Top 5 Architecture and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of Sept. 2, 2013

090213 The excitement of  field trips. Returning streets to the people. Building under bridges. Public squares in the urban world. A trail for volunteering. Examining thought leadership.A trip into the field.

Melanie Kahl of Cannon Design discusses how field trips contribute to design, learning and place.

“Strange as it may seem, we think field trips are more of a mindset and lifestyle than anything else. A mindset central to learning and design. When we go on field trips, we become students of the world––our awareness is heightened, our inspiration is fueled, and our understanding is deepened. Life is a series of really awesome field trips.” – Melanie Kahl

Via Cannon Design Blog

Returning streets to people. Gerdo Aquino, president of SWA Group, examines how cities are finding opportunities to reintroduce car-free zones that give the streets back to the people.

Aquino provides five tips for going car-free in urban areas, including making sure that pedestrians already frequent the space, that the street is not currently essential to the city’s street grid and the place is a unique destination.

Via Ideas SWA

 

Under bridges. Jared Green of ASLA’s the Dirt explores Mexico City’s creative use of space under its bridges.
After the success of its pilot program Bajo Puentes, or Under Bridges, which turned four trash-strewn, vacant underpass spaces into vibrant shopping plazas, playgrounds, and cafes, the city is expanding the program. It will add another five and target 30 more possible areas that can be turned into commercial or recreational space. as candidates.

Public squares are center of urban world. Landscape Architects Network (LAN) features 10 festival squares as part of its Top 100 Squares, showing the world the power of people and the power of public space.

  1. St. Marks Square, Venice, Italy
  2. Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia
  3. Century Square, Shanghai, China
  4. Yonge-Dundas Square, Toronto, Canada
  5.  Zócalo Square, Mexico City, Mexico
  6. Jackson Square, New Orleans, USA
  7. Leidseplein, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  8. Parc del Forum, Barcelona, Spain
  9. Place Sainte-Catherine, Brussels, Belgium
  10. Bristo Square, Edinburgh, Scotland

Via LAN

A great trail for volunteering. Stantec landscape architect Dalton LaVoie assembled a volunteer team of local designers throughout Northern California to help create a road map for converting an iconic stretch of now defunct Northern California railroad into a landmark hiking trail.

When complete, the 80-mile scenic Great Shasta Rail Trail will link the Northern California towns of McCloud and Burney, as well as nearby recreation areas and local communities. “Volunteering can serve as a creative outlet and provide opportunities that may not otherwise present themselves through your everyday work. For design professionals, exercising creativity and imagination is one of our passions. When this passion is coupled with opportunities to learn, explore, collaborate and assist communities in need, we’re usually interested.” – Dalton LaVoie

Via Stantec Blog

Thought Leadership Article

Amanda Walter of Walter Communications examines the term thought leadership, discovering a growing movement toward thought leadership programs across the AEC industry.

Walter conducted a global survey, which indicated several common topics: sustainability, technology and business growth and operations, design process and project delivery. But there was one factor that was evident in each firm interviewed: “Leadership. Somewhere — maybe not directly conducting the research, but cheering on the team that is — there are passionate individuals who have sparked the initial curiosities. Permission to pursue ideas can have infectious results.”—Amanda Walter

Via Design Intelligence

Weekly Design and Urban Blog Post Roundup for Week of April 29, 2013

HOK on utilizing space smartly. Cities, water, and drinking fountains. Shanley in The Dirt on protecting our coasts. Earth day, the P+W way. Social media campaign worth noting: Bare Essentials. 130506

 

Smart space utilization. As clients seek to use their office space effectively, Mike McKeown, a senior workplace strategist with HOK Strategic Accounts + Consulting group, looks at ways to improve the workplace experience.

McKeown makes several recommendations in approaching workplace studies such as examining goals and key performance indicators, and keeping time, technology and privacy factors in mind. “Establishing goals and KPI’s early on will help determine how long to conduct a study as well as how high-tech or low-tech you want to make your approach. In some cases the client may have data to provide you as a reference point, such as badge swipe statistics for days and times employees are coming and going.” – Mike McKeown

Via HOK Life

 

Urban water. Josselyn Ivanov, a landscape and urban designer in San Francisco, discusses the benefits of public water and her love of drinking fountains.

“Sources of water are inherently magical. Especially in a city, sealed in concrete, water connects us with nature, engages our senses, and physically connects us with place. Free water sources in public spaces, historically provided by philanthropists or cities themselves, were one of the major progressive steps forward for civilization.” - Josselyn Ivanov

Via Landscape Urbanism

 

Protecting our coasts. Kevin Shanley, CEO of SWA Group, talks about protecting our coasts in the wake of increasingly damaging storms and sea-level rise brought on by climate change.

Shanley talks about real-world lessons from Hurricane Sandy, soft green infrastructure in New York City, the impact of sea level rising and wetland parks in China.

Via The Dirt

Honoring Earth Day.  Perkins+Will celebrated Earth Day by having its offices honor the planet in different ways throughout the week.

Perkins+Will, which is committed to sustainability, is carbon neutral and actively seeks to reduce carbon emissions through green operations and has

212 LEED certified projects. Earth Day activities included planting an herb garden in the Washington, D.C., office café,  showing a slideshow that outlined several ways to minimize negative environmental impact on the climate in the Boston office, and participating in the 2013 Earth Day Rideshare in Chicago.

Via Ideas + Buildings

 

Innovative Social Media Campaign

Bare Escentuals' bareMinerals, kicked off its nationwide #GoBare tour on Twitter by revealing their secret indulgences for a chance to see them brought to life. The #GoBare Twitter initiative comes as the brand embarks upon its Go Bare tour, a six-month six-city tour of the U.S. that includes a "pop-up boutique-meets-lounge and a traveling team of complexion experts devoted to helping women discover their best skin ever." A camera crew will be stopping in cities across the country to surprise select Twitter users that share their secret indulgences

Via Clickz

Bare Escentuals

 

Favorite Design and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of March 10, 2013

Olin Studio considers the intersection of planning and landscape. Landscape Urbanism spots an app for street design. SWA acknowledges the designers of the Golden Gate Parks.  An interview with an HOK designer. A different model for design education in Metropolis POV. 130318

Intersection of planning and landscape. OLIN Studio hosted a symposium that explored the intricacies of the relationship between planning and landscape architecture.

Several issues were brought up, including whether design should be brought back into planning. Or should planning sensibility be folded into the world of design? How are these topics relevant today? The symposium focused on the following themes:

  1.  Projective Work
  2. Powerful Players
  3. Global Scale
  4. Education and Conversation
  5. Art and Instrumentality

Via The OLIN Studio Blog

 

App for street design. Sarah Kathleen Peck, editor of Landscape Urbanism, writes about an app that lets you place various street elements in different spaces and adjusts the Right-Of-Way to desired traffic levels.

The app was designed by Code for America graduates and launched to increase real-time engagement at community planning meetings and allow people to work collaboratively with one another as well as share and edit each other’s creations. The app can be tested at at StreetMix.Net.

Via Landscape Urbanism

Related: StreetMix

 

Designers of the Golden Gate Parks. Rene Bihan of SWA Group blogs about the important legacy left by the designers and stewards of the Golden Gate National Parks. The landscape architect is hosting a fundraiser for The Cultural Landscape Foundation in honor of these citizens next month.

“Our vibrant and tightly-packed North Beach neighborhood is offset by the not-too-far-away wide open spaces of the Golden Gate National Parks (GGNP) that hint at the what the city was like generations ago and what the landscape was like before there was a city. It is no accident that these spaces are still here. The GGNP of today is the collective result of generations of activists, environmentalists, lawyers, stewards, and designers. We owe these individuals a great deal.” – Rene Bihan

Via IdeaSWA blog

Related: You’re Invited! An Evening Honoring a Model for Stewardship Innovation and Design Excellence

 

Interview with HOK designer. Todd Bertsch, Design Director for HOK in Atlanta, Georgia, discusses what it’s like to be an architect in Atlanta and some of the projects he’s worked on.

“Practicing architecture is this incredible collision of solving technical problems, exploring philosophical ideas and expressing creativity. We have the opportunity to affect what our communities look like, how society operates and how people live. We can blend beauty and poetry to create these high-performance buildings that have a positive influence on the world. These challenges thrill me every day.” – Todd Bertsch

Via HOK Life

 

Different model for design education. Sherin Wing examines the graduate program at the Art Center College of Design’s Media Design Practices (MDP), which provides a unique foundation of theory and on-the-ground training. Advocates of the program hope the model will influence other design programs.

While “activist” design has been around for years, the Art Center model unites critical analysis with design skills. The goal is to provide useful solutions for people locally and abroad without being culturally reductive or condescending. Too often, designers try to reinvent social intervention in their haste to be in the vanguard of a “new” approach and school-based design projects. These can be equally misguided. The result can waste material resources, human capital and money, while reinforcing cultural assumptions about the “other.”

Via Metropolis Magazine POV

 

Favorite Blog Posts for Week of Sept. 17

Advocating for a new sustainability. Julia Hughes, an associate principal for HMC Architects, blogs about her work with sustainable justice began in 2006 with a presentation about green juvenile facilities. Out of this evolved the AIA Academy of Architects for Justice (AAJ) Sustainable Justice Committee.

The committee has developed the Green Guide to Justice, which is designed to serve as a voluntary educational tool for early adopters of sustainable design, construction, and operations practices, and to encourage continuous improvement in the justice sector, continued leadership, and increased rigor associated with creating high performance justice environments.

Via HMC Architects Blog

Green Guide to Justice, via AIA Knowledge Network

Millennials leaving small towns. Brittany Shoot, who resides in the Bay Area, discusses her guilt on leaving her small hometown of Anderson, Indiana, and how most of her friends in the Bay Area come from small towns.

“It’s easy to find people who will sneeringly complain about how trapped they felt as teenagers. It’s harder to talk about our nuanced realizations that in such dire economic times, maybe we just got extraordinarily lucky.” –Brittany Shoot

Via The Atlantic Cities

Swiss Cakes and Shasta.  Doug Windall, president of HDR architecture, blogs about his love for junk food as HDR rolls out a wellness program for employees.

While Windall reminisces about his deep fondness for Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls, he encourages people to enjoy the great things in life, but “never to the point that the great becomes ordinary. Too much of anything can take away the thrill (and in the case of junk food, put on the pounds).’’

Via Blink – Perspectives on Design Blog

Flying bicyclists. London Mayor Boris Johnson is seriously considering developing SkyCycle, a concept by landscape architect Sam Martin that proposes a network of elevated cycled paths between London’s main tube stations.

The SkyCycle would transform unused elevated rail lines and also include new infrastructure. Martin, who is director of Exterior Architecture, is already developing feasibility studies for a few open-air tunnels, which would be sided in glass or plastic. If all goes well, the sky-highways could be open by 2015.

Via The Dirt

Innovative Social Media

Favorite drinking fountains. Josselyn Ivanov of SWA blogged about how she loves drinking fountains, and how they are important as they are small urban elements that have an outsized impact, enhancing people’s lives or modifying users’ behavior in surprising ways.

Ivanov held a weekly quiz on SWA’s Facebook page featuring some of her favorite drinking fountains from around the world – people had to guess where the fountain was located.  WNPR found her articles and asked her to be part of their radio show called “For The Love of Fountains.”

WNPR http://www.yourpublicmedia.org/node/21908

SWA Social Impact Blog

What Will Pop-up Tomorrow?

The pop-up urbanism trend that started with parklets in San Francisco is spreading across the country. These temporary parks in place of parking spots have shown up in Oakland, Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and even smaller cities like Asheville, NC. The concept has spread beyond temporary park space and is now testing retail concepts in gentrifying areas.

The idea for parklets emerged in 2005 from PARK(ing) Day in San Francisco, an annual event that will happen on Sept. 21 this year, when residents reclaimed a parking space for the day by setting up chairs, tables and plants to create a temporary park. Last year, PARK (ing) Day occurred in 162 cities and 35 countries. The true “parklet” movement was kicked off in March 2010 when San Francisco approved the building of a parklet in front of Café Mojo on Divisadero Street. Another parklet milestone is the Powell Street Promenade, the largest parklet in San Francisco that was installed in 2011. This area provides a space to eat, talk and relax, providing people a reprieve from the bustle of the corridor, which is one of the busiest in the nation and frequented by more than 100,000 people on an average weekend.

Earlier this month, I dropped by one of San Francisco’s latest urban intervention “SqFt”. Spanning several blocks between 5th and 7th on Market Street, the organizers programmed activities throughout the day that gave retail renters in the area a chance to try something new and it gave virtual companies the opportunity to interact with customers in person. The day began with coffee for bike commuters, a yummy tamale vendor provide fuel for drumming lessons, etsy artist sales and yoga lessons.

With a surge of interest in urbanism across the country, communities are rethinking public space. The advantage of pop-ups is that they offer fast and inexpensive tools for making a big impact. Designers and planners are heavily involved in the big and long term moves of a city and each project becomes the latest calling card for the firms involved. These mini moves are also opportunities to distinguish a firm’s design, creativity and philosophies. The phenomenon of pop-up urbanism, also known as tactical urbanism, has not only gained popularity, but has created a way to test new concepts before embarking on substantial political and financial commitments with the intention of improving the quality of human life in sustainable way.

What started as parklets has evolved to temporary storefronts like [storefront] Olson Kundig’s experimental work place for the firm's community collaborations in Seattle and David Baker’s San Francisco StoreFrontLab, a year-long exploration of storefronts as places of community, creativity and local industry. [storefront] has performed as a record store, a mushroom farm, Hardware [store] and is currently an exhibition focused on the individuals working in the Puget Sound region to eradicate poverty and homelessness, Skid Road.

Olson Kundig Architects in Seattle uses the [storefront] below their studio for community collaborative exhibitions

The upcoming pop-up at StoreFrontLab is the Post-Car Travel Agency, which opens on Aug. 17 for a week of talks, one-on-one travel services and discussions on living car-free. Before that, it was a craft shop selling artisan goods such as skateboards, clothing and sandcastle molds.

Tactical urbanism seems to be the current motif in the architecture world. The theme of this year’s U.S. Pavilion at the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale is Spontaneous Interventions: design actions for the common good. The biennale will focus on compelling and actionable strategies, ranging from urban farms to guerilla bike lanes, temporary architecture to poster campaigns, urban navigation apps to crowdsourced city planning.

Conger Moss Guillard’s (CMG) Parkmobiles, which are robust, movable containers with lush gardens that fit in a street parking space, was accepted into this year’s prestigious Venice Biennale. While everyone is embracing the gush of interest in pop-up urbanism, there are some concerns. How can tactical urbanism work in architecture and the formal planning process? Mike Lydon, principal at Brooklyn’s Street Plans Collaborative and author of Tactical Urbanism, Volume 2, is among the tactical urbanists contributing to the Venice Biennale. He says that the planning process won’t be replaced by pop-up-urbanism.

“Following up on comprehensive planning efforts, the neighborhood-wide or city-wide planning process can use tactical urbanism to take some of the most popular ideas and really do things quickly rather than have them wait on the shelf for the million-dollar funding stream. Tactical urbanism is a tool for the more formal planning process,” Lydon said in an interview with the Architect’s Newspaper.

What do you think is next in the pop-up evolution?

Check out our Tactical Urbanism Board on Pinterest!