Tag Archives: buildings

NOW AVAILABLE | The City’s Essential DNA and its Pattern

The City’s Essential DNA and its Pattern covers the most essential aspects of physical form at work in the design of all cities from older, highly-localized urban grids in the Middle East/Africa to deformed grids in Europe to regular grids in the United States/Americas. All cities utilize these (usually geometric) properties, though the scale at which they are realized will tend to vary during urban growth in defining a distinctive spatial culture. The purpose is to provide an understanding of the basic typologies/geometries of urban form that can be found underlying all settlements around the world, to one degree or another (1.0 hour course).

Key concepts: grid expansion, block manipulation, linear extension, grid deformation, discrete separation, and urban blocks.

Instructor: Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

Check here to purchase this course ($9.99), which includes an one-hour video presentation and PDFs of the course notes and slide handout.

Note: We are beta-testing with these initial course offerings so if you have any issues accessing the course material, please do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. Thank you!

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Map Shows Age of Buildings in Paris | Geoawesomeness

This post is for those of us who love maps from Geoawesomeness.

Excerpt:

“Paris is an amazing city. It represents a unique combination of magnificent architecture, beautiful scenery, culture and people. It is the city where the history, present and the future meet together in a single place. The new map called BatiParis is a great tool to understand how the city evolved over time. It shows age of buildings footprints in the city with each building colored according to its year of construction. You can turn on and off each period of time to visualize the major stages of the Paris development.”

Read  full article here: Map shows age of buildings in Paris | Geoawesomeness

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Poor Richard 2.0 | Planning Magazine

A review of Poor Richard: Another Almanac for Architects and Planners (or Book 2 of the Poor Richard series) appears in the April 2015 issue of Planning Magazine (pp 69-70).

Excerpt:

“As in life, some days are better than others… Two favorites: Week 13, Day 6 (In the city, buildings mate for life) and Week 29, Day 5 (Never go to an architect or planner whose office plants are artificial).”

Download the full review here.

PoorRichardv2_FrCoverPoor Richard, Another Almanac for Architects and Planners by Mark David Major
Foreword by Steve Mouzon, AIA
Paperback, 140 pages (5″ x 0.3″ x 8″, 7.4 ounces)
Forum Books (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; First edition)
November 30, 2014
English
ISBN-10: 150290182X<
ISBN-13: 978-1502901828

Poor Richard, Another Almanac for Architects and Planners (Volume 2 of the Poor Richard series) is available for purchase from CreateSpace, Amazon, iBooks, and other online retailers around the world. Be sure to check the online store in your country/currency (USA stores available below).

Purchase from CreateSpace here.
Purchase from Amazon here.
Purchase from Kindle Store here.
Purchase from iBooks Store here.

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RE-POST | Steve Jobs | On the Social Potential of Built Space

RE-POSTING THE MOST POPULAR ARTICLE IN 2013 ON THE OUTLAW URBANIST! THIS ARTICLE EDGED OUT BY ONLY 3% THE “URBAN PATTERNS” ARTICLE ON OLMSTED’S RIVERSIDE SUBURB IN CHICAGO.

Steve Jobs on the Social Potential of Built Space
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

While reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of the co-founder of Apple and former majority shareholder of Pixar Animations Studios, Steve Jobs (review available here on The Outlaw Urbanist), I came across a fascinating passage. I wanted to share it because the point is so powerful, it bears repetition and celebration. The most important passages are in bold.

Pixar Animation Studios was reaping the creative and financial benefits of a $485 million worldwide gross for Toy Story 2 so…

(Excerpt) …it was time to start building a showcase headquarters. Jobs and the Pixar facilities team found an abandoned Del Monte fruit cannery in Emeryville, an industrial neighborhood between Berkeley and Oakalnd, just across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco. They tore it down and Jobs commissioned Peter Bohlin, the architect of the Apple Stores, to design a new building for the sixteen-acre plot. Jobs obsessed over every aspect of the new building, from the overall concept to the tiniest detail regarding materials and construction. “Steve had the firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture,” said Pixar’s president Ed Catmull… (John) Lasseter had originally wanted a traditional Hollywood studio, with separate buildings for various projects and bungalows for development teams. But the Disney folks said they didn’t like their new campus because the teams felt isolated, and Jobs agreed. In fact he decided they should go to the other extreme: one huge building around a central atrium designed to encourage random encounters. Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings.

“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow.” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.” So he had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see…” “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalled. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen in months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”

For those who don’t believe architects such as New Urbanist Andres Duany or Space Syntax people such as Alan Penn, Tim Stonor and Kerstin Sailer about the social potential of built space, then believe the words of a genius like Steve Jobs. Design matters, space matters, and architecture matters to innovation.

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