The City Council of San Jose recently approved Google’s “Downtown West” mixed-use corporate campus, an 80-acre net-zero environment, also set to feature the largest multimodal transit hub on the west coast. A departure from the tech campuses of Silicon Valley, the masterplan designed by San Francisco-based SITELAB urban studio is envisioned as an integrated part of the urban environment, an extension of Downtown San Jose open to the local community.
SMAR Architecture Studio has won the Urban Confluence competition to envision a new landmark for Silicon Valley. The Breeze of Innovation project is a forest of kinetic rods swaying in the wind creating a mesmerizing visual effect.
Design practice CROX has designed a conceptual vertical park for San Jose, California. Dubbed the San Jose Ring, the landmark project takes on a circular shape inspired by architect Lin Congran's idea of unity and historical continuity. As the team outlines, the project aims to reconnect people and nature through a huge loop, emphasizing connection through a combination of sculpture, architecture and park space.
Google has released new details of a sprawling, 80-acre plan to transform downtown San Jose, California. Designed to be a corporate campus, the "Downtown West" development will emphasize public open space and parkland. Google intends to make the area feel less like a traditional corporate development by incorporating office space, housing, retail and other uses within a new urban neighborhood framework.
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Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) has just announced the groundbreaking of Platform 16, an office campus in Downtown San Jose, California. Comprising three-buildings, the 1,200,000-square-foot project is an innovative complex that favors indoor and outdoor connections.
Vienna, Austria has been ranked as the city with the best quality of life in the world for ten consecutive years. The ranking made by multinational consultancy Mercer is dominated by Western European cities in the highest positions, while Vancouver, Canada reached third place, becoming the highest-ranking city in North America for the last 10 years.
As anyone who has recently attempted apartment-hunting in a major urban area will know, reasonably-priced housing can be difficult to come by for many and salaries don’t always seem to match the cost of living. This gap is contributing to housing crises in developed and developing countries worldwide. People are simply being priced out of cities, where housing has become a commodity instead of a basic human right. Financial speculation and states’ support of financial markets in a way that makes housing unaffordable has created an unsustainable global housing crisis.
Earlier this year the 13th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey was released for 2017, revealing that the number of “severely unaffordable” major housing markets rose from 26 to 29 this year; the problem is getting worse. The study evaluates 406 metropolitan housing markets in nine of the world's major economies and uses the “median multiple” approach to determine affordability. By dividing the median house price by the median household income of an area, this method is meant to be a summary of “middle-income housing affordability.”
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