Reviews » Archives » 2008

Birds do it. Bees do it. Bagworms and bald eagles do it. Or at least they inspire it.

It may be easier to design than to explain designing. Fortunately Ned Crankshaw does both. Don’t miss this one!

History that didn’t happen: the once-in-a-millennium chance that LA missed.

You want a more prosperous, less segregated, more attractive metropolitan area? Draw a line around it.

According to Peter Katz, “We now have information one could ‘take to the bank’ in the form of ‘smart growth’ underwriting standards to push qualified projects to the front of the line for speedy loan approval.”

How do you categorize the unique, the incomparable? Rayner Banham doesn’t try. What he does is more useful and more difficult: he actually sees what he’s looking at.

More people on the same amount of ground? The Urban Land Institute thinks it can happen here. If ULI is right and if the various policies it describes continue to spread, they’ll make room for architects and urban designers to do more creative work to improve urban life at all levels of density.

One of the top jeremiads of the 20th century, Ecology of Fear is also a collection of amazing tales.

Didja hear about the megaprojects to build a better suburbia? They happened 30 years ago, and they match up pretty well against what’s being done today.

If you can’t look at two-dimensional drawings and see the finished structure, you shouldn’t be in the business of designing and arranging buildings. At least until now.

In the old-but-still-good department, check out Nature, Landscape, and Building Sustainability, a collection of articles first published in the Harvard Design Magazine between 1998 and 2004. The roster here includes big names like Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben, but I liked Kristina Hill’s 2003 take on a Seattle project to redesign streets to work better ecologically, specifically in processing stormwater rather than just funneling it and its pollution out into the streams as fast as possible.…

Another inconvenient truth: places with warm Januarys and cool Julys put out less carbon dioxide.

It seems so harmless. Who wouldn’t prefer to worship, play chess, or go shopping without having to deal with some knucklehead who thinks George W. Bush is a great president — or (alternatively) who blames Bill Clinton’s troubles on a vast conspiracy? . . . Then again, who wants to live in a country divided into two implacably hostile tribes?

The August 13 issue of the New Republic offers a double treat of pop urbanism.

“Complete streets” – welcoming to cars, bicyclists, transit, and pedestrians alike – are all the rage now, but who knew they had a history? Less than 90 years ago they were the standard. Now historian Peter Norton of the University of Virginia has told the forgotten story of how cars took them over.

Traffic congestion may be different than you think.

Form-based codes let communities set the standard for what new development should look like. They’re transparent and they don’t assume that homes and stores will ruin each other if they’re next door. Will they leave room for creativity and change? It’s hard to see how they could do worse than standard-issue Euclidean zoning has.

Douglas Farr, Chicago architect and a leader in codifying the new LEED standards for neighborhood development, reveals some important trade secrets of green design in Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature (2007; John Wiley & Sons; 304 pp.; $75) and calls for a movement comparable to the 1960s moon shot, in which millions of Americans “get” the idea of sustainable design and act on it. “The entire built environment gets renewed or rebuilt every few generations, and we just need to do it differently.” {296} A keeper for reference, even if the movement doesn’t mushroom as fast as he hopes.

Robert Bruegmann went to Paris as a graduate student in the 1970s to study 18th- and 19th-century architecture. But when he flew in and out of Orly Airport, on the city’s southern edge, he saw something that blew his mind: a cityscape that looked like suburban Chicago or LA. European cities, he thought, were supposed to be pedestrian friendly, not like our monstrous agglomerations of auto-dependent sprawl.

We humans don’t do catastrophe well until one hits us, if then. After all, our ancestors didn’t survive by planning a century ahead; they survived by spotting predators fast and stretching one harvest until the next.