Quickly, to mark this website's 2nd anniversary before the month is out, I've put together a rundown of some personal Brand Avenue favorites from the last year. Take a look:
- IDEO's Smart Space practice group mines the idea of place in Kansas City:
The firm deliberately dodges all the “technical” parts of urban planning: arranging infrastructure, determining financing, and navigating the public process. Instead it practices urban planning as branding: define the spirit of a place and then let others articulate that spirit—whether in bricks, mortar, tax breaks, or billboards. IDEO claims accountability only for its ideas.
It’s not clear that works, mostly because it’s too early to tell—but also because the team at IDEO is messing with the DNA of the planning process. They’re changing it from a concrete process of infrastructure and building to an imagined one of narrative and identity; they’re exchanging the idea of a place for place itself.
- A Dutch traffic engineer reimagines the streetscape by removing all of its boundaries:
The "self-reading street" has its roots in the Dutch "woonerf" design principles that emerged in the 1970s. Blurring the boundary between street and sidewalk, woonerfs combine innovative paving, landscaping and other urban designs to allow for the integration of multiple functions in a single street, so that pedestrians, cyclists and children playing share the road with slow-moving cars....
When Mr. Monderman, a traffic engineer and the intersection's proud designer, deliberately failed to check for oncoming traffic before crossing the street, the drivers slowed for him. No one honked or shouted rude words out of the window. "Who has the right of way?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains."
- In a demonstration of the impracticality of a "one size fits all" approach, a developer in New Jersey tailors the design of a new residential district to the lifestyle particularities of Orthodox Jews. (Another analogous new project, here.) How is this house not like other houses?
- A couple in Vancouver discover the complex connections between environment, culture, place, and consumption when they experiment with limiting what they eat to what's available within a 100-mile radius:
We walked into the diet cold turkey for a full year, and it was hard. For example, we live on the West Coast, so it took us seven months to find a rogue local farmer who actually grows wheat. Meanwhile, we ate an unbelievable number of potatoes. Doing the diet the hard way taught us a lot about the current food system, but it isn't for everybody. A more realistic approach is to plan a single, totally 100-mile meal with friends or family, and see where you want to go from there.
The 100-Mile Diet is about learning by doing. Getting to know the seasons. Understanding where our food comes from, and at what risk to our health and to the environment. Sorting out how we all ended up eating apples that taste like cardboard and cakes made with petrochemicals. It was a challenge, but a good one–a genuine adventure.
- The airport terminal becomes the town square as aerotropoli boom worldwide, rivaling their host cities in urbanity and economic might:
Airports are no longer simply places where airplanes land and passengers and cargo transit. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is a case in point. About 58,000 people are daily employed on the airport grounds. Its passenger terminal—containing an expansive mix of shopping, dining, and entertainment arcades—doubles as a suburban mall that is accessible both to air travelers and the general public. Amsterdam residents regularly shop and relax in the airport’s public section, especially on Sundays and at night when most city stores are closed....
With the airport and its immediate area serving as a multimodal transportation and commercial nexus, a new economic geography is taking shape: property near the airport commands premium office rental prices for the Amsterdam area, even above those in Amsterdam’s central business district.
- Would-be residents to a new housing development in Southern California are asked to fill out a survey on their values, to see where they would fit in:
"Please check the box that comes closest to how you feel most of the time," it began, and asked people to rate how strongly they agreed with various statements.
"We need to treat the planet as a living system," read one. "Abortions should not be legal unless there's a threat to life," read another. And, "I have been born again in Jesus Christ." There were questions about corporate greed, divorce, the merits of foreign travel.
And over the next several years, the results materialized across thousands of acres: For the more conservative-minded "Traditionalists," Covenant Hills, where homes have classic architecture and big family rooms, was built. For the green and soul-searching "Cultural Creatives," developers built Terramor, where Craftsman-style houses are fitted with photovoltaic cells and bamboo flooring.
Feel free to browse the archives for more content--and as always, I'd love feedback if you want to offer some!
In the meantime, three new projects to explore:
- A group of Atlanta business leaders have put forward a $1B vision for an overhaul of Peachtree Street, that city's 14.5 mile-long historic spine, complete with the return of streetcars, to rival NYC's Broadway and Chicago's Michigan Avenue. Below, Peachtree in the late 1930s (with long-lost bustle):
- Four finalists compete to remake Nathan Phillips Square, the iconic, windswept public space that sits astride Toronto City Hall. Below, the four concepts:
- Neutelings Riedijk's spectacularly cavernous Institute for Sound and Vision opens in Hilversum, Holland--its facade a scrim of abstracted television screens, and its interior vast and open.
(Lastly: thanks, whoever you are, for reading.)
no, thanks for writing.
Posted by: | 05/29/2007 at 10:44