“ReBurbia”

Ideas for a “new” suburbia. (via kottke)

 

London squat

It appears that the folks who had been occupying London’s Mayfair mansion have been evicted. On to the next one …

 

The need for denser elements

A fantastically dense post from the City of Sound folks on “densification and urbanism.” I won’t maul it by empty repetition or inaccurate summation — just check it out.

I will say that — at least in part — it involves Monaco House in Sydney Melbourne, my official favorite building (until I change my mind and/or learn Australian geography):

(Monaco House Flickr stream here)

 

“50 Must Read Blogs and Resources for Architecture Majors”

They also work if you just kind of like reading architecture blogs. A good list. (via city of sound)

 

Crowdsourced cuisine

A raw vegetarian restaurant, Elements, is slated to open next year in D.C., and was created and developed through a “crowdsourcing” model:

If it successfully opens, Elements will be the first “crowdsourced” restaurant, conceived and developed by an open community of experts and interested parties.

The term was coined by journalist Jeff Howe in a 2006 article in Wired magazine. It’s essentially the application of open-source principles to fields beyond software. Instead of outsourcing a task to one person or expert, it is outsourced to a crowd. (Get it? Crowd. Sourcing.) The process uses the group’s intelligence to come up with the best ideas, then distributes the tasks to people most suited to perform them. Crowdsourcing puts the wisdom of crowds to work.

The WaPo article makes clear that, politically, Elements resembles a benevolent dictatorship more than an egalitarian collective, but the participants’ enthusiasm for the process is still a welcome reminder of how empowering collectivist efforts can be:

A month later, the group had its first meeting. “I ordered one pizza and picked up a six-pack of beer,” Welch says. “I thought if there were three or four people there, that would be a lot.”

There were 14 people at the first meeting.

Over the next several months, the group grew to include architecture buffs, food lovers, designers, potential chefs and servers and a local nonprofit called Live Green, whose purpose is to help establish affordable, environmentally sound businesses. The concept has evolved, too. Where Welch had originally imagined a 1,500-square-foot cafe, perhaps with a comic book theme (she also owns Washington’s Big Monkey Comics), the group wanted something more. The cafe expanded to a 3,500-square-foot, green-certified restaurant. The kitchen would be sustainable, using food from local farms as well as growing some ingredients on a green roof.

[snip]

Financial gain isn’t the draw for most community members, however. June Blanks, a 27-year-old Penn Quarter resident who is the group’s architectural liaison, has to date garnered the fifth-highest number of points. But that, she says, was never her motivation: “It’s the community. What’s rewarding is coming together to create a place in the city that’s beneficial to the community and yourself and your friends.”

 

Discussions of cycling take over the world!

Good news for cyclists in Minneapolis — where “more than 12 miles of local streets will be revamped to give priority to bikes” — and New York — where the city is “spending $700,000 to create the string of blocklong plazas from 42nd to 35th Streets.” [via kottke]

Elsewhere, serious people consider the numbers, weigh the evidence, and proceed to make embarrassing arguments about activities they care about only tangentially:

1. Ezra Klein;
2. Andrew Sullivan;
3. Some dork named Will Wilkinson;
4. Andrew Sullivan’s passionate and unattribued readers;
5. Marginal Revolution;
6. And Megan McArdle.

Also, and related: an interesting post with some worthwhile links. John Pucher’s Cycling for Everyone lecture is probably worth a post of its own.

 

A couple of interesting things over at Slate today. First, a fawning piece on Lloyd Dobler — er, John Cusack — that mentions his new film War Inc. (trailer), which he co-wrote with hipster author Mark Leyner. I mostly remember Leyner from a very funny short story, “Oh, Brother,” about twins who murder their parents because their kind, generous, and loving treatment is so different from everyone else’s families that they assume it’s part of a plot to eventually do them harm.

Also, a neat slideshow showcasing the varied work of the architect Eero Saarinen, famous for both his design of Dulles Airport and for having the crossword-puzzle-friendly name “Eero.”

 

Kottke links to this piece from the March issue of the Atlantic, exploring the possibility that home foreclosures and demographic shifts will convert the suburbs into the slums of the future:

The decline of places like Windy Ridge and Franklin Reserve is usually attributed to the subprime-mortgage crisis, with its wave of foreclosures. And the crisis has indeed catalyzed or intensified social problems in many communities. But the story of vacant suburban homes and declining suburban neighborhoods did not begin with the crisis, and will not end with it. A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound…

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

It’s a counter-intuitive notion, the suburban ghetto. But it makes a lot of sense. Similarly, I’ve been wondering how the desert Southwest is going to fare in the years to come. Las Vegas, where I lived once and may live again, is likely going to be without water soon: Will the enormous rate of growth in the areas surrounding the Strip and downtown mean a vast wasteland of abandoned pre-fab houses, and some sort of Mad Max dystopia, while the casinos surround their stretch of profitable turf with fences and guards?

There’s weird shit coming.