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It has been said that Central Park is New York's "living room."  New technology firms and 21st century schools compete in creating collaborative workplaces forming "neighborhoods" connected by "streets" leading to "commons" or "town squares."  Flexibility and adaptability are king, blurring the lines made by walls until inside is out and outside is in. Nature is part of this game, first with buildings set in nature (the office park) and then with nature in buildings, like in the huge tent-like structure proposed by Bjarke Ingels (BIG) for Google in Mountainview.  It can be confusing to follow the many iterations of forms, from urban to suburban back to urban, from undesignated spaces to specialized spaces back to undesignated ones.  Closed offices open up, then fill with cubicles, then become open offices again.  We move from specialized classrooms to open classrooms, to flexible learning studios with moveable walls and learning str...

Most Americans are uncomfortable with a post industrial society in which jobs are either menial service jobs or filled by academics, creatives or IT people. Everybody remembers good paying industrial jobs that disappeared in the "big sucking sound" that presidential candidate Ross Perrot heard in the wake of NAFTA. Vestiges of the glory days of industrial production: Carroll Camden Industrial Park, Baltimore (photo: ArchPlan) Now it is the Transpacific Partnership TPP that many fear will suck even more manufacturing jobs out of America. We have a sweet spot for manufacturing in our hearts which which grow fonder of it the more it dwindles. In that sense manufacturing is the new farming, an occupation once associated with hardship and exploitation, now part of a yearned for ideal. The dream of clean, well-paying local manufacturing and sustainable local farming bask in a warm glow. Add caption The reality, of course, is that manufacturing in the US hardly was romantic in the p...

Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse Bleak windswept plazas, overwhelming brutalist concrete boxes, glass boxes, public housing misery, the car fixated city, urban freeways, separation of uses and Euclidian zoning, soulless high-rises – there is hardly any ailment that plagues our cities that isn't laid on the doorstep of modernism. Quite different from sentiments in Europe, there is little love for modernism in the US. True, one can travel through many cities, here and abroad and find plenty of examples for any or all of the above perceptions and notions and one can find in each case some plausible linkage to writings of architects, planners and others who considered themselves modernists that corroborate the damning verdict about modernism as the cause of much we don't like about our cities. Corbusier's proposal for La Ville Radieuse and especially his Plan Voisan Pour Paris have become infamous examples of urban renewal or soulless new towns which are exemplified by Frank Lloy...

The big questions facing community development After the blue chip companies left town and with them blue and white collar workers, non-profits began to take their place, establishing headquarters in Baltimore. Maybe not a surprising transition, in a hard hit legacy city in a nation with growing poverty and shrinking government. Druid Heights CDC title image  But the non-profits are not exactly flourishing. In the week after the Baltimore riots the community development corporation (CDC) located right at ground zero of the unrest changed its leadership. A smaller CDC in Sandtown folded long ago. A very successful CDC at Patterson Park went under when the recession hit. It is tempting to see this as an indication of a long standing and pervasive crisis in community development that the recent turmoil highlighted, especially because Baltimore’s unrest originated in an area that experienced decades of community development-type intervention. The Atlantic’s  CityLab brought to a p...