Contributor Blog
Roger ShermanRoger Sherman is founder of Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design in Santa Monica, CA; and Co-Director of cityLAB, an urban design and research thinktank at UCLA.
Risky Business
With cities developing today at a rate that is outpacing architects’ and planners’ efforts to shape them, there is no longer sufficient time to plan. As a result, architecture’s role in the city has fundamentally changed from that of designing buildings which both engage and are a product of their context, to that of creating commodified experiences--like everything else, tied first and foremost to speculation in future identity, and real estate values.
The End of Planning (as we know it)
For as often as the Gulf Coast and 9/11 debacles and their aftermaths have been analyzed, one discussion has been conspicuously missing: how starkly those events, natural and man-made, revealed the inability of planning today--however professionally designed, organized and regulated—to contend with the vagaries of circumstances and conditions out of its control.
