challenge is what we try to put across."

QUOTE:
There’s more to architecture than its simple purpose of shelter or protection, a cast to architecture. However they are creating social environments, urban spaces and the public spaces where people actually interact. So they are the catalyst for social interaction, for society to work in. This is a big topic and we can go from dictatorial architecture to that of social engagement.
(...)
This book gives a broad overview of what’s possible in sustainable building practices or social practices in architecture. So it ranges from economically speaking very simple, modernistic architecture to very free-flowing, avant-garde forms; from small, private houses to school buildings to skyscrapers, to federal buildings. It’s not restricted at all to one certain section. And secondly it comprises all these ideas that are in a state of research or initiative.
UNQUOTE
Bonus: gorgeous pictures/ illustrations.

Wouldn't mind having a copy of this book!

Tags: pingmag, ping_mag, architecture, sustainability, design on 2008-06-28 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Transmaterial 2: To Redefine Our Physical Environment - PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”

PingMag interview with Blaine Brownell, architect and sustainable materials researcher, whose focus is on green building.

"From repurposed materials that act as surrogates, to recombinant ones that fuse several materials into a hybrid, making them stronger and more effective — Blaine points us to products that might shape our physical environment in the future."

Materials discussed include self-healing polymers inspired by biological systems, which can automatically heal cracks in buildings, for example.

The article includes many other photographs / examples with descriptions of weird and wonderful bioneered and sustainable building materials.

Tags: pingmag, transmaterial, bioneering, biomimicry, architecture, technology, blaine_brownell, sustainable_materials on 2008-05-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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I studied architecture and practised in the field for over a decade, and I believe this experience has been essential because of my exposure to the exploding number of innovative building materials. During my early years of practice, I had a chance to research materials for a prominent project and was impressed by the challenges as well as opportunities associated with this task. I immediately saw a need to share this — which typically gets archived when a project is completed — with a larger audience of architects, designers, contractors, etc. I began an electronic journal and database, which quickly became popular with a growing audience of material enthusiasts who have given generous feedback. Over time, I have been able to appreciate the critical trajectories of material development as a result.
Although Europe and Japan are largely ahead of the curve, the United States has struggled with the development of sustainable building practices since the softening of the 1970s oil crisis that initiated much of the initial interest in green architecture in this country. I think the primary challenge to sustainable design is the fact that it has been viewed primarily as a long-term intellectual proposition without immediate economic benefit, and the relatively cheap cost of petroleum has made it nearly impossible to convince industries to consider other alternatives.
Very true! Alex Steffen speaks in his Worldchanging — A User’s Guide to the 21st Century of the world’s natural resources as our ecological capital, saying that the ultimate bankruptcy will not land us in a state-run old people’s home ― it’ll land us in a world of deserts, hunger and freaky weather. Can the employment of sustainable materials and energy conservation methods save us from such a harsh reality?

I believe Alex’s prediction is correct at certain scales.
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- - useful qualification: "at certain scales."
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-23
we have to face the discouraging truth about accelerating environmental degradation and act quickly to prevent it. Since buildings comprise roughly half of the problem in terms of energy use and emissions, vastly improved materials, construction methods and energy use should help significantly.
The title is a conflation of the words transformational materiality, and the book is the second volume of materials that have significant potential in shaping the physical environment through design innovation.
Ultraperforming materials attempt to push conventional performance boundaries; multidimensional materials enhance structural depth in order to maximise resources; repurposed materials are surrogates for more precious, conventional resources; recombinant materials are hybrids in which the sum exhibits superior characteristics to individual components; intelligent materials employ creative structural and formal ideas for enhanced environments; transformational materials undergo change based on environmental stimuli; and interfacial materials explore digital processes and fabrication.
The term often used is disruptive technologies — a title that suggests radical departures as opposed to incremental developments. One focus is materials whose behaviour conflicts with our traditional understanding — such as bendable concrete, transparent ceramics, or exfoliated graphite nanoplatelets. Another focus considers materials imbued with biomimetic qualities, like self-healing polymers, strong enviroboard, and active protection system. Another focus considers environmentally remediating materials such as Italcementi, Superabsorber, and Reben. Yet another focus relates to digital fabrication innovations, such as the Ombrae system, intaglio composites, and Erwin Hauer Continua.
You speak of materials and products that have unique phenomenological effects. Explain, please!

What I mean here concerns materials that generate unconventional responses when interacted with — such as the light-bending properties of Sensitile or the colour and pattern-changing qualities of Living Surfaces.

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Home Tweet Home: Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter | Wired Science from Wired.com

Wired Magazine article by Alexis Madrigal on "wired" homes, including http://twitter.com/andy_house, by IBM "master inventor" Andry Stanford-Clark who "rigged up his home to twitter its energy use." See The House That Twitters Its Energy Use by Katie Fehrenbacher (http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/30/the-house-that-twitters-its-energy-use/).

Compare to Wired Mag's recent "Peak Water" article, which pointed out that many London households aren't even on water meters, making consumption monitoring impossible.

In addition, consider too the New Scientist article, "City road networks grow like biological systems" (4/23/08).

All this relates to infrastructure -- and to how we're just beginning to understand it from new angles. (See also Doc Searls' continuing investigation of infrastructure in Linux Journal.)

Tags: twitter, infrastructure, data, architecture, housing, consumption, energy, wired_magazine on 2008-05-02 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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In Defense of Townhouses — Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool)

- great article by Eric de Place on why so many new TH developments are so ugly. As his lede says, "How parking laws make housing expensive. And ugly."

Tags: sightline_daily, seattle, urban_design, urbanplanning, cars, parking, architecture on 2008-05-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Some of the new townhouse developments are pretty bland, and many seem divorced from the street. But why are the designs so flawed?
Here's one explanation. Nearly every townhouse in the city is required by law to provide offstreet parking. Since cars don't fly, the practical effect of the minimum parking regulations is that each and every townhouse has a garage on the bottom floor. And these garages are often the prime culprit in walling off the townhouses from the street, and of sending the residents upstairs.
because the garages are small and the driveways are tight, the residents who have cars often end up parking on the street anyway. All this puts city planners in a lose-lose situation.
One obvious solution would be to strip out the parking requirements, which would revolutionize the design possibilities. But so far, the city's modest attempts to remove minimum parking mandates in a few urban areas have been greeted with howls of protest from angry mobs wielding pitchforks and torches.
Contrary to the screeching of some neighborhood activists, the reason that townhouses are sprouting up everywhere is not because developers are part of a notorious cabal dedicated to ruining Seattle's aesthetics. No, the reason is because people want to buy them.
Not only are single-family homes about 25 percent more expensive, on average, but the single-family homes are more often older, requiring expensive fixes and upkeep. (Believe me, I know). Meanwhile the townhouses are sparkling new, very energy efficient, and often within walking distance of services and transit. As a result, the true price differential is much greater than the sale prices suggest.
But now there's a push to subject townhouses to more extensive permitting, increased design scrutiny, and more neighborhood input. And while those may or may not be wise public policy decisions, they are precisely the sort of regulations that -- bit by bit -- increase the price of housing.
Another possibility is simply to downzone neighborhoods, so that it's illegal to build townhouses. But that kind of supply-side restriction -- already common throughout much of Seattle's land-base -- is likely one big contributing factor to unaffordable housing.
minimum parking requirements -- the ones that foul up townhouse design -- they may also make the townhouses more expensive. In fact, it's been estimated that parking requirements can add tens of thousands to the price of a condo, and it's fair to think that a similar price hit happens with townhouses.
And free parking is ugly too.

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New Urbanists Point the Way Forward by Catesby Leigh, City Journal 18 April 2008

"The New Urbanism and suburban sprawl have something in common: they’re uncool. New Urbanism is uncool because it is basically traditional; modernism is still the thing in architecture, notes Andrés Duany, the most influential New Urbanist."

For some reason, City Journal is impossible to annotate (neither highlights and consequently "stickies" work), which is too bad. Some good ideas in this article, but I can't mark it up.

Tags: urbanism, new_urbanism, suburbia, sprawl, smartgrowth, density, modernism, architecture, style, city_journal on 2008-04-28 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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"Bay Street is awash in banality" by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

Christopher Hume goes after banal architecture, specifically the evil banality of non-descript, visually insulting high-rises of certain Toronto areas. (Note: I highlighted the entire article to have as a record, in case the link decays.)

Tags: cities, architecture, christopher_hume, toronto, critique on 2008-04-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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E
very generation looks back and sees evidence of a time when everything was better. It may not be true, but in this regard we are no exception.
Still, it's hard to wander around this city and not become convinced that the quality of architecture has deteriorated badly in recent decades. That's not to say there aren't spectacular things being built; it's more that the level of design of the non-landmarks, the background buildings, of the urban fabric has never been worse.
Perhaps it's that only the best of the past survives, but by contrast the bulk of work done by architects today is appalling. Let's be honest: Most people dislike contemporary architecture passionately and often for good reason.
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- True, at some point you get sucked into nostalgia -- but there's no denying that the illustration for this article shows "commie block" architecture at its worst, a sort of computer-generated churning out of floor plates, and a totally graceless "meeting the street" kind of interaction. The buildings just scream "fast & cheap" and "fuck you," too.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-07
Bay St. is as good a place as any to see firsthand how this profession has lapsed into banality. Starting at Bay and Queen St., of course, we have two of the most distinguished buildings in Toronto – New and Old City Hall – but by the time we reach Dundas St. a couple of blocks north, the landscape has devolved into one of architectural mediocrity and civic indifference. By the time Bay meets Gerrard St., it has become a contemporary wasteland, the kind of downtown neighbourhood desirable for everything but what it has become.
The template here is the tower sitting on a base with a canopy at grade. Nothing wrong with that, but it's surprising how something so simple and straightforward can be messed up in so many different ways. For the most part, the architecture here is artless and devoid of any spark of imagination. It is clumsy, dull and apparently built by architects and developers who couldn't care less. The materials are cheap, the façades monotonous and the results deadly.
Interestingly, this same culture of indifference applies to corporate, institutional and residential buildings. The last remnant of architectural self-respect comes in the form of a row of two-storey houses that extend west from Bay on the north side of Gerrard. These aren't fancy structures, but they were clearly conceived with something larger in mind, namely the city and the idea it represents, civilization itself.
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- Ah, the resonance of Richard Sennett and Jane Jacobs, clearly. Well, it seems that architects (or the developers that hire them) don't necessarily read.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-07
To a great many contemporary architects, this must seem precious and all rather beside the point. Their job is to deliver their client's bidding as cheaply and painlessly as possible, and to hell with the rest.
And the city, why should they worry about that, it's not their concern?
Condo critic

THE LIBERTIES, 717 BAY ST.: This nasty slab sums up the ethos of a generation of architects that may be well trained, but was certainly poorly educated.
There isn't a single element of this complex here that engages us at any level; more disturbing, there wasn't meant to be.
It comes to us as one of those poor architectural creations unloved by those who gave it birth. Its justification is strictly an economic one.
Indeed, architecture here involves little more than a series of mechanical calculations, the sort of things a machine could do – and probably better.
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- - exactly: this is what I meant by my comment above. (Over?)-reliance on CAD (computer aided design) produces monsters.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-07
The miserable green metal columns that support the glass canopy clutter the sidewalk and the building. You just want to get past it as fast as possible.
The frontage on Bay and Gerrard Sts. has been broken up into a series of bays that reach up from a four-storey base.
The bricks are beige and the results aren't pretty.
GRADE: D
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Email us at condocritic@thestar.ca

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