If you’ve ever wondered why public spaces look the way they do, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces created by urbanist William Whyte will give you many clues. It’s obviously not new, it’s from 1979, so I wonder if the guidelines for creating a bustling public park are the same. The biggest change is probably how people use small gadgets to create their own, personal private spaces even while sitting in public. Christina Rosen wrote about the public use of cell phones and other small gizmos back in 2004. Her article is smart, but it was written well before smart phones started proliferating into our hands and pockets like bacteria.
One bit of irony from the film is what Whyte describes as ”Probably the best Public square in the country” Cincinnati’s Fountain Square. I’m not sure why it was decided, or who made the decision, but by 2005 the plaza was closed and redeveloped. I only visited the old square a few times before it was renovated, and been there a few times since, so it’s probably unfair of me to compare the old and new, but I will say that the new one seems more enthusiastically commercial. It has all the exciting ingredients that would be alien to someone in 1979: an Urban-scaled TV, a parking garage covered in translucent glass with color-changing LEDs, and a restaurant in the middle of the square– but it seems more like a space for individuals now than a place for folks to meet or congregate.
The last time I visited Fountain Square before it was renovated, I was with my mom and some kind of step show was happening when we arrived there. Now, I just imagine people playing Angry Birds on their phones or watching the giant TV before their table is ready at the restaurant. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the change, but finding yourself in the middle of a step show is kind of amazing. That kind of spontaneity should happen more often, and I’m not sure it does when everyone is off in their own little world instead of the public sphere they happen to be walking through.
If you follow food, you’ve absolutely heard of NOMA. Ranked as the best restaurant in the world in both 2010 and 2011 by Restaurant magazine, NOMA concentrates on creating meals from locally harvested and seasonal foods. Continuing their experimental nature, they’ve worked with 3XNS Interior to create a food lab of sorts where “chefs could continue to take their skills further in the evolution and development of Nordic cuisine.” It’s a beautiful space that came with some extremely firm restrictions – no glue or nails could be put into the building. Yeesh.
Thankfully 3XNS Interior came up with some clever ways of utilizing the space, filling it with specialized storage units utilizing customized modular units. Here’s how they describe them:
Curving playfully throughout the space, these units divide the 200M2 room into smaller areas accommodating the Food Lab, the herb garden, staff areas and office. Raw and simple, through colours and forms, it captures a unique Nordic aesthetic.
To learn more about the project I’d suggest you click here. I’d also suggest you check out the photos below which will give you a great idea of how amazing this space is.
Found through Core77
The Danish firm EFFEKT has won a competition for the design of a Cancer Counseling Center at Næstved Hospital. The program isn’t as daunting as the name suggests (programmed spaces include a library, kitchen, conversation rooms, lounge, gym, etc.) but it’s easy to get weighed down with sobering questions like “What quality of space is appropriate for counseling cancer patients?” If there is a correct answer to this question, I think EFFEKT’s project is that correct answer.
All of the images used to represent the project are alluring without being too splashy. Overall, the project seems to be light and finished with warm, natural materials. The mass of the project is broken into smaller, more intimate spaces by courtyards and gabled ceilings. There are more pictures on EFFEKT’s facebook page.
Over the weekend, I came across this nice list compiled by the nice folks at Frame Publishers. As I scrolled through the wonky, urban houses I thought that so many were worth posting, I might as well post about the entire list. In describing the menagerie of houses, Lydia Parafianowicz says that Japanese houses are “quirky, modern and often unexpected.” I couldn’t say it better myself, except to add that some of the unexpected forms are thanks to Japanese architects’ skills to hone and articulate a kind of site-specific intuition.
Click here to see the full list.
Monday night, Friends of the High Line unveiled designs for the third and final segment of the High Line, that elevated railway-turned-park that snakes through western Manhattan. Landscape architect James Corner along with architect Ricardo Scofidio presented plans for the segment of the park that loops around Hudson Yards from 30th to 34th street. The first two segments of the park have been very popular so it’s no surprise that the third segment of the park extends on the “peel-up typology” developed in earlier segments. Trying to parse out how this particular segment will differ from its predecessors is more of a challenge.
While there are several remarkable features designed into the new segment (like the 10th avenue spur and a segment of the park where the walkway plunges down between huge, structural flanges that have been coated with “thick rubber safety coating”) the defining characteristic of this segment may be the construction going on around it for the next several years. That is, as Hudson Yards transforms from railyard to mixed-use neighborhood, the splashy new towers may overshadow the wildflowers. And while the newness around the park distinguishes the third segment of the park from the earlier segments, the High Line simultaneously helps define the new neighborhood. The character of the park’s surroundings in the third segment will surely to different from the earlier segments, but the diversity will make the park better.
So even though we now know what the walkway will look like as it meanders through the elevated park, the biggest variable is the neighborhood growing underneath it.
From looking at pictures of this house in Venice, it’s easy to see a modern and serene attitude designed into this project by architects Brooks + Scarpa. You might even notice the building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) panels incorporated into the shading structure that cantilevers from the second floor and correctly guess that the project is interested in generating some of its own energy. But this project does more than generate some of its own energy, it generates all of its own energy by taking advantage of the plentiful sunlight that bakes southern California.
What you can’t see from looking at the pictures of the project are some of the other strategies that helped the house reduce its energy consumption: radiant floor heating, blown-in cellulose insulation, natural ventilation and “a host of other sustainable factors” hiding under the environmentally-friendly finishes. I was interested in looking at a plan of the project to see how the architects managed the space in the acute angle adjacent to the stairs (answer: closet on one floor, mechanical room on the other) when, to my delight, I found a site plan with a wind rose for both January and June. What is a wind rose? It’s a rarely-seen flora cultivated by environmental engineers that indicates prevailing wind direction and speed for a given time period. Usually wind roses die in architecture offices, so it’s amusing to see one on a site plan that supports the claims of natural ventilation.
Found through Arthitectural
