House of Cards

This architect had 44 days of free time to use 218,792 cards to build a giant house of cards.

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Via The Daily What

Formalizing the Homeless Camps

Someone wants to turn the derelict KOA campground down by Nevada and I-25 into temporary housing for the homeless.

He still has to line up financing, he said, but that isn’t his biggest hurdle.

“It’s the city,” he said.

The issue is over zoning. He and a proponent of the project, City Councilman Tom Gallagher, say the property at 1209 S. Nevada Ave. is already permitted for use as a campground. But Koscielski said city planners are treating it as a new development that would place cumbersome stipulations on the project.

Sounds like a good idea to me, but what keeps this temporary solution from becoming permanent?

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Glitter Competition

An architectural competition with these rules:

1. It's a drawing of architecture.
2. It uses glitter

Any takers?

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Via Kottke

Leonardo Da Vinci's Resume

At 30, he considered himself a "skilled contriver of instruments of war," and wrote a letter to the the Duke of Milan, looking for work. This is a great example of bold business development. The letter had 11 points.

6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.

7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.

8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.

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Via Kottke

Political Problems for US Base in Japan

The politics of our military bases abroad are complicated:

Apparently, Japan and the US worked out a deal to relocate a Marine Base on the island of Okinawa to the city of Nago. Now, a Nago has elected a new mayor who opposes the deal, and the Prime Minister of Japan may back out of the deal. That would mean the Marine base would have to move to Guam or another island, which President Obama is against.

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Via Planetizen

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.

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Via Planetizen

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.

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Via Planetizen

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

Giant Optical Illusion

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Via The Daily What

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.



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Via Digital Urban

Camouflaged Airplane Hangar

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




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Via Gizmodo

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.

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Via Planetizen

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.

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Via Planetizen

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.

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Via Amy U.

Imaginary Suburbs

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Via Planetizen

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.

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Via Marginal Revolution

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

Airport Design

Interesting slideshow showing the evolution of airport design.

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Via Freakonomics Blog

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.

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Via Kottke

Tunnels

A roundup of cool maps of tunnel systems.

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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.

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Via Pruned

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.

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Via Kottke

Ugly and Non-Functional Public Housing

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

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Via Kottke

Bike Friendly Design

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

Via Kottke