Home    Contact Us     Subscribe

Today's News - July 26, 2002

New design debates are sure to arise when the winner of the 55 Water Street plaza renovation competition is announced in mid-September, and the six shortlisted proposals are put on exhibit.

For the time being, there's no let-up on news about Ground Zero: John King offers an insightful profile of Billie Tsien, the only architect on the board of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. "For political reasons, they needed an Asian, they needed a woman…," she said. (We only hope that she doesn't resign.) For Richard Florida (author of "The Rise of the Creative Class"), "economics" is not a dirty word in making "Lower Manhattan become the prototypical hub of the 21st century." And LMDC president Lou Tomson is surprisingly candid.

Meanwhile, there's the rest of the world: "Enthusiastic pragmatism" is the way of the future, or so it is said at the UIA Congress in Berlin. That means, according to another pundit, the future will be "in the hands of children and of women."

The future of housing and urban planning: barns in Colorado inspire affordable housing in Kenya. And you could probably substitute any city with any of the stories from Portland to Pittsburgh, and Sydney to Chongqing. There is praise (will protect urban character) and derision ("watered-down imitation vanilla," "1950s-style Russian housing," and "instant slums") for "pattern book planning" (expect to hear that phrase more often!). On a most positive note, entire buildings really are being recycled…and much more.