#IABR — Thousand Rain Gardens
The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam’s Smart Cities competition received 80 entries by students and young researchers from across the globe. These projects represented the future of cities through smarter technology application in areas such as distribution, energy, mobility, and infrastructure. The Smart Cities Biennial Award ceremony, held at the end of this past April, announced the Sendai […]
Why Not Store Bikes On Rooftops?
Forget about rooftop gardens, rooftop campsites and rooftop farms, we need our roofs to solve a much bigger problem — to store bikes. The engineers at IBA, the Amsterdam Department of Engineering, came up with the idea to install Velominck bike storage facilities on top of the city's roofs.
Neighborland: Crowd-Sourcing Community Development
We love a good crowd-sourcing initiative, whether it’s helping determine what neighbourhoods are safe or unsafe or establishing a do-it-yourself framework for urbanism. We aren’t living in closed cities (well, except for these folks) and societies, and crowd-sourcing prompts us all to interact just a little bit more to make sure our increasingly hectic and […]
Illumination As A Strategic Intervention In New Delhi
What can light do for the urban future of New Delhi? In a series of experiments, Philips tries to explore in which different ways lighting can make a difference in tomorrow's world cities.
Glowing Canals In Amsterdam
The area of Falmouth close to Montego Bay in Jamaica is famous for its Luminous Lagoon, where water naturally illuminates due to the micro-organisms living in the shallow, warm area where salt and fresh water meets. The fish and giant rays can even be observed from a boat, creating a certain discomfort if one is […]
The World’s Largest Tetris Game
On Friday 20 April, a group of hackers at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology turned the facade of MIT’s Green Building into an awesome playable version of the classic game Tetris. First the word TETRIS scrolled down the facade of the building, a screen of 153 windows = 153 pixels, followed by a giant Tetris game. A console […]
Parking Lot Picnic
You’ll find that good cities are sprinkled with little parks great for soaking in the sun, meeting people, reading a book, and… picnicking! However, the development trends of the past century have covered the land with vast swaths of pavement. Pavement that caters well to the automobile, and not much else. Here, in a typical […]
Silent World: What Makes A City A City
Lucie & Simon, a French/German duo of photographers, recently put together a series of humbling photographs of huge urban spaces completely devoid of activity. The photographs (also with an accompanying video that ably mixes in Philip Glass and Daft Punk) show some of the busiest places in the world (Tiananmen Square, Times Square, Place Montparnasse) […]
Paige Smith’s Geodic Urban Street Art
Over the past couple of months, shiny crystals quartz and geodes have been discovered in neglected nooks of the Los Angeles Area. The street art project was created by freelance artist and graphic designer Paige Smith, who also goes by A common name. Geode is her latest and ongoing project. The artist uses painted paper as her main material, and […]
Meals On Wheels: Dutch Design Meets Dinner
Mobile food is a wonderful thing. Whether it’s a Japanese-style hot dog stand in Vancouver or Iraqi mahshi from one of Portland’s world-famous food carts, there’s something to be said for having the ability to head outside to pick up a tasty meal on the street corner. Diemen-based Tuk Tuk Factory recently unveiled their e-Tuk […]
A Villa For Urban Bees
One of our urban trends for 2012, the 'design for animals', involves increasing numbers of products that extend design principles to the world of animals, whether it's modern bird houses or skyscrapers for bats. This ready-made villa for urban bees, found on Bright, is a product that goes hand-in-hand with this trend, as well as the urban beekeeping hype that's spreading across cities around the globe. If you want to keep bees but don't know how to do it, this product seems to be a solution.
Forget SimCity, Try The Augmented City
Complex urban forms require complex modelling tools in order to represent them digitally. But this is just neat: over at the Barlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London, they’ve been playing around with ways to digitally represent our cities. CityEngine is a 3D content producer that allows architects, designers, and planners to […]
A Narrative Experience In A Patchwork City
Recently we stumbled upon this stunning 1:200 patchwork of a city that Dutch architecture student Arne Lijbers created at the Waag Society fab lab in Amsterdam. Lijbers used only three ingredients — cardboard, glue and a laser cutter. He says it took him a month to build his imaginary city, but the result is great. Click here for more […]
Melvin The Traveling Mini Machine
Why take the path of most resistance, when there’s an easy way to go? This is almost a universal agreement. In the case of technologies, they can provide us with a simple solution for more complex problems. Efficient is the way to go. However, a Rube Goldberg machine like Melvin the Traveling Mini Machine by Eindhoven-based […]
Holes In The City
San Francisco-based artist Kathryn Clark used to work as an urban planner between 1999 and 2004. In 2007, when the foreclosures began to occur in the United States, she began wondering to which extent she added to this problem by promoting home ownership. Using quilts, she created an extraordinary series of visualizations, based on maps […]
