Thursday, December 24, 2009

Vandergrift


Looks like a town in Pennsylvania is looking back to its original plan, drawn by the master landscape architect, Olmsted, for tips on sustainability.

Olmsted designed Vandergrift, 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, with no right angles, instead following the curves of the river. He also used curving paths to blur movement among pedestrians and hedges to buffer commercialism. Street corners and the buildings on them were rounded. Parks dotted the hilly landscape, and the town was walkable.


Link

Via Planetizen

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

LEED buildings are energy hogs?

When the Illinois study looked at cases where engineers had taken the time to labor over sophisticated energy models, it found that 75 percent of those buildings fell short of expectations. The fault presumably lay with building managers who made numerous small mistakes—overheating, overcooling, misusing timers, miscalibrating equipment.


Looks like an interesting article, although I'd have to cast doubt on the thoroughness of their research, given that they spelled Rick Fedrizzi's (he's the CEO of USGBC) name wrong in the first sentence.

Link

Via Planetizen

Monday, November 16, 2009

Empty City, built for stimulus

Ordos, an empty city in China, was built but not unoccupied. Looks kinda cool, but does it make any sense to you to have a city that sits empty because housing is too expensive?

Money quote: "Most of the people here are the construction workers, and some old people."



Via Matt

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Autonomous 3-D Interior Mapping

Amazing video of a robot built to search and map unfamiliar interior environments without any remote control. Imagine setting one of these suckers loose in a building to do a building survey.



Link

Via Digital Urban

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Camouflaged Airplane Hangar

The Army Corps of Engineers made this hangar look like a rural landscape during WWII!




Link

Via Gizmodo

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Unplanned neighborhood wins planning award

Interesting: Houston's Montrose neighborhood won an APA Great Neighborhoods award for 2009. The editorial below claims irony, saying that the neighborhood (like most of Houston) wasn't really planned at all, and if it was planned, it was the private land developers who originally planned it, not public servants and city officials.

Link

Via Planetizen

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Personal Rapid Transit

A good in-depth article from the Boston Globe about Personal Rapid Transit's recent resurgence. In some ways, it sounds ideal for military installations.

While some true believers hope PRT will eventually become a dominant mode of transit, others see it more as a gap-filler. It could serve places like airports, university campuses, and medical centers. As a “distributor,” it could branch out into less dense areas to bring riders to other mass transit hubs. And it could provide a valuable service in “edge cities,” to ferry people from residential areas to shopping areas or office parks - routes that are now taken almost exclusively in automobiles.


Link

Via Planetizen

Friday, September 18, 2009

A Perfect City

David Byrne (founding member of the Talking Heads) wrote an excellent essay about what makes a good city.

There's a certain attractiveness to New Orleans, Mexico City or Naples—where you get the sense that though some order exists, it's an order of a fluid and flexible nature. Sometimes too flexible, but a little bit of that sense of excitement and possibility is something I'd wish for in a city. A little touch of chaos and danger makes a city sexy.


Link

Via Amy U.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Friday, September 11, 2009

How Much do Densification Efforts Help the Environment?

Tyler Cowen, one of my favorite economists online, spots a study that quantifies the environmental gains that result from land use policies that curb urban sprawl. Interesting conclusion:

The environmental benefits of checking pro-suburb subsidies are real, but they are smaller than many people think. That's from the National Academy of Sciences and the authors are no haters of the environment. If you check out p.59, you'll see that a forty percent increase in population density decreases vehicle miles traveled by less than five percent.


Link

Via Marginal Revolution

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

How Sweet is This!

555 KUBIK_ extended version from urbanscreen on Vimeo.



I like the part from 3:00 to about 4:30

Via Gizmodo

Monday, July 27, 2009

Airport Design

Interesting slideshow showing the evolution of airport design.

Link

Via Freakonomics Blog

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Architecture of Star Wars



Bright Tree Village is an exemplar of sustainable, low-tech development. This Ewok settlement on the forest moon of Endor follows the traditional pattern: thatched-roof huts are arranged on the main branches of a tree around the chief’s hut on the trunk. Rated BREEAM Excellent, the development - by architect Wicket W Warrick - makes use of locally sourced materials, is carbon-neutral and far exceeds Endor’s notoriously strict building regulations.


Link

Via Kottke

Monday, June 8, 2009

Tunnels




A roundup of cool maps of tunnel systems.

Link

Via Kottke

Plan of Chicago








Almost 100 years ago, Daniel Burnham created the "Plan of Chicago." It was a milestone of urban planning, and the Art Institute of Chicago has a great online exhibition here.
Perhaps the most striking—and uniquely American—aspect of the Plan was its idealistic belief in Chicago as a city without limits. The planners believed their city could become the most beautiful and prosperous in the world, and they inspired its citizens to undertake the challenge.

You can also view the original plan document here.

The images in the plan are just amazing.

Wetland Machine




I'm not sure this would be legal in Colorado, but it's still cool.

Some of the runoff gets in an underground cistern. During dry weather, this storage tank provides water to the pond. During heavy rains, excess water flows from the pond into the rain garden, simulating the hydrological dynamics of a floodplain environment. Water seeps through the soil and gets naturally filtered.

Link

Via Pruned

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Elephants and Cities

There are a couple of great mathematical gems about cities in this article.

First, Zipf's Law:

The mathematics of cities was launched in 1949 when George Zipf, a linguist working at Harvard, reported a striking regularity in the size distribution of cities. He noticed that if you tabulate the biggest cities in a given country and rank them according to their populations, the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as the third largest, and so on. In other words, the population of a city is, to a good approximation, inversely proportional to its rank. Why this should be true, no one knows.

Even more amazingly, Zipf’s law has apparently held for at least 100 years. Given the different social conditions from country to country, the different patterns of migration a century ago and many other variables that you’d think would make a difference, the generality of Zipf’s law is astonishing.

Keep in mind that this pattern emerged on its own. No city planner imposed it, and no citizens conspired to make it happen. Something is enforcing this invisible law, but we’re still in the dark about what that something might be.


Second, cities evolve efficiency through branching networks of circulation, just like animals:

This implies that the bigger a city is, the fewer gas stations it has per person. Put simply, bigger cities enjoy economies of scale. In this sense, bigger is greener.

The same pattern holds for other measures of infrastructure. Whether you measure miles of roadway or length of electrical cables, you find that all of these also decrease, per person, as city size increases. And all show an exponent between 0.7 and 0.9.

Now comes the spooky part. The same law is true for living things. That is, if you mentally replace cities by organisms and city size by body weight, the mathematical pattern remains the same.


Link

Via Kottke

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Ugly and Non-Functional Public Housing




Really interesting pictures of the worst public housing projects in history.

Link

Via Kottke

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Bike Friendly Design



As this video demonstrates, pretty much everything is friendly to bikes.

Via Kottke

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Secret Passages



Who hasn't wanted a secret passage? Well there's a company that specializes: Creative Home Engineering


Link

Via Things

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Sitcom Map



I think Colorado looks pretty good on this map. The Southeast - not so good.

Via Impact Lab

Rainwater Harvesting and Colorado State Water Law

Article in the LA Times about rainwater harvesting in Colorado.

...according to the state of Colorado, the rain that falls on Holstrom's property is not hers to keep. It should be allowed to fall to the ground and flow unimpeded into surrounding creeks and streams, the law states, to become the property of farmers, ranchers, developers and water agencies that have bought the rights to those waterways.


Link

Via Boing Boing

Friday, March 6, 2009

Finding Atlantis


Interesting description of how the ocean floor is mapped.

Some have speculated that these are the plow marks of seafloor farming by aliens. If there really are little green men hiding somewhere, the ocean's not a bad place to do it. Mars, Venus, the moon, and even some asteroids are mapped at far higher resolution than our own oceans (the global map of Mars is about 250 times as accurate as the global map of our own ocean).


Link

Via Kottke

Bus Stop Designs







Hey! Take a look at these fun bus stop shelters.


What could we resuse to create practical spaces and art at the same time?





This purple bus shelter seems to resonate with Robert Venturi's house below...








http://blog.designpublic.com/


For more interesting bus shelters see Village of Joy's blog post:

http://villageofjoy.com/interesting-bus-stops-around-the-world/






And right in our backyard...




Denver University Station







Friday, February 20, 2009

The recession has hurt the shark attack industry...

As the article states:
One supposes that sunburns, jellyfish stings, and cases of "bocce wrist" are also off.

Link
Via The Economist Blog

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

How much of the stimulus will go to the DoD?




Here's a good quick rundown of the Department of Defense line items in the stimulus bill that was just signed. It's about $10,000,000,000 altogether for the armed forces.

Link

Via Armchair Generalist

Monday, February 9, 2009

Stimulation

There's an interesting thread running through the three articles linked below.

Enormous government injections of money into the economy have the effect of distorting market forces and shifting the foundations of the economy for a long time. The best historical example: the federal government's huge investment in the interstate system in the 50s made suburban development relatively cheap because transportation infrastructure costs were borne by the government.

In different ways, the authors below are all making the point that we should be deliberate about how this stimulus happens, because it will inevitably affect the economy's ground rules for years to come.

The first article (Link) argues that if we really want to use less energy, we'll never get there by designing more efficient cars.

In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons discovered an efficiency paradox: the more efficient you make machines, the more energy they use. Why? Because the more efficient they are, the better they are, the cheaper they are and more people buy them, and the more they’ll use them.


The next editorial (Link), written by Peter Calthorpe, takes the same sentiment to the next level and argues that the stimulus package should be focused on three areas:

• Transportation funding that moves away from a bias for highway projects and toward transit investment.
• Environmental policy that protects air quality and opens space.
• Federal housing assistance that moves beyond its historic orientations toward single-family hosing to encourage urban redevelopment.

The final article (Link) makes the point that we shouldn't neglect design in our haste to jump into the massive backlog of "shovel-ready" projects:

We need to ensure that the money spent goes to creative, sustainable buildings that will stand the test of time and will still be used by our children and our grandchildren. After all, they are the ones who are going to be paying for these debt-financed projects.


Via Planetizen

Friday, February 6, 2009

Ants as architects and community planners

This is an interesting video about uncovering the extensive and complex megalopolis that is an ant colony.

Link

Via Planetizen

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Changing Places

This interactive site from the Pew Research Center explores migration flows in the U.S. on state and regional levels. To tie this into the planning realm, I’d guess there is at least some interplay between these flows and different types of land use/real estate development regulation among the states. (Of course, that'd be just one factor out of many). Beyond planning, it will also be worth watching how state-to-state policy differences in dealing with the general economic and budget difficulties affects these flows in the years ahead.

Link

Via Pew Social Trends

Monday, February 2, 2009

Landmark Preservation, 'Chicago'-style

A law prof offers an alternative approach to preservation policy:

Link

Via Forbes

Design and Branding



The goofy picture of the baby first caught my attention, but the topic is interesting. Branding has changed over the years, to the point that today, the design of logos and other marketing features is a huge tool. Interesting concepts to consider in our marketing, designs, and even our personal consumer decisions!
To see the full post...
Enjoy!

Via Design Observer

Friday, January 16, 2009


Matt sent me this link about high speed rail.

Link

Via Getting Rich