Top 5 Blog Posts for Week of July 22, 2013

July 29, 2013 Amanda Walter

BNIM on a Kansas City Streetcar. Lake|Flato and the Boy Scouts Jamboree. AECOM notes on the Venice Biennale. HOK, biomimicry, and the Mint Museum. Data vs. delight by NBBJ.

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Streetcar in Kansas City. Kansas City has not seen a streetcar since 1957, but BNIM’s proposed “streetcar starter line,” would be a reintroduction of it.

BNIM’s work on the streetcar and light rail expansion will capture the initial momentum set forth by the streetcar for an entire new generation of users. While the region has considered light rail for decades, this project builds upon the foundation of recent success downtown.

Via BNIM Blog

New home for Boy Scouts. Matt Morris of Lake Flato discusses his visit to the new Summit Bechtel Family National Scout Reserve in West Virginia for the 2013 National Scout Jamboree.

The main purpose of the trip was to check out the Scott Visitor Center, which is currently under construction. The center will have a new dance porch that will host exhibits about the site, scouting and West Virginia. Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts have taken it over as a “patch trading” hub, a huge pastime in scouting where scouts set up under trees and along trails.

Via The Dogrun

Notes from the Venice Biennale. Daniel Elsea of AECOM writes about attending the vernissage of this year’s Venice Biennale held in June, an opening week of events, openings and parties that bring together the good and the great of the art world.

“For those of us who work in city-making, seeing one of the world’s most iconic cityscapes transformed into a contemporary art gallery – en masse – is a brilliant phenomenon. As it has for many decades, art today twists and turns notions of beauty; if often shocks; it overturns assumptions and it comes in dynamic forms – encompassing not just painting and sculpture, but architecture, video, sound, spoken word and performance, and three-dimensional media. It comments on the human condition today, reflecting anxieties and distorting realities. It requires an open mind.” – Daniel Elsea

Via AECOM’s Connected Cities blog

Museum inspired by biomimicry. Paul Wolford, design director in HOK’s San Francisco office, talks about how biomimicry inspired the vision for the San Francisco Museum at the Mint adaptive reuse project, which will be one of the country’s most environmentally innovative museums.

“When the city was founded in the 19th century, the San Francisco Bay’s edge and marshland area were just a few hundred feet from where the historic Old Mint building sits today. We suggested a design idea that incorporates lessons from the local biome while creating new ways to collect and store water.” – Paul Wolford

Via HOK Life

Future of workplace. NBBJ held its first salon event, Data vs. Delight, in partnership with Bloomberg Beta, to explore the changing dynamics of workplace design with the advent of big data.

Topics discussed included: What role does big data play in workplace design now that there is more of it and it’s easier to process than ever before? What degree do designers, who have typically relied on intuition to create space,a implement the technology into their practice? Is a physical office needed with more new technologies?

Via NBBJ Blog

Top 4 Architecture and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of July 8, 2013

July 15, 2013 Amanda Walter

071413 Embracing daylight. Architect Barbie. Texas sand sculpture. Alternative outputs. Sharknado is Twitter bait.

Embracing daylight. Florence Lam, who leads Arup’s global lighting design team, discusses how daylight is critical to sustainable urban development in addition to a person’s health and well-being.

“Up until around the 1980s, architecture students were encouraged to develop an instinct for daylight and its qualities in different parts of the world. Today, I believe this part of their education has been neglected. The complex and crammed curricula of modern architectural education leave students lacking the necessary opportunity to observe, imagine and embrace daylight experience at the beginning of every design.” – Florence Lam

Via Arup Blog

Architect Barbie. Lisa Boquiren, chairwoman of the AIA SF communications committee, explores the changes needed to keep women practitioners engaged in the architecture profession which was discussed at the symposium The Missing 32%, which is the opt-out rate of women in the industry.

Boquiren looks at the advent of Architect Barbie, which was a partnership between AIA national and Mattel in which “architect” lost to “computer engineer” in 2010 for Barbie’s 125^th career, eventually advising Mattel on “Architect Barbie’s” design.

Via Metropolis POV

Texas sand sculpture. Gensler’s Houston office was asked by Mayor Annise Parker to build a patriotic-themed sand sculpture for the city’s 2013 Freedom Over Texas Festival.

What emerged was a sand sculpture that included iconic American structures like the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell, Washington Monument and iconic Texas structures such as the Alamo and the Houston skyline. In the center of the sculpture is a star above a map of the US and flanked by the US and the Texas flags. Special elements that memorialized the teachers, students, runners, firefighters and factory workers that had lost their lives were also included: a book, an apple, a hammer, running shoes, a rose, and firefighter’s helmets.

Via Gensleron Cities

Alternative inputs. Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG writes about how UK artist Ryan Jordan led a workshop in Montréal, building musical instruments out of geological circuit boards, an experiment in terrestrial instrumentation he calls "Derelict Electronics."

Manaugh says we should “plug our cities not just into giant slurries of wood pulp, like thick soups of electricity, but also directly into the forests around us, drawing light from the energy of trunks and branches, is yet another extraordinary possibility that designers would do well to take on, imagining what such a scenario literally might look like and how it would technically function, not solely for its cool aesthetic possibilities but for the opportunity to help push our culture of gadgets toward renewable sources of power.”

Via BLDGBLOG

Innovative Social Media

Sharknado is Twitter bait. Syfy's made-for-TV movie 'Sharknado,' which is about tornadoes that scoop up sharks from the ocean and dispense them on LA residents, inspired a feeding frenzy on social media. The show generated 318,232 tweets during broadcast and 5,000 tweets per minute at its peak.

Two key factors contributed to Sharknado’s social media success: smart buzz generation, led by Syfy's senior vice president of digital, Craig Engler, and participation by leading Twitter celebrities such as Wil Wheaton, Damon Lindelof and others.

Via Mashable

Top 4 Architecture and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of June 24, 2013

July 1, 2013 Amanda Walter

062413 Design is a research project. Pattern of blooms receives recognition. Renaissance in the Windy City. Women in engineering. National Zoo uses social media to find missing red panda. Design is a research project.

Peter Hourihan, an architect at Cannon Design, discusses how research opportunities are everywhere in a firm’s design work.

“There are a number of ways that project or design goals can be generated: overall client specific outcomes; design team design strategies; pressing or ongoing research topics; or novel, untested design innovations. Any of these categories can spawn specific large and small scale design goals. They can each become a hypothesis when the designer or team collects data and draws conclusions about the intended or possible outcomes of the design idea.” – Peter Hourihan

Via Cannon Design Blog

Pattern of blooms. OLIN Studio’s Lines in Four Directions in Flowers on the west lawn of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been recognized by the Public Art Network as part of the group’s Year in Review Program, which honors outstanding, exceptionally creative, or innovative public art works.

OLIN Partner Susan Weiler, who led the design team for Lines in Four Directions in Flowers, said the team “spent months researching the color and flowering cycles of dozens of species and were able to design a system of plantings which ensures that there will always be an even pattern of blooms throughout the spring, summer, and fall.”

Via OLIN Studio Blog

http://www.theolinstudio.com/blog/lines-in-four-directions-in-flowers-recognized-by-the-public-art-network/

Renaissance in the Windy City. David Broz of Gensler talks about how downtown Chicago is going through an urban renaissance as companies are returning, apartment construction is booming, and hotel stays are increasing.

These new urban inhabitants are digital native residents who expect a hybrid urban environment, different than what was previously in downtown Chicago. They expect pedestrian friendly streets, bicycle accommodating traffic lanes, a place to sit in parks and plazas, temporary pop-up-galleries and food trucks.

Via Gensleron Cities

Women in engineering. Emily Jones, architectural technician at Stantec, talks about Techsploration, a program that aims to increase the number of women working in science, trades and technology by promoting careers in these fields to young women in grades nine to twelve throughout Nova Scotia.

Jones, who became involved in the Techsploration program in 2011 while attending school, discusses events she was involved with and how girls are being encouraged to do anything they want to do in the fields of science and technology.

Via Stantec Blog

Innovative Social Media Campaign

Zoo social media swoop. The National Zoo in Washington, D.C., turned to social media to find missing red panda named Rusty. The zoo announced Rusty’s disappearance to its thousands of Twitter followers in a tweet at 11:51 a.m, which was retweeted nearly 3,000 times in an hour. Politicians and journalists, including Newt Gingrich, joined the online search. Around 1:15 p.m., a Washingtonian posted a picture on Twitter of Rusty in a patch of weeds in the Adams Morgan district, not far from the 163-acre zoo.

Via The New York Times