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“Blade Runner Meets Flower Power In IwamotoScott’s City Of The Future

October 19, 2012

In the year 2108, San Franciscans will drive their hydrogen-powered hovercars through subterranean expressways on their way to picnic by water-producing fog flowers and geothermal mushrooms.

This is the concept that IwamotoScott Architecture‘s Craig Scott presented at a TEDxCity2.0 event in San Francisco October 13. The mini-conference was one of the many independent TED events presented in 70 cities worldwide—and an untold number of Livestream feeds—to advance the cause of urban innovation and collective action. Previously we brought you an update on the retro-utopia Arcosanti, and now we turn to a totally futuristic ecotopia called Hydro-Net. Read/ogle more!

Scott’s talk reprised a proposal he and his partner, Lisa Iwamoto, made for a 2008 History Channel competition called City of the Future. Their concept for a symbiotic city powered by hydrogen-producing algae, geothermal energy, and fog took the grand prize in the San Francisco competition. The renderings are admittedly fanciful—Scott broached the subject of hovercars only after a sheepish “It’s possible we’re not bound to the ground…” But the substance of Hydro-Net focuses on known challenges (rising sea levels, access to fresh water, population growth) and taps resources that will be in abundance come 2108.”

Photo: IwamotoScott Architecture

“That Parking Spot In Front of Your House Doesn’t Belong to You

A-P Hurd. OCtober 16, 2012

I live on a single family residential street in Seattle, and in the evenings, it looks like this:

This makes me wonder sometimes: why is the city in the business of paving and maintaining three lanes of street when only one of them is actually moving cars? In fact, many people in my neighborhood have a driveway or a garage (and zoning requires on-site parking for any new construction) but they still choose to park in the street, presumably so they can use their garage for something else.

Next obvious question: Why should local zoning require on-site parking when hardly any one is using their on-site parking for parking?

Third, and perhaps most interesting question: If we think on-site parking has better uses than parking, could we elect to use our street parking for better uses as well?

Think about it. Most of us in single family neighborhoods have a proprietary relationship with the street parking spot in front of their house. We think: “someone is parked in MY spot.” This is understandable on a logical level when there is a foot of snow outside and someone has shoveled out a spot, but it’s much less understandable when it’s just part of the city right-of-way.

Given that people do have this relationship with the parking spot in front of their house, what if we enabled them to do something other than park there? Some compact neighborhoods have taken to putting bike corrals or patios in parking spots, provided a reasonable percentage of the neighbors agree

But what if we could do this, and more, in single family neighborhoods?

The transformation of street parking in single family neighborhoods could make even more sense since there is more often room to spare in those parking lanes. Not to mention that if you have zero, or even one car per household, you’re not really allowed to do anything else with that space, so you’re losing out relative to your multi-car neighbors, which isn’t really fair.

What if cities allowed residential blocks to apply to convert those parking lanes to whatever they wanted to, including cottages, bike lanes, extra garden space, public p-patches or dedicated car-share parking? Even better, what if our cash-strapped cities started monetizing the value in those two lanes and allowing neighborhoods to do whatever they wanted (including parking there) as long as they rented out the space, and generally agreed on a plan? The drive lanes in the middle of the street would be conserved, we might find ourselves with more neighborhood parks, or perhaps more little cottages permeating the urban fabric. We might even find new neighborhood amenities in these spaces that we hadn’t even thought of.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo; Noreiga Street Parklet, San Francisco: designed by Matarozzi Pelsinger Builders, Photo by Wells Campbell Photography

“Swim to Work in This Goofy New ‘Commuter Pool’

• MOLLY COTTER
• OCT 09, 2012

Londoners who are growing bored of their typical morning commute may be in for an exciting change of pace. Alex Smith and David Lomax of Y/N Studio have proposed to revamp the city’s Regent’s Canal into a swimming commute lane. The LidoLine would convert the unused 8.6 mile waterway into a super clean stream for people to swim and sail to work. As for those pesky winter months, the team envisions the frozen lane to appeal to ice skaters too.

Ever since New York City’s High Line walkway changed the way people see urban spaces, cities around the world have been developing their own alternative green walkways. The Mayor of London recently launched a city-wide competition, asking architects and designers to create their own High Line-inspired space. While many entrants scoured the city for green plots, Y/N Studio dove right into a prominent yet underused resource: water. The LidoLine would not only encourage exercise and eco-friendly commuting, but would also revitalize a run-down industrial area with waterfront hang-outs and corporate sponsored competitions and events on floating rafts and amphitheaters.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Image: Y/N Studio

“Let’s swim to work!

Waterways surrounding cities were once filled with toxic industrial sludge. Now they’re the new recreation frontier

By Will Doig

A month ago, sewage in the Hudson River nearly canceled New York’s first Ironman swim. Yet last week, there was Martin Strel jumping into the water at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The gregarious 57-year-old Slovenian has swum the lengths of the Amazon, Yangtze and Mississippi Rivers, so this particular 2.2-mile jaunt was really no big whoop. The swim, from Liberty Island to Battery Park City, was part of an effort to call attention to urban waterways (and partly, just for kicks). But something about the scene felt all wrong. Watching Strel crawl through the choppy gray water astride the steely Manhattan skyline, with exhaust-belching ferries and barges churning by, he looked too pink, too soft, and just too human to be there.

Centuries of boat traffic, heavy industry, sewage runoff and toxic dumping have ingrained in us the idea that urban waterways are not places for people. Even as cities have rushed to the water’s edge over the past couple of decades, building elaborate waterfront parks and esplanades, few have taken the next logical step: encouraging residents to dive in. “Twenty-five years ago, I bought a pair of wire cutters and cut a fence and declared the L.A. River legally open,” says Lewis MacAdams, president of Friends of the Los Angeles River. “But legally, no one is supposed to be in the river. It’s still on the books as a $500 fine or six months in jail.”

People like MacAdams and Strel are early adopters of the idea that cities’ rivers and canals, cleaner than they’ve been in a century, are ripe for recreational use. Just a few short years ago, the notion would have repelled most people. But we’ve clearly reached a tipping point.Kayakers have become a sporadic sight on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, the industrial-sludge channel that famously caught fire in 1969.Clammers have returned to dig in the sands around Boston’s once-notoriously polluted harbor. Last month, the New York Times reported that, after years of dancing around them because they’re so difficult to clean, the Environmental Protection Agency is finally going all-in on revitalizing urban waterways. “The public wants this stuff picked up and hauled away,” a consultant on one of the EPA’s waterway Superfund projects told the paper.”

Via: Salon

“Responsive Urban Design

Tim De Chant. 30 August 2012

We’ve been planning cities for almost as long as they have existed. Archaeological evidence suggests the ancient Egyptians did so 5,000 years ago. Hippodamos, considered by many to be the father of urban planning, imposed street grids on every ancient Greek city that would let him. Since then, we’ve been busily drawing, revising, and otherwise fussing about how best to design our cities.

It turns out we may have it all wrong. Or at least wrong for today’s cities. Urban areas have always been in constant flux, but we’re now demanding far more of them than before. They’ve never housed, transported, or employed so many people. To cope, cities have been changing at an astonishingly rapid pace. The results can be inspiring—as they are in Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo—or depressing—just look at anywhere with extensive slums. In some cases, it seems urban planning is up to the task. In others, it’s not.

Where it falls flat, urban planning’s failings aren’t necessarily the fault of the designers. Too often planning is focused on minutiae—ordinances, regulations, zoning, setbacks, and so on. Even when it tackles bigger problems like economic growth, it doesn’t necessarily consider the city as a whole.¹

The solution, according to Michael Batty, an urban planner and professor at University College London, is infusing planning with science. Systems science, specifically, where bright minds and complex mathematical models try to digest the entirety of a system, like a city. It’s no simple task. IBM is just one company throwing billions of dollars and tons of silicon at the problem. What they’ll get out of it is anybody’s guess, but they seem certain they’ll get something. Cities are overflowing with collectable data. It’s making sense of it that’s difficult. The possibilities it presents is what I think is going drive us to rethink city planning.

Urban planning has its origins in the design world, which is both a bonus and a handicap. Architects make natural planners—they design the buildings, why not have them design the streets, too? When those planners are enlightened designers, the results are attractive and livable cities. If they’re not? Well, we’ve all seen what happens when they’re not. But as much as good design has created great cities, I and others suspect it can’t deal with the coming challenges. Not on its own, at least. Good design can solve many problems, but it can’t solve them all. At some point, you need science.

The rate at which cities are growing and changing presents a problem for the traditional design-centric approach. Good design requires a thorough understanding of your problem. But these days, problems are appearing and evolving so quickly that we don’t have enough time to properly observe them.

Urban planning is at a crossroads, much like ecology was 50 years ago.² Planning is still largely descriptive and not very scientific, again, much like ecology was 50 years ago. Sure, cities gather hard data like traffic and sewage flows. Yes, they model projected growth and consider the social factors behind neighborhood demands. But urban planning lacks a unified, data-driven theoretical foundation.

That’s beginning to change. Michael Batty, Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, and others are proposing data-driven theories and testing them, just like Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson did in ecology back in the 1960s and 70s. Though these new urban theorists are trying to shake things up, they’re not trying to eliminate planning as we know it. Their science of cities won’t be a replacement for current planning, but a superset. Think of it as a grand theory to tie it all together, to make sense of why cities have evolved the way they did and how we can coax them to cope with 5 billion people.”

Via: Per Square Mile

Photo: MagnusL3D

“In Philadelphia, a Porch for an Entire City

Kaid Benfield. Aug 9, 2012

If you care about green cities, you have to like a lot of what’s happening in Philadelphia lately, from land use planning to watershed management to the greening of vacant and blighted lots and, now, the opening of a lively new public space that makes the city a better place to live, work and visit. In particular, last week I learned about The Porch at 30th Street Station, a very promising new plaza just outside the city’s iconic train station. The creation of University City District, an organization dedicated to revitalization and community improvement, The Porch opened last fall and has been hopping all summer with activity. It is at once ambitious and low-key.

The new 50-foot-wide, block-long plaza replaces an unnecessary outer parking lane and barren sidewalk on one side of the station with seating, tables, shade, plantings and, depending on the week or day, perhaps music, a farmers’ market, a beer garden, or even miniature golf.  It is ambitious because, in its statement when The Porch opened, UCD said that it “sees this new space as Philadelphia’s front porch, a welcoming entryway to the city, as well as a place to linger and socialize, and to entertain and be entertained. The Porch serves to balance the indoor grandeur of 30th Street Station with the wonder and expanse of Philadelphia.

What a great idea. The space is adjacent to the country’s third busiest train station and within easy walking distance of over 16,000 jobs. UCD’s executive director, Matt Bergheiser, says that 1,800 pedestrians on average stroll along the sidewalk every hour on weekdays. With some nine acres of developable land now covered only by surface parking lots, the area also has the potential for further walkable development linking Center City, the station, and University City. 

According to a fact sheet on the project, UCD was able to take advantage of a larger state transportation project to rehabilitate six bridges adjacent to 30th Street Station. Key partners highlighted in the fact sheet include Councilwoman Jannie L. Blackwell, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, the city’s Streets Department, Amtrak, and Brandywine Realty Trust. ”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Courtesy of Shaping Spaces

“Close Quarters

VISITORS to the High Line often marvel at the panorama the elevated park affords: open-sky views across the Hudson River, an unbroken sightline up 10th Avenue to Midtown and beyond. But in recent months, in a section of the High Line around 23rd Street, a more intimate, domestic cityscape has emerged.

Where the park widens to form a seating area with bleachers and a lush lawn, several apartment buildings rise up and enclose the space on either side. Three are newly constructed glass and steel towers that just began filling with residents, and the most prominent of them, the architect Neil M. Denari’s sleek HL23, is so close it’s as if parkgoers could walk right into one of the multimillion-dollar apartments.

Pierre Salamon, who lives in the Marais, another building rising above this section of the park, called it “a secret new city waiting to be discovered.” It makes him feel, he said, “like I’ve arrived in another dimension of Chelsea … I slow down on purpose to retain that feeling.”

Annik La Farge, who wrote a book about the park called “On the High Line,” looks onto this section from her office and living room windows in the Spears Building. The space is made more striking, she said, by the narrow, forested path that precedes it, known as the Chelsea Thicket. “Horticulturally, the area goes from dense, shady thicket to open, sunny lawn,” Ms. La Farge said. “And in more human terms, it goes from a very private space to a very, very public one.” 

Walking this neighborhood in the sky is like finding yourself in a mash-up of “Blade Runner” and “Rear Window.” The thrill isn’t the wide angle, but the close-up, being at eye level with high-rise apartments and the people inside them. Like the hulking, metal-sheathed 245 Tenth, an 11-story co-op designed by the Brooklyn-based architects Jared Della Valle and Andrew Bernheimer: on a recent evening, a couple rested among moving boxes inside their new third-floor apartment there, obviously exhausted, in full view of passers-by.

Just a few steps down the High Line is Ten23, another glass building, which opened along this section of the park in January. In one west-facing corner unit, a mod-looking candy-red chair was displayed prominently in the window, as if this weren’t an apartment, but a store or a design studio.

While casual voyeurism along the High Line (the “ ‘Pry’ Line,” as The New York Post dubbed it) has been going on since the park opened three years ago, the residents of new buildings like HL23, Ten23 and 245 Tenth are different from earlier High Line dwellers in at least one respect: they moved here knowing their homes would be among the most exposed in the city.

Moreover, the cutting-edge architecture, the bleachers and lawn, and colorful metal “Urban Rattle” sculpture by the artist Charlie Hewitt, installed in May in the courtyard of Ten23, have all made this section of the High Line a popular gathering spot.

Thousands of people go by these apartments every day, and no doubt wonder who lives in them. But what do the residents see? What is life like on the other side of the glass?

We talked to people who live in HL23, Ten23 and 245 Tenth, and two other buildings, the Spears Building and the Marais, which predate the High Line but are integral to the skyline of this section of the park.”

Via: The NY Times

Photo: SIGHT LINES In a section of the High Line near 23rd Street, five apartment buildings, three of them newly built steel-and-glass towers, overlook the park and create a sleek update on “Rear Window.” Robert Wright for The New York Times

“Boston’s Lost Island Neighborhood

The plan was breathtaking in its ambition: to build a whole new chunk of Boston, a boldly modern new section of the city stretching out into the harbor.

A cross-shaped grid of floating platforms would carry hundreds of acres of soaring block-like buildings and public plazas. The site, stretching from Dorchester’s Columbia Point out to one of the harbor islands, would first serve as a site for the 1976 World Expo, attracting visitors from around the world. Then it would become home to a brand-new neighborhood with housing for tens of thousands, public space designed to be a modern version of Boston Common, and a new subway line.

It was perhaps the most dramatic reimagining of Boston’s landscape in the past half-century. It never happened, of course: The plan fell victim to local politics, and the very idea of a 1976 World Expo disintegrated as the country became caught up in the political and economic uncertainty of the era.

But now this all-but-forgotten plan has resurfaced at the center of a conversation about whether it’s time for Boston to reclaim that sense of vision. The World Expo site was the heart of the inaugural exhibit at the Boston Society of Architects’ new public space near the waterfront. The exhibit’s curators—a group of young architects who also curate the pinkcomma gallery in the South End—and a handful of other thinkers citywide are taking a fresh look at the big planning era of the 1950s and ’60s, an age when Boston still dared to dream big and offer sweeping visions of what the city’s future might be.

Today that era of big planning is known chiefly for the damage it did, the high-handed urban renewal programs that scarred Boston with the memories of demolished neighborhoods and soulless rebuilding. The city and its residents have spent decades understandably wary of such ideas. But these critics point out that the city’s 40-year turn away from that kind of broad vision has also cost us opportunities in developing Boston’s neighborhoods. At a time when Boston seems hamstrung by a piecemeal planning process that leaves the city vulnerable to the whims and fortunes of individual building developers, it’s worth asking if the city needs a different approach to shape its future. And that question has many people reexamining the expo plan—a bold and optimistic souvenir of a time when Boston wasn’t afraid to look ahead.”

Via: The Boston Globe

“In Queens, An Artistic Alteration

“That’s the screech,” Margie Ruddick explained. She was referring to the No. 7 train. It emitted an ear-splitting sound as we rounded a curve and came to a stop at the Queensboro Plaza subway station.

It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that Ms. Ruddick, a landscape architect who led the recently completed $45 million makeover of Queens Plaza, spoke of the screech with affection. It was more like she was talking about a crazed relative whose existence one is forced to acknowledge when neighbors hear him barking in the attic.

The screech was but one challenge Ms. Ruddick and her team—including Marpillero Pollak Architects, Judith Heintz of the landscape architecture firm WRT, artist Michael Singer and lighting artist Leni Schwendinger—faced in attempting to transform Queens Plaza from a wasteland of potholed roads, a parking lot and elevated subway tracks into a greenway that would attract businesses and greet pedestrians and motorists arriving in Queens.

Let me put it another way: Imagine an urban-design competition where some higher power with a peculiar sense of humor—that would be the New York City Planning Commission—said, “We’re going to give you a 16-lane roadway so dangerous pedestrians get hit by cars and an elevated subway track that creates so much noise you can’t hear yourself think; now go turn it into a life-affirming oasis.”

Remarkably, they succeeded, doing so by creating a lush strip of green plantings, benches and a two-way bicycle path. The project culminates in a new, 1.5-acre park on the site of the former parking lot. Ms. Ruddick describes the whole thing as a “linear park.” That might be stretching it, no pun intended. Nonetheless, it’s shining proof of the power of enlightened urban planning, talent, taste, trees and other plants and, perhaps most of all, positive thinking to minimize, if not wholly eradicate, the effects of an otherwise hostile environment.”

Via: The Wall Street Journal

Photo: Queens Plaza; Jason Andrew for The Wall Street Journal