It’s unclear from Anthony Flint’s Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City, whether Jacobs and Moses ever actually met, face to face—which is remarkable given the role each one played in the other’s life and legacy. If, at times, Flint has a hard time resisting the now-typical David versus Goliath narrative, it might be because the story, and its protagonists, lend themselves to that characterization: Moses, the Yale- and Oxford-educated master builder, beloved by one generation of the city’s public, then vilified by the next; Jacobs, the self-educated reporter from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who, as Flint tells it, fell in love with Depression-era Greenwich Village and then, almost by accident, fell into four decades of reluctant activism on its behalf. Read more…

Metropolis’s 2009 Next Generation competition received scores of entries, from which this year’s jury chose one winner and eight runners-up to be recognized in the May issue of the magazine. But there were far more than just nine good ideas in the bunch. The judges also selected 12 “notables”—entries that, for various reasons, fell short of the final selection, but that the jurors felt still deserved recognition. To that end, we’re posting one notable Next Generation proposal every Thursday for the next few months. (Click here to check out previous weeks’ selections.) In doing so, we hope to foster discussion that will help the teams refine their ideas, connect with like-minded readers, and perhaps even implement their projects in the real world.

This week: Luciform, a bioluminescent coating for concrete proposed by Erin Hayne and Nuno Ferreira, of NunoErin. How would it work? Read more…

I’m a sucker for best-of lists, so I always look forward to Monocle’s annual ranking of the world’s top 25 most livable cities—and I’m always amused by how poorly American burgs fare in the editors’ estimation. Granted, Monocle’s target reader appears to be the sort of wealthy European jet-setter who favors Aspesi outerwear and has strong opinions on the virtues of Gstaad versus St. Moritz—in other words, not someone likely to be lured by the discreet charms of Des Moines. Still, the magazine seems to take special pride in ignoring the States. Last year was an exception—for the first time, three American cities made the cut: Honolulu (number 12), Minneapolis (19), and Portland, Oregon (25). This year, however, only Honolulu hangs in there, moving up one spot to number 11. Why Honolulu? It satisfies several of Monocle’s key criteria for livability: good public transit, plentiful annual sunshine, a balmy average temperature, bars open until the wee hours, and relatively few chain stores (only 16 Starbucks and zero Zara outlets!) It’s worth noting, however, that the editors care nothing of affordability—thus Hawaii’s “paradise tax,” which matches one of the highest costs of living in the country with middling wages, is a non-issue here.

For your kvetching pleasure, here’s the full list: Read more…

In Architecture Depends, author (and dean of architecture at the University of Westminster) Jeremy Till seems to be trying to head off his critics at the pass, by pointing out the book’s shortcomings before they can. After introducing his premise—that architects don’t take into account the unpredictable forces that will change their buildings over time, from weather to dirt to other people’s alterations—he imagines a listener replying, “That’s kind of obvious.” (Till retorts that it may be an obvious point, but it’s still worth writing about, since architects so rarely confront it.)

Yet the real problem with Till’s premise is not that it’s obvious, but that it’s hard to imagine an alternative. How exactly would one plan for unforeseeable changes? Architecture Depends purports to answer, but Till’s idea of an answer is so inchoate and oblique that it’s easy to forget, for pages at a time, what the original question was. Read more…

When photos surfaced last Friday of the P.S.1 courtyard pavilion built by MOS—the winner of this year’s MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program—I worried that the firm’s principals, Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith, had failed to fulfill one of the brief’s most basic requirements: creating an outdoor oasis where museum visitors and Warm Up revelers could escape the summer sun and cool off. Sure, there was shade… but what could be less suggestive of “cooling off” than the woolly brown fur heaped upon and flowing over the sides of the canopies (which prompted one blog to run the headline “Somebody Skinned Snuffleupagus”)?

Seeing the structure in person this morning, however, completely changed my impression of MOS’s creation. Read more…

Every Monday until mid-August, first-year graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture are blogging about their progress building an affordable, accessible owner-renter residence in New Haven. Click here to read the previous posts.

A student applies exterior sealant tape around newly-installed windows. Photos: courtesy the Vlock First Year Building Project

Something about today felt much different. Our crew of 12 still seemed to be recovering from this week’s review of digital-media projects (the second class we are taking during this summer—as Dean Stern put it, he wouldn’t want for us to be “bored” during the off-time from our Building Project shifts.) Our minds are still fluttering amidst the constellation of digital animations, CNC-milled surfaces, and interactive Web sites. It’s as if the realities of the day have yet to truly set in. Today is the last day that the majority of us will be on site until the ceremony marking the completion of the Yale Vlock Building Project in August. Read more…

Perhaps it’s the fact that people in California spend so much time outdoors, but whatever the reason, the streets I strolled on a recent trip to the Golden State were a lot friendlier than the ones I’d left behind in New York. In San Diego, for instance, there were pedestrian crossing buttons at every intersection and all were in working order. (A fair percentage of the ones I find in New York are permanently depressed, and I have to wonder what kind of signals they are submitting to the network.) And each public park I entered, from San Diego to San Luis Obispo, had a bin of emergency poop bags for dog owners left high and dry. It finally occurred to me to take a few pictures of these amenities, so here goes:
 

Crossing Button, San Diego
This is what you see at most intersections—clearly labeled, working properly, and convenient. I’d love to know how much time these buttons lop off of the average pedestrian wait, but together with drivers that actually wait at crosswalks for pedestrians who are still on the curb, the buttons went a long way toward making me feel like I belonged on the street every bit as much as much as the cars did.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Read more…

The final June cover (left) and an alternate version. Illustration: Aesthetic Apparatus

“It took the editors around here a couple of tries to get used to saying their name without giggling,” says Metropolis’s creative director, Criswell Lappin, of Aesthetic Apparatus, the Minneapolis-based firm that illustrated this month’s cover. “By then we had found one of their concepts particularly com­pel­ling: the idea that the future of green building (in this case, the new headquarters of the U.S. Green Building Council, in Washington, D.C.) would involve utiliz­ing existing structures. We just needed to deter­mine whe­ther it should be type- or image-driven. After Michael Byzewski put in a tad more quality time, we went with this image—a generic-looking concrete structure—but not before pumping up the type a bit.”

Metropolis’s 2009 Next Generation competition received scores of entries, from which this year’s jury chose one winner and eight runners-up to be recognized in the May issue of the magazine. But there were far more than just nine good ideas in the bunch. The judges also selected 12 “notables”—entries that, for various reasons, fell short of the final selection, but that the jurors felt still deserved recognition. To that end, we’re posting one notable Next Generation proposal every Thursday for the next few months. (Click here to check out previous weeks’ selections.) In doing so, we hope to foster discussion that will help the teams refine their ideas, connect with like-minded readers, and perhaps even implement their projects in the real world.

This week: Samuel Formo’s No-Waste Pattern Design, for cutting garments without creating scraps of fabric, which typically get thrown away. How would it work? Read more…

Renderings: Lincoln Center West 65th Street Project: Diller Scofidio + Renfro in association with FXFOWLE Architects

The other day I checked out the latest phase of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ongoing facelift of Lincoln Center, a new outdoor-seating area called Barclays Capital Grove (catchy name!) located just north of the Metropolitan Opera House. Although its official opening isn’t until August, the grove has been available for use since May—thankfully, since it offers more of what the Lincoln Center campus has always sorely lacked: public places to sit and meet. Read more…