I've been holding on to this for too long. A pink rabbit of enormous proportions is resting on a hillside in Piemonte, Italy. Also in the department of really strange, giant-sized landscape art is a chair and desk combo in England. Really.
Not unlike the still brewing concept floating for San Francisco's Treasure Island - Landmark Communities hopes to create a "Sustainability Enclave" in the Nevada desert. It's one of those unlikely, w holistic, master planned communities that is being marketed specifically for its completeness. Both are trying in essence to capture the same market of residents - those people looking for something new and totally flawless. According to the Nevada developers,
"Residents of Traditions will have a great opportunity for interaction with their neighbors and should develop a real sense of community," said Donna Kristaponis, Lyon County Manager. "This, in turn, builds a great lifestyle. Similar new communities across the country are in extremely high demand."
This is literally the greatest, most topical thing I've ever run into on Wikipedia (and right on the front page nonetheless!)
Dogpatch USA was this hillbilly-theme park in Arkansas that's been closed for years. This thing is a monstrosity. But sadly it reminds me of one of the beaten down theme parks of my area, Splash! Family Fun Park. However, this one is funny because it was so blatantly "Southern" and just downright filthy. This quote sums it up nicely, front to back, and screwed-up all around.
After struggling a few more years, the park was closed for good on October 14, 1993. In 1997 citizens of Dogpatch, Arkansas (which had been the postal designation of the area since the park opened) voted unanimously to change the name to Marble Falls, its original name. Curiously, no records exist of such a vote to change the name to Dogpatch in 1966, and residents who lived there in 1966 and are still living there today claim it was done against their will.
Some Interesting Ones
13) Build a System of Community Aquaculture
Most New Orleanians, black or white, rich or poor, love seafood, and many of them make live-caught fish and shellfish part of their regular diet. They put down crab traps, crawfish traps, or slat traps for catfish or they fish, net shrimp, dig oysters or otherwise forage in the waters of bayou, river, lake, and marsh. Designing a network of managed nurseries for a variety of kinds of marine life, which can be harvested by ordinary people with ordinary tools, could make New Orleans a model for a sustainable city in a difficult place. Use the place, don’t fight it. The people of New Orleans always have.
11) Bring Back the Music (Part 2): Make a Place for the Musicians
Whether by setting aside a place or places in the city, or simply by offering New Orleans musicians priority in housing, facilitate their return and support them with the kind of practice spaces, gathering places, and other amenities that will make recovering New Orleans a nurturing space for musicians. Bring our musicians back and invite the world’s musicians to join them. They will come.
1) Reassemble and Restore Social Capital
Two practically unrelated topics this morning: a rebuilt church in Germany and a nuclear fall-out bunker for sale in the UK.
No other city had received the wrath of the allied counter-offensive in Europe quite like Dresden. Controversy about the choice of Dresden as a target, a culturally significant city with relatively little industrial activity, has been a sore point for many Americans and British. One of the places that was destroyed by the fire-bombing raid was the Frauenkirche. 60 years later, it's been rebuilt (be sure to check out the slide show). It's a truly amazing structure.
A 240 acre underground nuclear fall-out bunker is going on the market in England. Like most cold war designs, this enormous facility was designed to protect the royal family and the government in case of a Soviet nuclear attack. Of course, once everybody realized that 4 minutes would be the longest warning possible from an intercontinental ballistic missile, the whole concept of retreating to a "safe place" became obsolete - nobody can evacuate that fast. So not the British have to unload this property to the private sector. Proposed uses: wine cellar, rave-party scene, data storage? Hey, if you've got a better idea it's only £5,ooo,ooo.
Interesting and highly informative article from the Wall Street Journal regarding Green Buildings. It appears that the certification process that allows certain buildings to be dubbed "green" gives equal weight to features with wildly divergent prices and ecological outcomes. (Scroll to the bottom of the article for a quote from GR's own Progressive Architecture)
Under the current system, buildings get points for "green" features on the list, such as water management or use of natural sunlight. Builders get one point for installing a $350 bike rack or an electric-vehicle recharging station that few might use. They score the same one point, however, for promising to obtain 5% of the building's energy from renewable sources such as wind or solar power. To win a green seal from the council, a building needs to earn 26 from a total of 69 possible points.Talking Trash Cans are encouraging Berliners not to litter. Oh, and they're solar powered.
My aunt Barb recently visited Salt Lake City. I had never considered the place a haven of cutting edge innovation in the realm of urban development and planning - but perhaps I was wrong.
The Michigan Land Use Institute tells us how Mr. Grow (appropriately named) is getting things done in the name of regional, "quality growth" for the area. It sounds basically like Transit-Oriented-Design (TOD) but with sales-tax teeth."The region has built 19 miles of light rail transit lines, is constructing 44 miles of commuter rail, and has purchased enough rail right-of-way for a 300-mile regional transit system. Dozens of communities have rewritten their master land use plans, and several have new zoning requirements that prompt builders to construct new homes and businesses within walking distance of planned transit stops."
Every field has situations where definite "lines" get blurry - where constants are questioned and not always upheld. One I hadn't considered much was the definition of species. While this might not surprise some biologically-oriented people it was very interesting to me. It's difficult for me to describe so please read the Wikipedia article and BBC article about it.
To some degree this cuts under stark boundaries between different animals. It shows how all life is a complex tapestry of diverse and co-existing organisms.
Radical Cartography is a treasure trove of fascinating maps. Click on Projects and Yummy to get to the goodies. 'A Different Atlas,' 'Art & Language,' and the 'Boy Scout Camp' are a few of my favorites (don't forget to read the descriptions on the left.
Check out both galleries on Lori Nix's page. Her scenes of imminent destruction seem almost warm and comforting because they are easily dismissed as "models."
In Place of Berlin - scroll down for some good photography and observations about Berlin.
Reused Big Boxes. Yeah, there are a bunch of mega-churches, but there's also the Spam Museum.
Also (not from Things) Building Green's 10 point plan for New Orleans. Ambitious but informative proposal.
The Dutch have a way with water - everybody knows that. But I bet you didn't know they've built homes that will literally float in a flood. Yeah, they did.
Columnists are leaping on the similarities between the WTC and NOLA events. Convienient timing may be a partial cause of this bizzare comparison - but not the whole reason. People are pleading, begging that NOLA (and the many other communities devestated by Katrina) learn the lessons of New York's rebuilding process. Given the dissatisfaction surrounding the current plans for the former WTC site - perhaps these loud warnings are justified.
The city needs two new features to ensure its continued existance.
First: The city needs to be hardened against another natural disaster of this scale. This is a massive task that goes far beyond rebuilding a few levies. Serious and unprecedented infrastructure improvements will be needed to rehabilitate the area.
Second: The city needs an economic base other than tourism. While the charming districts that have kept the city on life support largely survived the storm - they should not become the only reason to visit New Orleans in future decades. My magic wand: sustainable energy development.
Now that the nation has seen how fragile and expensive our energy habits are - we should honestly work to building large-scale solutions to oil dependence. The city can be reformatted - re imagined and eventually transformed into a model of energy independence. This would have to be in spite of the massive oil industry prescience to the south (drilling in the Gulf) and west (Houston) near New Orleans.
The benefit of rebuilding New Orleans this way is three fold. First, a cultural and historic American city would be saved for future generations. Second, the current residents who now face unemployment as a result of the hurricane would have opportunities in the reconstruction efforts. Third, the process of economic and physical transformation would draw in professionals and capital from the most cutting edge industries in the world. (After all, everybody wants a slice of the New Big Easy.)
The tough question is always how.
A few links:
A Daily Dose of Architecture
Wall Street Journal
New York Times Infographic
Slate - Don't Refloat
"The Control of Nature" - John McPhee, excerpt
António Jorge Gonçalves' online gallery of drawings of people riding subways in 10 cities around the world. Stockholm, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Lisbon, London, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Athens, Cairo. Good stuff.
This is genius - it could precipitate a revolution in manufactured goods. At its core inverse manufacturing means products whose components are interchangeable amongst various models and within the product line. For example: parts in your copier might also be used in your printer or your fax machine. And these same parts will meet specifications for future models, too. It is the opposite of obsolescence and forced replacement and the dawn of a "repair and maximize" approach.
Read more about it. (Note: I mentioned copiers because the only firm I know practicing this is Fuji Xerox.)
The next architectural phenomenon will be the integration of design and sustainability. On my little tour of M.Arch schools the most striking project I witnessed was RISD's solar decathlon prototype house.
The competition for successful, reproducible, and sustainable designs is widespread and powerful. The ecoMod project at University of Virginia is another example. Even if many of the ideas out there relating to green construction are still underdeveloped - there is little doubt about the surge in interest and work on this front. This 'P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E.' project is one idea that needs further work.
There are several examples of projects that are migrating large-scale sustainability practices into the real world. These early attempts at a greener building pattern will teach the development community a lot about future building practices. A proposal in Portland, Oregon might be the largest scale any green project has attempted.
This movement has a long way to go. Finding ways to utilize existing and alternative energy sources, reusing water, reducing emissions, and finding more ways to attain social responsibility are all trial-and-error processes that cannot be solved all at once.
PS - check #7 on this list of the best "green schools" in the country.
Those of us currently recovering from a Bachelors of Urban and Regional Planning degree program might be a bit cynical about implementing the principles of Sustainability in a real world practice. In fact, we might be very cynical, even hopeless about the very thought of it.
The Denver Post has an article that imagines a future where a neighborhood might survive through the coming increases in energy costs. And it's not as dramatic as some might think - no eco-village where we live amongst the animals. The critical aspect to changing energy consumption is that communities must work to more intellegently use scarce resources. The current pattern allows the individual to make decisions that result in redundancy and waste. Furthermore, the community can plan out methods of extracting energy from new sources (wind, solar, biomass, etc.) that are unfeasable to the individual.
Superbia! is mentioned at the end of the article. Sounds like a good read and something that forward-looking Planning departments should have on hand. Speaking of books on sustainability (in this case on a global scale) I'd like to leaf through Raising Less Corn, More Hell. Really fascinating idea.
Some people might call them ecological or economic disaster sites. I like to think of them as little tragedies stranded out at sea.
Nauru has strip mined phosphate for the past 100 years. The eight-square-mile island achieved independence in 1968 only to face complete economic dependence by 2003, when the mining operation had dried up entirely. There is not a single square mile of arable land left on this dot in the Pacific which is 400 miles from its nearest inhabited neighbor. The cost to restore Nauru to its once-tropical luster is $230 million over the next 20 years.
Hashima claims to have the title as the most densely populated area on earth. Now the rocky outcropping near Nagasaki is uninhabited. Mitsubishi operated the tiny island like the "company towns" of mining operations in West Virgina or the U.P. - all the residents worked for the mine in some fashion. Unlike Nauru, Hashima's population and economy vanished with changing energy demands: coal was out, gas was in and the company closed the mine. (Found on Things)
Chicago is beyond any question North America's Super-Tall Building capital. Even though the visually unsettling Freedom Tower (if built) would take away Sears' Tallness Title, Chicago persists in its collection of super-tall structures. And, if Fordham Company and Santiago Calatrava get their way another landmark will soar over Lake Michigan.
Proposing to build the tallest building in any city is bound to generate some interest. Bigger cities lead to more intense interest. And the inevitable outcome of proposing a 2,000 ft. condominium/hotel is a plethora of opinion.
The Slatin Report has two op-eds on The Spire: The first sees it as a development that uses architecture (or the brand-name of an architect) as a financial attractor, the second takes the view that Fordham is simply trying to distract people from other financial problems the company is having.
However, trying to be optimistic about things that are as nascent as this, I enjoyed USA Today's 'Rising Above Fear'. The Freedom Tower demonstrates how a skyscraper can be (potentially) big in spite of 9/11 fears - but also a brutish and a terrible presence. The Spire is practically the polar opposite of that in terms of its appearance.
Finally, there is a piece in the Tribune which asks some pertinent questions about the proposal. The second-to-last paragraph is worth consideration:
"One more thing: How skyscrapers meet the ground is as important as how they
scrape the sky. It is not encouraging that Calatrava's tower will emerge from a
tiered, four-story podium like a stripper popping out of cake. That is a crude
way to bring a skyscraper to the street. It makes this tower resemble a piece of
sculpture on a pedestal, fit for an on-the-make, look-at-me Persian Gulf
boomtown like Dubai."
Pruned is easily the best landscape architecture weblog I've ever seen - and probably one of the coolest websites I've found this summer. This guy finds some amazing stuff: like this post about the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River Valley. Keep an eye on this one (it has been added to the list of links on the left in case you don't feel like bookmarking this just yet).
NIMBYism has held off many wind turbine projects around the world - and it's understandable: people want to see the beautiful waterfront views they paid so much for regardless of the environmental costs of continued resource consumption.
But there might be a solution. The Vertical Axis Aerogenerator is in the prototype stage and could be ready for production in 3 to 5 years. (Note: this might work great on Lake Michigan because of the high sustained wind speeds.) It's difficult to tell from the picture on this page, but the designers believe this could even be a visual focal point for a community's water resources instead of an eyesore.
Checking over some otherwise bland news this morning I found this piece on Michigan's new 'Food Policy Council.' This rocks my world - and maybe they'll actually accomplish something worthwhile. Two areas they're investigating seriously interest me: getting local and fresh food into public school cafeterias and selling more Michigan grown crops to Michiganders. After all, as the article mentions - we're second only to California in terms of crop diversity.
Granted, any improvement to the current situation is a long ways off (ironically I read this while eating an apple grown in New Zeeland). But this is the critical first step that might give enough people inspiration to continue working on this.
From Rodcorp.Our sages give a fascinating answer. The spies saw the walls around the cities and concluded that if the cities are strong, the people are strong. It's a natural assumption but the truth is the opposite. If cities are surrounded by high walls against invaders, that's a sign that the people are weak and afraid. It's when you see a city without walls, that you know the people who live there are strong.
And so it's proved to be. Historically it's been the countries most open to refugees that were the strongest: the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, Britain and America in the 18th and 19th. Why? Because refugees almost always give back more than they received. Helping others, we are helped.
I've been fascinated with UNESCO world heritage sites lately. There aren't many, and often times they are difficult preservation tasks for already burdened nations and lower units of government - but they are inheritely unique and irreplaceable.
Two new sites were added in Africa that really caught my attention. Here's a clip from the BBC article:
The world's largest and oldest meteorite crater, the Vredefort Dome, in South Africa was added for its scenic and scientific interest.
Egypt's Wadi al-Hitan, known as Whale Valley, was listed for its amazing fossil remains of now-extinct whales.
"Welcome to the Neighborhood" was supposed to illustrate how three white-bread, Christian, Austin families can eventually settle for the stripe of diversity of their choice as a neighbor. In order to do that the show forced a rainbow coalition of minorities and marginalized groups to humiliate themselves.
Some commentators on this anomaly of reality television saw "Neighborhood" as a worthy social experiment where people were forced to handle their stereotypes and preconceived prejudices. Granted, documenting any kind of community outreach of this kind would be interesting - if not very useful in real-world applications in community development.
However, the producers of "Neighborhood" forgot about the Fair Housing Act that in very plain language prohibits this kind of discrimination. And don't for a second think it's not discrimination just because a non-white or marginalized resident is going to occupy the house. The neighborhood is acting as the real estate agent in this reality show: through this process they are expressly choosing the least-offensive family for the home.
The question that bugs me still is this: if the show were to air (and by some chance be a smash hit) would hit have any capacity for changing the way people think about cultural and racial segregation in their neighborhoods? Or would it have further deepened these divisions? There's no way to know now. The corporate leadership at Disney/ABC apparently would rather burn heaps of money than face any kind of public humiliation about discrimination.
Read the National Fair Housing Alliance's Call to Action on this subject and a synopsis of the story from Newsday.
You though that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer and Newman get the homeless to pull rickshaws down the streets of New York was a joke? Nope. Well, not any more - and they're not called rickshaws - they're pedicabs.
An SUV horn blasted several feet from my left ear, and I nearly shot through the plastic shield. Visions of Singapore circa 1935 evaporated as I white-knuckled the sides of the carriage in sudden terror -- I was in a tin can on spoked wheels smack in the middle of Manhattan traffic beside drivers with the black hearts of those chaps in "Ben-Hur" who sported sharp, competitor-destroying blades on their chariot wheels. I was going to be crushed like an ant.On the other side of transportation is an interesting article from Maine relating the build-up of the Cold War to that of our Interstate Highway System during the Eisenhower years. Sure, it's all theoretical and this doesn't propose any kind of solution to the sustainability issues presented by an auto-dominant system, but it's still fascinating.
Only rarely do the architecture/planning blogs (that I read) actually talk about Detroit in specifics. Detroit is too often synonymous with complete municipal failure or racial bifurcation or sprawl. Well, Veritas et Venustas has a good, short analysis of the home turf of the Detroit Tigers, Comerica Park. Seeing as I have no personal MLB ballpark experience outside this stadium, it's an interesting take from an outsider who clearly has seen a few.
OZ Architecture from Boulder Colorado just got the commission [bugmenot for password] to draw up a new master plan for the capital of Rwanda. Like many people, I hadn't realized that the 1994 genocide was taking place largely in a city. It's been more 10 years now since that tragedy, and they're ready to start seriously reshaping Kigali.
This looks like a very interesting and significant project. So far they are preparing plans for a new hospital, educational facility, and airport. Eventually they will begin work on a new central business district that is close to the airport and the old city center.
Wikipedia on Kigali.
Really great photography site. Don't miss the 'Urban China' and 'Chicago in 38 Frames' features. The Chicago pics are really excellent - even the more postcard-ish pictures feel inspired and original (I've seen enough postcards of Chicago to know the good ones...)
Everybody who has had the endurance to keep up with all the junk I've thrown up on the internet in my lifetime knows there is one terribly consistent theme: change.
Toponymy needs a new direction - some kind of purpose, focus. Let's face it, this website is a real mess.
So, if you have any suggestions about what I should put up here on Toponymy - let me know. I'll try to coalesce your ideas into something coherent and legible. In the meantime I might start another side project. Don't hold your breath.
Yeah, it's been a while since you last heard from me. And, I can't promise my return will be anything but fleeting. In any case, here are a few little nibbles from the past weeks.
This guy's globes are amazing. And he was born in Dortmund, who would've guessed. The name is Igno Günther.
Perhaps the Duck Billed Platypus is some kind of repository of obsolete evolutionary improvements that other mammals have shed. I was unaware it had the keenest electroperception sense of any mammal. (Yes, that means it uses electricity to locate prey.)
Currently, Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay is practically vacant. It's purpose as a military base has expired and there have been few serious proposals to develop it. Until now. A group has laid out a plan for 20,000 residents to live there in a car-free district that is powered by renewable energy sources. SF seems like the perfect political environment for an idea like this to get support. Let's hope it happens.
All I've got to say about this is yikes. Urban Renewal Zimbabwe style.
For the next several weeks I'll be heavily blogging on my overseas experience at Oh, and Chocolate. So I'd suggest bookmarking that.
Oh, and if I have your e-mail you'll get another reminder.
-Toodles!
Some people say we're the unusual creatures at the bottom of a sea of air.
I didn't know people kept Octopuses as pets (scroll down to first comment) or that they might provide a model for robotic arms. They are undeniably the smartest invertebrates being able to solve difficult mazes and distinguish between various objects (they have very high degree of tactile inteligence).
This was also interesting: young dolphins make toy air rings and play with them.
Megastructures are measured in 1,000s of kilometers (1,000 KM = 1 Megameter). The only megastructure on earth (built by creatures) is the Great Barrier Reef which is around 2,000 kilometers long (1,200 miles). No single human settlement compares with its magnitude.
Angler fish are scary.
A little tidbit I learned from my ecology class: the oldest living being on earth is a creosote bush in Arizona. Carbon dating puts its inception around 18,000 years ago. This is around the end of the last ice age. (The bush has been there as long as the desert.)
These vehicles really must speak for themselves. So I'll let them.
Alexi
Camera Van
Sinclair C5
... and a list of automotive flops from the wikipedia.
Sundays are great for one liners.
If you have real player please, please watch this movie made by American Institute of Planners in 1939. File part one, part two. It documents the urban blight brought by industrialization, the rapid pace of '30s city life (I especially enjoied the shots of the mechanization of food), and the ideal community of the future. It was written by Lewis Mumford. The movie is about 30 minutes (15 a piece), it starts out slow and boring but it picks up.
In my ecology class a student asked how you could track the migration and habitat of Giant Squid. There are major technical difficulties such as the depth they live at and their oceanic range. So when I saw this I was interested.
The bug-eyed sea creatures, believed to be Humboldt squid, normally reside in deep water and only come to the surface at night. Why approximately 500 of them began washing up on the sands of Laguna Beach and Newport Beach on Tuesday isn't clear.
I really don't want to be pessimistic but I've got some articles about hellish cities.
The City of Dis is the term for the lower four layers of Dante's Inferno. Here is a handy cross section of Hell. Clicking the Down Arrow brings you to Dis.
Feral Cities
Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power.
