Best of
Urbanism

2001

New City Spaces, Strategies and Projects


Jan Gehl - 2001
    The book presents an overview of the developments in the use and planning of public spaces, and offers a detailled description of architecturally interesting and inspiering public space stategies and projects from all parts of the World. In this context 9 cities with interesting public space strategies is presented: Barcelona, Lyon, Strasbourg, Freiburg and Copenhagen in Europe, Portland in North America, Curitiba and Cordoba in South America and Melbourne in Australia. Further 39 selected public space projects from all parts of the World are presented and discussed. City strategies as well as public space projects are extensively illustrated by drawings, plans and photographs.

The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping / Harvard Design School Project on the City 2


Jeffrey Inaba - 2001
    Each year, six to twelve individuals document, examine, and analyze new forms and mutations of urbanity through particular areas or topics undergoing dramatic change, in order to develop a conceptual framework and vocabulary for phenomena that defy traditional categories. Even though research is formally conducted as graduate-level thesis projects advised by Rem Koolhaas (Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Design School), the Project represents "an important reversal, in the sense that teaching is no longer the distribution of a central knowledge, but is more the assembly of different insights and different experiences, where the students often represent deeper knowledge of a very specific condition than the teacher can ever hope to represent," according to Koolhaas. The Harvard Design School Guide To Shopping, the second volume of the Project on the City series, is an incisive, in-depth look at the culturally defining activity of modern life that has affected almost every aspect of the contemporary city. Through a battery of increasingly mutable forms, shopping has infiltrated-even replaced-almost every aspect of urban life. Town centers, suburbs, streets, airports, train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet, and even the military, are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. The extent to which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal-if only-modes by which we experience the city. The Harvard Design School Guide To Shopping explores the spaces, people, techniques, ideologies, and inventions by which shopping has so dramatically reconfigured the city. The book's 14 authors examine the nature of this experience in 45 essays covering topics such as air conditioning, the dying mall, mechanically enhanced plants, how the military is so compatible with shopping, how "high" architecture disdains yet embraces shopping, how American downtowns have become indistinguishable from the suburbs, how women were "liberated" as consumers, and how shopping spies on us. The book is a fascinating analytical survey of the evolutionary forms and pervasive influences of shopping around the world.

The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards


Allan B. Jacobs - 2001
    The American preoccupation with destination and speed has made multiway boulevards increasingly rare as artifacts of the urban landscape. This book reintroduces the boulevard, tree-lined and with separate realms for through traffic and for slow-paced vehicular-pedestrian movement, as an important and often crucial feature of both historic and contemporary cities. It presents more than fifty boulevards--as varied as Avenue Montaigne, in Paris; C. G. Road, in Ahmedabad, India; and The Esplanade, in Chico, California--celebrating their usefulness and beauty. It discusses their history and evolution, the misconceptions that led to their near-demise in the United States, and their potential as a modern street type.Based on wide research, The Boulevard Book examines the safety of these streets and offers design guidelines for professionals, scholars, and community decision makers. Extensive plans, cross sections, and perspective drawings permit visual comparisons. The book shows how multiway boulevards respond to many issues that are central to urban life, including livability, mobility, safety, interest, economic opportunity, mass transit, and open space.

Estética da Ginga: A Arquitetura das Favelas através da Obra de Hélio Oiticica


Paola Berenstein Jacques - 2001
    Estética da ginga – A arquitetura das favelas através da obra de Hélio Oiticica goes from a transcendental gesture [the rising of the artist, Hélio Oiticica, to favela's hill] to perform a mapping in three fields: artistic, architectural and, by extension, the sociocultural.The book pursues an interdisciplinary frontier, narrowing notions of art, architecture and philosophy.The life and work of Hélio Oiticica serve as a living model for this aesthetic in which the "ginga", dancing, covering and uncovering his body of dancer, artist, slum inhabitant, the artist evokes at the same time the samba of the "favelas", the "favelas" themselves, and shows us that the origin of the artwork changes every moment in the life of a city, a group, a man, in a sort of ephemeral joy.

Norman Foster And The British Museum


Norman Foster - 2001
    Published to coincide with a major retrospective of Foster 's work held at the British Museum, this book brings together essays, design drawings, and photographs to provide an unprecedented account of the development and completion of Foster 's project.

Poems for Architects: An Anthology


Jill Stoner - 2001
    In this unprecedented volume she brings the two disciplines together, choosing 48 poems by some of the 20th century's finest poets - including Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich and W.H. Auden - and providing an introductory essay to each one. Jill Stoner believes that, "The strange spaces of poetry can make more familiar the spaces of daily life, and architects, by visiting the spaces of poems, can become more tuned to the walls we still build, and within which we pass these present days." Includes 6 b&w and 6 color reproductions.

Cities from the Sky: An Aerial Portrait of America


Thomas J. Campanella - 2001
    in 1920, the intrepid inventor and aviation pioneer Sherman Fairchild first tested his custom-built sky camera, effectively founding the aerial photography company that would bear his name. Roaming America's skies for the next 40 years, the photographers of the Fairchild Aerial Survey Company documented nearly every major city in the United States. Their images, both maplike shots from high above, and low-angle raking views, form a definitive portrait of the American landscape. Rescued from destruction in the 1970s, the Fairchild archive was scattered across the country. Painstakingly reassembled for this book, the images (many of which have never been seen before) are brought together here for the first time. This beautifully produced, large format book collects over 125 extraordinary images taken between the 1920s and the 1960s. The photographs, valued both as works of art and as tools for urban historians, often capture historic moments: the Capitol Building during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inauguration and Yankee Stadium during Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series. Others depict architectural landmarks: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, Hoover Dam, and Alcatraz, to name a few. Some of the cities revealed in astonishing detail include: Albuquerque, Atlanta, Baltimore, Berkeley, Boston, Cedar Rapids, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Des Moines, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miam,i Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Oakland, Palo Alto, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Reno, Salt Lake City, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington

Power of the Machine


Alf Hornborg - 2001
    He demonstrates how the power of the machine generates increasingly asymmetrical exchanges and distribution of resources and risks between distant populations and ecosystems, and thus an increasingly polarized world order. The author challenges us to reconceptualize the machine-"industrial technomass"-as a species of power and a problem of culture. He shows how economic anthropology has the tools to deconstruct the concepts of production, money capital, and market exchange, and to analyze capital accumulation as a problem at the very interface of the natural and social sciences. His analysis provides an alternative understanding of economic growth and technological development. Hornborg's work is essential for researchers in anthropology, human ecology, economics, political economy, world-systems theory, environmental justice, and science and technology studies. Find out more about the author at the Lund University, Sweden web site.

Domesticity at War


Beatriz Colomina - 2001
    In Domesticity at War, Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity--going from missiles to washing machines--American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller's words, turning weaponry into livingry.This new form of domesticity itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic bliss--suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories--went around the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a plaid-shirt wearing homebody.Colomina examines, with interlocking case studies and an army of images, the embattled and obsessive domesticity of postwar America. She reports on, among other things, MOMA's exhibition of a Dymaxion Deployment Unit (DDU), a corrugated steel house suitable for use as a bomb shelter, barracks, or housing; Charles and Ray Eames's vigorous domestic life and their idea of architecture as a flexible stage for the theatrical spectacle of everyday life; and the American lawn as patriotic site and inalienable right.Domesticity at War itself has a distinctive architecture. Housed within the case are two units: one book of text, and one book of illustrations--most of them in color, including advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural photographs, and more.

New American Urbanism: Re-forming the Suburban Metropolis


John A. Dutton - 2001
    This renewed interest in "town planning" focuses on the relationships between buildings and open spaces that form urban patterns. These architects argue that a range of appropriate urban patterns organized into neighborhoods can best meet the physical and social needs of residents and restore a sense of community. Architecture and urbanism, in this view, are instrumental agents of social change and reform. The projects in this book demonstrate their attempts to restructure urban growth into cohesive designs that balance buildings, open space, infrastructure, landscape, and transportation. In place of the piecemeal advance of placeless, car-dominated suburban sprawl, they envision dense, mixed-use neighborhoods with walkable streets, and connections to transit. The work ranges from entire new towns to urban infill. Many of the architects practicing these ideas have formed a movement called the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU), which most clearly and effectively has articulated this alternative vision. This book is about particular tendencies, however, and not ownership of ideas. Although the Congress for New Urbanism presents its position in the proprietary form of a charter, its vision is representative of much broader strains of architectural ideology, and continues a twentieth-century search to find ways to address the problems of the modern city. New Urbanism is merely the latest movement to seek alternative forms to reshape society. In this way, it can be seen as a continuation of modernism, not its antithesis. Althoughmuch has been written recently about the American revival of town-planning in general, and the New Urbanism in particular, much of the writing consists of either partisan claims of New Urbanism's ability to rebuild American community or facile dismissals of the movement as nostalgia-peddling suburbanism. This book presents readers a chance to judge the ideas and work for themselves, and to participate in the debate over alternative forms of the contemporary city.

Architectural composition and building typology: Interpreting Basic Building


Gianfranco Caniggia - 2001
    

Urban and Regional Economics


Philip McCann - 2001
    Offering a concise, accessible, and up-to-date introduction to the main foundational models, principles, and theories--including Classical, Neo-classical, and Keynesian approaches--the book uses a range of international examples to illustrate the ideas it explains. It is ideal for courses in economics, urban economics, regional economics, economic geography, land management, and urban and regional planning.

Chicago the Beautiful: A City Reborn


Kenan Joseph Heise - 2001
    Has Chicago become what Wright predicted? In Chicago the Beautiful, former Chicago Tribune journalist Kenan Heise claims that it has. With descriptions, fact, and full-color pictures, he catalogues recent dramatic changes in this great city. Find out how Chicago is being turned into a visual treasure.