Top 4 Architecture and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of July 1, 2013

Cities as living organisms. Pedestrian bridge for Buffalo Bayou. Phoenix Project soars. Perkins + Will explores open workspace.  Oscar Mayer's Weinermobile Run.

Cities as living organisms. Charlie Payne of HMC Architects discusses his journey to study cities as living organisms and to uncover implications the health of the city has on its populous through the firm’s Xref travel grant.

Payne visited three cities – Detroit, Dubai and Istanbul – and chronicles the health, history and culture of each.

Via HMC Architects Blog

Pedestrian bridge. SWA looks at Buffalo Bayou’s Jackson Hill Bridge in Houston, which is under development and will create ways to mitigate the wet landscape of the urban area and connect neighborhoods together.

The bridge is 345 linear feet and is made out of weathering steel truss bridge with pressure treated pine deck. It will be completed by the fall.

Via SWA Ideas Blog

Phoenix Project soars. Bob Carroll of Payette examines Xu Bing’s Phoenix Project at MASS MoCa, two 100-foot long, 10-ton sculptures intended to resemble birds in flight.

Carroll says the project was inspired by a visit to Bing’s native China after living abroad for nearly 20 years. Bing was amazed to find how much had changed both physically and cultural as a result of the country’s growing wealth, and found the “huge contrast” between the modern skyscrapers and the primitive shantytowns, which housed the construction workers, striking.

Via Payette Blog

Designing for innovation. Janice Barnes, a Principal and Global Discipline Leader for Planning and Strategies at Perkins + Will, explores the growing prevalence of open plan workplaces.

With a more complex, knowledge-based economy, there’s a growing interdependence between coworkers. Some tasks are simply too complex for one person to tackle. That’s when the idea of focus becomes exceedingly interesting. For companies that are at the forefront of innovation, truly trying to capture the ‘pre-wave’ of that next best thing, focus often means leverage. – Janice Barnes

Via Ideas + Perspectives

Innovative Social Media

Oscar Meyer has announced the Weinermobile Run, a revamped tour of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles. To encourage consumers to follow the promotion on social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the young men and women who drive the six Wienermobiles — Hotdoggers — are being organized into teams. Each team’s vehicle gets its own name and hashtag. The teams will race around the country accumulating points as the drivers perform tasks or challenges submitted by the public on a Web site, wienermobilerun.com.

Via New York Times

Top 4 Blog Posts for Architecture and Urbanism

HDR on art-filled spaces. P+W discusses disabilities and design. Summer reading with SPUR Rugged history from Preservation. Nature's mutualism.

 

 Art filled spaces. Michael McManus, communications specialist at HDR Architecture, writes about the new HDR expansion of MultiCare Health System’s Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital and Health Center in Tacoma, WA,

For the art program, designers from HDR and Bainbridge  worked with the client, an art committee, and an art broker to commission works of art by local Tacoma artists. “The artists were tasked with creating pieces that reflect Washington’s Puget Sound. The Puget Sound, which is an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, is home to a wealth of coastal life, from the giant pacific octopus to curious seals and an abundance of Orcas. Each piece that was placed in the hospital captures the innate wonder of marine life.” – Michael McManus

Via Blink Perspective

Disabilities and design. Bill Schmalz and Bruce Toman of Perkins + Will, examine accommodations for those with physical disabilities and how this affects design.

For those who aren’t disabled, the temporarily-able bodied, “we don’t know when accessible design will help us, but at some point in our lives, it probably will.

That’s the attitude we should take when we design. Rather than reluctantly complying with codes and standards, or charitably giving “those disabled people” a break, let’s take the selfish approach: we’re designing accessible spaces for ourselves” – Bill Schmalz and Bruce Toman

Via Ideas  + Perspective

Favorite urbanism reads. SPUR, an organization that’s dedicated to ideas and action for a better city, provides a summer reading list of its favorite books on urban planning and policy.

Jeff Speck’s Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time, will be discussed during SPUR Reads, a book discussion series launching in San Jose this summer.

Via SPUR

Historic with rugged charm. Lauren Walser, field editor at Preservation magazine, discusses a visit to the historic restaurant Saddle Peak Lodge in Calabasas, California.

While the historic building has been a restaurant for many years, current owner Ann Graham Ehringer purchased it in the early 1990s and revived much of the interior. Her approach has been one dedicated to continual maintenance, making repairs to the historic structure, ensuring the space always feels welcoming and has been a preservation steward of the property.

Via Preservation Nation Blog

Biomimicry and urban design. Biomimicry 3.8 hosted the 7^th Annual Biomimicry Education Summit and first Global Conference in Boston this past weekend, keynoted by Biomimicry 3.8 cofounder Janine Beynus.

Benyus proposed a shift in thinking about how nature's communities function, arguing that mutualism, not competition, is the driving force in nature. "Together is better," she said, adding that building mutually beneficial relationships will ultimately result in surplus, not scarcity.

Via Treehugger

Favorite Design and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of January 28, 2012

 

Decoding landscape urbanism. Michael Mayer of OLIN Studio seeks to find out what is landscape urbanism at OLIN’s Theoretical Symposium.

While the book The Landscape Urbanism Reader defines the term as “a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism,” the symposium explored four definitions of landscape urbanism as the framework for the studio’s theories to clarify the term.

1. Landscape urbanism as diagnosis
2. Landscape urbanism as framework and process
3. Landscape urbanism as green infrastructure 
4. Landscape urbanism as landscape + urbanism

Via OLIN Studio Blog

Community building through arts education. Because of the increase of financial inaccessibility to higher education and city center exhibition and production space, creative practitioners have had to find alternative strategies to sustain creative knowledge exchange.

Sustainable Cities Collective looks at five very different and innovative London-based engagement projects that offer individual insights into alternative arts education and their positive effect on connecting the local community.

1. Trade School Croydon
2. Zeitgeist Arts Projects, New Cross
3. National Portrait Gallery, Late-Shift
4. Wide Open School, Hayward Gallery
5. Q-Art London

Via Sustainable Cities Collective

Embarking on adaptive reuse. Tom Ito, a principal in Gensler's Los Angeles office and a leader of the firm's global hospitality practice, explores the use of adaptive reuse -- the art and design science of reinventing buildings -- in hotels.

Many important urban centers in the U.S. don’t have much buildable, open space but offer a nice supply of underperforming buildings, which could be a golden opportunity for hotel owners and developers looking to bring their brand to those sought-after cities.

Via Gensleron Lifestyle Blog

Retail serenity. The new Alchemist store, a 2,500 square-foot oasis of calm designed by Rene Gonzalez Architect, was designed to offer refuge from the frantic pace of Lincoln Road’s bars, banks, shops, theaters and restaurants.

Tucked into the ground level of an award-winning concrete parking structure at 1111 Lincoln Road (designed by the Swiss firm Herzog and DeMeuron), the new retail space will complement the original Alchemist on the fifth floor.

Via Architects and Artisans

Landscape architects vs. architects. A reader responds to an article in The Atlantic Cities about the transformation of Youngstown, Ohio, in which the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted is referred to as a ‘famed architect.’

The Atlantic Cities clarifies the distinction between architect and landscape architect, pointing out that licensed landscape architects study a quite different curriculum than architecture and typically have a choice between completing a four or five-year bachelor's degree or a two-year master's degree.

Via The Atlantic Cities

Favorite Design and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of December 31, 2012

Vision for healthcare environments.  Wish list for placemaking. Walkability in Mumbai. Sustainability with e-waste.

Ensuring the health of a population. Noah Tolson, Practice Area Leader for Planning at Array Healthcare Facilities Solutions, blogs about questions healthcare organizations should be asking as healthcare institutions envision and realize their operations.

Our clients have been thrown into a strange new ocean, where they are treading water in a shifting tide and are wondering at which angle they should swim to get to a more secure location. Our clients are the ones with the questions. Now, it’s our job to help contemplate where to go and how to get there. . . and only then can we develop an environment that might be appropriate. – Noah Tolson

Via Array Knowledge Communities

Placemaking wish list. PlaceMakers blogs about placemaking trends they hope to see in 2013 that will serve communities better.

1. More Options in the Reform of Local Growth Regulations
2. Incremental Growth
3. Tactical Urbanism as Normative Citizen Practice
4. Better Methods for Measuring Livability
5. Return on Infrastructure Investment
6. More Streets-for-People, Near and Long-Term
7. Placemaking in Under-Appreciated Places

Via PlaceMakers

Pedestrians but no sidewalks. Mark Bergen blogs about his experience of walking in Mumbai, a city that hosts 15 million walking trips but not many sidewalks.

Bringing walkable spaces to the dense remainder of Mumbai with its abundant poverty, makeshift homes and messy property markets, is a difficult task. However, a handful of activists are trying to make Mumbai more hospitable to walkers such as the launch of the Walking Project, which educates the public on the conditions pedestrians face across his city.

Via The Atlantic Cities

Sustainable solutions. Lea Anne Leatherwood, who directs Perkins + Will’s Houston office’s Sustainable Design Practices Team, blogs on how the Houston office collected and recycled 500,000 pounds of electronic waste as part of the What IF campaign, which calls for donations of unused, unwanted, and outdated electronics.

The Houston office hosted a recycling drive, collecting 6,000 pounds of e-waste that included boom boxes, record players, cassettes, and VHS tapes. Easter Seals Greater Houston used funds collected from e-waste to provide training courses for people with disabilities.

Via Ideas + Buildings Blog