Clever Design for a Non-Stop Train

Via Kottke

Experimental Cities Part 1: Charter Cities

Here’s a grand urban concept that has generated plenty of recent policy debate. Economist/entrepreneur Paul Romer is advocating advancement in developing nations through the creation of city-scaled zones in which sponsor nations ensure improved “rules” (Romer’s favorite word) that allow host nation migrant populations to flourish. Think Hong Kong.

Check out Romer's TED talk below (there's even mention of military installations).



Some good points concerning feasibility, etc are raised here, here, and here, among other places.

Maps that Changed the World

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Via Planetizen

So real it's unreal...

This impressive short film on architecture is said to be entirely CGI. I was recently at Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum, which is one of the subjects illustrated in the video, and this captures it amazingly well. Though I don't recall any spontaneous indoor cloud formation during my visit.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

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Via MNOL

Transformer Room

A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Different Rooms @ Yahoo! Video

Via Matt Orsillo

LIDAR Mapping for Archaeology

Another LIDAR example, finding hidden insights about an ancient mayan city by looking through the tree cover. They can see roads, terraces, and buildings they never knew about before.

We were blown away,” Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.

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LIDAR Mapping for Solar Access

Sanborn (a Colorado company!) is flying over New York City using LIDAR to create a hyper-accurate 3-D model of the city.

The data will be used, among other things, to create up-to-date maps of the areas most prone to flooding, the buildings best suited for the installation of solar power and the neighborhoods most in need of trees.

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Via Planetizen

A designer (Florian Pucher) has created rugs meant to evoke aerial views of different countries and continents. Above is Africa, below is the USA.


Via Boing Boing

PowerPoint and the Military

Thanks to Bob for passing along this interesting article about PowerPoint use in the military. There are many quotes that I could have pulled out, but the final sentences were the best:

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

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Via Bob Steimle

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