Category: representation
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WPA 2.0 Winners
[post corrected on 12.13.09] I have been remiss in posting about the WPA 2.0 competition beyond this initial post way back when… it’s been exciting to see both the professional and student awards coming together into a fabulous compilation on information on the reinvention of public infrastructure. So alas, it was time to capture at…
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Urban Crude
One the most fascinating passages of the book ‘The Infrastructural City’ was the chapter on oil production that still existed in a variety of forms throughout the urban form. The fabulous Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has done some investigations, which are captured on a post in the Places portion of the Design Observer…
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As We Found Them… As We Leave Them
A provocative image found in an email from the local Audubon Society email offers the visual of ‘As We Found Them… As We Leave Them’, a Jay “Ding” Darling cartoon from 1923, as a statement about the state of our rivers in the face of urbanization. The reason for the email was an upcoming hearing…
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Portland Grid, revisited
The question of the efficacy of the grid system is continually interesting, and there have been some interesting conversations about this with a range of folks locally. Another resource to throw some information into this discussion is the recently released background documents in support of the Portland Plan. One worth checking out for any Portland-phile…
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Size Does Matter, or Not
An interesting article in Planetizen called “Beloved and Abandoned: A Platting Named Portland” investigates one of the unique, frustrating and beloved quirks of Portland. This is, our slicework of 200 foot square blocks… making for a lot of roads, and development of tiny blocks. It’s our burden to bear. The article is a fascinating ride…
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Reading List: Beyond No. 1
Perfect airplane fare, on a recent trip I had an opportunity to borrow Beyond No. 1, entitled Scenarios and Speculations, featuring a range of short stores on the ‘post-contemporary’, edited by Pedro Gadanho. An interesting idea, the slim volume takes a different tack: “…dedicated to new, experimental forms of architectural and urban writing, a bookazine…
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McDs as Density Indicator
It’s interesting to make connections between mapping and healthy communities. In this case it’s not just health in terms of people (such as this correlation between parks and obesity) – but factoring in local business, access to fresh/healthy food, and even the idea of non-drive through oriented business. The always fantastic Strange Maps offers a…
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Reinventing Cities Winners
The finalists for the Reinventing Cities competition have been announced. This open ideas competition was aimed at reinvisioning ‘new urban infrastructures’. It’s hard to tell too much about the entries themselves w/o any appreciable explanatory text to accompany them, but some views of the graphics. I hope we can get more detail about the entries…
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Large Parks
In the spirit of one of the finest collections of writing on parks (and landscape urbanism) ‘Large Parks’ (edited by Czerniak & Hargreaves) a recent post on The Infrastructurist catalogs 10 of the world’s greatest large parks. “We thought it would be fun to take ten of the world’s largest, most famous, and most beautiful…
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3 Dutch Megacities Map
Another fantastic post from Strange Maps, this time featuring the excerpt from Rem Koolhaas’ fabulous door-stop like book ‘S/M/L/XL’. In this case, “…a rumination on “Manhattanism” – i.e. the tendency of city centre densities to be taken to new heights, sometimes literally, in the form of an urban grid filled with skyscrapers. These three maps…