Un-graying Infrastructure

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Roads, parking garages, even trails rarely have the urban glamour of Italian hill towns, grand plazas, or museums and symphony halls. For many planners and architects, they are the unfortunate necessities that make a place work and are often treated accordingly.

But as this article in Better Cities and Towns shows, infrastructure can add drama to the urban profile and fun to daily life. What particulalry got me interested in the topic was looking at how we talk about parking garages. The only solution appears to be hiding them, screening them, making them look like something else. While some of these examples in Miami are truly extraordinary, more of them are replicable and through their design, location, and tenanting, … Continue reading

Gehry’s Back? What About His Front?

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According to Witold Rybczynski in Slate, Gehry’s New World Symphony in Miami Beach proves he’s back. I’m not sure where he went, but the building is a well-detailed box that adds the civic-friendly option of turning itself inside out by broadcasting performances on the building to a lawn park.

This is bascially a programming decision as much as a design decision, as is the building’s interface with the the park and the way the park functions. Interface and progamming are a lot of what makes a place pleasing and interesting. So an empty lot in Silver Spring becomes a weekend market or a Miami warehouse becomes a Sunday afternoon hangout.

Gehry’s building is nicely detailed, but it’s … Continue reading