StreetTalk

THE ECONOMIC STIMULUS OF GREAT PUBLIC SPACES

2013-06-07T02:19:58Z

A Lonely Food Truck Outside Discovery World Headquarters In Downtown Silver Spring

Food Trucks Thriving In Farragut Park in DC

Food trucks are all the rage these days. Go-To tools for urban designers, aspiring restaurateurs and festival planners, they are seen as a relatively quick and easy way to activate spaces, test new businesses and market the potential of a street, block or neighborhood. Culturally they have been embraced by young professionals as a cheap, fun alternative to sit-down restaurants and bland corporate cafes. Gastronomically, they have evolved to showcase the best creations today’s aspiring chefs have to offer.

So one would think if you were across the street from the global headquarters of Discovery Channel in the up and coming Downtown Silver Spring, you had won the jackpot! Add to this the fact that you were the only food truck in a 1-mile radius, and your odds for success should sky-rocket, right?

Creating Super-Organisms Out Of Our Communities

2013-06-05T00:46:15Z

The global population surpassed 7 billion people in August 2012.If you think that is a big number, consider 10 trillion. That is the number of microbes every human being carries within its body at any given time! As Michael Pollan put it eloquently in a recent article, we are all "Superorganisms". And it turns out that our health is not just dependent on our own physiology, but is greatly affected by the health of these countless organisms that call our body home.

This recent discovery highlights a broader trend in science and problem solving. We are quickly moving away from an isolationist approach to broadening our lens as much as possible. Take any Big Data project, social media campaign or ecological restoration study conducted in the past 5 years.

Designing in the Commons

2013-06-03T09:43:06Z

Build a Better Block in Norfolk, Virginia (image: Virginian-Pilot)

The design charrette as part of implementation

The contemporary incarnation of the design charrette has attempted to take design, architecture, and planning out of the studios and academies and into the vernacular lives of the places in which we work. It has taken great strides to break down the silos between professional specialties and to reconnect the "expert" to the lay person, whose previous role had only been to deal with the expert's professionally built results for about thirty years. These intense, collaborative design sessions have lead to quick testing and decision making for long-ranger visions. At the end of a four-to-six day charrette, you typically have a plan to further refine and advance. It has proven to be a highly effective approach.

But the charrette is evolving into another dimension and taking on a much bigger role. No longer a one-and-done flash in the pan, the model for a charrette, like great neighborhoods, is becoming a succession of ideas, events, 3-dimensional testing, and discoveries.

THE NEW AMERICAN CITY

2013-05-31T01:30:36Z

Places like Silver Spring, MD confront us with unprecedented adjacencies and ground realitiesWith exploding global populations and awakening giants of the developing world, much of the talk around urbanization and new city form revolves around cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. After all, these are places where cities are being built at lightening speed, often out of thin air. But here at home in the United States, a new type of city form is taking shape.

DESIGNING FOR CHANGE

2013-05-30T00:16:38Z

The modern paradigm of planning emphasizes, even mandates predictability. Ironic, given the increasing complexity of our undertakings as planners and urban designers. Most of us in the field today are working on multi faceted, complex, public-private joint ventures. And planners are increasingly looked towards as non-biased captains to guide these titanics through the stormy seas of community consensus, approval, financing and implementation.

THE WEB OF RESILIENCE: COMPLEX AND CONNECTED

2013-05-24T00:09:39Z

Resilience depends upon strength in numbers and it thrives on connections. Any resilient system can only be achieved through a highly connected network of equally resilient parts, alllowing it to adapt to, and benefit from change. In fact, in a resilient ecosystem, each resilient part is a contributing member to multiple resilient systems, creating much needed redundancy.

BEAUTY & RESILIENCE

2013-05-23T02:02:45Z

Resilient objects exhibit longevity against all odds. Today, we humans have firmly established ourselves as the species in-charge of spaceship earth (Buckminster Fuller). As a result, the lifespan of most living beings and inanimate objects is directly affected by human decisions. Whether we like it or not, we exert influence on all systems: natural and man made. Due to this new reality, the importance of beauty, as we humans COLLECTIVELY perceive it has become a major factor guiding the fate of the physical world.

AN EMPTY WORLD

2013-05-21T20:01:05Z

Technology’s ultimate goal is to be ubiquitous and invisible at the same time. Technology interacts with the physical world more every day, embedding itself into objects big and small. As it becomes invisible, beneath the surface, it also fundamentally changes our relationship with the real world.

FOSTERING RESILIENCE

2013-05-21T00:33:23Z

To cure a sickness, one must study its cause and the pattern in which it unfolds. As we approach the age of turbulence, we must look at mediums that exhibit similar traits and explore ways to remediate the trauma cased by uncertainty, intensified cycles and ever more complicated inter-relationships. One such petridish is a typology where all of us are spending more time these days, and not by our own volition: the airport.

INTO DARKNESS

2013-05-20T01:17:17Z

Movies often give us a glimpse of the shape of things to come. If the latest installment of the Star Trek enterprise is even a remote precurosr, the future, I am afraid is terribly sterile, cold and inhumane. London, depicted in the 23rd century as a sprawling megalopolis is littered with glass clad towers jutting into the stratosphere, each more twisted and gravity defying than its neighbor.