Category: Design

Residential origami

13 December, 2011 (12:50) | Cities, Construction, Design, Homeownership, Innovations, Zoning |

By:David A. Smith   Amidst a New York Times story intended to be a heartwarming tale of self-revival after twice surviving cancer is a nice little example of creatively reusing the available cubic, which will be an increasingly important challenge of the twenty-first century:   Before: The original cabin had small windows, which obscured much [...]

A shining city on a desert hill? Part 2, the messy reality

21 October, 2010 (15:07) | Abu Dhabi, Architecture, Cities, Design, Innovations, Urbanization |

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]    By: David A. Smith    Yesterday, while working through a supercilious New York Times profile by architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff of the rising new Abu Dhabi desert city of Masdar, which after several years of envisioning is now rising from the desert:   Y’all gonna have a football stadium [...]

A shining city on a desert hill? Part 1, the clean vision

20 October, 2010 (13:34) | Abu Dhabi, Architecture, Cities, Design, Innovations, Urbanization |

By: David A. Smith   Because infrastructure is an enormous fixed and largely non-recoverable cost, changes to an established city tend to be incremental, hence patchwork, so if we are going to build truly visionary twenty-first century cities that use generation-skipping technology, they may well arise as complete new visions.    NYT: Does that look [...]