Omotesandō Street | Tokyo

Omotesandō in a trendy, upscale shopping street in Tokyo filled with over the top architecture designed by, almost exlusively, big names. It stretches from Harajuku to Takeshita and Aoyama-dori, which probably means nothing to you, so here’s a really cool Google map. The people over at PinkMag made a guide of Omotesandō architecture covering all the major buildings and that’s bootyshakingly awesome. I’ll try to upload slideshows of all the buildings throughout the day so edits will follow.

(via: PingMag)

Richard Rogers On Trees in Public Spaces

Sir Richard Rogers wrote an article at The Guardian on modern urbanism. This caught my attention: ”…all too often public space has been an afterthought – literally the space left over after planning.” Instead of patching small weird empety places with bushes and small trees, why not just incorporate the idea of adding real greenery to the plan in the firts place? You know you’re leaving the annoying task of fixing the badly designed space to your children. A lot of architects just do the building. And it should never be just about the building, your responsibilities are always greater.

/read his article at The Guardian

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(via: Archinect)

Slums

Valley Slum, Nairobi, Kenya

What does the future hold for urbanism? We are somewhat educated in the field of urbanism but studying urban methodology, street patterns, Lynch and urban design is merely a drop in the bucket. Cities are living organisms and here ‘in the western world’ they can be regulated rather easily but it will take more than urbanism to regulate a growing number of sheds and tents of shanty towns and slums. Of course we can not predict the future, but squatter settlings will inevitably be a big part of it. Cities like Buenos Aires, Kinshasa, Dhaka and São Paulo all contain huge areas inhabited by an increasingly poor population that simply have no choice but to live there. Urban life was created by humans for humans but has long ago muted into a new, harsh ecosystem that is a melting pot of diseases, natural disasters and fuckups caused by big international funding organizations that created them in the first place.

100 Design Solutions For Ordos, Inner Mongolia

Ordos 100 is a huge architectural project that is to take place in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. The client is Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd and the challange for the 100 architects from around the globe, selected by Jacques Herzog, will be for each to build a villa on a 1000m2 parcel. The whole masterplan will be led by a Chinese architectural designer Ai Weiwei of Fake Design. The architects that were chosen come from the States (22), Switzerland (14), Mexico (9), France (7) and many others. I always wondered how a city (or a district) would look like if it was designed by high profile architects and now we’ll see. Fingers crossed it won’t be completely twilight zone weird. By the way Jacques – you told me if I ate that formaldehyded ‘animal’ you’d let me be a part of this project but you totally bailed me out. That’s cool… no no, it’s ok really. No don’t call me it’s… Stop it Jacques! Stop begging, this is pathetic and I won’t do it. (Drop me a line sir, I’m totaly in.)

slideshow: click

(via: Inhabitat)

Dubai City

The largest mall in the world.

Here are some shots and footages of the insanity that is called Dubai City, the main city of one of the 7 United Arab Emirates. I’m sure you know heaps about it already but this is how it looks like from the sky. If you’ve been wondering where they get the money from, it goes a little something like this. Constantly the cities’ wealth and the gain of it is mistaken to be coming from one source – oil. In fact, the percentage of that revenue is merely 6%. Other finances come from fast growing tourism, business and trade. JAFZA, the Jebel Ali Free Zone, is located in the biggest man-made port, the Jebel Ali Port, and is a free economic zone that represents the biggest financial boost for the area. It is a ”140 km2 free trade zone that offers office units, warehouses and land sites for lease, whilst storage space in the cold and cool stores, open storage areas and ultra modern cargo handling equipment can be hired.” In 2006, 6000 companies have been registered. Now you know.

You like? Not to diss them or anything but I’m not feeling it. Let’s do the rain dance so the emirate gets some greens.

photos:  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14

vids:  Dubai 2009    Burj Dubai Skyscraper

(via: The Sudanese Thinker, photos: nubricks)

When You Think You’ve Seen It All…

I don’t know what to think about this particular farmer but this made me chuckle. There will always be illegal buildings I suppose. Urbanists and environmentalists are thought to be bright people and try to keep the green belts and agricultutal lands intact. But ha ha, think not that there isn’t a brighter cookie in the jar to outsmart them!

How to build a house on a piece of protected agricultural land?

1) Build a huge frame and cover it with hay bales and bushes.

2) Build huge house inside the frame so it’s out of sight of the neighbours.

3) Wait 4 years so that you trick the law that says: If nobody complains about a situation on a piece of land, it is permitted to stay.

4) Take the hay away and live in house.

5) Use laser mind control wand to make them think it’s always been there.

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Oh please, keep reading.

Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong, China

click on the image for a larger view

I read a great post today on Archidose (via Blog Like You Give a Damn) about Kowloon Walled city in Hong Kong that was brought down in 1993. Kowloon Walled city was a densely built extremely overpopulated area in Hong Kong initialy built as a watchpost for the guards that would defend the area against pirates. By the year of 1947 the city had a population of 2000. In ’71 10.000 people were living in 2.185 dwellings. Ultimately, after several attempts to evacuate the squatters, the evacuation was completed in 1992 and the demolition was carried out in 1993. Check out the timeline done my Archidose here. The city has a linkage to the nonverbal Ron Fricke film Baraka that features Kowloon. A definite must see for all of you who haven’t seen it yet.

images: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

video – footage: a footage of Kowloon from 1990

video – Baraka: trailer remix with Adyashanti (zen master) audio

(via: Archidose, more images at Spirit of Baraka < scroll down)

19.20.21 | Supercities Study

Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED conferences, made this slideshow revieling interesting data about supercities and their rise throughout history. 19.20.21 will be a ”five-year study that will encompass all aspects of the phenomenon of supercities”. The study will cover comparative and statistical analysis based on the following subjects (bare with me): health, education, transportation, demographics, energy consumption, growth patterns, water sources, use and quality, waste management, economics and the cost of living, infrastructure, quality of life and standard of living indices, crime dynamics, calamity risk, culture and art.

Thanks to their immense effort, the whole world will have access to all the information listed above and changes to the urban hubs (including urban design and strategies) could be done more effectively because of the project’s transparency.

Click on the image above to view the slideshow.
(via: swissmiss)

Masdar Development | Foster & Partners

The city of Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates will soon get an astonishing add-on designed by Foster & Partners – an eco-town/district called Masdar. The Masdar Initiative is ”a global cooperative platform for open engagement in the search for solutions to some of mankind’s most pressing issues: energy security, climate change and truly sustainable human development.” The city itself will be formed inside of a 6x6km2 square-shaped floor plan and will provide homes for some 50.000 people. The city will be zero-waste, zero-carbon and car-free.

– cooling: concentrated solar power

– electricity: photovoltaic (solar) panels

– water: solar-powered desalination plant

Eye Candy From Across The Pond

Dan Barry took a trip with Kenneth Fry and photographer Ángel Franco and as a result wrote an article entitled A Place Just Like Every Other Place. Only Not. that was published by The New York Times on Dec23rd 2007. This video is part of that article addressing the problem of visual pollution in the States. “Kenneth Fry is the president of Scenic America, and organization that works to preserve and enhance the visual character of America’s communities. The visual pollution they try to address can be found almost anywhere/…”

We should not point any fingers at US because of this but rather realize that this might happen/ is happening in Europe as well, and as future architects and city planners it is our duty to design with conscience. Also check out the James Howard Kunstler’s talk about The Clusterfuck Nation. Holy ugly shit, now my eyes are hurting. If you ever design something like that, I shall poke you in the eye repeatedly with a rusty fork.