Public: The Latest Architecture and News

For the Cosmos Foundation, environmental conscience, ecological conservation, and community focus form the foundations of land planning and landscape design within public infrastructure projects. We sat down with the foundation's project director, Felipe Correa, as well as foundation architects Valentina Schmidt and Consuelo Roldán, as they went in depth on the benefits, objectives, and motivations behind the Healing Gardens initiative.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

A global pandemic can change the way you look at things. In Greenwich, Connecticut, as with most places, restaurants and bars are shuttered now, schools are closed, and traffic is sparse as people stay home and maintain social distancing. 

But each weekday, as the sun comes up over the eerily tranquil streets of the historic downtown business district, First Selectman Fred Camillo is still heading to the office. Camillo works in the Town Hall, a public building that’s been off-limits to the public—and to most employees—since mid-March, when all of Connecticut entered a constantly evolving state of lockdown following an executive order by Governor Ned Lamont in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Harvard GSD is presenting during the month of April 2020, an online series of talks and webinars via Zoom, where attendees can interact and submit questions. Accessible for everyone who registers, the events are also streamed live to the GSD's YouTube page.

The Midnight Charette is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by architectural designers David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features a variety of creative professionals in unscripted and long-format conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and more personal discussions. Honesty and humor are used to cover a wide array of subjects: some episodes provide useful tips for designers, while others are project reviews, interviews, or simply explorations of everyday life and design. The Midnight Charette is available for free on iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, and all other podcast directories.

On this episode of The Midnight Charette Podcast, Sharon Zukin discusses the economic and social impact the technology industry has had on cities around the world, the relationship between gentrification and the commodification of modern life, building improvement districts and the increasing securitization of public spaces, and the desire to live in authentic neighborhoods.

Last week, we asked our social media followers, "What does public architecture mean to you?" These thoughts are intrinsic to the architectural debate and come into play in various types of projects, especially in those related to the planning of common-use spaces in cities.

In Ancient Greece, a Polis referred to both the city and its body of citizens, where one cannot exist without the other. It is in this intersection, where Public Architecture, has the opportunity to construct the ideals of society: a space where individuals gather, relate to one another, and become citizens.

This article was originally published on CommonEdge as "What Landscape Architects and Urban Designers Can Learn About Public Space From Cuba."

It was certainly what I had come for: I was sitting on broad, cobbled steps, watching people interact in the public realm. It was an August afternoon in Cuba, and I had found temporary respite from the harsh sun beneath a haphazard array of trees. My design work as a landscape architect focuses on urban parks, streetscapes, and academic campuses, and I wanted to see how differently the open spaces of Cuba might function.

The career of Japanese architect Kenzō Tange features a curious anomaly: he received the same commission twice. In 1952, during the early stages of his career, Tange designed an administrative building in Yūrakuchō, Tokyo, for the city's metropolitan government. Over thirty years later, when the government relocated to Shinjuku, Tokyo, he again won the commission to design its administrative building. Completed in 1991, this would be one of his last, and most ambitious, projects. The second incarnation now dominates the city’s skyline, its highly distinctive design guaranteeing it landmark status. Nicknamed Tochō (an abbreviation of its Japanese name Tōkyō-to Chōsha), its architectural references to both tradition and modernity act as a visual metaphor for the eclectic city over which its inhabitants govern.

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