Review: Ian Baldwin

Architect, Park Thyself

In the 20th century the United States became a nation of drivers, and for decades now our cities have been adapting to the automobile, with notably mixed results. "The auto-urban relationship — fumbling, overheated, unsatisfying for both parties — never stands still long enough to be rationally inspected," writes architect Ian Baldwin. "But there is one place where city and car merge into stasis: the parking garage." Baldwin reviews House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage, now at the National Building Museum. The exhibition takes a long look of the evolution of a building type that, as Baldwin notes, "makes the modern city possible." Baldwin also reviews The Architecture of Parking, by British architect Simon Henley, which offers an overview of international garage design.

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Opinion: Hector Fernando Burga

A View of Haiti from Liberty City

Last week on Change Observer, in "Prepared for Haiti," the product designer Tony Whitfield reflected on the limited ability of design to respond in the immediate aftermath of catastrophic destruction. Here Miami-based architect Hector Fernando Burga suggests a similar challenge for urban design — that the field has yet to devise the techniques by which practitioners might apply their expertise with speed and agility. Tony Whitfield provoked an animated debate, which isn't surprising. As designers we are, says Hector Burga, "trained to find solutions," to pursue "positive transformation." And yet our methods tend to assume "a high degree of stability and linearity." Can we devise more improvisatory techniques, more supple and adaptable frameworks for response?

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Opinion: Nancy Levinson

The Public Works

The Great Depression of the 1930s inspired FDR's New Deal, which built thousands of public works that remain vital to this day. Our Great Recession has so far failed to spur a new New Deal, even as essential American infrastructure decays and collapses. Why? Certainly there's no shortage of innovative design thinking. The real dilemma is that we confront our crisis in a market-driven culture that's suspicious of public sector solutions — and more, of the very idea of the public.

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Report: Linda Samuels

Working Public Architecture

The WPA — Works Progress Administration — was the largest of the various agencies that made up FDR's New Deal. It was a big-picture federal response to the Great Depression that created millions of jobs and funded thousands of projects, including major infrastructure and public buildings. Can we envision a new WPA in response to the Great Recession? This was the challenge that cityLab, the urban design think tank at UCLA, set for itself with WPA 2.0, an ambitious program that's so far comprised a competition and exhibition, with a web-based exhibition scheduled for next month. Here, as part of our intensifying focus on infrastructure, Linda Samuels reports on the WPA 2.0 competition and symposium, and on the challenges of moving from vision to implementation.

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Review: Beth Weinstein

The City's End

For well over a century the fantastical destruction and rebirth of New York City has been the subject of books, cartoons, comics, paintings, movies, television shows and multimedia art. As architect Beth Weinstein says, in her review of Max Page's The City End, "Anxiety about the city's readiness to cope with attack long predates the events of September 11, 2001. From the 18th century to the present, preparedness, as concept and reality, has been an always ungraspable goal, given the city's escalating and diversifying population as well as the rise of increasingly unruly means of destruction, in the hands of real or imaginary enemies." Those enemies are still afoot — this Sunday's season premiere of 24 finds Jack Bauer and his fellow counter-terrorists operating from their new base in NYC.

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Report: Quilian Riano, Dk Osseo-Asare

A City in Search of Good Fortune

Buenaventura is one of Colombia's most profitable seaports, and its most notorious city. Plagued by drug traffickers and paramilitary gangs, poverty and corruption, it was called the country's "deadliest city" in a New York Times report. This past summer architects Quilian Riano and Dk Osseo-Asare ignored the warnings of friends and family and traveled to the port on the Pacific. They've returned with a multidimensional narrative — analyses, interviews and images — of the struggling city, where the proposed solutions might be part of the problem.

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Review: William L. Fox

Las Vegas

"Las Vegas is a problem that won't go away," writes William L. Fox in his review of Nicole Huber and Ralph Stern's book about the city. Despite the recent troubles — housing crisis, persistent drought, rising foreclosures, declining tourism — America's playground is by now, argues Fox, "so deeply embedded in the collective American imagination that you might say it's too important to fail." Created — and periodically re-created — by massive allocations of resources, the city will continue to be underwritten by the gaming-entertainment-retail conglomerates that it enriches. Whether this is a smart move — or whether it's symptomatic of the sort of expenditures that will, in Fox's words, "lead us to a dead planet" — is anybody's bet.

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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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Miscellaneous: Places Editors

Best Wishes for 2010

Partner Schools: Arizona State University

Phoenix – Barcelona: Cities in Transformation

Arizona State University
Symposium: Feb. 8, 2010
Exhibition: Feb 8, 2010 - Feb 26, 2010

This month ASU will sponsor a symposium and exhibition which builds on the work of a previous exhibition and symposium, The Desert as a Client, held in Barcelona in October 2009. >>

Gallery: Alan Thomas

Chicago Self-Park

For several years Chicago-based editor and photographer Alan Thomas has been focusing on the city's self-park garages, large multistory structures that provide "a particular way of framing the cityscape beyond." Here, with a gallery of Thomas's photographs, we continue to look at the architecture of parking, at more "houses of cars." >>

Partner Schools: Auburn University

"Think Tall"

An interdisciplinary team of students from the Masters programs in Architecture and Building Sciences at Auburn University has won a competition to design a pedestrian bridge for the new Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, TN.>>

Observed

Tugendhat House on talk radio: this week the Diane Rehm show features a fascinating discussion of The Glass Room, the new novel by Simon Mawr inspired by the complex history of Mies's glass-and-steel villa in prewar Czechoslovakia. Participants include the National Building Museum curator Susan Piedmont-Palladino. [NL]

Gallery: Gavin Browning, Michelle Fornabai

ink

Tonight Studio-X — an initiative of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia — is opening "ink," a show of ink-on-Mylar drawings by artist-architect Michelle Fornabai. The exhibition was shown last summer at Studio-X Beijing, and tonight's event will feature a simulcast between participants in Bejing and New York including Fornabai, GSAPP dean Mark Wigley, and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Places is pleased to present a selection of images from "ink." >>

Gallery: Christine Macy

Dams Across America

Last week we featured articles and videos that focus on the prospect of a new era of public works — and the challenges of making that happen. So naturally we were interested in Dams, the latest in the Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks, just published by Norton. As Christine Macy notes, dams are a monumental presence in the landscape, and controversial too — hailed as feats of engineering and vilified as destroyers of habitat. Here we offer an excerpt and a slideshow focusing on the legacy of the 1930s and '40s, with period images suggesting the complex, years-long construction processes of Tennessee Valley Authority dams and of Hoover and Grand Coulee, two of the largest hydroelectric dams in the U.S. Something to contemplate as the current administration struggles to stimulate the economy and smarten the energy grid. >>

Partner Schools: UC Berkeley

Visualizing the Future of
Environmental Design

Visualizing the Future of <br />Environmental Design

UC Berkeley Spring Program
College of Environmental Design
2.3.10 – 2.6.10

UC Berkeley's spring celebration will focus on the global dynamics and sustainability challenges that could have not been foreseen when the CED was founded in 1959.

More information >>

Observed

Interdisciplinary design education is a ubiquitous, though elusive, goal. See Urban Omnibus for a thoughtful look at the Integrated Studio that David Leven and Derek Porter are teaching at Parsons, in which architecture and lighting design students are reimagining the WPA-era 79th Street Boat Basin along the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan. [NL]

Video: cityLab

WPA 2.0: Projects

To complement Linda Samuels's article on the WPA 2.0 competition and symposium, we are pleased to feature expanded visual presentations and videos of the finalists' projects.>>

Observed

News we can definitely use: according to a new study, What we learned from the stimulus, a joint project from the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Smart Growth America and U.S. PIRG, "investing in public transportation produced twice as many jobs per dollar as investing in roads." Via Land Online. [NL]

Observed

For the virtual traveler on a wintry day: take A Pilgrimage to the Solar Electric Generating Stations in the Mojave Desert, with Alexis Madrigal of Inventing Green. Via Rob Holmes at Mammoth. [NL]

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.>>

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Recommended Book

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes
Anita Berrizbeitia, editor
A hefty and handsome monograph on the work of this landscape architecture firm. Much of the work is for environmentally damaged sites, and combines complex reconstruction techniques with a sophisticated design sensibility. The projects range in scale from a series of gorgeous minimalist courtyards for Tahari’s headquarters to large-scale waterfront parks in Pittsburgh and New York. [NL]
Buy This Book >>
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