But it is out there. This page will keep a running list of articles that I come across. If you have any to suggest, please write to me at dsucher@citycomforts.com.

I usually start my own day by scanning Arts & Letters Daily, whose excellent work has been the inspiration for this page. But few of the journals it lists cover the built environment with much intensity.

Where, as often as not, I find something of interest is as follows.

The New York Times Real Estate
Metropolis
Wired

Thank you for visiting.

It is not unusual to see a child in the street chastising a driver for going too fast in the Methleys neighbourhood near Leeds city centre. A couple of years ago, residents agreed to drive at no more than 10 miles an hour as part of a community festival. The experiment was so successful that it made residents want to change for good the power balance between pedestrians and cars...[link]

All 1380 pages of S,M,L,XL are wallpapered through the ICA's gallery as a running commentary. It is a big seller. The biggest thing in it, fame wise, is a celebrated essay on "Bigness" as an architectural determinant. This is lucidly written, but all it comes down to is that some buildings are now so huge that there's room for lots of other architectures to happen inside their skins. This is absolutely true to the point of being rather obvious. It doesn't amount to much as a theory, you'd think - but it's the way he tells 'em. The presentation, the packaging, the air of myth and mystery, is a great deal to do with the success of Koolhaas...[link]

Hugh Pearman strikes a plausible note: treat Koolhaas _seriously_ but _not seriously_ i.e. see through his archi-babble as insignificant froth but leave room for his real skill as an architect.

I focus less on individual buildings than on how the buildings fit together to form a city. So my own preference is more in the "Jerry-Rubin-Testifies-at-HUAC" direction: humor. So many people make the mistake of treating Koolhaas' presentations as serious commentary and respond to them as if they have substance, thus elevating the man's stature as a 'design theorist.' The better approach might be to simply smile indulgently.

For example, recently I ran across this energetic remark: "I certainly find all his theories just a tad short of Big Brother's."

Personally, I can find no fault with his "theories." My criticism of his "theories" is much more basic. "There is no there, there." His ideas appear to be either too amorphous to have any juice or utility--for example, "bigness"--or too basic--for example, "flexibility"--to be a contribution of any great value. (d.s.)

Only a month ago Webvan Group Inc., a Silicon Valley startup selling groceries online, was taking its first orders from customers. Friday (July 9 ed.) it placed a sizable order of its own, asking Bechtel, the engineering and construction giant, to build distribution and delivery centers in 26 markets.

And even as Internet deals go, the price tag was impressive: $1 billion... [link]

When the deliveryman failed to show for several hours, I checked my order confirmation and realized that the groceries wouldn't arrive until the next day. Approximately 21 hours after I sent my order, a driver pulled up to my apartment with a cheery hello, carrying the yellow tote...[link]

What distinguishes the most recent massacre is that, under the code words of modernity and urbanisme, what animates the many culprits, in and out of government, is the same kind of contempt for knowledge, tradition, beauty, and truth that animates the enemies of the idea of a Western canon in education and of the more time-tested values of human civilization...[link]

"Telling" and "asserting" that something is wrong is not as effective as "showing."

Like many discussions of the built environment, this article from a "prestige" journal is full of moralistic assertions but little concrete detail to show us the way. The author's understandable scorn for the use of "code words" to discuss buildings ("modernity and urbanisme" ) is hardly persuasive----even a bit grimly humorous----when she herself uses twice as many code words ("knowledge, tradition, beauty, and truth") to make her own point.

One puts down the article not quite knowing what to look for in the cityscape of Paris, what is significant and what is not. [d.s.]

The July 5, 1999 issue of The New Yorker has a very worthwhile article by Jane Kramer titled "Living with Berlin...How do you rebuild a city that wants to settle its accounts with the past, but can't decide what its future should be?"
Too bad The New Yorker is not on-line.

Using airbag technology, a Japanese construction company has developed a safety vest to protect construction workers from injuries due to falls...[link]

Say hello to the talking crosswalk. The first one in Los Angeles introduced itself Friday to 2,500 blind and visually impaired people gathered at Century Boulevard and Concourse Way for a convention.

The automated voice system is connected to the pedestrian signals in front of the Airport Westin hotel. It tells when it is safe to cross the busy, 120-foot-wide boulevard, and when it is safer to stay on the curb. "Crossing Century at Concourse," the signal announced as pedestrians pressed the "walk" button. When boulevard traffic came to a halt a few moments later, the voice advised: "The walk sign is on to cross Century." [link]

We in the capitalist West used to sneer at communist Russia for its long queues and chronic shortages. But if the communists were still in business today you wonder what they would make of our property market...[link]

In May 1979, after a two-year political battle, the city won approval from state officials to treat its sewage not with chemicals but with a system of freshwater marshes that has since become a model for natural wastewater treatment throughout the world...[link] `

We can put Europe back to work by reducing home ownership... [link]

For developers and architects, it has long been the juiciest prize in Manhattan, a squalid corridor of rail yards covering 12 square blocks and stretching from the General Post Office on Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River. But what should be built on it?.. [link]

..I focused on the role Philip Johnson played in securing Michael Graves the job, and the dangers of an unwitting, architecturally naive public relying on the advice of a partisan party for professional advice... [link]

I asked three leading urbanists and city activists to spend some time with the game's latest incarnation, SimCity 3000, released earlier this year to mixed reviews... [link]

"Many of the lesbians we know have been interested in apartments as investments, but for their own homes they tend to want a house with a garden," he said... [link]

...these places seem the very definition of sprawl - areas typically dissected by wide, traffic-clogged streets, ringed by apartment compounds, and anchored to a strip mall that often turns its back on the neighborhood.
But.. these neighborhoods look a lot like urban villages in the rough and could be the answer to many of the region's biggest growth-related problems... [link]

... the new urban future will be a vigorous edge-city outer ring, with a shell city within. It is hopeless, and counterproductive, to try to stop edge city in its tracks. The real task is to make shell city humane... [link]

This concluding-sentence of the essay should have been the opener. Yes, it takes a leap of imagination to even ponder the possibility, but the central task of metropolitan planning is how to transform the dreary suburban shopping districts of our edge cities into pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods.[d.s.]

They were flying over D.C. and Ike looked down, and there was I-95, which cuts right through the middle of Washington. They were starting the demolition and the grading, and Ike saw this slash going into the city and said, "What's going on down there?" They said, "That's the interstate system." He said, "I never wanted that. I thought we were going to do it like they do it in Europe and build to the edge of the city and then do a ring around.".. [link]

With uncommon deference to the works of art on display in his galleries, Taniguchi rejects the egocentrically assertive role we have come to expect from museum architects in recent years. In doing so he eliminates perceptual barriers between the building art and the fine arts, making the separation of those mediums seem blissfully a thing of the past...[link]

Our urban tragedy is that---while first world citizens hunger for urban environments of grace and style---an architect cannot build a "name" for him/herself by designing buildings which "fit-in" and are comfortable. There is a common interest between architects (with goals of global glory) and their clients in making a "statement"---rather than merely a contribution to the urban landscape [d.s.].

In the most striking part of the analysis, the authors reveal that whether cities develop strong policy guidelines for the design of downtown open space or whether they work on a case by case negotiation, the result is the same. The contemporary American downtown is designed, the authors argue, not by reference to an overall vision, but on a project-by-project basis. This is why, they contend, it looks and feels so formally and socially fragmented... [link]

Heaven help us indeed if we all marched to "an overall vision." [d.s.]

Some of society's most important decisions concern the far distant future. Up to now, economics has failed to shed much light on them ...Some economists take the view that the welfare of future generations should be given the same weight as the welfare of today's. This innocent-sounding stipulation has a big effect...[link]

The subject of this Notebook---building and rebuilding the urban environments of the world---often involves proposals for large social investments such as mass-transit systems which may not pay a dividend for many decades. This fascinating article explores what is known as the 'discount rate' which we---individuals as well as institutions---apply to current investments to determine if they are sound or not. [d.s.]

There is no space, no money and no appetite for endless road-building. That is why road pricing is coming...[link]

"If it's free, I'll take a bunch." That's a natural, human attitude and one of the reasons we have congested urban highways. The solution to the 'tragedy of the commons' of our streets and roads is to create a market . Or at least so say many advocates of 'congestion pricing.' [d.s.]

Developers should be able to walk into their local council office and ask for an immediate and complete picture of the planning controls affecting any parcel of land across the nation... [link]

Predictions that 25 per cent of the workforce will be based at home in the future is the motivation behind a new city project of luxury home/offices... [link]

After 30 years of failed attempts to tame the traffic in Herald Square, the city is planning to widen sidewalks, add crosswalks, eliminate a lane of traffic and extend islands to make it safer, and a little less nerve-racking, for the 100 million pedestrians who cross the square each year... [link]

Was Paul Reichmann crazy when he sank $1.6 billion into a project to develop an 81-acre plot of unused docklands on the outskirts of London? Maybe not, but he was something almost as bad for a real estate developer: He was too early... [link]

Besides "location, location, location" success in real estate development also involves "timing, timing, timing." To some degree, the politically-popular slow-growth mentality of many local goivernments may diminish the importance of timing by maintaining a permanent tight market [d.s.].

Cecil Rhodes spoke for many plutocrats when he wrote to an argumentative architect: 'All I care for at the moment is to find an architect willing to carry out my instructions...This attitude, in [author] Mordaunt Crook's view, accounts for the generally second-rate architecture of the nouveau-riche houses... [link]

The subject of the book may be architecture but this review is mostly about snobbery. The reviewer's seemingly-central and tremendously-provocative put-down (above)---summing up simultaneously the proper role of architect and a whole generation of buildings---is presented without elaboration or crtitique, which raises doubts about either the reviewer or the book or both. The tut-tutting of the anti-semitism of the era is also presented with such relish as to make one wonder if the puppets on paper are happy to say what the puppet-master cannot. [d.s.].

Koolhaas has a way with words, which includes a facility for obscuring difficult questions by enveloping them in rather glib statements. He finds it "crucial that the tradition of reinvention, which may be the most fertile, progressive Dutch tradition, is itself reinvented." Sounds good. But what precisely does he mean? What is to be reinvented? You cannot reinvent chaos or spontaneity. But you can give it scope, by an architecture that doesn't pretend to offer any lasting solutions but allows people to use it in any way they like... [link]

Buruma has got the first part right---Rem is glib. But Buruma seems to forget that flexibility and adaptability have been core values in building since humans moved into caves. [d.s.].

ON the day of my interview with Rem Koolhaas, I left the house wearing the wrong shoes. The suede was too casual for the slacks... [link]

Take, for example, the Taco Time on Northeast 45th Street in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood. Here is a shopping street filled with small, locally owned businesses. Each has added a combination of carefully crafted storefront windows, entrances and signs - all aimed at engaging the people who stroll along the street day and night. What does this fast-food business do but thumb its nose at all this effort and build a box of mirrored glass that looks as if it wandered in from some suburban office park... [link] [comments]

Reviewing buildings and urban spaces is as much an art as a science. So I have no magic formula to offer readers for distinguishing masterpieces from design duds. But I can suggest a few key things to look for... [link]

There are genuine arguments for those proposals, which reflect a particular vision of community life. That vision is too static and intolerant in my view, but it deserves debate--the sort of examination the Austin summit was too friendly to conduct... [link]

This article is a perfect example of the intellectual right's disingenuousness when it comes to urban design. [d.s.].

... In the interview, Daley indulged in a wide-ranging discussion about one of his favorite subjects: the way Chicago looks. That he would grant the interview -- or that an architecture critic would feel compelled to ask for one -- tells a lot about the difference between him and his predecessors... [link]

The Central Business District offers the best value for office leasing in Melbourne and it is especially good value if companies don't have large car parking requirements... [link]

...when an organization commissioned an architectural masterpiece for itself, it was almost always done at precisely the moment when that organization was on its last legs... [link]

Extremely intriguing thesis. But by way of counter-examples: what about the Catholic Church's gothic cathedral-12th & 13th century? Or the English aristocracy's country houses -17th & 18th? There was still a lot of trotting left in the ponies that built them.[d.s.].

WIRED:
It would also seem likely to produce a less hospitable environment.
KOOLHAAS:
I disagree. People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable... [link]

The mystery of Koolhaas is not the man himself or his so-called"thoughts" but why anyone takes him seriously as a thinker. Koolhaas's significant stature as a "design theoretician" says more about the paucity of public thought on the built-environment than about his ramblings. He may indeed be a competent architect but as a fount of significant meaning for thinking about cities, I don't think so.[d.s.].

The trend of modern times appears to indicate that citizens of democracies are willing heedlessly to surrender their freedoms to purchase social equality (along with economic security), apparently oblivious of the consequences...[link] [comments]

One of the reasons edge cities haven't attracted many artists and bohemians is that so much of it is brand-new and therefore expensive...[link]

Though most attention has been given to revitalizing/preserving central cities, the real action inthe future will be to transform the strip-mall suburbs.[d.s.].

I was sitting on a plush velvet sofa, a low oval coffee table before me, in a room with a low ceiling and dim random lighting. It was no different from a living room, a very nice living room, where I would have been happy just to sit and relax.
But this was a restaurant...[link]

Intel would invest up to $12.5 billion in new equipment and plant upgrades over the next 15 years, and the county would grant $200 million in property tax breaks.
And just one more thing, the county asked: Please don't create too many new jobs...[link]

The catch-22 and irony of growth-management is that the more successfully a region limits growth the more attractive it becomes.[d.s.].

The attraction of living within walking distance of restaurants and cultural activities persuaded Eli Egozi and his wife, Kathleen, to settle for a 2,500-square-foot semi-attached town house in a development called Harborview at Port Jefferson, even though their previous home in the Chicago suburb of Naperville had given them more than 4,000 square feet... [link]

The explosion in E-Commerce, or retailing over the Internet, has prompted speculation that the traditional retail store is doomed. This concern is reflected in investor sentiment, which has caused retail-related REIT stocks to lag the entire REIT industry since the end of last year. Is this concern valid?.. [link]

Factory and warehouse conversions have become the lifeblood of the London property scene. Loft-living has transformed the nature of the market, revitalising old villages like Clerkenwell and creating new communities in previously "no-go" inner-city areas. But with the supply of riverside and other prime sites drying up, builders are having to unearth less obvious opportunities. Many of the most stylish conversions now taking place are tucked away in busy shopping and business districts... [link]

It is an asymmetrical chunk that fills an entire block, with 85-foot-tall walls surfaced in many different materials, none of them especially nice. Lots of vents, not a lot of windows. Every time I walked by, I wondered whether the simple science of making a building meet the street had been entirely forgotten... [link]

The publication in England of Mark Girouard's Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling marks a milestone in the evolution, or the devolution, of architectural biography. [link]

A book review which furthers the dangerous myth that architects are some sort of artist [d.s.].