Video: Center for Urban Pedagogy

Bodega Down Bronx

Where does the food in your bodega — or the corner grocer or local minimart — come from? Who decides whether to stock tortilla chips or salad greens? How come it's easier to find fresh produce in Brooklyn Heights than in the South Bronx? What's the connection between diabetes and the grocery supply chain? Last year the Brooklyn-based Center for Urban Pedagogy set out to answer these questions, and the result is Bodega Down Bronx, a 29-minute video created in collaboration with high school students at New Settlement's Bronx Helpers. Places is pleased to premiere Bodega Down Bronx, in advance of its wider distribution later this month. In the next few months we'll be presenting more CUP projects. Stay tuned.

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From: Places Editors

Best Wishes for 2010

Review: Sandy Isenstadt

Crystal and Arabesque

Does good design encourage good behavior? Can geometric form influence social form? These are the kind of questions that inspired Claude Bragdon, the architectural polymath and progressive thinker active at the turn of the 20th century, whose career and work are the subject of Jonathan Massey's Crystal and Arabesque. Architectural historian Sandy Isenstadt, now a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, reviews the book, which, he says, retrieves not just a figure who had been "abandoned by architectural history" but also a "thrilling moment in design history."

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Review: Barbara Penner

Niagara: It Has It All

Over the years the trans-border cities of Niagara Falls, New York and Ontario, have had multiple identities — honeymoon destination, casino resort, factory town, Superfund site — all rooted in the presence of the famous waterfalls, the most powerful in North America. Architectural historian Barbara Penner, in her review of Inventing Niagara, by Ginger Strand, recounts a contradictory history of landscape stewardship and exploitation. "Niagara Falls," she writes, "has been not only one of the most famous natural wonders in the world, but also one of the most exploited, the preeminent staging ground for the ur-battle of American culture: the battle of human against nature, of the power of nature versus man’s ability to harness it."

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Scholarship: William W. Braham

How Much Does Your Household Weigh?

How much does your house weigh? Decades ago Buckminster Fuller formulated this question as a challenge to homebuilders to assess the environmental impacts of constructing — and heating, cooling, plumbing, furnishing, inhabiting, etc. — a house. Architect and educator William Braham now updates this question, teasing out the complex calculations that will be required even to begin to comprehend the ecological footprint of an architectural design.

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Review: Mark Klett

Placing Memory

On the morning of December 7, 1941 — 68 years ago this month — the Japanese navy attacked the United States' base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, triggering the U.S. declaration of war against Japan and entry into World War II. Soon after the federal government implemented a program that was even then controversial and has since been condemned as racist and unconstitutional: the forced relocation of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry to internment camps located throughout the West. Placing Memory mixes contemporary color photographs of the abandoned camps, by photographer Todd Stewart, with period black-and-white, government-commissioned images documenting the life of the internees. In his review, photographer and Places contributing editor Mark Klett describes the juxtaposition as poignant and provocative — a timely reminder of a troubling history, given current fears of domestic terrorism.

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Review: Gavin Browning

it is what it is

Founded 15 years ago, the New York-based 2x4 is one of the most influential and and prolific design firms around (their portfolio includes the graphic design of a few issues of Places, from the mid-'90s). Now they've published it is what it is (or ... Are we done yet?) — a thousand-page portrait of the interdisciplinary studio. Gavin Browning, coordinator/curator of Columbia University's Studio X in downtown Manhattan, reviews this latest contribution to the genre of the monumental monograph.

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Scholarship: Nicole Huber & Ralph Stern

Urbanizing the Mojave

Las Vegas is one of the great boomtowns of the American West. Nicole Huber and Ralph Stern explore the cultural and environmental consequences of the city's rapid expansion into the Mojave Desert, tracing a complex and troubling history of resource extraction, recreational tourism, military testing, housing speculation and water management. Lately, of course, the boom has gone bust, and regional authorities are struggling with the worst drought on record. Is history finally catching up with the self-styled entertainment capital of the world?

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Essay: Timothy Beatley

The 100-Mile Thanksgiving

What will be the ecological footprint of your Thanksgiving dinner? How far will your turkey travel to the table? Timothy Beatley describes the growing emphasis on regional food systems in urban planning education, and describes a new tradition at the University of Virginia: the 100-Mile Thanksgiving, for which students prepare the annual feast, trying to use food grown, raised or produced within 100 miles of the Charlottesville campus. Here at Places, we are setting out for the annual holiday. We'll be back next week. Happy Thanksgiving!

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Gallery: Ken McCown

Found Landscapes

Photography has long been central to our understanding of buildings and landscapes — and for most of us the experience of places both iconic and ordinary comes largely via images. Landscape architecture professor Ken McCown takes pictures to explore "factors that create harmonious interactions" between design and nature. Here he trains his lens on found objects and landscapes from the American West to classical Rome to street scenes in Seoul.>>

Gallery: Sergio Lopez-Piñeiro

White Space

Years ago the late urban planner Kevin Lynch suggested, as a topic to consider: "How to pile up snow in interesting ways, or to decorate it or color it, with an appendix on ice palaces." Now architect and educator Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, who teaches at SUNY Buffalo, proposes that we delve into the urban design potential of snow, so that "standard plowing techniques can become creative tools for generating winter landscapes and in this way spark a new public appreciation for snow-blanketed urban spaces." >>

Observed

How do you persuade people to take the stairs? Turn the steps into a Piano Staircase. How do you encourage people to throw their trash in the can? Create the World's Deepest Bin, with sound effects. Via Volkswagen's Fun Theory series, "dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people's behavior for the better." [NL]

Observed

Bas Berck's Pocket Architecture Guide is a new iPhone app for design enthusiasts that showcases 165 architects in more than 170 cities around the world. Via core77. [KL]

Observed

What housing is affordable? To find out, in New York City, see Who Lives Here? The site is sponsored by the Center for Urban Pedagogy as part of its Envisioning Development Toolkit. [NL]

Observed

Via Citiwire, Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, proposes what he calls "button parks" — networks of small, informal green spaces that could be created by citizen-activists in collaboration with local land trusts. [NL]

Gallery: Center for Land Use Interpretation

Urban Crude

Every year 28 million barrels of petroleum are extracted from the 41 fields located within Los Angeles — making L.A. the most urban oil-producing site in the nation. Created by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and now on exhibit at its gallery in Culver City, Urban Crude photo-documents this metropolitan petroscape — paying special attention to the myriad efforts to camouflage the fact that some 5,000 wells remain active in the second most populous city in the U.S.>>

Gallery: Renata Stih, Frieder Schnock

Open Space: Berlin After Reunification

For two decades the Berlin-based conceptual artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock have been creating provocative works of public art exploring questions of German memory, history, politics and identity. Here they curate a selection of projects and images, containing and referencing multiple works, to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall.>>

Miscellaneous: Donlyn Lyndon

Lawrence Halprin, 1916 – 2009

Lawrence Halprin, one of the most influential landscape architects of the postwar era, died this past week at the age of 93. Donlyn Lyndon, longtime editor of Places, remembers the work and life of a valued friend and colleague.>>

Event: Alphabet City Festival

Water

Alphabet City: Water
Toronto + New York City
10.31.09 – 11.06.09

Toronto-based Alphabet City is holding its annual festival of arts and ideas. This year's theme is "Water." Taking place in two cities and multiple venues, the festival features exhibitions, performances, panels, readings, an installation, a symposium, and a river walk.

More information >>

Gallery: Paho Mann

Re-Inhabited Circle Ks

The wide arterials of Phoenix, Arizona, are classic low-commitment landscapes — mostly treeless, lined with fast food drive-ins, big box discounters, payday loans, and parking lots everywhere. Photographer Paho Mann has been focusing on this landscape for a decade, paying special attention to "reinhabited" Circle Ks — to the small local businesses that set up shop in locations the Texas-based convenience chain had abandoned.>>

Observed

On Saturday October 24, 350.org held its International Day of Climate Action, featuring more than 5,200 events in 181 countries. People came with cameras and took over 19,000 photographs. You can see them all on the group's Flickr photostream. And on TreeHugger, you can read 350.org founder Bill McKibben, on the Science of 350. [NL]

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Recommended Book

The Tennessee Valley Authority
Tim Culvahouse, Editor
An expansive and interdisciplinary examination of one of the most influential infrastructure-building programs of the New Deal, with essays by Jennifer Bloomer, Steven Heller, Barry M. Katz, Christine Macy, Todd Smith and Jane Wolff, and with new photographs by Richard Barnes. [NL]
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