WTF is platform building?
What is platform building? It’s when you put buildings over railroads and highways. On platforms:
Earlier this century, urban planner Robert Moses did what he thought necessary for New York City’s growth, including building highways that displaced homes and ripped apart neighborhoods.
Now, as a space-starved city looks for places to put more housing, a construction concept called “platform building” may be gluing the city back together.
A major part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to make room for some 1 million new city residents in the next two decades, for example, is to develop air space by building on gigantic platforms constructed over the city’s highways and rail yards.
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The Times-Online guide to nightlife in six so-called “party cities.” No mention of Chattanooga.
Spending the night in Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Belgrade, or New York? The Times-Online offers you a guide to the nightlife in six so-called “party cities.” Belgrade’s inclusion intrigues me.
A Monocle video report from Murmansk
Monocle’s Shaun Walker reports on the revival of Murmansk [wiki, map]. In the wake of the Cold War, the far-north Russian naval port went south; it seems to be doing much better now.
Cabspotting time-lapse visualizations
The Cabspotting project has some great time-lapse maps of routes taken by Bay Area cabs.
Cabspotting is designed as a living framework to use the activity of commercial cabs as a starting point to explore the economic, social, political and cultural issues that are revealed by the cab traces. Where do cabs go the most? Where do they never turn up?
Harvard Design Magazine: The Dutch 70s, by Wouter Vanstiphout
I was browsing the back issues of Harvard Design Magazine and found an article by Wouter Vanstisphout entitled “The Dutch 70s.” Though it’s about the legacy of 1970s design in The Netherlands, I found the introductory paragraph most interesting:
In Holland there are no architects, buildings, or even unrealized designs that have been unjustly neglected. In the last ten or fifteen years — before which only the golden age of the 17th century and the heroic period of modern architecture in the 1920s were of interest — almost everything has been colonized by historians: first the eclectic 19th century, then the neoclassic 18th century, then the styleless pragmatic 1930s, the protomodern teens, and most recently the ugly reconstruction architecture of the 1950s and 60s. . . Whole areas in Holland have been designated as “protected cityscape.” This does not mean that you can’t demolish important buildings — but they first must be documented, described, and categorized.
The Denver Museum of Contemporary Art reopens this Sunday in a new location
The Museum of Contemporary Art | Denver reopens this Sunday in a new location [map]. Architect David Adjaye designed the shiny, new building [pictures]. Architectural Record has the details. I like the design, especially what I’ve seen of the interior walls:
Adjaye, known in Europe for his creative use of industrial building materials, employed tinted glass for the museum’s exterior walls but added an interior skin of MonoPan, a translucent material made of woven recycled plastic and used in the fabrication of trailers and storage sheds, among other products. “It was something I encountered at a trade fair of motor cars,” Adjaye says. “I was blown away by this material.”
If that’s not enough, I recommend the New York Magazine interview with Adjaye:
Your museum in Denver also seems like an attempt to make something more public than the traditional museum.
It is like a mini-version of a city.How is that done architecturally?
You never go from one exhibition space to another: You always come out into a kind of street and then you meander into another exhibition space. The way in which you are seeing art is almost like being in a little village or little town.What is the plus of that?
You have the ability to perceive art, digest it, then go on to the next thing. You get away from the exhaustion when you are relentlessly pounded with stuff.
Forbes: America’s most sedentary cities.
Forbes: America’s most sedentary cities.
Forbes added together three scores for each city. These scores measured body mass index, physical inactivity, and television viewing. They derived the first two scores from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the television viewing score came from Nielsen data.
Memphis came in first and five of the top ten are cities in the southeastern United States (I’m not counting Miami).
A (slightly edited) passage from Lindsay Bremner’s draft for “Citiness as Literariness”
A (slightly edited) passage from Lindsay Bremner’s draft for “Citiness as Literariness” [PDF]. Found via Networked_Performance.
The city asserts its otherness in a number of ways.
Firstly, it exposes us to an excessive presence of others, of strangers, who call into question our ownership of the world.
Second…the city annihilates authorship. It is most certainly a made artifact, yet by whom? The very multiplicity of agency at work in it means firstly that it is not made by any one. In other words, it is made by no one, which is the same as to say by every one. Urban life is constantly made and unmade by multiple realities, and authorship, no matter how prominent, quickly disappears into obscurity, anonymity or cultural history. The city erases authorship for itself.
Thirdly, like the work of literature, the city brings its authors / writers into existence, not the other way round.
More information on Lindsay Bremner’s appearance in Slought Foundation’s Architecture Dejeuner Series may be found here.
Chinese company City8 enters online mapping fray
Using home-grown technology, a Chinese firm has upstaged the likes of Google and Microsoft with a mapping service featuring 360-degree street-level imaging of extraordinarily high resolution.
The Sydney Morning Herald covers City8’s entrance to the online mapping fray [web site and a sample street level view]. The catch? City8 has been around since 2005 and has done street level mapping since 2006, nearly a year before Google dropped Street View on an oversuspecting public.
The democracy of traffic
Traffic democratizes; commuting equalizes. Hell, the very word commute comes from the Latin for to change.
It’s rush hour in Atlanta; if you’re on the road in a car, you’ll have to wait. The commute doesn’t care about your income level or what kind of car you drive. Twice daily, Interstates 75 and 85 are the most mixed of mixed-income experiments in the region. The trouble is, we’re all locked inside our cars.
The trouble could be worse. The rich could skip the traffic ritual in favor of a helicopter ride.
They already do it in Sao Paulo:
Like a fleet of airborne limousines, the helicopters are increasingly used by privileged Paulistanos to commute, attend meetings, even run errands and go to church. Helicopter landing pads are now standard features of many of Sao Paulo’s guarded residential compounds and high-rise roofs.
Illustrating what may be a Blade Runner-esque glimpse of the future in metropolises where rich and poor are crammed together, helicopters are the vehicle of choice for more than just their convenience. Many of the roads here are hopelessly clogged with traffic. Carjackings, kidnappings of executives and roadside robberies have become a part of the risks of daily life for anyone perceived to have money.
At 400 and growing, the total fleet of private helicopters in Sao Paulo is the biggest of any city in the developing world. Although the fleets in New York and Tokyo are larger, the helicopters in those cities are owned mostly by corporations, not rich individuals.
The future of commuting looks a lot less democratic. I’ll miss the Jaguars next to me in traffic when they’re gone.