One of China’s historic tourist destinations is set to get a new, “super green” makeover. The architecture firm Woods Bagot has won an international design competition to transform the XiXi Wetlands region outside the city of Hangzhou in southwest China.

Hangzhou has been a tourist hub for centuries. Its famous West Lake was a favored haunt of the Chinese Emperors, and now the city wants to make the Xixi Wetlands a second tourist magnet. The Woods Bagot design, spread over 12 square miles, includes hospitality facilities, residential areas, and public spaces, all clustered around five square miles of wetlands. There will be an “entertainment zone,” complete with a humongous outdoor movie screen; a “cultural zone” with suitably futuristic-looking buildings; and water features everywhere.

But the development’s key feature will be its low carbon footprint. Read more…

Every summer since 2007, the editors of the self-consciously upscale magazine of “global affairs” Monocle have assembled a list of the world’s most livable cities—in their words, “urban settlements where human life can thrive because they are easy to navigate, diverse, pulsing and full of opportunities.” I generally find these kinds of best-of lists irresistible, and Monocle has always used an appealingly idiosyncratic set of metrics (including the number of cinema screens and outdoor seats; the quality of the local architecture; the average amount of annual sunshine; the robustness of public transit; and the government’s commitment to diversity, tolerance, and sustainability.) The problem is, their criteria keep turning up the same cities year after year. Not exactly the same ones—but close enough to make the so-called Quality of Life Issue increasingly predictable and even dull. Let’s take a look at the rankings for the last three years: Read more…

The National Mall owes much to the architectural legacy of Daniel Burnham. The McMillan Commission, which planned the Mall in 1901, was inspired by the City Beautiful movement that Burnham sparked off with his design of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago. So it is fitting that the National Mall will be the venue of the Washington, D.C., premiere of a PBS documentary on Burnham, Make No Little Plans. The film was produced by The Archimedia Workshop, in consultation with Kartemquin Films, and will be screened at 8:30 p.m. this Wednesday, June 9, on the Mall at 4th Street. You can watch more clips from the documentary here.

You may remember the NYC Department of Transportation’s call for designs for an “economic, temporary surface treatment” for the new pedestrian plazas on Times Square. The design was meant to be a placeholder that will keep the plazas looking fresh till the real overhaul slated for 2012.

The DOT announced yesterday that, from the 150 designs submitted, it has selected a proposal by the Brooklyn-based artist Molly Dilworth. Titled “Cool Water, Hot Island,” Dilworth’s swirling blue pattern is based on NASA’s infrared satellite data of Manhattan. The infrared readings determined that the New York urban area is much hotter than the surrounding rural areas, a phenomenon known as the “urban heat-island effect.” The new design proposes to symbolically cool New York down.

Dilworth’s vibrant colors certainly fit in with the Times Square look, although it is debatable if Times Square needs any more vibrancy. What Times Square as an urban space has needed is some public art, some form of creative expression apart from the flashing signs and billboards. This new work–which is scheduled to be installed in mid-July—is definitely a step in the right direction. But the really nice touch is that Dilworth will be inserting a little marker of water into the urban landscape. In this glass-and-steel metropolis it is easy to forget that you are on an island whose history has been shaped by the water around it. Dilworth’s little swash of blue will do very well as a reminder, at least until Times Square is ready for the next big change.

Image, courtesy the NYC Department of Transportation

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This morning, the International Living Building Institute (ILBI) announced its Living City Design Competition, which asks designers, engineers, and urban planners to imagine cities capable of meeting all the requirements of the Living Building Challenge 2.0. Participants must select an existing city anywhere in the world and transform it through computer renderings and 3-D models. Successful entries will capture the attention of a broad audience while including technical information that will stand up to expert scrutiny.

Below, Jason F. McLennan and Sarah Costello, the CEO and development director, respectively, of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council—which founded the ILBI in 2009—introduce the new competition.

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Close your eyes for a moment and think of the cities of the future. What do you see? Vast stretches of gleaming skyscrapers connected by speeding trains or hovercraft? Dark, crowded streets whose only greenery comes from the weeds that assert themselves in untended pavement? For over a century, novelists and filmmakers have helped define our visions of the future, shaping our dreams and our assumptions about what is possible. Think of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner–or even the cartoon future of The Jetsons. Our manifold imaginings of tomorrow’s cities run the gamut from hopeful to despairing, from silly to deadly serious; yet all reflect a profound sense of ecological dislocation. We seem to take it as inevitable that the cities we bequeath to our grandchildren will be massive and developed without reference to the ecosystems they inhabit. Exactly how these cities will be powered, how their inhabitants will secure food, water, and clothing, is anybody’s guess.

We have grown used to predicting an increasingly mechanistic future, but what we have forgotten is that a future that crowds out the natural world is not simply bleak: it is impossible.  A world without a healthy and vibrant natural biosphere simply cannot sustain human life. Read more…

On Friday I spent all day at the Regional Plan Association’s annual conference. This year’s terrific event was entitled “Innovation and the American Metropolis.” The RPA, as it always does, cast a wide net, bringing in experts from the fields of architecture, urban planning, sustainable design, transportation, alternative energy, city planning, computer technology, politics, and so on. Bill McDonough—whose lucrative speaking engagements seem to have survived the hatchet job Fast Company did on him two years ago—kicked off the event in the morning with a typically rousing and poetic speech that had attendees still buzzing at lunch. (I, alas, missed him, but I’ve heard some version of Bill’s song and dance before.) Read more…

At first glance, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything exemplary in the layout of Willets Point, Queens, with its jumble of auto repair shops, junkyards, and the cars, broken down and not, that litter the spaces between buildings. The city hasn’t built sidewalks there—neither has it installed sewers—so the main drag is both street and sidewalk, and the neighborhood looks more like Mumbai than Queens. When Roberta Brandes Gratz makes that observation in her new book, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, she means the comparison as a kind of praise, a compliment to the neighborhood’s industriousness and gritty entrepreneurship. Willets Point, like the infamous Dharavi slum outside Mumbai, might be messy, but it’s also, in the best sense of the word, urban.

The reference to Dharavi is a rare instance where Gratz’s focus leaves New York City, if only briefly. The Battle for Gotham, as its subtitle suggests, is a book about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs and their storied clashes, but it’s also about how those conflicts defined the city in the years following Moses’s retirement and Jacobs’s departure for Toronto, in 1968. And, threaded into that public history, it’s an account of Gratz’s own life in New York: as a child in the city and a teenager outside of it, and as a mother, reporter, and preservationist. Those experiences, informed by a friendship with Jacobs that began in the late 1970s and continued until her death in 2006, ultimately make Gratz’s perspective both reportorial and deeply personal. Rarely is her tone equivocal; Moses, who some revisionist histories have sought to partially vindicate, she calls “undemocratic, arrogant, ruthless and racist.” Read more…

Attention, New York artists and designers: the city’s Department of Transportation just announced  that it is soliciting conceptual designs to refresh the new pedestrian plazas at Times Square. As you may recall, Mayor Bloomberg decided last month to make permanent the five plazas that DOT installed in the area last May. Now the DOT is looking for “a series of economical, temporary surface treatments” to keep these spaces looking good until it’s able to implement a permanent build-out (currently slated to for 2012). Designs must enhance the pedestrian experience, improve the setting for Times Square events, and accommodate fire lanes, crosswalks, and other “use zones.” The complete request for proposals is supposed to go up on the DOT Web site sometime today.

Update: Here’s a direct link to the RFP.

Now that green design has gone from a fringe concern to an absolute imperative for the architecture community, you have to wonder what, if anything, is the next frontier. The recent publication of New York City’s Active Design Guidelines suggests one possible answer: architecture to get people off their butts.

The Guidelines, which were unveiled at the Center for Architecture last Wednesday, outline how architects, city planners, and other design professionals can encourage daily physical activity among city dwellers. Strategies range from the simple (posting signs encouraging office workers to take the stairs) to the formidably complex (creating a vibrant streetscape with mixed land use, attractive public plazas, and designated bikeways). And although they’re specifically geared to New York, many of them would be relevant anywhere. Read more…

One of the great treats in working on our “1-5-10 Issue” was talking to experts and inviting them—urging them, really—to speculate on the future. Toronto-based Ken Greenberg—our urban-planning talking head—is currently working on a book, due out next year, on the future of cities, and he took the opportunity to ruminate on all of the changes he sees on the horizon. It was a fascinating and far-ranging talk. We took highlights from our interview for the print edition, but Greenberg’s expansive view of cities is worth a longer look online.

What do you see on the ground now in urban planning? What’s engaging you and the clients you’re working with?

I’m pretty convinced we’re in the midst of a transformation which is probably as profound as what happened immediately after the Second World War, when we got all excited about automobiles and in a sense turned our backs on cities. There are all kinds of things that are propelling this. Some of it has to do with the environment; much of it has to do with the cost of energy. I don’t know if you know the book that came out recently called Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. It was written by Jeff Rubin, a former chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce who actually resigned to write this book. From an economic standpoint he is talking about peak oil and the effect it’s going to have on cities. Right now I’m in the midst of a series of skirmishes, as people adjust to this new reality and we change our entire tool kit when it comes to how we deal with cities.

How is that tool kit changing?

Almost everything that we’ve inherited and put into practice in the post-WWII decades has in some way become obsolete. Read more…