• Telectroscopic Connections

    A post by Varnelis mentioned a couple of interesting ideas of crossing space, both virtually and physically through various modern forms of communication. Three items come from his post: 1. Chatroulette—a site that pairs you with a random person somewhere on the Internet so that you have a webcam conversation… which to me just seems…

  • Natural Stone Permeable Paving System

    [L+U NOTE: This is a guest post from Miles Chaffee from Milestone Imports] “With the rising popularity of permeable pavement systems in residential and commercial landscape designs, it is important for landscape professionals to educate themselves about the different materials available for paving options. Natural stone is increasingly used as a permeable paver because of…

  • Piggy-back Big-Box

    An interesting hybrid assemblage of big box behemoths in Baltimore, shows a trend away from the sprawling power centers to a more . Via the Baltimore Sun, the development will place a Walmart atop a Lowes store in a piggy-back move: “The new location will be unusual for Walmart because it will be built on…

  • Cartographic Rectification

    A recent post at the Fresh Kills Park Blog showed the beauty and function of the process of map rectification in GIS, where a map and image can be combined by matching ground control points in the mapping system to points in the image. As it may be well known, I’m constantly fascinated by historic…

  • Floating Manhattan

    Via Ptak Science Books, a proposal to float Manhattan into the adjacent Hudson River and seemingly into the Atlantic. “Robert Grosvenor had a delectable and memorable idea for a project in 1975: testing the sea-worthiness of Manhattan island. Grosvenor (b. 1937) was a well-known kinetic sculptor in Manhattan by the time of his detaching-Manhattan idea……

  • Bell Street Park – Seattle

    A new project recently via the Daily Journal of Commerce unveiled by SvR Design Company in Seattle shows a pair of proposals for Bell Street Park: “The project will affect the area from First to Fifth avenues and create 17,000 square feet of park space. The city is converting one lane of traffic to public…

  • Thickened Waterfront from AALU

    An email from Jorge Ayala from the AALU shows off some recent Landscape Urbanism work, in this case an academic workshop with a focus on designing a Contemporary Garden in Xi’an, China. I’ve included the full text from Jorge, and some of the images of the project that were sent. Thickened WaterfrontAA Landscape Urbanism Garden…

  • Take Back the Streets 2

    A follow up to the story from Korea and the daylighted stream that was realized upon the removal of a highway, this ephemeral project from San Francisco (via Streetsblog SF) takes the same idea of remnant roadway and thinks of it in terms of gardening: “A few weeks ago in San Francisco, a number of…

  • Take Back the Streets 1

    From Fast Company: “Most metropolis’ are so busy building the future that they don’t have time to re-think the past. Not so with Seoul, South Korea. In 2003, the city demolished a downtown freeway to restore an ancient stream that once flowed beneath the thoroughfare. More than 75% of the scrap material from the demolition…

  • Paper Cities

    Another great video from Digital Urban shows a snippet of ‘Metropolis’ a time-lapse film by Rob Carter showing the evolution of Charlotte, NC: “Made entirely from images printed on paper, the animation literally represents this sped up urban planners dream, but suggests the frailty of that dream, however concrete it may feel on the ground…