'Peace Gardens' bring needy communities together, 'saving our own neighborhood'

  This is a great story: grassroots-driven gardening in western North Carolina is bringing diverse, underserved communities together around the cause of local sustainability, enlivening neighborhoods in the process. I’m visiting family in my home town of Asheville, a small city where it seems everything has changed, yet everything... [read more]

Discovering Common Ground through History and the Built Environment

Building community around a deep appreciation of shared history creates the momentum for a strong future, a belief that lies at the heart of PPS’ new partnership with the National Trust. Creating a link between history and the physical environment is also one of the main goals of Common Boston, a free, city-wide festival held annually to... [read more]

Draw your Landscape

A new GPS drawing project by Jeremy Wood (earlier on uT with the dog drawings and the dragon) has hit the online news. A contextual landscape map drawn by walking the landscape and tracing it with a GPS. Couldn't be more simple as engadget points out: "walk around in the defined area with a GPS unit and end up with a 1:1 scale map of... [read more]

Crowdsourcing green cities more ways than one

Wouldn’t cities be a lot greener (literally and figuratively) with more trees and solar energy? Those are two very big ticket items, and exactly the kind of scope where purpose-driven collaborative crowdsourcing is most effective. One Block Off the Grid tackles the solar energy Catch 22 where solar panels are too expensive to install for... [read more]

Museum for Neglected Spaces

[Image: Proposal for a "bunker gallery" in Paris by architect Stéphane Malka].In the first of two proposals by Stéphane Malka that I want to post about here, we see what Malka calls "an alternative art gallery" installed like vertical parasites beneath the tracks of the Barbès–Rochechouart metro station in Paris.An assemblage of... [read more]

Buy a Torpedo-Testing Facility

[Image: A former torpedo-testing facility, now a £4 million private home; courtesy of Knight Frank].This £4 million property located in the suburbs southwest of London "must be one of the most unique spaces to have come to the market in recent local history," estate agents Knight Frank justifiably claim. [Images: Former torpedo-testing... [read more]

Happy Birthday, and Welcome

            "On our national birthday, and amid an angry debate about immigration, Americans should reflect on the lessons of our shared immigrant past. We must recall that the challenges facing our nation today were felt as far back as the Founders' time. Immigrant assimilation has always been... [read more]

Shay Salomon’s Little House on a Small Planet… Reviewed

Shay Salomon’s Little House on a Small Planet is not a book about little house design, as I originally thought; it’s a book about everything you should think about before you design and build. Or — if you already own a house — it’s a way to rethink space, and ultimately decide what you want in a “dream house” and what you can compromise... [read more]

Landscape Architecture as Public Investigation

Places recently started a great series of interviews with innovative landscape architecture thinkers and practitioners. In its most recent interview, two young landscape architects, Sanjukta Sen, James Corner Field Operations, and Nicholas Pevzner, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, talk to Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da... [read more]

The shift from (auto)mobile to mobile (device)

It’s no longer cool to be in a mobile device as much as it is to be on a mobile device. To understand this evolution from (auto)mobile to mobile (device), it may help to quote someone who is playing a large role in it… At the All Things Digital ‘D8’ conference on June 1, 2010, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple (now the second largest company... [read more]

Urbanism in Print: A Magazine Review

Architecture, urbanism, and sustainable design have been covered in print exceptionally well this last month. Here’s some highlights. Icon magazine delivered another strong issue, though not quite up to the standard of last month’s incredible Africa issue. Icon always cover a broad range of topics, with this month being no different.... [read more]

Frank Talk: Gehry Explains Dropping The (Shiny, Maybe A Little Over The Top) Bomb On LEED

The Pritzker Prize is not awarded for humility or moderation or being a chill dude. The Pritzker Prize, at least in theory, is awarded to architects who design impressive buildings, and by that standard Frank Gehry eminently deserved the Pritzker Prize he won way back in 1989. Since then, Gehry has continued to do what he does best,... [read more]