Unless you resolutely avoid reading the news then it can hardly . have . escaped . your . attention that we’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Since I was living in New York at the time …
Category Archive: Built Environment
Clan of the Cave Bear: Herzog goes 3D
The last sentence I ever expected to hear was “Let’s go see the 3D Werner Herzog film…” [Vanity Fair] Like everyone who hasn’t managed to steer clear of a theatre entirely for the past couple of years, I’ve seen …
Problems of Scale
So on Friday I went to hear my supervisor, Peter Hall, on a panel discussion with Hank Ditmar (of the Prince’s Foundation) and Will Alsop (famous architect/urban designer). The title for the discussion was “The Object, the City & the …
Slow-Motion Mortgage Wreck
Over at Naked Capitalism, Yves is talking about the risk of default in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As someone without a mortgage or a home part of me is kind of enjoying the whole debacle since I rather foolishly …
Comedy Imitating Life
I came across an amusing coincidence between life and art/comedy recently: in the first corner we have The Onion’s take on why other people should shift to public transportation; and in the second corner we have the New York Times …
Visiting Bilbao
The idea that a ‘starchitect’ could regenerate an entire city effectively began with the ‘Bilbao Effect’, and a host of other cities have jumped on this particular bandwagon. Apparently, you pretty much have to get Gehry, Calatrava, Foster, Rogers, or …
Recycling in Britain (or, a most confusing street)
Apparently I’m not the only one who finds recycling in Britain (and especially London) confusing. As the article notes, part of the problem is that each council manages its own recycling system — so council A takes one set of …
Local Employment
The Guardian reports that proposals for Britain’s new ‘eco-towns’ were found by a government panel to be ‘inadequate’. The two most oft-cited problems for the ones that weren’t “little more than a typical existing housing scheme” were local employment and …
Redevelopment of the West Village
From an article by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair I was led to a web site opposed to the the redevelopment of St Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village section of Manhattan. Aside from the fact that Protect the Village …