With forest fires threatening thousands of homes outside Los Angeles last week, and California in its third straight year of drought, alternative models for housing are starting to look better and better.

Professors Don and Ann Cottrell might be able to teach us a thing or two. For thirty years, they’ve lived in the earth-integrated, zero-energy house that they designed and built into a hillside near San Diego State University. Inspired by the nascent environmental movement in the late 1970s, but without many precedents to guide them, they had set out to join the vanguard of the alternative housing movement. Although they hired an architect to advise them on their design and ensure it conformed to building codes, they did much of the actual construction themselves, from the waterproofing to the electrical wiring. “We were just going in blind,” Ann Cottrell told me. “Nobody knew what they were doing back then— it was just so seat of the pants.” Read more…

A research lab at UCLA aims to improve cities from the grassroots up, with a soon-to-launch platform that will allow citizens to document trends in their built environment using their mobile phones. The concept, dubbed “urban sensing” by the university’s Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS), hinges on taking as much advantage of the data-capture capabilities of the mobile phone as people already do of its communication capabilities. Read more…

Even before the arrival of the New Museum’s latest installation, I was uncomfortable taking the stairs between their third and fourth floors. It’s a notoriously narrow space, measuring 50 feet long and only 4 feet wide. Sandwiched between tall walls on the museum’s north side, the stairwell has barely enough room for two people to squeeze past each other. And despite the efforts of SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa to open up the space with high ceilings and light, standing at the base of the stairs and gazing up its slender passage  induces mild panic in a claustrophobe like me.

Now the artist Rigo 23 has taken that constriction to a new level with a site-specific piece built into the stairwell, called The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes. Those are the words of Herman Wallace, one of the three black men dubbed the Angola 3 who were imprisoned in late 1960s Louisiana, and whose nearly 30 years of solitary confinement and hunger strikes have fixed an unflattering spotlight on the American penal system. Read more…

A Cartagen map of Berlin, color-coded by the users who submitted map data. (Click to view a larger image.)

Scarcely a week goes by without an excited report on Google Maps: the breadth and depth of its coverage, its multiplying features, and all the innovative uses people are finding for it. But could the ubiquitous program be stunting the field of map design?

“Before Google Maps, designers thought much more broadly about what maps could do,” the MIT researcher Jeffrey Warren says. “Now, most mapping on the Web consists just of using Google Maps and sticking pins on it.” In the name of reclaiming some of that creativity, he’s created a software platform called Cartagen, the latest version of which debuted last week. It uses Google’s geographic data as a starting point, but lets people choose which features to include on their maps—streets, parks, churches, and so on—and how to visually represent those features, creating their maps from the ground up. Users can also add new data, which Cartagen can represent not just as points on the map but as outlines, polygons, overlapping shaded clouds—the possibilities are still expanding as Warren’s team brainstorms new potential uses for its creation. Read more…

The architect and urbanist Michael Sorkin covers an impressive amount of ground in the titular walk of Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, using the blocks from his West Village apartment to his Tribeca office as seeds for his musings on the city. The route itself is really just a loose framing device for tangentially-connected topics, but Sorkin’s conversation is compelling — even if you do sometimes find yourself blinking and wondering, “Wait, how did we get onto the subject of text-messaging?” (Or globalization, or modernism, or cinematography…)

The journey begins on the apartment stairs, where Sorkin launches a history of elevators, skyways, and the challenges of making a city handicapped-accessible; then the building stoop, sparking memories of Jane Jacobs and observations on neighborly behavior. Arriving in Soho prompts a lament about gentrification; crossing Canal Street, a look at how different modes of transportation can coexist in a crowded city. Shifting verb tenses helps keep things interesting: Sorkin alternately expounds on the tenements that were, the Lower Manhattan Expressway that might have been, the social networks of the Village that exist now, and the green-roofed paradise that the city could become. Read more…

It’s hardly news to architects and planners that the increase in security after 9/11 has changed American cities, with bollards, blockades, and security cameras sprouting like toadstools after a rainstorm. But exactly how much space is affected?

A new Web site called Secure Cities is helping to quantify the issue. Professor of urban design Jeremy Németh and his partners at the University of Colorado, Denver, surveyed the civic centers and financial districts of New York (left), Los Angeles, and San Francisco, evaluating public spaces on three criteria: accessibility (are the entrances blocked off?), mobility (are there restrictions within the space, like security checks?), and surveillance (are security personnel present?). 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…

Images: courtesy Eric Gordon

Eric Gordon, a professor of new media at Emerson College, and Gene Koo, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, just won a MacArthur Foundation grant for their innovative new take on community planning using Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world which users explore as avatars. I spoke with Professor Gordon over the phone last week about how holding community meetings in Second Life transforms the planning process.

Tell me about the site that your workshops were focusing on.

We had the opportunity to work last summer with Library Park in Allston, which is a neighborhood of Boston. The park is being designed by Harvard University as part of their expansion into Allston, so it’s the first piece of a much larger development.

What’s wrong with the way architects’ plans are used at a typical community meeting?

The typical two-dimensional plans assume that the people viewing them have some understanding of architecture or urban planning—they adopt a professional discourse and bring it to a lay community, without enough thought into how to communicate abstract spatial ideas in a way that people can relate to. Read more…

Building Happiness: Architecure to Make You Smile is much more skeptical of architecture’s ability to make us happy than last year’s widely-read book on the same subject, Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness.

That’s because while de Botton waxes poetic, the contributors to Building Happiness look to the empirical record—which, apparently, just doesn’t show a strong link between architectural aesthetics and happiness. It’s a difficult pill to swallow. As Jeremy Till, dean of architecture at the University of Westminster, says, “The association of beauty with happiness is one of those platitudes that have been passed unthinkingly from one architectural generation to another,” and it’s easy to see why. The idea that we can shape our psyches by shaping our buildings seems both comforting and intuitive. Read more…

A map of the 11 emerging mega-regions in North America. Image: courtesy the Regional Plan Association

“A badly-conceived pudding… indigestible and tasteless” was Lewis Mumford’s scathing review of America’s first regional plan in 1929. He castigated the plan’s authors for accepting projected urbanization as a given rather than warning against its dangers. In trying to be pragmatic, he argued, they had given up the high ground too easily.

That debate was still alive and kicking as of last Wednesday at Sustainable Urbanization in the Information Age, a conference at the United Nations Headquarters organized by the American Institute of Architects. The blunt-spoken Australian politico Peter Woods was a modern-day Mumford, scoffing at the very idea of sustainable urbanization. “You may come up with a few interventions that look good,” he said—but, in his opinion, you’d just be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. To actually keep that ship from sinking, we have to rein in urbanization itself. Read more…