I live in a ridiculously lush part of the world, and I’m not talking about the Canadian propensity to drink alcoholic beverages. In Victoria BC, on southern Vancouver Island, it’s green year ’round. By February, people are mowing their lawns. By mid-summer, the climate turns nearly Mediterranean (after a winter and long spring of cool, […]
Pulchraphilia, a new word coined by Jason McLennan, makes the case for designing green and sustainable buildings with beauty in mind. This makes environmental stewardship easier, for humans are hard-wired to love beauty.
Gordon Price deconstructed “Motordom” during a recent presentation. One question especially continues to resonate, both in relation to sustainable transportation planning and to Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge.
Strip malls are the inbetween places produced through car-centric (mis-)planning, and will be the hardest places to bring to adaptive re-use. So ugly they can’t be directly looked at, we avoid seeing them lest we turn to stone.
Julia Vitullo-Martin: Don’t Wreck the Authentic New Harlem Renaissance – WSJ.com Sharon Zukin takes on gentrification (in Harlem especially), while Harlem-ites dismiss her critique. “Gentrification” v. “authenticity”? Between black and white there might actually be plenty of shades of gray (no pun intended)… QUOTE It should also be said that these talented, innovative African-Americans are […]
Streetfilms has produced a great ~4minute video, “Fixing the Great Mistake: Autocentric Development,” that makes the case for taking city streets back from the automobile. As it happens, I had the same idea in the early 1970s. It’s finally getting mainstream traction!
The tremendous natural beauty that surrounds us bestows a false sense of entitlement, although we’ve done nothing to earn natural beauty. Stewardship lets us earn it, but now Victoria must at last wake up to earning built beauty.
Artists offer billboard alternatives | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times Interesting strategy: artists using billboards to counteract billboards and direct attention in other ways… tags: art, public_art, billboards, los_angeles Vancouver, the pros and cons of our splendid isolation – Techvibes Blog This is part two of what will be a three part series, by […]
Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort and Archie Bunker’s inability to avoid rubbing up against people explored as an issue of urban form and domestic architecture.
Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
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