Contributor Blog

Do yourself a favor: Go check out the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum, either online or in hard copy. Spectrum is the trade magazine for the international engineers' society—it's really quite good—and this issue features an extensive package on megacities.

This is the engineer's take on many of the issues we all grapple with on Interchange. So it's not about making public meetings go more smoothly or trying to understand how to use GIS for placemaking. It's about building stuff and making sure it'll keep working.

The new San Francisco Federal Building, designed by Morphosis starchitect Thom Mayne, opened earlier this year. It's visible from the windows of our kitchen at work, so I see it at least five times a day, every time I make myself a decaf double americano. And I knew it looked familiar. Today I finally figured it out.

The building:

And what must have been the inspiration:

(Oh, come on. It's the Sandcrawler from Star Wars. The nerds got it.)

Well, it's not quite urban-theory-related, but my brilliant colleague Nancy Miller pointed me to the invasion of the Blade Runner aesthetic into the fashion world this year. At left, that's Darryl Hannah, playing the kooky sexbot Pris in the movie.

And here's the work of designer Peter Christian, from the blog ZooZoom:

See what I'm saying?

More after the jump.

I drive the Bay Bridge just about every work day. I'm not proud of this fact. I never expected to be one of those dreaded suburban commuters, living off urban sprawl, the sole occupant of a compact car inching through rush hour traffic twice a day.

So sue me. Or better yet, give me enough money to afford a house in San Francisco. Until then, Berkeley it is.

But on my morning drive last week I saw a new feature amid the landscape of cargo containers that borders the southern side of the Bay Bridge toll plaza—that's on the East Bay side. It was a new billboard, depicted above. I have no idea how it works. But damn, is it bright. It's an active surface—it changes, presumably according to programming, cycling through a bunch of different ads. So what? Well, for one thing, it's the biggest, brightest one of these kind of signs I've ever seen, high resolution and bright enough to be seen in stark California sunlight. And second, it's just another step in the Blade Runnerfication of our cities.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. More after the jump.

Anyone seen any of the three museum shows in New York on Robert Moses, the colossus of urban planning? I myself have not, seeing as how I live 3,000 miles away from them. To recap: highly controversial figure, built many public works from the 1920s through the 1960s, in the end wanted to destroy neighborhoods to build freeways, ultimately brought low by grassroots organizing and the sainted Jane Jacobs via her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The exhibits have gotten a lot of ink in the New York press and the planning press. An excerpt from Ada Louise Huxtable's review in the Wall Street Journal today, and other rantings, after the jump.

The family and I took a recreational ride on the newest light rail line in San Francisco today, the Muni train known as the T. It runs along the city's east-west spine, Market St., and then cuts south along the water of the bay, then inland and way, way south down Third Street—from the city's hottest under-construction neighborhood through the worst ghetto.

As such, it's an interesting new ride in San Francisco. Some photos and observations after the jump.

The French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard died yesterday ("or yesterday maybe"). He wrote a lot about simulation and simulacra; if you went to college in the late 1980s like me, you quoted him in your thesis. Lots of stuff about how things in the world were actually perfect simulations of real things, and what that meant for our experiences of them.

Postmodernists. Weird guys.

But I remembered—misremembered, actually—a salient bit from his book America. Tracked it down in a recent issue of the International Journal of Jean Baudrillard Studies. It's coming after the break.

Our blog taskmaster, Christian, told me that my day for posting was going to be the 6th of every month, and that if I failed...well, let's just say he pointed me to this site and told me to be afraid.

So here I am, with an easy three hours before end-of-day.

Let's get started with a couple of blogs you should be reading (other than ours, of course). The action starts after the jump.

Portland's river is a central gathering place for the city. New York lives between two rivers. A river defines Washington DC's geography.

In Los Angeles, the river is a concretized ditch.

But that river was always wilder than the others. Until the last century it ran not north-south -- its course today -- but east-west, emptying in Santa Monica instead of San Pedro. I have an antique map of Los Angeles on my living room wall, the first one published (1849 or so), and the river does indeed run perpendicular to the one I grew up driving over, or next to.

The always-rewarding Bldgblog has a fun interview with Mike Davis, who wrote the iconic history of Los Angeles City of Quartz. Davis is flacking a new book, Planet of Slums

Next weekend -- that'd be May 6-7 -- a bunch of GPS geeks are going to map the entire Isle of Wight, off England. Not much on the Isle, apparently, but whatever's there is gonna get mapped. Says the New Scientist blog:

These high-tech cartographers will drive, cycle and ramble all over the island, using their GPS receivers to record the co-ordinates of roads, natural landmarks and points of interest. They'll use this data to create a completely digital map which will be available online to anyone.

Nice bit of writing on London's sewers starting up on Slate today.

Down in the Fleet, Rob shines his helmet lamp on a pipe. It's encrusted with something. "Liquid concrete!" he says with disgust. "This is a throwaway society. Out of sight, out of mind." People will chuck anything, he says. Flushers—wastewater operatives got their name because they used to flush river water into the system to help it flow—have found gold, jewelry, even motorbikes. But mostly they find cotton buds, condoms, and fat.

If you follow the entertainment/business news, you know that Disney bought Pixar, the digital animation company that made Toy Story, among other great movies.

This is cool, right? A gadget called ike that combines "an array of different sensors, e.g. GPS, Laser Distance Meter, Compass, Camera and operating software into a rugged hand held mobile device, for rapid data capture." Not so useful for a desk jockey like me, but talk about going off to find yourself....

Via Pruned

My link-fu is strong. Please welcome to the Web Burb, a site dedicated to suburbs and New Suburbanism. From the manifesto:

The suburbs, in short, are the American mainstream. Our major writers, dating back to Updike and Cheever, have focused on decoding suburban life, and today Richard Ford, Chang Rae Lee, Rick Moody and others continue that work. Suburban megachurches are the engine of American Protestantism. Eminem is a suburban boy, and a suburban phenomenon, as are the "soccer moms” and "soccer dads” fought over in the last few elections.

Yet for those who live there, the suburbs can be a bewildering place. Urbanites who have moved out for more space and better schools gaze out the kitchen window into their new garden paradise and ask, "Now what?” Children of the suburbs return to find their sleepy burbs utterly transformed by commercialization. Those on rural routes watch in dismay as farms and tiny towns are supplanted by mass developments and strip malls. All of these people have common problems and solutions, from commuting to child care to what to put on the side of a house. Burb is for all of them.

We talk about "the suburbs” as a state of mind, but only now have real connections begun to be made among the suburbs of even a single city, never mind nationally. Burb is proposed as a place where mutual recognition and the single purpose that comes from it might be achieved.

A few hours ago I got home from my first stint as a reviewer of student urban design proposals. That's right, kids: I went from consumer to teacher without ever having to be a producer. This afternoon I ducked out of work and went to the architecture and planning school at UC Berkeley to have a look, with some real professionals, at 18 class projects for a graduate-level landscape architecture class.

Here's what happened: a few months ago I got a survey asking me how I felt about open space and parks in my neighborhood - West Berkeley, also known as Oceanview - and specifically how I felt about an alley that bisects my block and a couple blocks northward and southward.

No, seriously. As I keep getting into arguments with urban planners about community involvement (they're in favor of it) and bitching about marquee architetecture (and marquee architects) someone else voiced my inner conflict before I got to a keyboard. Here's Robert McDonald on the Urban Cartography blog:

MIT's new Stata Center lurches impressively over Vassar Street, a mélange of surfaces and cylinders intersecting at odd angles. Designed by Frank Gehry, it's seen as the pinnacle of hip, postmodern architecture in Boston (which ain't saying much), and supposedly is surprisingly functional inside despite its odd form. I therefore feel decidedly square saying it but I must: I think it's rather ugly. More than anything, its ornamentation seems ostentatious to me, arbitrary, like a sculpture pretending to be a building. Part of me still believes in that mantra of modernist architecture, form follows function. Politically and spiritually, this at least seems like an honest goal, far more than mere irony and whimsy.

Yet as I've been reviewing the works of Mumford and Kunstler, I've been realizing how much of modern architecture and modern town planning has been a disaster. Often the scale of the projects has been all wrong, and the projects have not really been focused on human needs at all. There's typically no respect for public space, no creation of places for human interactions. And they are often just plain ugly, all gray concrete and blacktop, which on our New England winters gets pockmarked with salt stains.

And so I've been struggling between these two parts of myself. I want architecture and urban planning to reflect some of the honesty of modernism, and yet I want beauty and even a bit of whimsy and ornamentation. It strikes me that both post-modernism and modernism have same fault, at least as they are often practiced: An utter lack of interest in what the users of the space want, and what will seem beautiful in the context of its surroundings. Form does not follow the true, human function of the building but instead a perverted function set by someone other than the users. For modern architecture, it became cheapness of construction; for post-modern architecture, it has become hip irony; for urban planners, it became moving cars efficiently. The solution, in my humble opinion (as an ecologist who is admittedly not trained in architecture), is not to abandon "form follows function” but to make sure society gets the function it wants.

A few months ago, when I was still taking the bus to work - and walking from San Francisco's Transbay Terminal to my office - my favorite shortcut got strange. And I'm glad it did, because it helped me crystallize one of the necessary qualities for a great city: surprise.

I'd taken to shaving a few minutes off the march by cutting down a narrow walkway between two skyscrapers. Tall brick on one side, tall concrete on the other. And at the end: pop. The backend of a simple plaza, bits of crummy retail and a Starbucks guarding the front.

Do I love this? I love this. Fake Is the New Real compares two dozen subway systems from around the world, at the same scale. All these fractal diagrams show, incidentally, a city's rough sprawl-to-core ratio, density, and size -- at a glance. Below, London versus Los Angeles (winner: London).



via Curbed LA

Okay, somebody out there try this. Somebody who knows their way around Portland, Oregon. And then you, somebody, whoever you are, send an email reporting back. Because this is Google's new trip planner beta -- it uses Google Maps and transit info to tell you how to get from here to there on bus and so forth, as long as "here" and "there" are in Portland. And I haven't spent real time in Portland in almost 20 years.

But it's Google, right? And they're smarter than all of us.