• 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
  • By Laurence Qamar

    A context-based, form-language for mixed-use, main street buildings

    How to design buildings with human scale and proportion (and Modernism’s ongoing inability to get it right).
    A housing crisis and subsequent apartment building boom has overtaken many America cities in the post Great Recession twenty-teens. Similar transformations have not been experienced in American Cities since the decades following the two World Wars. With rising homeless rates, and spiking real...Read more

  • Mixed-use center is next step for revitalization

    CNU Legacy project in Russell neighborhood in West Louisville listens to residents, drawing their dreams.
    A mixed-use center focused on locally owned, food-oriented businesses, renewed streetscapes, community uses, and new housing opportunities is a key to revitalizing Russell, a neighborhood in West Louisville that has experienced decades of disinvestment. A CNU Legacy Project, sponsored by community...Read more

  • From McMansion to McMain Street

    Like the McMansion, the McMain Street attempts to mimic the complex roof massing of many buildings in a single building. Here are ideas on better ways to preserve or create Main Street character.
    Drive through any middle-class suburban neighborhood built in the last 25 years and you will encounter the “McMansion,” the aspirational mega-house with its overly complex roof form, dumbed-down architectural details and grandiose double-height foyer. The term McMansion is embedded in the American...Read more