Posts tagged Public Spaces
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Ramp spaghetti on the Potomac
The National Mall in Washington DC is an American icon, visited by millions of tourists, but also somewhat threadbare-looking; since 2001, increasingly choked with security barriers; and gradually becoming overbuilt with memorials for every group with clout in Congress. The National Coalition to Save Our Mall is fighting these disappointing trends. Keep reading…
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Brooklyn puts retail in municipal building
“From the street, [Brooklyn’s Municipal Building] looks like ‘dead space,’” writes the Brooklyn Paper. “‘People have just accepted that government buildings are only for government,’” says Joe Chan of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. Downtown DC is even worse, with back to back Federal buildings each of which… Keep reading…
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Hope for DC’s waterfront
DC’s Southwest Waterfront neighborhood is a classic example of failed urban renewal - old row houses and tenements (some nice, some less so) were razed, replaced with a freeway and 1960s/70s-era buildings where cars enjoy more square footage than people. The dinner cruise on the Potomac Stefanie and I took for our six-month anniversary departed from a pier in Southwest, and… Keep reading…
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Drive-through apartments
In Robert Heinlein’s (fairly bad) book I Will Fear No Evil, cities have become so dangerous that residents drive their cars directly into their buildings, up car-sized elevators, and right to the doors of their apartments. Early in the book a significant figure is murdered because she tries to use the pedestrian entrance. Now, via Streetsblog, such a building is under construction… Keep reading…
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Washington’s good streets and bad streets
Washington, DC is a city with some of the most magnificent public spaces and some of the worst at the same time. The Mall is mixed; it’s a huge tourist attraction with great, free museums and monuments, but many of the buildings present blank stone walls to the streets and there are too many cars, rendering it more of an empty grassy space between attractions than a destination in… Keep reading…
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Grander Army Plaza
Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza could be a terrific public square. Qt the northern end of Prospect Park, it was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to be a gateway to Prospect Park, and features a beautiful arch modeled on Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. Keep reading…
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Building real community in Allston
Drawing a pretty architectural diagram with lots of pictures of people is easy. Creating a real vibrant community where people want to go is harder. Harvard has noble intentions and many very good ideas for the new science campus (PDF) it is planning in Allston. I’ve praised it in the past. Keep reading…
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Soho shoppers seek sidewalk space
I’ve written before that SoHo streets could be enormously improved if we simply took away some parking (accommodating about 6 people per block) in favor of larger sidewalks (accommodating hundreds of people per hour per block). 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…