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The Art of Creating and shaping cities and towns. Urban design involves the arrangement and design of buildings, public spaces, transport systems, services, and amenities.
The Marine City projects by Kiyonori Kikutake designed between 1958 and 1963 are the first and most influential proposals to build ‘Megastructures’ into the sea after the dissolution of CIAM. They include two basic types: the ‘Floating Structure’ as a concentric and city-scale type, and the ‘Linear Ocean City’ as a linear and national-scale type.
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Completed in 1936 on the border between Nevada and Arizona, the Hoover Dam is the second-highest dam in the United States and the 18th highest in the world. It was a monumental accomplishment for its era which set new standards for feasibility studies, structural analysis, quality control during construction, and post-construction performance evaluations. Nowadays, the dam’s generators provide power for public and…
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In the mid-60s, Peter van Dijk designed the Blossom Music Center for the Cleveland Orchestra in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. At that time he was a 37-year-old architect who found himself working with Christopher Jaffe who brought expertise in acoustics to the project and structural engineer Richard Genser.
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Maki’s Golgi Structures designed in 1968 by Fumihiko Maki was named after Nobel Prize-winner Camillo Golgi, who developed techniques for visualising nerve cell bodies. The structure proposed by Maki alternate dense urban areas with unstructured open spaces. Encasing the latter are light-absorbing cells that facilitate communication, energy distribution and mechanical systems.
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Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa designed in 1960 the “Agricultural City”. Intended for the replacement of the agricultural towns in Aichi destroyed by the Ise Bay Typhoon in 1959, the accommodation was to be raised above the ground to deal with future Flooding. The grid was intended to be between 300 and 500 meters; Kurokawa challenged the assumption that the city and the country need to be…
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Ziggurats were ancient towering, stepped structures built in the ancient Mesopotamian valley and western Iranian plateau, having the form of a terraced step pyramid of successively receding stories or levels. They were made of mud-brick that appear to have served as temples to the ancient gods of Mesopotamia. Ziggurat bases were square or rectangular. Their walls were sloping.
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Pueblo Bonito (Spanish for beautiful town) is the largest and best-known great house in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, northern New Mexico. It was built by the Ancestral Puebloans who occupied the structure between AD 828 and 1126.
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Aerial Photography is particularly difficult to do. First, you’re generally going to be in a moving aircraft with windows. Considering the cost of plane and fuel, this makes waiting around for better lighting somewhat less of an option. To get a good aerial shot, you need to plan to be in the sky at the right time, know how to avoid…
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Kenzo Tange’s 1960 plan for Tokyo was proposed at a time when many cities in the industrial world were experiencing the height of urban sprawl. With a unique insight into the emerging characteristics of the contemporary city and an optimistic faith in the power of design, Tange attempted to impose a new physical order on Tokyo, which would accommodate the…
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Timeless
Architecture
