Longitudinal Slum

wallpaper* Not So Good For The City

Adam Greenfield lays out his vision of an urban utopia. Before assembling an urban kit-of-parts taken from the best that several cities have to offer, he writes an honest blurb that exemplifies why we shouldn't be so quick to trust the design elite with our cities, or many of its institutions, big or small.

The first thing that might surprise folks who know me - unless they’ve been paying very close attention - is how little I trust high-end design and architecture to deliver enduringly congenial urban environments; long, sad experience with the kind of hotels, shops, restaurants, bars and clubs you so often see gleaming from the pages of wallpaper* and its ilk has convinced me that, however beautiful they may be, such locales are all too often the province of fabulous wannabes and overprivileged douchelords.

This telling view exemplifies my own disillusionment with design strictly grounded in aesthetics and beauty. Moving to Manhattan from design-starved Nebraska six years ago, I was in heaven, suddenly surrounded with access to high-design in a multitude of scales. Within a couple of years it was clear to me that this level of design either (in many instances) didn't contribute to the urban fabric, and was geared to the 'overprivileged douchelords' Adam refers to. This awakening probably contributed to my fascination with the topics covered in the last blog, and is the genesis for this one. Of course, when I'm back in Nebraska next week to pick up some Danish furniture I'll recoil in horror at the EIFS clad buildings on the strip fronted by large surface parking lots, and will crave to be standing intoxicated in front of 40 Bond, as I was earlier this week, in awe of its beauty.

What would your urban utopia look like? [speedbird]

Grasscrete® Pimped At Pruned

Pruned does some pimping of Grasscrete®, a grassed cellular paving system that is an environmental alternative to traditional hard-top surface paving.

Grasscrete® [Pruned]

Lincolnites Tired of Living in Prairie Town

A story in the Lincoln Journal Star featuring reservations about a 22 story building proposed for Lincoln's beige downtown set off a fury of pro-development comments from Lincolnites, complete with New York cynicism, tired of living in a "prairie town". University Towers resident Kim Sturzenegger complains the proposed tower will block the view from her 12th story apartment window with a big beige wall (they love beige in Lincoln) that will be "a monumental mistake". Dick Quinn, who also has a view from University Towers is concerned about the "sheer mass of the tower".

Lincolnites, who tend to balk at new development (if it threatens to impact their taxes), must be tired of being Omaha's bitch, because they attacked the "anti-progress" crowd (or those concerned about views from their apartments) as NIMBY's and whiners. At 90 comments and counting this is a good view into the heart of a community as it struggles to transform from a prairie town into a city, complete with the some of the messiness that comes with city living.

jackson at 1:32 pm says it best: "Hey, if you run around with corn cobs on your head, the rest of the country will always think of lincoln as a cow town or a town full of bumkins."

Some say proposed high-rise too high [Lincoln Journal Star]

Planners Kick-Off I-80 Corridor Study

Led by Omaha's HDR, the team "promised not to back away from possible controversy and conflict."

I-80 corridor study under way [Omaha World Herald]
previously
Nebraskans Look To Develop The Interstate Strip [Longitudinal Slum]

Philadelphia

Labor Day weekend was spent in Philadelphia, no reason in particular - it was close and cheap. So what did we think of the next borough?

The hipster-types seemed more 'authentic' than the hipster-types in New York, as if they weren't trying very hard. There was plenty of fat. Philadelphia is certainly an American city. A lot of the men wear ratty looking baseball caps and a lot of the women look like tramps.

Outside of the superficial stuff, the city felt a little disorientating. For awhile it felt like Denver, lifeless and disinteresting. It was refreshing how walkable it was. A lot of perfectly scaled residential surrounds the stale downtown area. There appeared to be a good car share program, PhillyCarShare. A park / bike trail along both banks of the Schuylkill appeared to be terribly underused, given the maniacs we're used to seeing ride the loop in Central Park. Most horrifying was this thing called South Street - a cross between everything that Coney Island, Delancy Street, Canal Street, and the West Village have to offer. South Street did have a Whole Foods however, so maybe some good old New York gentrification will be in its future.

The Rodin Museum was the best piece of architecture we saw, an exemplary example of procession, the sequencing of space, thresholds, detailing, etc... all good stuff we learned from a former Philadelphia resident. Also good was the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (good axial space), and the Guild House (good veneer). Bad was Independence Mall. Bad mall. Bad buildings. Bad. Bad. Bad.

And of course, all this tourism was done in the downtown and it's first ring suburbs...

This Weekend In The Times

Nicolai loves on Tschumi's Blue in the old neighborhood, and Eliasson gets his first major survey in the states.

Thinking Glacially, Acting Artfully [NY Times]
image by Olafur Eliasson
A Ragtag Neighborhood’s Big, Blue Newcomer [NY Times]