• Legacy projects kick off in Louisville

    CNU neighborhood design workshops this week are led by Urban Design Associates, Street Plans Collaborative, Placemakers, and Gresham Smith.
    Four CNU Legacy Projects will launch this week In Louisville, Kentucky, as community design workshops will engage residents to improve public spaces, streets, mixed-use centers, and natural and cultural assets. Three of the workshops will focus on specific neighborhoods—Russell and Portland in the...Read more

  • The emperor's new buildings

    A book review of Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism by James Stevens Curl.
    For most reform-minded urbanists today, the complicity of architectural Modernism in the urban fiascoes of the last century is not in dispute. A representative (and seminal) criticism was Jane Jacobs' withering 1961 attack, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she described Le...Read more

  • Better alternatives to Mr. Potato Head architecture

    Background buildings don't need to be ugly or use pointless variety in the “break-up-the-box” style.
    I recently criticized the architecture of multifamily buildings that too often prevails in US cities this decade. Materials and façade elements are often varied and juxtaposed in a way that is incoherent, and the buildings convey little order or sense of place. They look similar in Dallas, Denver,...Read more

  • Dragon boundary markers

    Iconic dragons, symbols of London, cannot slay the onslaught of hubristic architects and developers.
    Historically, property boundaries were generally demarcated by a physical object, either by a boundary marker or a fence to visually communicate the edges of land ownership. These were human impositions that represented a cultural, political, and social meaning upon a natural environment or within...Read more