This spring I made my first visit to Chicago. And while I did greatly admire the architectural richness of that city, making a visit to the nearby Farnsworth House was irresistible. Built in 1951 near Plano, Illinois, the residence designed by Mies van der Rohe is considered one of the most famous examples of modernist […]
Archive | October, 2013
Designer-for-hire: can free-trade agreements make cities better?
“Services generate about 70% of rich-world GDP” says a recent Economist article, which highlighted the drafting of a new regional trade agreement between Canada and Europe. While this trade treaty, called the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), includes many of your boring, old-school tariff and farming talk, it more importantly looks to liberalize the […]
Urban Design: A literature review
Whilst a grad student, I learned that the opinions on what urban design is, vary greatly between planners, architects, and landscape architects. It’s only fair to admit that most urban designers in the United States today are trained as architects. Some of them might argue that urban design is essentially a large-scale architectural exercise, where […]
Elevated Trains
I am coming to the end of my cell phone contract and have been going through the data stored on my phone. In the course of this rather banal task it became apparent that I have taken a large number of photos of two things: my dog and elevated train stations (or views from them). […]
Alice Munro Wins 2013 Noble Prize for Literature
The genesis of plaNYourCity was when some planners started to ask around for books of fiction that portrayed a distinct sense of place, particularly a city. Some of the first titles to surface were Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of Vanities which describes the racial tensions and environment of 1980’s New York, and Erik Larson’s The Devil in […]
60 Mies van der Rohe Haus
This was my first visit to Berlin, and I was thinking about Bauhaus and Mies. Inevitably, the next morning I decided to visit Mies’s Lemke House at the outskirts of Berlin. I arrived there after a U-Bahn ride and a bus connection and was surprised how unassuming and humble that house looked from the street. But when you enter the […]
Climate Change - The Verdict Is In
United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just published their fifth assessment report and the conclusion is that the global warming is caused by human activity and the scientific evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific body set up in 1988 by the United Nations. It is charged to gather comprehensive scientific assessments of […]
