Archive for the ‘architecture’ Category
Recommended read: “Walkable City” by Jeff Speck
The latest book by renowned city planner Jeff Speck is Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (2012). This is a follow-up to Suburban Nation, his popular work on sprawl in America’s suburbs.
“It turns out the way we move largely determines the way we live.” (55)
What I really enjoy about Jeff Speck’s writing is that he explains city planning concepts in a way that is universally relatable – to anyone with or without a background in planning, whether a resident of the city or the suburbs. It’s clear his writing is meant to grow mass support for urban living and walkable cities, and though he employs plenty of statistics to make his arguments, he keeps the material from sounding dry or inaccessible.
Speck moved to Washington, DC after leaving his home in South Beach, Miami, and has also lived in the various towns and cities he has helped plan. This means he can draw upon plenty of firsthand experience of what makes a city livable and capable of drawing new residents. (If you live in DC, you’ve likely seen his flatiron-style home at 10th and Florida Avenue NW.) His city planning experience also lends itself to his writing, and he pulls many real-world examples of the advantages of walkability and what makes certain cities so magnetic.
Speck centers the text on his “General Theory of Walkability” which centers on four conditions of what makes a good walk. It must be (1) useful, (2) safe, (3) comfortable, and (4) interesting. From this theory, he then presents ten steps for creating a more walkable city. As a self-proclaimed generalist, he recognizes that to design a city one cannot disregard cars, bicycles, transit, or the other elements at work. Speck makes sure to touch on these points in turn. The result is a book that is tuned into the physical and cultural landscape of cities today, as well as the demographic and geographic shifts currently at play in America. Jeff Speck didn’t write Walkable City for the planners, but for the people who live in these communities.
Jeff Speck’s Twitter feed is @JeffSpeckAICP.
Approaching Max Density: Kowloon Walled City
The 99% Invisible podcast recorded an episode about the Kowloon Walled City, a fascinating example of a city block that reached unrestrained levels of density. From the 1940s to 1980s, Kowloon Walled City (KWC) was largely ungoverned, “autonomous from both China and Britain,” run mainly by various criminal groups. People built upwards as well as into any open spaces – the chances of daylight reaching into the lower levels grew slimmer as more people moved in. At its peak, over 30,000 inhabitants lived in an area the size of a single city block. Without regulation, KWC continued to grow ever more complex and interwoven as residents flooded in. It was known as the “City of Darkness”. Trash was discarded out of the windows, electricity was pirated from the grid, and any business could set up without intervention from authorities. KWC was a massive city within a single block.
In the early 1990s, the Chinese and British governments agreed that it had to be torn down and the Hong Kong government began evicting residents. By 1994, Kowloon Walled City was demolished. Today there lies a neatly maintained park.
Kowloon Walled City (Photo by Ian Lambot)
The 99% Invisible podcast episode on Kowloon Walled City is worth the listen, a good summary in only 15 minutes.
Further reading and more background available online:
Views from St. Elizabeth’s East
As part of the “Season of Discovery“, the historic 183-acre St. Elizabeth’s East was opened to the community to explore this past Saturday. This beautiful former mental hospital in Anacostia was constructed in the 1850s as the “Government Hospital for the Insane” but has since fallen out of use. Both the east and west campuses are now slated for development into the new unified headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and a variety of additional office, residential, retail, and civic spaces are proposed for the east campus. The first of the DHS projects is the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters currently under construction.
We visited St. Elizabeth’s east campus on Saturday to take some photos, which continue under the cut.
Digital Preservation of Historic Places
Preserving the world’s historic places is no mean feat. It is inevitable that buildings will fall, statues will be destroyed, and the structures of entire civilizations past will be mere memories. Buildings will erode, be reimagined and rebuilt in a new form. However, technologies such as digital photography are playing an increasing role in cataloguing and recording the world’s historically significant sites. With the advent of new methods of digitizing these places, our histories are better shared and the fabric of our cultures are better recorded.
Ben Kacyra is the inventor of a 3D scanning system that has been used to visualize historic sites. The projects of the CyArk archive use this system to collect millions of data points for each heritage site, capturing the sites in point clouds that together form a precise 3D model. You can browse the public online archive to see a point cloud, a 3D model, a Google Earth representation, and various photos of each site that has been digitally preserved so far. Also see his inspiring TED talk, “Ancient Wonders Captured in 3D.”
Our heritage is much more than our collective memory, it is our collective treasure. We owe it to our children, our grandchildren, and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and pass it along.
Close to home: Google Street View screen capture of the Wonder Bread factory in Shaw.
In a way, the immense efforts of the Google Street View team are also a piecemeal digital cultural preservation of our highways and byways (as well as the life lived around these paths). Camera-mounted vehicles have driven across more than 30 countries, documenting the view from the streets. Small moments are taken out of time.
At an intersection in downtown São Paulo
Those images above are just two of my finds this evening, but especially interesting Google Street View finds can be found at Jon Rafman’s project 9-eyes.com. There you’ll see a wild slice of life as caught by these roaming photo cars: passersby waving, police officer pat-downs, caribou traveling down the highway, chaotic urban scenes and, every once in awhile, bits of serene bliss.
First time in Austin, TX
I spent this past weekend in Austin, Texas, filling up on lots of Tex-Mex and seeing more cowboy boots in two days than I usually see in a year. The temperature was in the high-80s and it was sunny, which was a little shock to the system in late October – I’d already been bracing myself for fall weather in DC. I’ve always heard good things about Austin and found it to be a pretty cool city. Although it has a higher population than DC proper, Austin is larger so things are more spread out. It also has a smaller surrounding metro area – less than a third the size of the Washington, DC metro area. This lack of density made parts of the city core feel somewhat empty at times. There are a few buses but not much other public transit to speak of. Didn’t see as many bicycles as I’d expected, either. I’d say most people drive.
Austin has a lot of colorful murals, a constant schedule of events, and some interesting architecture (check out the Arthouse at the Jones Center, right in downtown). Muted tones under the hot Texan sun and fun art deco touches on buildings made up the unique aesthetic of the city. The bars are kind of quirky – we went to a dive bar with a huge jackalope replica that you could sit on and another place with a mechanical bull and an extensive list of shooters. South Congress Street has a row of boutiques and antique shops, including Uncommon Objects, the best antique store I’ve ever stepped inside. And the University of Texas at Austin has the largest college football campus I’ve seen in my life.
One highlight of our visit to Austin was seeing the incredible display of 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats flying out from the Congress Street Bridge to catch their dinner. We watched them from the bridge, but there’s also a park nearby where many Austinites and visitors gathered to watch the nightly ritual. Some others opted to take a tour boat, kayak, or paddle-bike on the river, which looked fun too.
Despite its slogan as the live music capital of the world, we unfortunately didn’t make the time to catch any shows. The streets (especially Sixth Street) are lively, though – you hear music streaming out from the bars onto the sidewalks. Since most of the bars have live music, it’d definitely be feasible to hear a band every night if you wanted to. Austin is also home to a couple of the most popular music festivals, including South by Southwest (SXSW) and Austin City Limits (ACL). The Austin Film Festival was ongoing while we were in town, and the city has several beautiful historic theatres.
But really, if you need one reason other than the music to visit Austin, it’s the food. Austin is at the top of the heap when it comes to Tex-Mex and BBQ. Most Tex-Mex restaurants had veggie options; one taco joint on South Congress even had a vegan menu. We ate so well – and so much. Everything’s bigger in Texas.
Everyday Lessons Learned: July 2011, Week 1
Daily lessons learned are back! And they’ll continue for the rest of the year, since I don’t have any big trips planned for the rest of the year 2011. It’s true you learn something new every day, and writing it all down helps. Here’s the latest installation, with the first 10 days of July.
01: China has opened a 26.4 mile over-water bridge, the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge, connecting Qingdao city with the island of Hongdao. Many of the world’s longest bridge projects are located in China, including the three longest.
02: The sensation of “brain freeze” you get when you drink an iced drink or eat ice cream too fast is a result of your blood vessels constricting quickly. Still, it strikes me as strange how the feeling’s experienced towards the top-back of your head.
03: According to a woman I met from Australia, Australian accents are considered similar to the Surrey accent in the southeast of England. This area of England may be where the Australian English accent first originated. I wonder if the Surrey accent also demonstrates the upward inflections at the ends of sentences that is so characteristic of Australian English.
04: The St. Louis Gateway Arch is taller than the Washington Monument. Learned this from the game You Don’t Know Jack, which is a pretty entertaining game if you like quirky trivia. The arch looks like an impressive structure; never been to St. Louis myself. [Photo at right, which I snagged off the internet.]
05: The angklung is an Indonesian instrument made entirely of bamboo. It’s played by holding the instrument loosely by its upper section (the top horizontal beam of the frame) with your left hand, and moving it to the left and right with your right hand (holding the bottom tube). The sound is a pleasant hollow tone and each angklung produces a specific note – musicians need to play together in an ensemble to play all the notes of a song.
06: Not all bars give you a new glass or pitcher when you order another of the same beer. This was a relief to see because I had grown accustomed to bartenders performing the (seemingly) pointless act of giving you a new cup when you went up to the bar to get a refill on your beer. If it’s the same beer, I don’t see the point in giving a fresh glass every time. Just looks like it’s creating more unnecessary dishes… but feel free to chime in if there’s a counterpoint here.
07: In the U.S., certain fictional phone numbers are set aside for use in movies and television shows by the Motion Picture Association of America. These begin with “555” and are not usually given out by phone companies, so that real phone customers aren’t continually harassed by people trying to call their favorite stars. However, Universal Studios is a notable exception. They own the phone number (212) 664-7665, which they’ve used in a few recent flicks and allegedly just keeps ringing when you call it. (via Mashable)
08: The hagfish, misleadingly nicknamed the slime eel, is the only animal that has a skull but no spine. One species of hagfish is caught in the northwest Pacific and exported live to Korea as food – their slime used in similar fashion to egg whites.
09: According to the World Health Organization’s “World report on road traffic injury prevention”, 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents each year. Approximately 85% of these types of deaths occur in low- or middle-income countries. Whereas in most high-income countries car deaths take the lives of car drivers, in lower income countries, the deaths are primarily among pedestrians, passengers, cyclists, motorcyclists, and those taking other modes of transport such as buses. (Source)
10: Watermelon is originally from southern Africa. We had a few people guess on its origins at a picnic, and the most specific we got was my aunt’s answer of “Africa! Because everything comes from Africa.” Today, however, China grows the most watermelon worldwide – over 63 million metric tons were produced in 2008.
Everyday Lessons Learned: April 2011, Week 4
24: Radiolab – one of my favorite radio shows with a focus on making science-heavy topics light enough for the general public to understand – is also very interesting for its production techniques. Radiolab has a unique sound design that layers and repeats clips of speech, strange noises, and timely pauses with the hosts’ commentary on topics ranging from overlooked day-to-day phenomena to more theoretical heights of philosophy. Speaking about the show’s sound design, Jad Abumrad is quoted in an interview: “The sounds should create a sense of subterranean movement. You know, like you’re hearing this surface narrative, but there’s some kind of turbulence in the depths deep below. That’s something that music can create, so I work really hard to create a bed of music that feels bottomless, but at the same time isn’t intrusive and manipulative.”
If you haven’t heard Radiolab yet, try this episode from March called “Help!” The part about the Russian ‘torpedo’ pill will make you cringe and say to yourself, “No way… really?” Questions aren’t always answered. But they’re certainly surfaced.
25: Ever wondered about the history of moving buildings? A brief history here.
26: The U.S. military’s been working with mobile app developers to find ways of implementing machine translation in situations where soldiers don’t have access to a live interpretors. Infantry units, for example, generally don’t have a human translator to help them. In PRI’s The World, a few of the demonstrated apps allowed a person to speak a phrase into the device and have it repeated back to them in the desired language. Some even have the ability to demonstrate proper body language, such as a hand gesture that may accompany a spoken phrase.
27: Rio Public Safety Secretary José Mariano Beltrame is considered Brazil’s top cop. Under his direction, the police force has managed to establish calm in the most crime-ridden of Rio de Janeiro’s many favelas (slums). A full 20% of Rio’s 9 million residents is housed in favelas; the largest, Rocinha, alone houses about a quarter million people. Beltrame’s approach to “pacifying” the favelas is highly resource-intensive – in one of the pacified favelas, the police-to-resident ratio is 1 officer for every 40 citizens – but effective:
“In four years under Beltrame’s control, police have “pacified” 14 slums, including Borel, the giant Complexo do Alemão, and the City of God—the flatland favela that inspired the eponymous drugs-and-thugs film. Dons of three competing crime factions are either in jail or dead. Nearly 1,000 rogue cops, including two former police chiefs, have been cashiered.” (Newsweek)
28: Street artist Shepard Fairey is probably someone you’ve heard of, at least in passing – he designed the famous Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster (at left) that was so prominent during the president’s election campaign. He started off with screenprinting, which has shaped his artistic style through necessary simplification of the colors and elements in his posters.
And Shepard Fairey’s been arrested 14 times, but takes a similarly freewheeling stance on these arrests. Fairey quotes Joe Strummer of The Clash in an interview: “Authority has no inherent wisdom.” (I have a photo of a piece in Philadelphia that definitely looks like Fairey’s style. Can anyone confirm?)
29: In the event of a flood, a colony of fire ants can cling to one another, forming a perfectly round raft that is so tightly woven that it forms air pockets which the ants can use to breathe. And this floating mass of ants can float for up to several weeks at a time.
30: According to my father, this dish is something of a delicacy in Korea: live octopus tentacles cut into pieces which are then dropped into a glass of soju (a clear Korean liquor) and taken as a shot (like a shot of liquor, not like a vaccine shot). The contact of the octopus legs with the soju makes the legs squirm around like crazy, which is what’s intended. I’m an adventurous eater, but I’m not sure I’d want to try it.
Everyday Lessons Learned: March 2011, Week 4+
22: This is a relearn: “Generative systems are systems that use a few basic rules to yield patterns.” I remember playing around with Conway’s Game of Life in a population geography course. Might the Chrome app Isle of Tune be considered generative music?
23: There are long-term travelers out there in the world who travel with zero baggage – “Total Nada” mode, pretty much the clothes on your back, your passport, a toothbrush. I don’t think I could do it without carrying ANY kind of bag (I even carry a messenger bag to the office), but it’d be neat to try traveling for over a week with just one messenger bag or daypack. Read more on modes of travel sans baggage. That’s the minimalist spirit!
24: My coworker taught me some more about SQL and even lent me his textbook to read. I’m only one chapter in, but at least I’m not lost.
25: DC has a Victims of Communism memorial. Has anyone considered erecting a “Victims of Capitalism” memorial? Just curious.
26: I was in NYC this weekend. See my previous post, NYC: Around Battery Park, and Graffiti.
27: Google Maps traffic information uses data from a variety of sources, but perhaps the most interesting portion comes from traffic data collected from the users of Google Maps on their smartphones. They can track where you’re going and how long it takes you, and that info is aggregated into their database to figure out how much traffic is on that particular route. For main roads, Department of Transportation (DOT) sensors in the road give Google data on traffic, but for the smaller roads, there aren’t any sensors. And those are the routes for which Google can still provide traffic estimates through other means (such as from mobile users).
28: I’ve been working my way (slowly) through Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Here’s a direct quote:
“The Greek word ponos, or “toil,” was a term used by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, to describe the fight of a body in disease. Today this idea is called homeostatis, or equilibrium as a strategy of the staying power of any body. All organizations, but especially biological ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change. The man-made social environment as an extension of man’s physical body is no exception. The city, as a form of the body politic, responds to new pressures and irritations by resourceful new extensions – always in the effort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and homeostatis.” (98)
29: Oysters are strange beings. Not all kinds are edible, and even those that are are pretty odd. I grew up near the Chesapeake Bay… Can’t remember for certain, but I must have seen an oyster reef at some point in my childhood.
30: Haptic refers to the tactile – the faculty of touch. First encountered the word on my phone when I disabled the keystroke vibrations, and explained in McLuhan’s writing later in the day. Funny how learning a word causes you to instantly notice it everywhere you go.
31: From David Brooks’s description of concepts worth using in everyday life:
Clay Shirkey nominates the Pareto Principle. We have the idea in our heads that most distributions fall along a bell curve (most people are in the middle). But this is not how the world is organized in sphere after sphere. The top 1 percent of the population control 35 percent of the wealth. The top two percent of Twitter users send 60 percent of the messages. The top 20 percent of workers in any company will produce a disproportionate share of the value. Shirkey points out that these distributions are regarded as anomalies. They are not.
NYC: Around Battery Park, and Graffiti
Spent the past weekend in New York City. One of the main reasons we went this weekend was to take in Infinite Variety, the quilt exhibit presented through the American Folk Art Museum. Here are a few factoids I learned in the (almost) two days spent in NYC:
- NYC’s bedrock lies only about 50ft underground, so skyscrapers can be constructed directly on top of the bedrock foundation, which gives these enormous buildings a boost in stability.
- Battery Park City is completely man-made. What’s Battery Park City now used to be part of the Hudson River, but they extended this part of Manhattan using excavated material from the World Trade Center site. Amazing to learn that as recently as 50 years ago, none of what I saw there existed.
- Many of the skyscrapers of the Financial District stretch really high close to the sidewalk and block out a lot of sunlight because they were constructed before the city implemented setback regulations, which state how high the building can be at certain distances from the road. The result is a kind of “stepped” look to the building. (I’m doing a poor job explaining this because I don’t really have the architectural lingo for it… hope my description makes some sense.)
Of course, I also took a few photos to post on the blog:
Everyday Lessons Learned: March 2011, Week 2
It’s been a busy past week and I just got home. Before I log off, here’s a quick weekly wrap up of things I’ve learned in the last 7 days. I usually jot down notes towards the end of the day (or whenever I think, ooh, that’s something new, and think I’ll forget) so it’s a “notes on scraps of paper” version.
08: From Matador Network: “The ‘Sliver by the River’ (aka the Bywater district of New Orleans) is famous for its Francophone roots and classic colorful southern Louisiana homes.”
09: The Scoville heat index is a measure of how spicy a pepper is. The world’s hottest pepper is the Naga Jolokia, with a rating of over 1,000,000 on the Scoville heat index. As I’m a huge fan of spicy foods, this is more intriguing than scary.
Bangalore is the fastest growing metropolis in India, thanks in part to huge international companies like Infosys, and is known as the “Silicon Valley of India.”
10: I spent some time reading arguments about industrial agriculture vs organic agriculture as methods of feeding the world’s growing population, but a lot of that’s still processing…
11: This little mark, ¶, is called the pilcrow. On the Shady Characters blog, Keith Houston describes the pilcrow with a subtle poetic flare:
They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7.
12: Urban parts of Japan like Tokyo have been equipped in some unique ways to deal with its specific geographic situation. For example, they’ve engineered high rise buildings that sit on a foundation that moves within a slightly concave “bowl”, to allow the buildings to move around slightly when they’re struck by a force of nature like a quake. Actually, much of Japan’s modern architecture is designed to account for these natural disaster situations. The process of modifying existing structures to make them more earthquake-proof, however, is known as seismic retrofitting (a more after the fact kind of method as new building techniques become known), and is used to reduce the risks from tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like.
13: According to a friend: with Westerners who’ve lived for a long time in East Africa, you often hear stories of several friends who’ve committed suicide because of the psychological effects of certain anti-malarials. Certain ones can have severe effects on one’s mental state, and so are only recommended to people without any history of psychological issues.
14: Slugging is a practice of impromptu carpooling/hitchhiking that’s common in the DC metropolitan area, and not very common anywhere else in the world. Give this article a read: Slugging – The People’s Transit, by Emily Badger.
Aesthetics of Everywhere 