Cities « 360Photography

RSS

Posts Tagged ‘Cities’

Cooling Cities: L.A. is Painting Streets White to Combat Heat Island Effects

15 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Thanks in part to heat-absorbing materials and colors, cities tend to be warmer than their natural surroundings, and in hot places with lots of dark roads like Los Angeles that can prove a serious public health hazard.The mayor has pledged to reduce temperatures in the city by 3 degrees over the next 20 years, in part by dealing with urban heat island effects in new and different ways.

As part of this promise to help make bring down temperatures for its millions of residents, LA is trying something that could dramatically change its urban landscape: repainting roads in white. The aim is to reflect rather than absorb heat and so far the results are extremely promising.

“We found that on average the area covered in CoolSeal is 10 degrees cooler than black asphalt on the same parking lot,” said Greg Spotts, the assistant director of the Bureau of Street Services for San Fernando Valley, an area with particularly severe heat problems.

It’s not just about open public spaces either: reducing exterior temperatures has impacts on adjacent interiors. Heat reductions outside and mean cooler spaces inside area homes and businesses. In turn, this can help residents and owners save on cooling costs. It also isn’t just a daytime problem: heat captured during the day is released into the night air, keeping things hotter around the clock.

The process doesn’t come cheap, however: each coat lasts for around seven years but prices out around $ 40,000 per linear mile. If it works, though, the cost could be offset in part by savings on other fronts, in addition to making for a more healthy metropolis all around. Meanwhile, other strategies are also in play — the city is looking to make roofs brighter, for instance, and bring more green into the mix. (via Inhabitat and L.A. Times, images by Greg Spotts and Giuseppe Milo).

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

WebUrbanist

Comments Off

Posted in Creativity

Brutalist Victory: Concrete Skylines Dominate Radical Retro-Future Cities

13 Jun

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Architectural trends come and go, but some visions are more persistent than others, and Brutalism could have been among them. This artist asks and answers the question: what if concrete monstrosities of the 1960s and 70s had somehow won the war against the steel-and-glass towers that dominate contemporary skylines?

German digital artist Clemens Gritl has built a virtual world around this retro-futuristic vision, dubbed “A Future City from the Past”, populated with extreme forms of concrete idealism. His “super-brutalist” metropolis extrapolates the revolutionary aesthetic of this harsh material, seen for a time as representing social progress and democratic ideals in architectural form.

Through 3D modeling (exhibited as black-and-white 2D images), this series presents something that could have been seen as utopian but inevitably, with Brutalism in hindsight, feels oppressive and dystopian. His renditions are meant to look like products of a past time, capturing Modernist-worthy views of these giant-sized Brutalist creations.

“All buildings and structures are homogenic,” says the artist. “The differentiations of architectural styles and eras are eliminated and replaced by geometric structures, repetition and absolute materiality.”

“Ballard’s novel paints a dark dystopian picture — the architecture of a single residential tower becomes the driving force for mysterious changes of the tenants behaviour. Can the presence of a high-rise structure truly create such a threatening atmosphere and social tension, culminating in murder, decay, destruction and even anarchy?”

Individually, various structures recall Modernist greats as well, like a towering residential complex arrayed on piloti (columns) as envisioned and realized by Le Corbusier. But, like Corbu’s masonry towers for his idyllic cities, the results do not look particularly livable. Perhaps the portrayal is also a little unfair — after all, Corbu at least envisioned these things surrounded by green landscapes.

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

WebUrbanist

Comments Off

Posted in Creativity

Urban Legend: Why Are European Cities so Much Denser than American Ones?

22 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

densities

At a glance, it seems obvious New York City would be more densely populated than Paris, but in fact the reverse is true: New York has only half the population density of its French competitor. In Europe, too, rich people tend to live in the hearts of cities, not in their suburbs as they often do in the United States. This fantastic short video will take you through the reasons for these differentials in just ten minutes:

Most people attribute this to the age differential — young American cities are much younger. Europeans walking to work preferred and paid a premium for proximity (and to live on lower floors before the advent of elevators). A similar effect can be found in small towns: villagers would walk to work in fields. And this is part of the story, but per the video above (and text below) there are other forces at work in the modern age.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., railroads took time to get up to speed, making it easy to build suburbs further out and not just adjacent to cities. Streetcars in turn created upper-middle-class suburbs closer into town. Finally, the automobile filled in the gaps between railroad and streetcar lines.

But why didn’t European cities experience a similar trend? In part, ones that were damaged during in world wars generally rebuilt the way they had been, and the rest kept their legacies of density throughout.

There is also the history of crime: violent urban crime drove those who could afford it out of the hearts of cities. Rural land is also cheaper in the U.S. thanks for fewer farm subsidies, making it easier for developers to buy and build remotely.

Cheaper energy costs also drive car ownership state-side, reducing motivation to locate homes close to work. Energy prices also mean that heating huge suburban homes in America is much more affordable. But these commutes are linked to higher anxiety and the trend is reversing, bringing the rich back into cities.

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

WebUrbanist

Comments Off

Posted in Creativity

Forest Cities: Tree-Covered Urban Architecture to Combat Smog in China

03 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

forest city

A new series of treescrapers designed for Nanjing, China, aim to combat air pollution with plant-covered towers, but this bold vision may represent hubris more than hope.

Architect Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) project in Milan was an impressive but small-scale version of this vision to turn Chinese cities into greenery-covered cityscapes. “Two towers in a huge urban environment [such as Nanjing] is so, so small a contribution – but it is an example. We hope that this model of green architecture can be repeated and copied and replicated.”

forest city project

And the figures put out to the press are impressive: these new buildings could, according to estimates, remove 25 tons of carbon from the air annually and produces a lot of oxygen in the process. Still, embedded carbon in plants has to go somewhere eventually — leaves and branches that break off of these vertical treescapes will eventually fall to the ground, adding to street-level pollution.

Projects like this face downsides and challenges, too. A lot of embedded energy (and thus: carbon) comes with retrofitting buildings to support plants. There are intensive structural requirements (for soil and trees) but also active system demands, too, that add to inputs and costs. As plants grow, they also have to be maintained — a lot more challenging than just sending window washers up and down the sides of a skyscraper.

forest city village

Ultimately, it makes sense to think about how cities can go green, but adding thick and lush greenery to the sides of buildings risks being an act of greenwashing more than one of sustainable design. The ground is a much easier place to plant greenery, plus an easier space for everyone to access and enjoy. Even the above rendering of one of these planned communities makes this point indirectly: there are a lot more trees on the ground than there are on the buildings in the image.

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

WebUrbanist

Comments Off

Posted in Creativity

Worlds Under Glass: 33 Miniature Cities & Architectural Sculptures

16 Feb

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

thomas doyle 7

Sheltered by glass vessels like tiny self-contained biomes, these miniature buildings and cities seem to have their own atmospheres and variable gravity, with houses teetering on the edges of cliffs or springing out of clouds in the sky. Artists craft small-scale structures from balsa wood, paper, cardboard and other materials and house them under domes, bottles, teapots and Victorian terrariums.

Balsa Wood Architecture by Vera van Wolferen

wolferen 1

wolferen 2

wolferen 3

wolferen 4

Often incorporated into animations, Vera van Wolferen’s tiny balsa wood structures can also be structures telling their own stories. A recent series of structures perches tiny dwellings on stilts or stretches them several stories into the ‘sky’ beneath a glass dome, often emerging from cotton ‘clouds.’

Paper Cities by Ayumi Shibata

ayumi shibata 1

ayumi shibata 2

ayumi shibata 3

ayumi shibata 4

Slivers of two-dimensional cities and landscapes curl around each other within glass vessels in rosebud-like arrangements or stack up into faux hillsides to create a three-dimensional whole in these works by Ayumi Shibata. The artist uses traditional Japanese paper cutting techniques, noting that the Japanese word for ‘paper’ is ‘Kami,’ which can also mean ‘god,’ ‘spirit’ or ‘divinity.’

“Kami move freely beyond time, universe and places, appearing during events, as well as in our houses and our bodies,” she says. “These spirits also dwell in paper. In the religion of Shinto, white paper is considered a sacred material.”

Micro Matter by Rosa de Jong

rosa de jong 1

rosa de jong 2

rosa de jong 3

rosa de jong 4

rosa de jong 5

rosa de jong 6

Enclosed within glass domes or test tubes, Rosa de Jong’s ‘Micro Matter’ sculptures bring unfathomably small worlds to life, each one seemingly floating in its own low-gravity atmosphere. The works often feature dilapidated homes, farm buildings, mines and construction sites, exploring the ways in which built environments interact with nature. The sculptures are created in a way that’s similar to building a ship in a bottle, snugly inserting the pieces to fit their vessels just right.

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Worlds Under Glass 33 Miniature Cities Architectural Sculptures

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

WebUrbanist

Comments Off

Posted in Creativity

Timelapse Tour: Watch How Cities Grow Between 1984 to 2016

07 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Culture & History & Travel. ]

google-earth-timelapse-san-francisco

Human civilization has grown and expanded at an amazing rate – or alarming, depending on who you ask – and you can watch the last 32 years of it unfold via satellite imagery thanks to Google’s Timelapse feature. Originally released in 2013, Timelapse has been updated to add four more years of data and tons of new imagery data from two new satellites, offering clearer views with more detail than ever before. Choose any location in the world to see how it has changed – from cities to the shrinking ice caps.

google-timelapse-3

google-timelapse-gif-2

Some of the most dramatic changes have occurred in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Dubai and Chongqing, China, but you can also watch the Aral Sea dry up and the Shirase Glacier of Antarctica melt into the sea.

Aral Sea

Miami, Florida

Beijing, China

Las Vegas, Nevada

Shirase Glacier

Hangzhou, China

Look for the location of your choice and create your own annual time lapse at Google’s Time Engine Tour Editor.

[ By SA Rogers in Culture & History & Travel. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

WebUrbanist

Comments Off

Posted in Creativity

Remixing Architecture: Building Collages Capture Spirit of Cities & Countries

13 Dec

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

montage-leader

Combining photographs or everyday vernacular designs, artist Anastasia Savinova aims to illustrate patterns in built environments across major European cities as well as rural countrysides. Her Genius Loci (a play on Genus Loci, or: spirit of place) series illuminates the distinctive details and materials of each place she visits and, set against a regional backdrop of landscapes and waterways.

genius_loci_se_upland

In some cases, it is colors that serve as unifying factors — in others: building materials and typologies. Each one manages to be at once a singular work of architecture and a montage of quintessential parts.

city-hybrids

In a way, her pieces serve act like scrapbooks or memories, combining fragmented portions of travels to countries including Sweden, Germany and Italy. They capture those ineffable qualities usually too hard to fit into a single picture frame.

black-and-white

“In this project I am a flâneur, wandering around, inhaling the spirit of places and trying to visualize it,” she says of her work. “I travel, I observe and document. I take pictures, stare into the windows, watch everyday life – all this helps to build the feeling of the Place.

urban-collage

“Architecture and landscape are visual components of the integral image of the Place, at the same time, this image is inseparably linked with a mentality and a way of life.”

townhouse-typologies

barn-buildings

“A House on each collage is composed of many buildings, which are typical for a particular country or city, in their connection with the land and the spirit of the Place.”

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

WebUrbanist

Comments Off

Posted in Creativity

Future Cities: 13 Fresh New Visions for Residential Towers

13 Dec

[ By SA Rogers in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

spire-london-main

The future of urban living (at least for the wealthy) is looking pretty lush, with residential towers finding new and creative ways to incorporate greenery, maximize views and give residents the feel of a spacious suburban backyard hundreds of feet in the air. As unrealistic as some of the renderings have looked, these towers are becoming a reality, with many set to be completed in 2017.

Fake Hills by MAD Architects, Beihai, China

residential-towers-fake-hills

residential-towers-fake-hills-3

residential-towers-fake-hills-4

One of those renderings that looked too fantastical to be real, ‘Fake Hills’ by MAD Architects is almost fully complete in the coastal Chinese city of Beihai. The development is part of a planned, built-from-scratch city featuring dense housing in architecturally innovative form along with a lush green landscape. The continuous roof platform running along the top will eventually be planted with gardens, too, and feature tennis courts and swimming pools.

Grove at Grand Bay by BIG, Miami

residential-towers-big-1

residential-towers-big-2

residential-towers-big-3

BIG’s recently completed ‘Grove at Grand Bay’ in Miami is true to its renderings, down to the undulating planted areas at the base. The pair of twisting towers is actually a luxury ‘low density’ project featuring 98 units topped with dual level penthouses and containing seven swimming pools, a spa and fitness center, and an on-site art gallery in what could be perceived as stacked mansions for a dense urban setting.

Gridded Residential Tower by C.F. Møller and Brut, Antwerp

residential-tower-gridded-1

residential-tower-gridded-2

residential-tower-gridded-3

residential-tower-gridded-4

This ‘vertical community’ by C.F. Møller is a residential and mixed-use tower that was “developed from the inside out,” placing an emphasis on social qualities, aiming for a suburban quality of life. The 24-story complex contains 116 homes, retail outlets, offices and communal areas, including enclosed winter gardens at each end of the tower and a shared 5th floor facility with a landscaped roof terrace. The envelope of the structure contains balconies enclosed within glass, spacious enough for kids to play.

Farmanieh Residential Tower by ZAAD Studio and Marz Design, Tehran

residential-tower-zaad-1

residential-tower-zaad-2

residential-tower-zaad-3

residential-tower-zaad-4

The form of this residential tower by ZAAD is pretty unusual, featuring a series of modular units wedged between stacked circular platforms to create a patchwork of indoor and outdoor areas. Also set to the scale of a suburban home, the units offer a comfortable living environment and highly varied views of the city intermixed with spacious terraces.

Vertical Forest Tower by Stefano Boeri, Lausanne

residential-tower-vertical-forest

residential-tower-vertical-forest-2

residential-tower-vertical-forest-3

Critics have questioned whether this ‘vertical forest tower’ by Stefano Boeri is an ‘Alice in Renderland’ kind of concept, especially considering that the trees pictured along the peripheral areas of the structure would need a much deeper root system and lots more soil than the design allows. The vision of such large-scale greenery seems pretty unrealistic, especially given the high demand for water and the inevitable strain on the supporting structures. But we’ve been surprised before, and the tower is under construction with a completion date set for 2017, so we’ll soon find out.

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Future Cities 313 Fresh New Visions For Residential Towers

[ By SA Rogers in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

WebUrbanist

Comments Off

Posted in Creativity

Miniature Cities in Motion: Tiny Animated Metropolis Made of Paper

15 Nov

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

paperholm

Diminutive flags wave in the wind, ferris wheels the size of clock gears turn, cranes rise and fall and tiny cars zoom around in this three-dimensional world made out of paper. Artist Charles Young has been working on his ‘Paperholm’ project for years, typically completing one miniature building every single day, mounting them to wood or stone and creating stop-motion animations from their moving parts.

paper-cities-1

paper-cities-3

paper-cities-4

Today, Young has amassed over 635 paper buildings, rollercoasters, vehicles and other elements of his miniature cities, putting them together into an impressively well-organized whole. A graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture, Young initially took on the 365-day project to explore architectural forms in paper, hand-cutting them from watercolor paper and assembling them with PVA glue.

paper-cities-5

paper-cities-7

The first time Young created an animated GIF of one of his creations, he just wanted to demonstrate how smoothly a particular element spun in a circle. This turned out to be a pretty cool way of showing them off. He sketches, cuts and assembles each structure in a single sitting.

paper-cities-2

paper-cities-6

The resulting city is gleaming white and surprisingly well realized considering its two-dimensional origins. Each element is individually documented on the Paperholm tumblr so you can see how it works, and then take in entire blocks of the tiny creations as a whole.

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

WebUrbanist

Comments Off

Posted in Creativity

Glitch Cities: Buildings Mysteriously Deleted from Chinese ‘Street View’

10 Aug

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

deleted buildings

All kinds of architecture is being inexplicably erased from the Baidu Total View image database (analogous to Google Street View) … and whoever is behind it is doing an oddly haphazard job of removing things.

810 (4)

Freelance photographer Jonathan Browning encountered this mystery a few years ago. He was searching for locations on Total View and discovered a half-erased bridge near some sooty factories and industrial complexes.

810

A resident of Shanghai, Browning dug deeper and found government buildings, prisons and other municipal infrastructure. These semi-deleted structures were all over, partially hidden in hundreds of Chinese cities viewed by hundreds of millions of monthly Total View users.

810 (2)

In some cases, the partial deletions seem intentional – a building might remain with its sign and smoke stacks gone. In other instances, at least some attempt has been made to erase the entire structure. Often, aftereffects of cloning tools and other basic Photoshop-style manipulations are easy to spot in the picture. Since some of these structures are high, many of them have to be edited in dozens of surrounding views, too. Even normal-sized, street-facing buildings often show up in a few different shots.

810 (1)

Like Google Street view, the images found on Baidu are assembled from shots taken from cars (or persons) with mounted cameras. Also like their international counterpart, Total View removes some sensitive details, but the removals in this case don’t add up in terms of privacy or national security. If anything, they leave traces and thus highlight areas that people like Browning might find worth exploring.

810 (3)

Of course, Browning had to be careful when driving around and photographing places that someone (corporate or governmental) had decided shouldn’t be on publicly-accessible image maps. In the end, no one seems quite sure what these attempted deletions are all about, and the Chinese government, as usual, isn’t saying a thing (via BldgBlog and Wired).

360Photography

Posts Tagged ‘Cities’

Cooling Cities: L.A. is Painting Streets White to Combat Heat Island Effects

Brutalist Victory: Concrete Skylines Dominate Radical Retro-Future Cities

Urban Legend: Why Are European Cities so Much Denser than American Ones?

Forest Cities: Tree-Covered Urban Architecture to Combat Smog in China