Posts tagged Architecture
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Landmark or mistake?
If a building is ugly, doesn’t serve its intended purpose, and the people who own it want to tear it down… but it was built by the firm of a famous architect and is a prime example of its architectural style, should it be a landmark? That’s the debate before the DC Historic Preservation Review Board about the Third Church of Christ, Scientist (aka Christian Science)… Keep reading…
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T is for Transit-Oriented or Towers in the Park?
From Le Corbusier to today, architects of the automobile era designed buildings that look good from an automobile vantage point: serene and beautiful at high distance or while passing at high speed, but become imposing and dehumanizingly out-of-scale at human distance. Large windswept grassy areas or concrete plazas provide pleasing visual separation at car scale but… Keep reading…
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New York public spaces good and bad
Speaking of public space, the Project for Public Spaces has put together a detailed commentary on New York’s public space - the good spaces, the terrible ones, and the opportunities for the future. Keep reading…
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“Suburban sensibility”
A Times article about Newport, the dense mixed-used development on the Hudson waterfront in Jersey City, talks about how the LeFrak family turned this wasteland of abandoned railyards into a thriving neighborhood. It’s a real success story and a great - and uncommon - example of how open developable spaces can be turned into something better than two-story generic… Keep reading…
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Restoring Penn Station: Possible?
In the 1960s, the beautiful Penn Station was torn down and replaced by the hideous Madison Square Garden, relegating America’s busiest train station to a cramped basement. Now, New York is poised to build a new grand Moynihan Station on the west side of 8th Avenue, in the old Farley Post Office building that happens to have been designed by the same architects. No… Keep reading…
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Three visions of the city
As Boozy so entertainingly informed us, Le Corbusier’s vision for a city was the Radiant City, of rows of identical buildings and skyscrapers separated by parkland. Robert Moses’ vision for the city included wide expressways (which eventually became choked with traffic) cutting across boulevards of urban renewal style projects. And Jane Jacobs famously… Keep reading…
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Five things not to do when building a convention center
1. Surround your building with an imposing stone facade that completely isolates it from the nearby street. Place no cafes or other businesses on the street, no places to sit, or anything to engage pedestrians. Keep reading…
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The all-purpose suburban mega-home
Robert Samuelson writes about the dangerous trend toward larger and larger homes. “By and large,” he says, “the new American home is a residential SUV. It’s big, gadget-loaded and slightly gaudy.” Encouraged by tax breaks for mortgages, American families are buying larger and larger homes even as the prices soar. Keep reading…
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Don’t play SimCity (Classic)
Like many people my age, I grew up playing SimCity, the 80s classic video game of city planning. The player lays out transportation infrastructure, parks, and residential, commercial, or industrial zones into which the Sims build their own buildings. All the zones are square and exactly the same size. (There have since been two sequels, SimCity 2000 and… Keep reading…