The Urbanophile » Blog Archive » This Is Why We’re Broke. Plain and simple, this is why we’re broke. As Banas put it, “same number of people, three times as much stuff” (to pay for).

Related articles

• It’s the Sprawl, Stupid – The Budget Buster No One’s Talking About (streetsblog.net)

Asphalt has been used for the last 80 years. It greatly contributes to the urban heat island effect, reaching peak temperatures of 48–67°C. At current consumption levels, approximately 28,000,000 barrels of crude oil were required to create South Korea’s 86,990 km roadway system. This is roughly 5x the amount of oil released into the Gulf of Mexico. The Sand Stone Road project proposes the use of an organic process to create sandstone from sand as an alternate paving surface, thereby mitigating the harmful effects of asphalt.

SandStone Road by Thomas Kosbau & Andrew Wetzler » Yanko Design.

Worst and best commutes in America.

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting suburbia | Video on TED.com.

Ellen Dunham-Jones fires the starting shot for the next 50 years’ big sustainable design project: retrofitting suburbia. To come: Dying malls rehabilitated, dead “big box” stores re-inhabited, parking lots transformed into thriving wetlands.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced the second round of recipients selected to receive funding for intercity rail projects under the administration’s High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program on October 28, 2010. These projects will bring us one step closer to realizing the benefits of greener transportation.  CAP has the story.

The graph below shows the projects currently under development as a result of the High-Speed Intercity Rail Program’s funding, which includes Recovery Act funding and funding from the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008. Some projects are in the planning stages while others such as California’s existing corridors (solid red) are already built and are being developed or expanded. The Milwaukee to Madison line and projects in Ohio will likely be canceled by incoming governors for those states (see “Passenger rail is not in Ohio’s future”: New GOP governors kill $1.2 Billion in high-speed rail jobs).

This is a shame, because these projects create jobs. The California High-Speed Rail Authority estimates that building the corridor connecting San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento will create 600,000 jobs.

via Laying the track for high-speed rail « Climate Progress.

“gutterspace”  is reclamation project inaugurated by a man named Jack Gasnick,

[Image: From Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates, via Free Association Design].

This is how Anthony describes Gasnick’s project:

In the early 1970s—unbelievably, given how influential Gordon Matta-Clark has become in the last few years—Gasnick began buying and collecting “gutterspace,” or small slivers of land left over from zoning or surveying errors. He said that after a little while he couldn’t stop: “It’s like collecting stamps; once you’ve got the fever, you’ve got the fever.”

Accordingly, Gasnick “bought a slice in Corona just behind Louis Armstrong’s house,” Urbablurb continues, “a piece near Jamaica Bay where he once filled a pail with sea-horses, and yet another adjacent to the Fresh Kills landfill where he claims an abandoned sea Captain’s house still stood.” Gasnick then cultivated small patches of parkland and wilderness within those areas—a micro-wilding of the metropolis, one site at a time: “On the weekends, he would sometimes drive out to the tiny parcels and help the milkweed and laurel grow, tend to the turtles, and sit down for a picnic. ‘This jump of mine from flower pot to apple tree bears witness to the fact that it doesn’t cost much for an apartment-living guy to get a share of the good environment,’ he wrote in 1974. To be exact, it cost between $50 and $250. But the taxes he had to pay were enough of a hassle that he gave away (or otherwise lost track of) all the pieces by 1977.”

He “lost track” of them! The mind reels at the possibility that there is still a distributed Jack Gasnick estate somewhere, peppering the streets and gutters of New York City.

As Anthony suggests, this all has an uncanny parallel in Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates project. From Cabinet magazine:

In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark discovered that the City of New York periodically auctioned off “gutterspace”—unusably small slivers of land sliced from the city grid through anomalies in surveying, zoning, and public-works expansion. He purchased fifteen of these lots, fourteen in Queens and one in Staten Island. Over the next years, he collected the maps, deeds, and other bureaucratic documentation attached to the slivers; photographed, spoke, and wrote about them; and considered using them as sites for his unique brand of “anarchitectural” intervention into urban space.

So who is Jack Gasnick, that minor New Yorker who once “bought strange-shaped lots in every borough,” as the New York Times reported back in 1994, when Gasnick was still alive and 74 years old, and who once claimed to fish in the basements of Manhattan? Who knows.

BLDGBLOG: An Invisible Empire of Sidewalks and Gutterspace.

Inspired by the Situationists, Serendipitor is a free app that utilizes Google Map’s API to “find something by looking for something else.” Begin by entering a destination, from which Serendipitor suggests various routes, which are shorter or longer, depending on how much time you have. As you navigate your chosen route, the app suggests actions and movements to generate interactive encounters. These actions inspired by artists such as Fluxus, Vito Acconci, and Yoko Ono, are designed to augment your experience of your surroundings and increase the likelihood of random encounters along your journey. Actions vary from “enter the tallest building nearby and head straight to the top floor. Take a photo” to “follow a person for two minutes” or “find the next one-way street and walk down it the wrong way.”

via Urban Drifting — The Pop-Up City.

Related articles

• vito acconci studio : lobby-for-the-time-being (designboom.com)
• Fluxus (finebooksmagazine.com)
• Lobby-For-The-Time-Being: Vito Acconci’s Fabric-like Corian Installation (core77.com)

Is it possible to be both builders of the prestige spaces of capital and self-declared avant-gardists? Owen Hatherley takes a look at the fluid architecture and financial times of Zaha Hadid Architects

This summer, there was an exhibition at the Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich entitled Zaha Hadid and Suprematism. It was a ‘dialogue’ between the Anglo-Iraqi architect, winner of the 2010 Stirling Prize – and her apparent forbears, the 1920s Soviet avant-garde, as her flowing, bristling forms whipped through rooms containing works by Kasimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Nikolai Suetin and El Lissitzky. Accompanying the exhibition was ‘A Glimpse Back into the Future’, a text by Hadid’s ‘right-hand man’, the theorist and architect Patrik Schumacher.1 While some would disassociate Constructivism and Communism, or argue that Bolshevik ‘totalitarianism’ was the enemy of art, Schumacher had no such qualms, and his text is impressively unambiguous in placing the political revolution as the very foundation of artistic innovation. ‘90 years ago the October Revolution ignited the most exuberant surge of creative energy that has ever erupted on planet earth. This amazing firework of creative exuberance took off under the most severe material circumstances – fuelled by the idealistic enthusiasm for the project of a new society.’ We’re very far from opulent Swiss galleries, although Schumacher does not make the unflattering comparison.

via Mute magazine.

Related articles

• hatherly on hadid and schumacher (m.ammoth.us)
• Zaha Hadid Thirsty for $6M: The Zaha Hadid-designed Eli and Edythe… (curbed.com)
• Zaha Hadid’s Peaceful Nassim Villas for Singapore (inhabitat.com)
• Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi was the right choice for the Stirling prize | Jonathan Glancey (guardian.co.uk)

via 10 Urban Visionaries Who Aren’t Jane Jacobs.

Related articles

• New Urbanist Leader Andrés Duany is Coming to Phoenix (yuriartibise.com)
• Cities for People: A Talk with Author Jan Gehl (archidose.blogspot.com)
• Friday 5: Urban Miscellany from Sept 18th-24th (yuriartibise.com)
• ‘Birdshit Architects’ and Other Jan Gehl-isms (observer.com)
• Cities For People: A Q&A With Architect Jan Gehl (fastcompany.com)