Höweler + Yoon Architecture and Audi to Develop Pilot Project for BosWash: Shareway 2030
Last year interdisciplinary architecture firm Höweler + Yoon Architecture was announced the winners of the Audi Urban Future Award for the project Boswash:Shareway 2030. The City Dossier in Boston, held this May, was organized as a series of workshops between Höweler + Yoon Architecture and Audi experts in developing steps to realize aspects of the Boswash: Shareway vision. Part research project, part feasibility study, part road map to the future of mobility – the focus of the workshops is to propose a pilot project that can be tested in the proposed region of Boston – Washington.
We featured the project last year as it highlights how the landscape of urban development has changed. The focus of “Shareway” is the string of high-density metropolitan areas, their suburbs and ex-urbs along I-95 between Boston, MA and Washington, DC. The I-95 corridor caters to some fifty million inhabitants, many of whom commute into metropolitan areas for work. Mobility and transportation are critical to the economic vitality of these urban areas; “Shareway” proposes an intentionally re-engineered “highly orchestrated and deliberately produced platform from which we might imagine alternate paths, different trajectories, or new cultural dreams” whereby imagining an “alternate life for the road” is imagining a new American Dream.
Read on for more on the progress of this project after the break.
The Bike-Sharing Takeover
Bike sharing has become a staple for urban commuting in city’s all over the world. Since its reintroduction into urban culture in the 1990s, it has taken on many forms. Today it is being optimized to serve dense cities to help alleviate traffic congestion, provide people with more transportation options, and to encourage a healthy way of commuting. An article by the Earth Policy Institute by Janet Larsen marks the exponential progress of bike-sharing programs, noting innovative solutions in cities across the world that make the programs safer, more accessible and more streamlined.
Join us after the break for more.
Businessman Offers to Save Brutalist Landmark From Demolition
Divisive concrete behemoth Preston Bus Station may yet be saved from its planned demolition. On the heels of a well co-ordinated campaign to save the brutalist monument, local businessman Simon Rigby has stepped in and offered to relieve the council of the building planning refurbish and operate the bus station himself.
Read more about the controversy and Rigby’s plan after the break…
Urban Development in the Bloomberg Years
Urban planning is delicately intertwined with government. As much as architects and designers try to avoid the overwrought laws and codes and prescriptive government policies that guide the construction and development of the urban landscape, they are very much a shaping force in cities such as New York. Ask any architect working in a such as NYC and they will likely describe the bureaucratic hassles of working with outdated zoning regulations and restrictive building codes. In this NPR segment Leonard Lopate interviews New York Magazine’s architecture critic Justin Davidson to discusses the impact of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s planning policies on New York City’s urban development.
Join us after the break for the link.
The London ‘LidoLine’ – Swim to Work on Y/N Studio’s Proposal
Join us after the break for more.
Forget High-Speed, the Next Transportation Will Be Hyper-Speed
Only hours have passed since Governor Jerry Brown signed the controversial bill providing initial funding for California’s $68 billion High-Speed Rail project, which will connect Sacramento to San Francisco to Los Angeles, but already another plan has emerged that could blow all of California’s efforts out of the water.
Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and the co-founder of both PayPal and Tesla Motors, isn’t content with his plans to get astronauts to the International Space Station or put humans on Mars. He recently shared with PandoDaily his desire to patent a 5th mode of transportation, which he coins the “Hyperloop,” that would cheaply get passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles – in just 30 minutes. What’s more, Musk claims the “Hyperloop” will never crash, be immune to weather, go twice as fast as an aeroplane, four times as fast as a bullet train, and – to top it off – run completely on solar power.
So, what would it look like? Although Musk likened the idea to Aeromovel (shown above) as well as a “Jetsons-tunnel” that “whisks you away,” no one really has any idea. Musk’s open sourcing the implementation to “anyone who can make a credible case that they can do it.” So whether the next frontier of transportation is pod-like, tube-like, or just a glorified train, we’ll have to wait at least a few weeks more before Musk’s willing to give up any more details…
Story via The Atlantic, Inhabitat, Business Insider, and Dvice.
