All that Arab culture learned in a thousand years about adapting cities to great heat — high-ceilinged buildings along narrow streets which provide shade and short distances to walk outside — have been forgotten [...]
The Ascent, and Fall, of Dubai
Besides (or maybe beyond) excess capacity, Dubai suffers from a major design flaw: It's a brilliant copy of the very worst model of urban planning: USA 1975.
Even in the 5-6 months of moderate weather you cannot walk around the new parts of Dubai. The' [...]
Live-Blogging West Point By Andrew Sullivan
8.35 pm. "Not the deepest of fears but the highest of hopes."
I confess I do not feel those highest hopes. I do not share his confidence in American military and civilian power to turn the roiling region of Afghanistan and Pakistan into something less [...]
Fascinating story of how LBJ escalated the war in Vietnam and explicitly offered as background to our current dilemma about Afghanistan.
What puzzles me is why LBJ didn't follow-up further on the "neutralization" option which he himself discussed several times. LBJ was obviously extremely smart and' [...]
The danger for Apple is trying to do too much with its iTablet, make it too complicated with too many "features" etc etc. All Apple has to do is take a current iPhone or iPod Touch and increase the screen size by 3-4 times. That's it.
The Mayor-elect asks the citizens of Seattle a question: How do we build public trust in the new administration?
In short, I say by delivering the basic services and enrichments for which the citizens have asked and for which they have paid taxes. In short, by being competent, by performance. [...]
Apple Tablet Speculation Continuing to Gain Attention
CNNMoney.com today reports on the continued hype over Apple's much-rumored tablet computer, citing the multitude of different speculative reports of the device's specs to attempt to [...]That's what Felix Salmon thinks: reduce unemployment by hiring artists. He writes:
I’d note that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, when it comes to “labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects”, with the first stimulus, and I’m not sure that there are actually any left. Instead, might I suggest arts subsidies?
Sure, pay [...]
Sally Bagshaw won a seat on the Seattle City Council. So congratulations, Sally! But I am a bit concerned about this quote:
And I am pretty' [...]
It still astonishes me that people (moi included) can get into heated debates about the shape of a product that Apple hasn't even says might exist. But here is one more example: Apple Executives Share Thoughts on e-Book Market, iPhone Profits - Mac Rumors.
One issue in dispute is whether a' [...]
Seattle faces an interesting election. The two-time incumbent (Nickels) didn't make it into the finals. Pretty amazing considering that he had been a 'not bad' mayor. Arrogant, maybe. But a perfect-pitch Seattle liberal with no financial or sex scandals (his own or in his city government entirely) in his 8' [...]
The speaker describes an interesting technique for (potentially) repairing/regrowing(?) piling under Venice. But her sneering characterization of current building methods as "Victorian technologies" is vast over-reaching, too-too trendy and it seemed to me a bit shallow.
With reference to Better Transit Information:
In general one of the best things a city can do these days is simply open information flows up so that third parties can develop interesting applications. If Google can access your city's public transit scheduling data, [...]Marching Toward Zombieland is political? So says James Howard Kunstler.
The "people" across this big country may not have a clue how any of this is done, and there may be much to fault them on from the care-and-feeding of their own bodies to the [...]Every few months I see articles and posts about congestion pricing as a means of "solving congestion." For example: How Does Congestion Pricing Work? and A Terrible Argument Against Congestion Pricing.
Why such interest in something which has no future? Serious consideration of congestion pricing is so far out of step with popular [...]
What's wrong with this list is that it is far too subjective to be meaningful and puts too much emphasis on the visible.
How it meets the sidewalk (does promote a walkable neighborhood around it) is the most [...]
A Humane Afghan City? (author's site)
....Today, what the public sees is the best park in Afghanistan, deservedly popular among upscale Mazar families, and a [...]
The story was a big one several weeks ago. It was all over the British online press and even the NYT covered it. A Prince's Charity Is Investigated.
But now that the British Charity Commission has issued its finding, no one' [...]
Hope creates reality?
Steve Jobs has not even decided whether Apple should market a Tablet to compete with...just about everything (e.g. Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and maybe Apple's own MacBooks) but the media is starting to go wild. The Apple PR machine must, I assume, be cooperating in generating iTablet (it's [...]
The top ten things you didn't know about Iran
Belief: But didn't President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to "wipe Israel off the map?" Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini to the effect that "this Occupation regime over Jerusalem'" [...]The title of the post says it all: How much did highways really matter for suburbanization?
The answer is not much. Of course suburbanization is not dependent on cars or highways. The Romans had "suburbs" and they used carts and asses. Hey -- [...]
Thus spake Winston Churchill in a different but parallel situation.
•••
Proposed:
The Office of Sustainable UrbanismThe mission is simple: ensure that all City policy promotes sustainable urbanism. And no apologies about the use of the word "urbanism." Seattle is a city, and [...]In a post title Geoengineering Done Calmly, Matthew Yglesias wonders:
That said, trying to get people to paint roofs white seems like a total no-brainer and given how solid the science behind this is I don't really understand why there isn't more momentum [...]Read Roger Valdez'' [...]
With respect to Prince Charles' activism Massengale states here that the issue is only "the quality and character of Starchitects' designs" with no overarching issues of constitution and class.
I wish it were so. Unfortunately Prince Charles is..uh...a Prince, literally and [...]
The charrette is hardly an unknown planning technique. But I have never heard of it being done for an "existing unplanned truck stop...so it can develop over time into a small town and benefit from a planned high speed railway that will stop near the site" in Brokelandsheia, Norway. The [...]
From Q&A With Mark Sisson
MB: I'm impressed by the way the book and the website complement each other. MS: Almost all readers of the book wind up back at the website because it's a constant source of new ideas, philosophies, recipes and communal support. [...]I have no disagreement that there' [...]
What's Wrong With This Building? Read and find out.
We need more analysis of buildings at this level of detail — how they work, in this case visually — especially of the significant buildings which get the big ink in the big media.
[...]More here: [...]
You know about the issue. Right? If not,
first Fifty-nine and a half minutes of brilliance, thirty seconds of hauteur
and then [...]
I was sorry that I witnessed those thirty seconds. They are impossible to forget and entirely change my impression of the man. I was more amazed [...]
Fifty-nine and a half minutes of brilliance, thirty seconds of hauteur.
Of course I am talking about Frank Gehry's thirty seconds of hauteur in response to that annoying "insistent character" Fred Kent.Grass covered building in Seoul, Korea
I don't care about the grass-covering per se but offer this photo only to show that even a most "cutting-edge avant-garde" building can be part of a good urban streetfront. Style is secondary.I'm not a restauranteur, but I've worked in plenty of restaurants, and I watch Kitchen Nightmares. Any time I hear about a restaurant with a huge menu that's having financial trouble, I say, well there you [...]
Daniel Nairn on Fred Kent vs. Frank Gehry
What's interesting to me is what makes this different from the British debate. It is actually more about function than about style. It's notable that Kent is not quibbling with the aesthetic properties of Gehry's buildings, nor' [...]
I used to think that a topic like -- oh, let's see, US-China friction -- was controversial, or climate change, or Google-v-Microsoft, or McNamara-v-Rumsfeld. That was before I innocently stepped into the crossfire concerning the effect' [...]
Commenter Daniel Nairn in post immediately below this one believes that the "insistent character" ignored by Gehry was none other than Fred Kent, who if you don't know is one of the most knowledgeable, astute etc etc people working to make cities more comfortable for walkers. He founded and still' [...]
It's not clear if he does.
The story so far: Frank Gehry (so famous as to need no descriptor such as "star architect") appears at a conference in Aspen and and takes questions from the audience.
Fallows' take — [...]
Has New York Lost Its Great Chance With Frank Gehry?
“Starchitecture” is a glib neologism that reduces hard-won reputations and decadelong undertakings to little dabs of glitz. Gehry can hardly bring himself to utter the [...]
We should thank Prince Charles for his intervention and ask him not to do it again.
On the substance Charles appears to have been correct about the weakness of Lord Rogers' design. Not only the general public and the Chelsea neighbors but the Qatari investors should thank him for helping avoid a' [...]
Lord Rogers:
Quinlan Terry:
Is there really much to say? If nothing else, Terry's open space will have more value to the residents.
[...]Who is Quinlan Terry? Yes, he is the architect pushed-forward by Prince Charles. See Quinlan & Francis Terry Architects. (He practices with his son Francis.)
My immediate reaction On looking at the firm's web page (and tempered as I looked further) was a mixture [...]
A danger of this clash of titans' — Prince Charles vs. Lord Rogers — is that the colorful personalities and constitutional question will obscure the substantive issues of urban design and planning which presumably lie between them.
So far the media has been predictably derelict in its silence on the substance' [...]
Take one example. Though never discussed with any precision much [...]
Developers ‘run plans past Prince Charles’ to avoid rows later
The irony for me is that I happen to largely agree with the substance of Charles' opinions about the urban landscape and think he' [...]Architect Rogers angry at prince
The developer had planned to spend £1bn building a complex of 552 flats in 17 blocks. It had favoured Lord Rogers' modernist glass and steel design, but in March, the Prince of Wales' [...]
...development patterns in the suburbs and exurbs are remarkably inflexible. Just as there’s no way to adjust suburban single-family subdivisions for higher densities, there’s not really any good way to turn a big box space into something other than a big box store. [...]
Riots erupt in Tehran over 'stolen' election
"...hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was confirmed today as the winner of the presidential election..."
"Mr. Netanyahu, please meet Mr. Ahmadinejad, your new best friend."
[...]
