The Community is an active vehicle for forging new ways of thinking about the ‘art of the possible’ at a crucial time when the need for planet-saving, world-enhancing solutions has never been greater. The trusted idea place for future design leaders aimed to inspire and motivate students, practitioners and clients alike; who believe that people make a city great.

Broadly speaking Urbanlogic Community is intended as a ‘research and learning centre’ and a window on the efforts being made to redesign the way we live.

Urbanlogic community will include

New Features will include:
An open discussion forum
A Professional membership forum
My inner circle
Issues and solutions
Networking and collaboration
Videos
Publications
Discussions
Projects
Articles

If your interested in featuring your projects / concepts ready for the launch please email me

Kind Regards
Ian J Vincent

Since the launch of Urban Logic In April 2009.

Urban Logic has been visited by over 15,000 people, from 130 countries/territories and over 40,000 pages have been viewed.

So I am really excited to announce that an Urban Logic Forum will be launched in Jan 2010 as a place where the world’s greatest thinkers and doers -‘YOU’ in other words, to exchange views on the most pressing issues in the built environment and forward thinking designs, and for students to learn from the best in the industry.

We would welcome your comments and practical experience on the latest issues, as well as suggestions for new forum topics, before the Launch in Jan 2010

Kind Regards
Ian J Vincent

The firm saw off three other anonymous practices to land the contract with developer Emaar, The Economic City.

It is a welcome win for SOM, which has suffered significantly in the current downturn. In 2008’s AJ100 list of Britain’s biggest practices, the firm was ranked at number 21, but it dropped to 100th place in this year’s list (AJ 28.05.09).

‘There is no doubt it is a real shot in the arm for the firm,’ said a source.

SOM will be responsible for ‘refining and finalising the existing concept masterplan’ for the 168km2 site, located in Rabigh, north of Jeddah.

The scheme is expected to include a healthcare district, numerous residential zones, an industrial park and a knowledge and media city. Several phase one projects already under construction, such as the sea port and a raft of housing developments, will not be affected.

An original outline masterplan was drawn up in 2006 by SOM and WATG, setting out the broad objectives of the project.

King Abdullah Economic City will be connected to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina via a new high-speed rail link, featuring stations designed by Foster + Partners.

Aedas have designed this spectacular 54,000 sq.m. Singapore Civic & Culture Centre comprises of cultural, civic & retail uses and when complete will provide a premier entertainment, lifestyle and retail experience for one-north and the wider Singapore community. Its angular, multi-faceted design creates a variety of perspectives, changing the form dramatically depending on the viewpoint.

The spectacle of the Center is most truly presented from the south elevation which, being completely open to the outside, shows the inner workings and layers as a section visible from the exterior.

The design for the 24,000 sq.m. retail space responds to the challenging site topography as the zone spirals inwards addressing the major entry points and culminates in an open amphitheater.

Above, a 40m high grand foyer creates a visual and spatial connection between the retail, civic and cultural zones. It also provides a canopy under which the public can experience outdoor entertainment and al-fresco dining while protected from the elements. The focus of the cultural zone is a 5,000 plus seat auditorium, which will be the largest venue of its kind in Singapore capable of staging amplified musicals, concerts and other large scale visual events.

The venue is supported with administration, artist and technical support, function spaces, foyers, concessions and circulation spaces making up the remainder of the 30,000 sq.m. cultural and civic program.

The project is currently making good progress towards its projected completion date in 2011 when Singapore will find its new civic and cultural signature.

Source: travel with frank gehry

The installation, announced today at the festival’s press launch, is billed as “a design reinterpretation of the Battle of Trafalgar”.

The Battle of Trafalgar

At the centre of the Festival will be a gigantic chess board in Trafalgar Square. Spanish designer Jaime Hayón has designed thirty-two ceramic chess pieces, each up to 2m tall that will be located in the centre of Trafalgar Square.

The installation – supported by Arts Council England and the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade – will be interactive, inviting the public to stage giant-scale chess matches; a design reinterpretation of the Battle of Trafalgar.

Mayor Boris Johnson said: ‘There has never been a better time to support London’s thriving creative industries and highlight the dynamic design that continues to boost our economy and attract investment to the capital. The London Design Festival helps promote our world-class innovative design and I encourage everyone to attend and experience London’s creative brilliance.’

He first floated the idea on Nick Ferrari’s LBC show last week. The Sunday Times followed his lead, reporting that a new “living bridge” across the Thames was planned and quoting the Mayor’s claim “that [it] will once again provide a commercial zone…a bridge that actually has residential and commercial property on it, as the old London Bridge did”. It continued:

Old London Bridge ... inhabited bridges are alluring but impractical. Photograph: Stapleton Collection/Corbis

Early plans being drawn up by Anthony Brown (sic), Johnson’s policy director, are being modelled on designs by Antoine Grumbach, the French architect who won a competition to design a habitable bridge held by the Royal Academy in 1996.

It’s the same sales pitch as Boris’s Bus: a new product that claims to revive a historic, nay, “iconic” feature of the capital. The notion hasn’t impressed the Guardian’s Jonathan Glancy:

Surely Johnson cannot really be keen on such a dubious structure, set between Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridge, and based on designs by the French architect Antoine Grumbach shown at the Royal Academy’s fine exhibition of Living Bridges 13 years ago? This takes the form of massively high towers given over to “luxury” flats, shops and restaurants, and a kind of miniature Kew Gardens spanning the Thames itself.

“Massively high towers”? I thought we were against those. Judge the 1996 Grumbach design for yourself here (pdf) then absorb more of Jonathan’s verdict:

I can see how the Johnson-Grumbach project adds up. An opportunity to build more costly, showy flats in central London and to serve up ever more lucrative chain shops and over-branded cafes to supposedly gormless Londoners still apparently hungry for more bland, packaged food and shiny knick-knacks.

And now, blogging at Building, Dan Stewart suspects the whole thing is a publicity stunt.

I wonder if this is yet another side-effect of the recession: proposing scarcely believable super-projects is a great way of getting press, without the inconvenience of actually having to build the things. Rafael Vinoly’s 300m eco-tower at Battersea Power Station was exactly the same thing, no matter what Treasury Holdings might tell you.

And what’s more:

Boris Bridge is clearly nothing more than a gigantic McGuffin…I promised to eat my own hat if Boris Airport ever got built. If Boris Bridge gets built, I will eat yours. All of yours. You can send me an enormous box of hats and I will live off it for a year.

I can see his point. After all, the “living bridge” story has taken my mind off the canning of the Cross River Tram and Dagenham Dock DLR extension, the Mayor’s questionable recent claim that he saw to it that the “ugly sisters” have been shortened, and the fact that a significant Barnet Tory has said conveniently within my earshot that the borough will meet the affordable housing target set for it by Boris “over my dead body”. But not for very long.

]]> http://www.urbanlogic.co.nz/boriss-bridge-some-bollockings/feed/ 0 http://www.urbanlogic.co.nz/will-this-classic-be-fit-for-purpose/ http://www.urbanlogic.co.nz/will-this-classic-be-fit-for-purpose/#comments Sun, 10 May 2009 01:12:36 +0000 admin http://www.urban-logic.com/?p=1312
As a prime mover in founding the Design Museum, our architecture critic considers the merits of its move to a refurbished Commonwealth Institute

Here’s a fine thing. The Twentieth Century Society, founded to cultivate educated enthusiasm for modern architecture, has declared itself “dismayed” by the Design Museum, founded to cultivate educated enthusiasm for modern design. Two cats in a sack here.

Object of the dismay is the proposed reuse of the Commonwealth Institute, the historic centre of an ambitious new development in Kensington, west London, now up for planning approval with the local council. The Design Museum wants to make this redundant, mid-century classic, with signature parabolic roof and unmissable traces of late-imperial pomp, its new home.

Designers of the reuse are the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and West 8. These are a cover for Rem Koolhaas, the cartoonishly hip, Prada-clad globaliser whose big interest, just as everyone else is beginning to appreciate the importance of small scale and locality, is “generic” cities. Koolhaas would like it very much if he could design the whole world. Then Balham could look exactly like Bahrain and his design project would be complete.

When Koolhaas won the competition to redevelop this important site in March 2008, the Design Museum was already and somewhat restlessly looking for new premises. Tate Modern was considered, but Nick Serota ’s ego took up all available space in the planned extension. Potters Fields , next door to City Hall, was also scouted. But last October, the Design Museum committed to move upmarket from wharf-side Bermondsey to the wrong end of a Kensington shopping street. Why?

What real benefit a larger home brings to the Design Museum, which has recently had problems making best use of its existing space, has not been explained; it has, for example, no very large permanent collection in need of storage. But for the developers of the whole site, which includes the inevitable “luxury newbuild” flats, the presence of the museum is what’s known as a “planning gain”. This is a sort of culturally flavoured bribe: we get to build nine-storey apartment blocks, you get a spiffy new museum.

The architect and developer have hired Roger Cunliffe and James Sutherland, architect and engineer respectively of the original RMJM design for the 1962 Commonwealth Institute, to oversee Koolhaas’s reuse. This is to guarantee authenticity and credibility or, at least, provide a simulacrum of them so perfect no one can tell the difference. Still, if the profile is unchanged, the institute’s original gay flagpoles have been removed in the reuse and replaced by boring, generic fountains that are so wearily predictable they might have been found in a catalogue of architect’s impressions. Along with the luxury new-build.

Koolhaas originally promised to “capitalise on the dynamic interior spaces” of the Commonwealth Institute. This means gutting it to create a huge void. It is this evisceration and the inevitable loss of period detail that has so outraged the Twentieth Century Society, which says provocatively that the Design Museum, with its rapacious intent, is not a suitable tenant for so distinguished a building.

Meanwhile, the council has expressed reservations about the height of the apartment blocks. So here is a fabulous and paradoxical scrap: the Twentieth Century Society, with its Osbert Lancasterish, broad-church approach to architecture, seeks to conserve with archaeological thoroughness a modern building in the style of Le Corbusier. The Design Museum, less willing to articulate its new purpose than pursue real-estate deals, seeks to “vandalise” it.

Design is a fugitive idea, so it’s appropriate – perhaps – that the Design Museum has become a migratory institution. Maybe the impending occupation of a new-old building will force a reinvention of the idea of each.

It was 20 years ago today, or very nearly, that the original Design Museum opened. At the launch party, we served miniature fish and chips wrapped in cones made from the Financial Times. I danced with Akihiko Amanuma, one of the Sony designers responsible for the original Walkman. We also had the first public demonstration of Apple’s hypertext file system, a quaint electronic card index that seemed utterly sensational.

We did not have email. We used fax. “We” being Terence Conran, who paid for the original Design Museum, and myself… who talked it into existence. Ten years before, Conran had discovered my first book, a crudely ambitious study of design called In Good Shape. He liked it and lured me from the obscurity of provincial academe to help make his monument to design. That was 1979.

And by 1989 we had a very clear idea what we wanted to achieve. Design was not well understood. We wanted to explain to government and industry and the public that design was one of the great organising forces of the 20th century: a way of tidying up industrial and social mess through the application of practical art. In this we passionately believed.

And then came the 21st century. The rare expertise of design, which required so much special pleading, suddenly got diversified and available. With design everywhere, what need is there for a Design Museum? I had a small intimation of that 20 years ago. Standing on the terrace looking at the river on the opening day, I remember musing that we have spent all this money and 10 years of effort and we have just opened a museum that looks like Habitat. Right now in Munich, the Neue Sammlung fur Angewandte Kunst, one of my models for the Design Museum, has an exhibition on Ikea.

If the Design Museum moves into the Commonwealth Institute, the fate of its first home may also weirdly become a concern to the Twentieth Century Society. It was an early example of creative reuse. The original warehouse we vandalised was found for us by the late Max Gordon who, as architect of the original Saatchi Gallery, has a real claim to be an eminence grise in London’s museum world.

We tore most of it down and built a sheer white box around the remaining concrete frame. The beautiful and uncompromising gallery interior was by Stanton Williams. The thing about what we may soon call the old Design Museum is that it’s a museum of itself. Whatever happens to the Commonwealth Institute, I do hope it is preserved, although my blue plaque will ruin its clean lines.

Source :Stephen Bayley The Observer

As the chart above illustrates, the things people are most concerned with when it comes to global warming (climate change, as we prefer to say) are as far removed from the individual as possible—including “Future Generations of People” and “Plant and Animal Species.” Practically speaking, this helps explain why we’ve been so slow to act on agressive climate change legislation, and why we’re so easily distracted from the topic as soon as anything (like a collapsing economy) comes up.

The competition encouraged entrants to develop solutions that dramatically rethink the relationship between transit systems, public space and urban redevelopment. Competitors were further encouraged to work within the parameters of LA County Ballot Measure R. Their entries had to focus on specific rail extension projects and also take a look at larger-scale, inter-related transit planning challenges.

The competition jury included Thom Mayne, Principal and Founder of Morphosis Architects, Professor, UCLA, Aspet Davidian, Director, Project Engineering Facilities, Metro, Neil Denari, Professor, UCLA, Principal, Neil M. Denari Architects, Gail Goldberg, Director of Planning, City of Los Angeles, Roland Genick, Urban Designer, Exposition Line, Cecilia V. Estolano, CEO CRA/LA- Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, Eric Owen Moss, Director, SCI-Arc, Principal and Founder of Eric Owen Moss Architects, and Geoff Wardle, Director, Advanced Mobility Research, Art Center College of Design.

Más is regional high-speed rail for Los Angeles with a landscape to match. It diversifies the communities in the built environment, making travel less necessary, easier and more predictable, and bypassing roadway congestion through a new raised infrastructure. A partnership between the public and private sectors creates varied opportunities for organic development.

1st Prize: Más Transit, Joshua G. Stein, Jacob M. Brostoff, Jaclyn Thomforde, Aaron Whelton http://www.radical-craft.com

Travel times improve over time with the addition of new trains. Más also links local and inter-regional commuting; providing frequent service that will sync up with the California High Speed Rail network. San Diego via más is less than an hour away, including transfer times; San Francisco is less than three hours away.

Source: Bustler

Located at the western edge of Midtown Manhattan, the Clinton Park mixed-use development, currently in the first stages of construction, will occupy more than half of a city block with 1.3 million sq ft of commercial and residential programs.

Designed by Enrique Norten and Ten Arquitectos, the building fills a void in the urban fabric by integrating multiple commercial uses at the base and providing 900 housing units in the 27 floors above. The base building will include a 50,000 sq-ft auto showroom fronting 11th Avenue with 250,000 sq ft of service floors below grade, a 30,000 sq-ft horse stable for the NYPD Mounted Police, a 7,500 square-foot neighborhood market, a 30,000 square-foot health club, and 200 parking spaces.

The overall massing of the project slopes up and away from Clinton Park, starting at 96 feet along 11th Avenue and climbing up to 348 feet at the middle of the residential block; this height transition negotiates two very dissimilar urban scales: the flat, horizontal one of the park located to the west of 11th Avenue and the vertical, windowless structure of the telephone switching tower to the east of the site.

Securing light and air for a great majority of apartment units, the double loaded corridor shifts diagonally across the site in a unique orientation to the Manhattan grid, reducing the building’s mass adjacent to the neighboring buildings.

Each floor steps up from the one below, allowing for unobstructed views to the park and Hudson River and providing private roof terraces with green roofs on every floor. A varied treatment of street walls and interior facades creates a solid exterior with smaller openings along the street edges of the building, while lighter facades skin the building where the form pulls away from the street. This language of interior and exterior makes reference to the historic court spaces of New York City housing.

The building’s mirrored structure introduces the creation of two garden terraces, a unique green feature among the city’s urban grid. The gardens and the green roofs on each floor introduce a refreshing sense of proximity to nature into the otherwise massive structure.

Source: World Architecture News