• Supersized Happy Meal houses

    The first step to good design is avoiding the bad, says Kate Wagner. Why not start with shutter crimes, poor proportions, and clashing architectural references?
    Kate Wagner is snarky, sarcastic, and full of contempt. But she's funny, so is her website McMansion Hell , and she knows a lot about urbanism and architecture. And she has a larger purpose of design education through relentless criticism of America's ugliest houses—McMansions. Wagner has tapped a...Read more

  • The 5 'Cs' of community planning

    Complete, compact, connected, complex, and convivial describes everything that you want a neighborhood to be.
    The source of most conflicts and confusion I see occurring when cities update their Community Plans is due to the confusion over the scale and size difference of a ‘Community’ versus a ‘Neighborhood’ unit. A community is defined as, “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular...Read more

  • The Thirty Years' War rages on

    In architecture, the constant search for the new no longer represents freedom. Urbanism and sustainability are nobler and more practical imperatives.
    Why has New Urbanism turned out for the design community to be the equivalent of the Syrian War, or perhaps the whole of the Middle East conflict? Quite simply, as Dan Solomon and others have noted , there are seemingly irreconcilable differences the Academy, and little willingness to negotiate or...Read more
  • Seaside FL Town Center

    Time is urbanism

    Authentic urbanism, unlike large-scale architecture, is built out over time. Architectural critics make the mistake of assessing an urban project in its early years.
    Editor's note: This piece responds to Daniel Solomon’s essay , The Thirty Years’ War: New Urbanism and the Academy , published September 27, which critiques the concept of fabric and monument buildings that helps to organize the design of new urban neighborhoods like Seaside, Florida. The essay is...Read more