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The New York Times with a photo essay depicting Levittown at its inception, and today with most of the original homes pimped out to American standards of contemporary home design.
Levittown Through the Years [NY Times]
images by Associated Press, Bettmann/Corbis, Damon Winter, Ed Bailey
Assistant professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University’s GSD Christian Werthmann uses Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' design for the ASLA's headquarters in Washington DC as a green roof case study for a new PA Press title Green Roof - A Case Study. As green architecture, sustainability, and LEED have all become hot topics in the last few years - and the ubiquitous green roof a token component in many design projects - this case study sheds light on both the historical underpinnings and technical issues associated with the design of a green roof.
Early on a distinction is drawn describing the correct terminology when talking of a roof that supports vegetation and any supplemental activity:
Roof gardens are installed to be accessed and enjoyed. They are more cost intensive to construct, heavy in weight with deep soil profiles, and maintenance intensive... Most green roofs are inaccessible, and they are mainly installed for environmental performance and visual improvement.Despite the recent infatuation with the green roof, this building component has a long history tracing back many centuries to Northern European vernacular architecture with an obvious insulating benefit grounded in fundamental building technology. The history of the green roof also traces through the early roots of Modernism where roof gardens were intended to occupy the flat roofs of Early Modernism and support the demand for "light, air, and sun." The current green roof trend accelerated with German research advances in the mid-seventies, coupled with a newfound green revolution. While fully embraced in Germany and other areas of Europe, the green roof is only now beginning to make an impact in the United States.
The featured case study project was a unique opportunity for the ALSA to showcase green roof technology through building a green roof hybrid - both a green roof and roof garden - through an experimental approach that could serve as a case study within itself. This case study portion does a thorough job of documenting the decision making process leading to the completed design, and the layers which compose the end product, including the roles and responsibilities for the design team - architect, landscape architect, structural and mechanical engineers.
Being a quick read, this is a good introduction to the history and fundamentals of the green roof. With both genuine and disingenuous interest in sustainability sweeping through both the schools and design community right now (being green is often supplanting other design considerations at the moment), this can serve as a quick education into what a green roof really is, when it is appropriate and what are its benefits, and the fundamentals behind its construction.
Green Roof—A Case Study [Princeton Architectural Press]
Green Grows the Roof [papressblog]
top image courtesy ALSA
bottom image courtesy Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.
Metropolis looks at recent allegations by Robert Bruegmann that Los Angeles is actually more dense than New York City.
Not so say a group of UCLA planning students who reveal on the Livable Spaces web site that a measure of density is dependent on how density is defined:
When discussing density it is important to distinguish between population density and housing density. Population density measures the number of people per unit of land and varies depending on the time of day. Housing density is the number of homes per unit of land.
Sprawl Brawl [Metropolis]
Lisa Selin Davis looks at a new take on the enclosed shopping mall that is developing in Natick MA, where 215 condominiums are being built adjacent and with direct access to the Natick Mall. Similar to higher-end Lifestyle Centers which combine outdoor shopping, condominium living, and commercial office space, the Natick development uses the increasingly unpopular enclosed mall as a substitute for the 'urban', and is re-branding the typology as such.
The developer, General Growth Properties, recognizes the optimized position existing malls already occupy in the suburban landscape, being situated at highway interchanges within the regional transportation network. One of the new condo owners, Michael DuGally, recognizes the development for what it really is, "People want to live there because it’s classy and yet a hip, urban environment."
This is a good thing. Regardless of the execution of this development and its resident's misconception of what constitutes 'urban', it begins to put certain components in play that can begin to form a fresh look at suburban living and eventually transform how we understand this often maligned swath of the city. Is living with direct access to a mall a bad thing? Probably not. Load the mall up with the services people require - gyms, fine dining, grocery shopping, and maybe education and religious services - and the mixture of various programmatic elements have the potential to make the mall more urban than the 9-5 downtowns of many American cities. Such cross-programming also has the potential to carry along the benefits of sustainable living already enjoyed by residents of dense urban environments like New York City.
When Downtown Is in the Suburbs [NY Times]
image by Jodi Hilton
