• The chameleon of urban architecture

    “Ambiguous and composite buildings” solve multiple urban design problems through a flexible approach to building form and architectural language.
    In the Excursus appended to the end of the influential 1978 book Collage City , Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter include what they call “an abridged list of stimulants … as possible Object Trouves in the urbanistic collage.” One of these found objects is the idea of a building type they called Ambiguous...Read more

  • When bad things happen in new urban places

    New Urbanist places sometimes get the reputation of looking like movie sets , especially some of the well-known developments like Celebration (built by Disney), and Seaside, which did serve as a set for the 1998 film The Truman Show (the filmmakers built fake buildings and landscaping to complement...Read more

  • Let main streets be main streets

    A community should determine what kind of community it wants to be, not unelected DOT engineers.
    Before moving to Ithaca, New York, more than 20 years ago, I lived on Main Street in the town of Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Cars would go by at 40 mph, sometimes 50 mph late at night. On-street parking buffered pedestrians from the fast-moving traffic, but crossing the street was uncomfortable. Few...Read more

  • Lids, teardowns, and infrastructure burials

    There is an abundance of in-city highways in the US that need to be demolished, buried, or capped so that neighborhoods can be made whole again.
    This essay is written as a warning to city administrators and finance directors all over the world who are considering building highway projects within urban areas. Experts have erroneously led city officials to believe that these expensive capital projects will alleviate congestion and improve...Read more