• Top-hat buildings

    While bemoaning another proposed flat-roofed box fronting on a new urban park in Charlotte, my city, I took a look at Central Park, Manhattan, on Google Maps 3-D and found all sorts of interesting, distinct yet similar, hats to buildings. These buildings were partly the creation of architectural...Read more

  • Urban roundabouts: A tool for placemaking

    Well-designed urban roundabouts solve traffic delay problems while slashing the kinetic energy of motor vehicles in intersections, improving safety and allowing for placemaking.
    Rampant sprawl in Orange County, Florida, was creating rush hour back-ups half a mile long at the Town of Windermere’s quaint Main Street. The conventional solution—widening Main Street to four-lanes—would have destroyed the town’s character. Planner Brian Canin and transportation designer Jurgen...Read more

  • Lean Development Codes: Pink, pocket, and smart

    Transect-based Lean Codes have compact formats, bare-bones standards, and lighter (pink) red tape, in contrast to the excessive controls, redundancies, contradictions, delays, and unintended consequences created by conventional zoning.
    Note: This article was written as part of the Project for Lean Urbanism and edited for Public Square. In the absence of a shared building culture, codes have proliferated and engorged over many de­cades. Today’s codes are accretions of controls, redundancies, contradictions, and delays that stymie...Read more

  • Designing missing middle for a small infill site

    A balanced project with placemaking that meets the market and gets public approval requires patience and understanding of building types.
    Note: This is Part 2. In our previous post showing how we design Missing Middle Housing for small sites, we reviewed some initial steps, including conceptual studies for a small site master plan in Novato, California. Now, we’re going to look at the steps we took to refine the preferred alternative...Read more