• Pedestrian village in a natural landscape

    The project inverts the usual relationship between car and human in land development.
    Swann Wynd incorporates a range of housing types and uses along an emphatically pedestrian-oriented right-of-way that links a main street and an artists’ village that are a quarter-mile apart by automobile. The pedestrian way includes sections of path, a footbridge, and a street—but mostly it is...Read more

  • Shared street connects culture and community

    The three-block Chicago street design creates a plaza-like feel by raising the street and eliminating raised curbs.
    Chicago is showing how change in public infrastructure can transform a neighborhood with drug and gang problems. Located in the ethnically Asian Uptown neighborhood, Argyle Shared Street is a shared-use, pedestrian-prioritizing streetscape. “This project creates an area that is more walkable, more...Read more

  • A campus opens up to the city

    A recent UConn relocation from a leafy suburban campus to downtown Hartford, Connecticut, follows wider urban trends.
    Four decades after moving its campus to suburban West Hartford, the University of Connecticut moved back to downtown Hartford—bringing mixed-use development and the revitalization of the Hartford Times Building, a neoclassical landmark. Because the suburban campus had been difficult for city-based...Read more

  • Budgeting for a fractal city: Campus design, part 5

    Most funding should go to small projects in a living city. Instead, funding is often skewed toward large projects.
    Author’s note: This is the fifth in a series of ten essays that present innovative techniques for designing and repairing a corporate or university campus. These tools combine New Urbanist principles with Alexandrian design methods. The present-day project funding formula — skewed towards the...Read more