The question remains whether this functional movement also calls for a new formal movement, displaying materials and designs that hew towards ecological goals rather than individual visions. Uneasy about the prospect of privileging efficiency over art, many of today’s starchitects say no.
Starchitecture and Sustainability: Hope, Creativity, and Futility Collide in Contemporary Architecture
Whether the prosaic goals of the environmental movement can commingle with those of high art remains to be seen.
Unconventional Thinking
Why cities shouldn’t buy into the convention center economy.
Putting Parking into Reverse
Professor’s Theories Influence Cities to Reconsider Pervasive Free Parking
Transportation Planning Warms Up to Climate Change
Strategies Sweeping and Small
Being Formed to Face Global Emergency
Out Of The Enclave: Latinos Adapt, And Adapt To, The American City
Planning strategies geared towards auto-oriented cities, detached houses, and scarce public space has nonetheless given rise to a sometimes awkward and sometimes elegant relationship between Latinos and American cities, in which streetcorner entrepreneurship is but one example of Latinos’ efforts to make a home in someone else’s environment.
An Underground Movement Forms in L.A.
After over a decade of dormancy and a litany of mishaps, civic leaders are trying to get Los Angeles’ famously chaotic public transportation scheme in order, and a focal point of these efforts is the extension of the subway to the Westside, a project whose prospects have, over the past 35 years, wavered between inevitable and unthinkable.
An Underground Movement Forms in L.A.
Supporters See a Window of Opportunity for Subway Extension
Black-Tie Optional: ‘Stepsister’ Cities Flourish in the Shadows
Stepsister cities are too small to be center cities but–unlike office-oriented edge cities or hypertrophic bedroom communities such as Mesa, Ariz., or Aurora, Colo.–they still lay claim to distinct local economies, urban character, and even urban sub-regions of their own.
Building Cities in the Virtual World
And although planning’s ultimate goals will always reside in the real world, planners are harnessing this new virtual world in a variety of innovative ways.
Softening the Edge
A coalition of developers, public officials, and planners has now converged on the barren sidewalks of Century City to see if contemporary planning principles can commingle with modernism.
Transportation Planning Warms Up to Climate Change
America’s 200 million drivers and their 10 trillion annual vehicle miles traveled pose possibly the greatest collective action problem in human history. Transportation thus may be the great untapped resource—the Saudi Arabia of climate change mitigation.
Building Better: Art or Eco?
Some architects worry that the flood of announcements of buildings earning acclaim from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program can detract from a building’s aesthetic merits and even devolve into a symbol of easy self-congratulation.