Category: suburbia
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Worlds Largest
Via, Dezeen, a post about Rafael Viñoly design for The Hills at Vallco, along with landscape architecture firm Olin, to redevelop the “…Vallco Shopping Mall in Cupertino into a vast mixed-use development featuring a 30-acre (12 hectare) green roof.” Billed as the ‘largest green roof in the world’, a title of which is somewhat arbitrary and ambiguous,…
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Siftings: 01.11.12
““All great art is born of the metropolis.” – Ezra Pound :: image via NY Times A great little snapshot on urban serendipity from the NY Times that looks at the accidental ‘curation’ of spaces that the urban environment yields, such as the framed view from the subway to the Brooklyn Bridge. Perhaps the uniformity…
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Community Growth: Crisis and Challenge
Via Atlantic Cities, an interesting film from 1959 exploring the implications for sprawl… from the National Association of Home Builders and the Urban Land Institute. I particularly like the diagrams of the monocentric city towards polycentric city form in post WWII United States. The solutions include planned unit developments, cluster developments, townhouses, culs-de-sac, separation of…
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Source: Whatever Happened to Urbanism? – Koolhaas
In 1995, Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau published ‘S,M,L,XL’, one in a line of oversized volumes so fondly disseminated by the Dutch. Amazon mentions the work as “extraordinary, massive, and mind-boggling 1,300-page book combines essays, manifestos, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city–and complex illustrations…” giving shape to a mixed…
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Reading the Landscape: The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism
The next essay from the Landscape Urbanism Reader is by David Grahame Shane, entitled ‘The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism’. This essay builds on Waldheim’s essay and further elaborates on the origins of the theory – with a broad take on the historical foundations and precedents around landscape urbanism as mentioned in the introductory text: “Shane…
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Reading the Landscape: A Reference Manifesto
As mentioned previously we are fully engaged in a group reading of the Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Charles Waldheim, and as promised, are providing some brief synopses of what transpired in the previous weeks dialogue are regular intervals. Our first week was a soft launch, allowing folks to introduce themselves to the group, and…
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Parsley On the Building
A great overview on Urban Omnibus features some of the recent site specific events in the 50th Anniversary of the GSD celebrating the half century of urban design (which at least in a modern perspective evolved from Harvard and mid-twentieth century theorists). While the author seems to incorrectly equate concepts ecological urbanism and landscape urbanism,…
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More on the Urbanism Wars
GSD as Epicenter The escalation of voices in the (let’s call it debate for lack of a better term) about some of the urbanisms out there – most notably New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism, has kicked up a notch even in the past few weeks since the initial salvos. There has been a fair amount…
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Alien Urbanism
De-Urbanization as Defense Against Alien Invasion The previews for the new Rogue movie ‘Skyline‘ made me think of a possible benefit from the general dispersion of urban populations. As shown in the film, the prototypical invasion is preceded by.the traditional ‘parking’ of ships above all of the ‘worlds cities’ that has been echoed in sci-fi…