Chinese architect and town planner Wu Liangyong was recently featured in a new interview from the International Union of Architects (UIA) about his life and teaching. As the former Vice-President of the UIA and the Architectural Society of China (ASC), Liangyong won the Jean Tschumi Prize back in 1996. Today, he reflects on his academic career spanning 70 years at the Tsinghua University School of Architecture.
In 1942, less than a year after the United States was pulled into World War II, the U.S Army Corps of Engineers quickly and quietly began acquiring large parcels of land in remote areas in three states. Soon after, thousands of young designers, engineers, planners, scientists, and their families, began arriving at these sites that were heavily shielded from public view. Workers there constructed hundreds of buildings including houses, industrial structures, research labs, and testing facilities at unprecedented speed and scale.
Last week, the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) released Designing Streets for Kids to set a new global baseline for designing urban streets. Designing Streets for Kids builds upon the approach of putting people first, with a focus on the specific needs of babies, children, and their caregivers as pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users in urban streets around the world.
The Henning Larsen-designed Belfast Waterside development was officially granted planning approval by the Belfast City Council, after a year in the planning approval process. Located on the site of the former Sirocco Works, the project is set to “transform the 2.6-hectare area on the east bank of the River Lagan that has been disused for nearly two decades”.
In a world devastated by war and destruction, new ideas for future reconstruction of cities are emerging. The latest technologies are creating opportunities to shape better built environments and better urban experiences. While the world has had its fair share of failed attempts of post-war reconstruction, the 21st century is promising concepts more in touch with culture, integration, and sustainability.
As we all know, technology is the game-changer of this century. It has ultimately modified how we design and build, and with the development of Artificial Intelligence, boundaries have been pushed furthermore. Able to transform the environment we live in, AI can also help shape a better version of the environment we have lost.
Today's designers have inherited unprecedented global challenges, a legacy which will require radically new ways of fashioning the buildings, places, and landscapes that harbor our diverse ways of life. The College of Environmental Design offers several introductory and advanced programs for those interested in confronting these challenges in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and environmental planning, urban design, and sustainable city planning. Please visit UC Berkeley's Summer Programs website to view images of student work and learn more about the CED Summer experience.
Amidst efforts to revitalize and improve urban centers, the peripheral areas of cities are often ignored or forgotten. The intense focus on the downtown core means, in terms of land use, that only a relatively small area receives the majority of designers’ attention. "Dvorulitsa" (literally "Yardstreet" in Russian) is an urban development strategy proposed by Russian architecture firm Meganom, aiming to shift that focus. Taking the idea of the “superpark” from the 2013 study, "Archaeology of the Periphery," the yardstreet project presents an alternative method of viewing the periphery of a post-soviet city.
The Cavatina Group has completed a series of designs rethinking public space and urban revitalization in Poland. With projects located through the city of Bielsko-Biała, the group's larger project aims to transform city parkways and major cultural venues. From street intersections and a former market to underutilized structures, the plan lays out a vision for historic buildings and new architecture alike.
Street art has long surpassed mere trend to become an integral part of cities' cultural identities. What was once considered vandalism is now not only accepted but encouraged. The works of once-prosecuted artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey are now collector's items; murals can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 or more. Through their works, artists may even have the power to save cities.
Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen is perhaps best known for pioneering the design of the American mall typology. His visions for these spaces sought to incorporate various aspects of the city into a single enclosed or indoor space, with a particular focus on consumption and commercial activity. His sprawling designs functioned as the perfect complement to America’s burgeoning leisure-driven consumer culture as a booming economy and an increase in car travel reinforced the possibilities of this new postwar way of life. Perhaps lesser-known, however, is Gruen’s commission from the Iranian government to design an urban plan for the city of Tehran in the late 1960s.
_-_Administration_and_Cour_d'Honneur.jpg?1497053167)
The United States had made an admirable showing for itself at the very first World’s Fair, the Crystal Palace Exhibition, held in the United Kingdom in 1851. British newspapers were unreserved in their praise, declaring America’s displayed inventions to be more ingenious and useful than any others at the Fair; the Liverpool Times asserted “no longer to be ridiculed, much less despised.” Unlike various European governments, which spent lavishly on their national displays in the exhibitions that followed, the US Congress was hesitant to contribute funds, forcing exhibitors to rely on individuals for support. Interest in international exhibitions fell during the nation’s bloody Civil War; things recovered quickly enough in the wake of the conflict, however, that the country could host the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Celebrating both American patriotism and technological progress, the Centennial Exhibition was a resounding success which set the stage for another great American fair: the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.[1]
A consortium comprising Progress, Miralles Tagliabue EMBT and Cushman & Wakefield recently reached the final stage of a design competition to create a tourist center in Russia in part of the embankment named after Admiral Serebryakov in the city of Novorossiysk. The proposal provides the required hospitality spaces but also features unique facilities, such as a wine museum, a fish market and an "artificial island", all serving as new centers of attraction for residents and visitors of the city. The foundation of the design concept is based on three components: "the idea of a natural city, the unification of the three forces of nature and the characteristic appearance of Novorossiysk as a port city."
An unfortunate fact of the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) industry is that, between every stage of the process—from planning and design to construction and operations—critical data is lost.
The reality is, when you move data between phases of, say, the usable lifecycle of a bridge, you end up shuttling that data back and forth between software systems that recognize only their own data sets. The minute you translate that data, you reduce its richness and value. When a project stakeholder needs data from an earlier phase of the process, planners, designers, and engineers often have to manually re-create that information, resulting in unnecessary rework.
![Call for Applications: Summer [IN]STITUTE in Environmental Design](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/58fa/065c/e58e/ceac/3100/0b9f/medium_jpg/open-uri20170421-7176-wv5zng.jpg?1492780631)
UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design is now accepting applications from prospective participants in the 2016 Summer [IN]STITUTE in Environmental Design. This six week intensive summer program gives students the opportunity to test their enthusiasm for the material and culture of environmental design.
The Summer [IN]STITUTE consists of [IN]ARCH, [IN]LAND and [IN]CITY, three introductory programs in architecture, landscape architecture and sustainable city planning for post-baccalaureate students and senior-level undergraduates, as well as [IN]ARCH ADV, an advanced studio for post-baccalaureate students who have a degree in architecture or who are senior-level architecture majors.
California is suffering through its 5th year of severe water shortage. Aquifers and rivers continue to dry out as the water provided by melting snowpacks is reduced, and even the heavy rain brought by El Niño this year could not relieve the drought. Authorities are wary of the long-term consequences for California and neighboring areas of the Colorado River, and Santa Monica is now seeing a growing number of initiatives to control the use of potable water and find sustainable solutions.
Most recently, a competition asked architects, artists and scientists to conceive sustainable infrastructure projects to improve Santa Monica’s water supply. Bart//Bratke and studioDE developed a raft structure named “Foram” that illustrates the future of floating platforms in sustainable development.
_-_Midway_2.jpg?1497053349 "Courtesy of Wikimedia user RillkeBot (Public Domain)")
_-_USG_Building_and_Ho_O_den.jpg?1497053430 "Although the building itself was handsome, the exhibits of the United States Government Building failed to entice many of the fair’s visitors. In the foreground stands the Ho-O-Den, a replica medieval Japanese palace. ImageCourtesy of Wikimedia user RillkeBot (Public Domain)")
_-_Birds_Eye.jpg?1497053224 "Courtesy of Wikimedia user scewing (Public Domain")
_-_Map.jpg?1497053293 "A map of the 1893 Exposition shows how much of the fair’s buildings were laid out on axis with the court of honor. ImageCourtesy of Wikimedia user scewing (Public Domain)")
