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Showing posts from April, 2015

An Overview of Resilient Construction

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This article is one in a series looking at the influences of codes on architecture and design Earth Day may be as good an occasion as any to raise awareness of the powers of nature and what it takes to withstand them or be resilient. With the growing popularity of the term resilience, the scope of its usage becomes ever broader. The same happened to the term “sustainability.” Now resilience is even bigger than sustainability. To be sustainable, architecture has to be resilient, the thinking goes. From  "Toward a More Resilient Future" Sociologists have begun to use the concept of social resilience, economists economical resilience, and environmentalists continue to use the environment as model for resilience, writ large. Haven’t they been saying all along that humans should take lessons from nature about the resilience of what they build? That nature tells us about diversity and redundancy, which allow natural systems to "spring back" improbably after forest fires,

Are Cities Becoming Less Authentic?

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In the never ending quest to find out what millennials want (bike sharing, walkability, brewpubs, strong coffee, place-making) another attribute is frequently mentioned: Authenticity, both as a desired quality millennials seek, or as a threatened quality that their influx destroys.   City slogans come and go These notions lead immediately to the question: what makes places or cities authentic? Is it their most famous landmark (the Eiffel Tower, the Pantheon, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building), an iconic skyline (New York, Dubai), a memorable slogan (the “City That Never Sleeps”), gritty art (Berlin's Kreuzberg before unification) or tough scars that come from the heavy blows of history (Detroit)?  This last example brings to mind a related word that people may seek alongside authenticity: Character. If hardship builds character and authenticity, Detroit and all the other industrial legacy cities must be full of it. Are the smokestack cities of the past, the ones

Oriole Park at Camden Yards - Still the Model for Urban Ballparks

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When fans stream into Oriole Park at Camden Yards for Opening Day today, they enter what many consider the best baseball park in the country. Certainly, it is one that set a whole set of new standards. There are many who claim to be the fathers and mothers of Camden Yards, above all the the late "do it now" governor William Don Schaefer. HOK the architects of record and the young RTKL architect, who as a student, had developed the idea of using the historic B&O  warehouse as the backdrop for the stadium.  Then there is Janet Marie Smith, architectural adviser to the Orioles who carefully orchestrated the detailed design and feel of the ballpark to be as intimate as the nation's oldest Major Baseball League ballpark, the 1912 Fenway Park in Boston.  Oriole Park with Hilton Hotel The Oriole Park.com website states this under its history tab: When Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992, a new era of Major League Baseball began. The park was brand new, but s