• Extending design excellence in a historic city

    A large-scale development raises the bar for new design in Charleston, while re-connecting neighborhoods and anchoring a 1.6-mile-long linear park.
    Charleston is one of the best-preserved historic cities in America, and architecturally sensitive redevelopment has fueled an economic revival of downtown since the 1970s. The Upper King Street Gateway project extends the design excellence north with a large-scale, mixed-use development creating...Read more

  • How a Florida beach town changed how we live

    12 Ways that Seaside revolutionized how we think about cities and towns.
    Note: Jay Walljasper, champion of walkable communities and former editor of Utne Magazine, died a few months ago . Jay wrote a number of articles published for Public Square over the years, including this one on Seaside, Florida. A town built from scratch in the 1980s ignited a revolution in how we...Read more

  • Richards is selected for Skyway panel

    CNU President and CEO Lynn Richards was selected to join a panel to judge a design competition for transforming Buffalo’s Skyway, a segment of freeway that soars over the waterfront. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently announced the competition to solicit creative ideas for replacing the...Read more

  • Lessons from travel: Het Schip

    Amsterdam architect Michel de Klerk and the patronage of Dutch merchants in the early 20th Century are an inspiration to today's wealthy classes on how to provide beautiful housing that is affordable to today's working class.
    I love to travel. Every trip widens my bandwidth, challenges my orthodoxy, introduces ingenious solutions to seemingly unsurmountable problems, and exposes me to the choices people make in living their lives as individuals and as a community. My recent trip to the Netherlands provided several such...Read more