81–90 of 148 posts
Glass curtain walls are progress, civilization, and enlightenment. "Random puncturing" by contrast, is pernicious just from the sound of it. Romanticism.
As often is the case, cars are the elephant in the room. In the alley? We have rebuilt our urban spaces for cars instead of people. Now we wonder at what we've lost but have trouble connecting it to the automobile because t's ubiquitous and most of us can't imagine it otherwise.
My city has caught on, and there are a bunch of car free streets and alleys being made in the CBD. They have boutiques and restaurants with outdoor seating, and it changes the dynamic of the area entirely. People are relaxed, not rushing, chatting with eachother without yelling . You get a lot more friendly encounters with strangers. It feels like you've reached some kind of special community area, just for you and the others there.
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Yup. It's the main reason many European cities and Manhattan feel so engaging and alive in comparison to other US cities (just using my experiences). In walking cities you interact with the city itself -- you can stop and look at things closely, walk into a small store you've never noticed before, run into a friend and chat, or pause and just people watch. In car cities everything's far off and viewed through glass,…
The crazy thing is a minor change could make many suburbs much more walkable: put the stores on the street and parking in the back. Not sure why they started doing the reverse. I've lived in a lot of California suburbs that are still within walking distance to shops (~1 mile), but the experience is so bad because of the way they've arranged parking.
In one way this makes sense since almost all customers arrive by car but it certainly makes the street visually unappealing.
EDIT: I wrote "arrive by foot", obviously it is arrive by car in suburban locations.
As often is the case, cars are the elephant in the room. In the alley? We have rebuilt our urban spaces for cars instead of people. Now we wonder at what we've lost but have trouble connecting it to the automobile because t's ubiquitous and most of us can't imagine it otherwise.
Also safety, or the pretence of safety. Who's going to be the architect signing off on an obscure narrow alleyway with poor visibility and hidden recesses in a major metro area today? We're obviously living in some of the safest times there's ever been, but that probably plays on some minds (alongside the "it's more efficient to build straight lines" part).
Part of this might be necessitated by the fact that we build most structures out of flammable materials, but with better fire-control technology (sprinklers) that could be mitigated.
It's amazing how often alleys/laneways are some of the most treasured parts of a North American city.
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Quite a lot of developments in the UK - certainly in London - are proposing zero parking. We had a (now shelved) plan near where I live to build 700 2 & 3 bed apartments in a new development with zero parking spaces in the design. This strikes me as blindly optimistic that of those 700 apartments (that will likely have between 2 or 3 people or more per apartment on average, so somewhere like 1500-2500 people) absolut…
Eliminating parking requirements is also starting to gain traction in the US: Seattle did it [0], and it's underway in Los Angeles [1]. Unfortunately it tends to make NIMBY opposition to development even more intense than it already is ("They'll use up all the street spaces!"), but fingers crossed we can keep this trend going. [0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sea... [1]: https://la.curbed…
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"get a reality check, this isn't going to work". If I gave out free hot tubs then there would pretty quickly be a hot tub shortage. The problem is that parking is the leasing of public land for insanely low amounts for private property storage. You are forcing everyone around you to pay for your private property storage because you don't feel like paying for it yourself. After all, can I pay the council the £100 a ye…
I'm not defending parking on street parking, and I am not saying we should force developers to add parking (I just find the fingers-in-ears ignoring of the issue frustrating), but with respect I think your views on the parking are a bit maladjusted. That's because you could use your same argument about any public service. We pay for it in spades through income and council taxes. Deliberately semi-quoting your argumen…
For each service that is public there's usually a good counterargument. Is there one for public subsidizing of private car parking?
As often is the case, cars are the elephant in the room. In the alley? We have rebuilt our urban spaces for cars instead of people. Now we wonder at what we've lost but have trouble connecting it to the automobile because t's ubiquitous and most of us can't imagine it otherwise.
Also safety, or the pretence of safety. Who's going to be the architect signing off on an obscure narrow alleyway with poor visibility and hidden recesses in a major metro area today? We're obviously living in some of the safest times there's ever been, but that probably plays on some minds (alongside the "it's more efficient to build straight lines" part).
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There is a third way. Suburban single-family zones full of cul-de-sacs are designed to be metaphorically put under glass and never changed. Building massive towers, on the other hand, is very drastic and has the potential to destroy the character of a community. I like the approach advocated by the Strong Towns movement: allow the next increment of development by right, everywhere. So a neighborhood of mostly single-…
I like their idea for height restriction as well--allowing a story higher than those buildings around it.
> Unbroken sheets of glass, prefabricated panels, poured concrete, steel girders—these are the basic units of construction, and all resist the kind of random puncturing and cobbling that subordinated the work of the architect to the changing needs of the community. Glass curtain walls are progress, civilization, and enlightenment. "Random puncturing" by contrast, is pernicious just from the sound of it. Romanticism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The crazy thing is a minor change could make many suburbs much more walkable: put the stores on the street and parking in the back. Not sure why they started doing the reverse. I've lived in a lot of California suburbs that are still within walking distance to shops (~1 mile), but the experience is so bad because of the way they've arranged parking.
Unfortunately many shopping centers that build out to the sidewalk will display a blank wall with ventilators and so forth facing the sidewalk, and the real entrances are in the interior, facing the parking. In one way this makes sense since almost all customers arrive by car but it certainly makes the street visually unappealing. EDIT: I wrote "arrive by foot", obviously it is arrive by car in suburban locations.