• Blocks versus barracks: On the missing chapter

    A discussion around the book, Architecture & the City, prompts a critique of prominent eco-urbanism developments on the basis that they fail to create good urbanism.
    Toward the end of John Ellis’s review of my recent book, Architecture & the City: Selected Essays , he suggested: A potential missing chapter in this otherwise splendid book could include examples of sustainable urbanism from other parts of the world. Taking clues from work such as Harrison...Read more

  • Architecture and urbanism in the climate change era

    Architecture & the City, part polemic and part auto-biography, makes the case for how architecture should be taught and the city planned to address some of the world's biggest challenges—by learning from the past.
    A revealing pair of images in Michael Dennis’s magnificent new book Architecture & the City compare a selection of contemporary buildings from well known architects around the world with an image of Boston’s Back Bay. The former is a collection of weird freestanding sculptural shapes unrelated...Read more

  • We need both EVs and the 15-minute city

    Without improvements in the way we plan and build communities, electric vehicles will never deliver on their sustainability promise.
    Farhad Manjoo's opinion piece for today’s New York Times notes the limits of electric vehicles (EVs). Despite a big market move to EVs and hybrids, the American fleet has barely improved its efficiency in the last 10 years—mostly because people are buying bigger cars. The move to bigger cars is...Read more

  • Guiding principles of the 15-minute city

    On Public Square, a recent article that lays out a design theory for the “15-minute city” is gaining a lot of viewers. Let's look at another influential take on this idea, that of Carlos Moreno, a French-Columbian scientist and university professor at the Sorbonne, and one of the chief proponents...Read more