Best of
Urbanism

2009

Transport For Suburbia: Beyond The Automobile Age


Paul Mees - 2009
    With countries like China and India moving towards mass-automobility, we face the prospects of an environmental and urban health disaster unless alternatives are found. It is time to move beyond the automobile age. But while public transport has worked well in the dense cores of some big cities, the problem is that most residents of developed countries now live in dispersed suburbs and smaller cities and towns. These places usually have little or no public transport, and most transport commentators have given up on the task of changing this: it all seems too hard.Transport for Surburbia argues that the secret of 'European-style' public transport lies in a generalizable model of network planning that has worked in places as diverse as rural Switzerland, the Brazilian city of Curitiba and the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver. It shows how this model can be adapted to suburban, exurban and even rural areas to provide a genuine alternative to the car, and outlines the governance, funding and service planning policies that underpin the success of the world's best public transport systems.

The Architecture of Community


Leon Krier - 2009
    Until now, however, his ideas have circulated mostly among a professional audience of architects, city planners, and academics. In The Architecture of Community, Krier has reconsidered and expanded writing from his 1998 book Architecture: Choice or Fate. Here he refines and updates his thinking on the making of sustainable, humane, and attractive villages, towns, and cities. The book includes drawings, diagrams, and photographs of his built works, which have not been widely seen until now. With three new chapters, The Architecture of Community provides a contemporary road map for designing or completing today’s fragmented communities. Illustrated throughout with Krier’s original drawings, The Architecture of Community explains his theories on classical and vernacular urbanism and architecture, while providing practical design guidelines for creating livable towns. The book contains descriptions and images of the author’s built and unbuilt projects, including the Krier House and Tower in Seaside, Florida, as well as the town of Poundbury in England. Commissioned by the Prince of Wales in 1988, Krier’s design for Poundbury in Dorset has become a reference model for ecological planning and building that can meet contemporary needs.

Drawing for Architecture


Leon Krier - 2009
    Drawn with wit and grace, these clever sketches do not try to please or flatter the architectural establishment. Rather, they make an impassioned argument against what Krier sees as the unquestioned doctrines and unacknowledged absurdities of contemporary architecture. Thus he shows us a building bearing a suspicious resemblance to Norman Foster's famous London "gherkin" as an example of "priapus hubris" (threatened by detumescence and "priapus nemesis"); he charts "Random Uniformity" ("fake simplicity") and "Uniform Randomness" ("fake complexity"); he draws bloated "bulimic" and disproportionately scrawny "anorexic" columns flanking a graceful "classical" one; and he compares "private virtue" (modernist architects' homes and offices) to "public vice" (modernist architects' "creations"). Krier wants these witty images to be tools for re-founding traditional urbanism and architecture. He argues for mixed-use cities, of "architectural speech" rather than "architectural stutter," and pointedly plots the man-vehicle-landneed ratio of "sub-urban man" versus that of a city dweller. In an age of energy crisis, he writes (and his drawings show), we "build in the wrong places, in the wrong patterns, materials, densities, and heights, and for the wrong number of dwellers"; a return to traditional architectures and building and settlement techniques can be the means of ecological reconstruction. Each of Krier's provocative and entertaining images is worth more than a thousand words of theoretical abstraction.

Zaha Hadid: Complete Works


Zaha Hadid - 2009
    This is the most complete survey of her work, and it encompasses both built and unbuilt designs, including her most recent commissions: the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum in Lithuania and the Aquatics Centre for the 2012 London Olympics. Among her most renowned works are the Vitra Fire Station in Germany and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space


Charlie Hailey - 2009
    Meanwhile, off camera, summer campers all over America packed up their gear, preparing to depart Scout camps, computer camps, and sports camps, and millions of recreational vehicles owners were on the road, permanent itinerant campers. In Camps, Charlie Hailey examines the space and idea of camp as a defining dimension of 21st-century life.The ubiquity and diversity of camps calls for a guidebook. This is what Hailey offers, but it is no ordinary one. Not only does he establish a typology of camps, but he also embeds within his narrative a key to camp ideology. Thus we see how camp spaces are informed by politics and transform the ways we think about and make built environments. Hailey describes camps of diverse regions, purposes, and forms, and navigates the inherent paradoxes of zones that are neither temporary nor permanent: camps of choice, including summer camps, protest camps, drift camps (research stations on Arctic ice floes), and LTVA (Long-Term Visitor Area) Camps; strategic camps regulated by power--boot camps, GTMO (the detention camp at Guant�namo Bay), immigrant camps, and others;--and transient spaces of relief and assistance, among them refugee camps, FEMA City, work camps, and Gypsy camps. More than 150 diagrams, sketches, building and site plans, photographs, political cartoons, video game screenshots, aerial and satellite images, and maps illustrate camp space in unprecedented complexity and variety.Today camps are at the center of emerging questions of identity, residency, safety, and mobility. Camp spaces register the struggles, emergencies, and possibilities of global existence as no other space does.

The Function of Form


Farshid Moussavi - 2009
    We need to move away from the definition of function as utility, she argues, to align it with how function is defined in mathematics, biology or music. Form, on the other hand, should be considered not only in the way buildings are produced, but also how they perform sensorially. Function and form, considered together in architecture, stand in opposition to the dualism which defined our approach to the built environment throughout the twentieth century. This book provides a thought-provoking account of the challenges facing the 21st century built environment, and an enlivened awareness of the wider possibilities of architectural form.

Street Smart: Streetcars and Cities in the Twenty-first Century


Gloria Ohland - 2009
    

Ecomasterplanning


Ken Yeang - 2009
    Finding green design solutions for our built environment must start from the wider scale of regional and urban planning and must then be carried right through to infrastructural engineering, architecture and industrial design. Masterplanning affords the chance to redress current environmental imbalances and to reduce the consequences of our built systems on the environment, with the greater and of reversing climate change. Ecomasterplanning presents a groundbreaking integrative and comprehensive approach to masterplanning, illustrated by examples that Ken Yeang - the original pioneer of the 'green skyscraper' - has designed in a highly visually driven format, the book examines over 20 of his masterplans from around the world, including those in the Netherlands, china, India, Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore and North America.

Common Ground?: Readings and Reflections on Public Space


Anthony M. Orum - 2009
    In this volume, Anthony Orum and Zachary Neal explore how public space can be a facilitator of civil order, a site for power and resistance, and a stage for art, theatre, and performance. They bring together these frequently unconnected models for understanding public space, collecting classic and contemporary readings that illustrate each, and synthesizing them in a series of original essays. Throughout, they offer questions to provoke discussion, and conclude with thoughts on how these models can be combined by future scholars of public space to yield more comprehensive understanding of how public space works.

Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails


Stephen Graham - 2009
    But the book also excavates the politics of more hidden disruptions: the clogging of city sewers with fat; the day-to-day infrastructural collapses which dominate urban life in much of the global south; the deliberate devastation of urban infrastructure by state militaries; and the ways in which alleged threats of infrastructural disruption have been used to radically reorganize cities as part of the 'war on terror'.Accessible, topical and state-of-the art, Disrupted Cities will be required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of technology, security and urban life as we plunge headlong into this quintessentially urban century. The book's blend of cutting-edge theory with visceral events means that it will be particularly useful for illuminating urban courses within geography, sociology, planning, anthropology, political science, public policy, architecture and technology studies.

Digital Cities


Neil Leach - 2009
    From the use of standard drafting packages to the more experimental use of generative design tools and parametric modelling, digital technologies have come to play a major role in architectural production. But how are they helping architects and designers to operate at the urban scale? And how might they be changing the way in which we perceive and understand our cities?Features some of the world's leading experimental practices, such as Zaha Hadid Architects, R&Sie(n), Biothing and Xefirotarch. Takes in exciting emerging practices, such as moh architects, kokkugia and THEVERYMANY, and work by students at some of the most progressive schools, such as the AA, Dessau Institute of Architecture and RMIT. Contributors include: Michael Batty, Benjamin Bratton, Alain Chiaradia, Manuel DeLanda, Vicente Guallart and Peter Trummer.