Today was the second day of the grand opening celebration at the de Young Museum, and it was in full swing. Ben and I planned to meet at 10 AM, but when I got there, I found no parking within the park and settled for the new parking garage underneath the Music Concourse. It ended …
Category Archives: Architecture and land use
San Jose’s new City Hall
Normally, my taste in architecture is traditional, but I’ve been trying to broaden my range. For example, San Jose’s new City Hall, which had its grand opening today, is decidedly modernist: clean lines and an absence of ornament. This is no surprise given the architect, Richard Meier. But it is an impressive space: the all-glass …
Ubicomp city
From the New York Times: A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is …
Fun facts about sprawl
Via PLANetizen: The Los Angeles area is the most densely populated metropolitan area in the country. Surprise! San Francisco/Oakland and San Jose are #2 and #3. (Why they are counted separately, I don’t know.) New York/Newark (which also includes parts of Connecticut) is #4. A climatologist says that sprawl in Dublin, Ireland has resulted in …
NY Times: City Seeking Rich Designs Instead of the Lowest Bids
If only more city governments would do this: hire architects based on the quality of their work instead of the competitiveness of their bids.
Shiny happy redevelopment
The malls in Cupertino and Sunnyvale have been in the dumps for a decade, with promises of redevelopment come and
Frederick Law Olmsted
The latest issue of National Geographic has a great article on Frederick Law Olmsted, an amazingly prolific landscape architect best known for designing Central Park with his partner, Calbert Vaux. Not mentioned in the article is his Bay Area work. For example, he drew up the first campus plan for UC Berkeley in 1866, which …