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Posts Tagged ‘Civic’

Civic Camouflage: Hiding a Huge Urban Stadium in Plain Sight

13 Feb

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

secret stadium hides urban

Sports stadiums can be contentious, particularly when located in the heart of a city, but this design works in various ways to reduce disruptions to urban fabric, slotting seamlessly into its surrounding context.

urban fabric stadium design

Designed by international architecture and engineering firm Arup, the AC Milan 48,000-seat soccer club stadium in Italy is wrapped in commercial (shops, bars, hotels and restaurants) programmatic elements that work with but also independently of sporting events. Additional public-purpose elements include rooftop decks, micro-parks and playground for children.

Reinforced with soundproofing and a plan to sink its base into the ground, adding these architectural buffers on all sides helps reduce noise pollution for blocks on all sides as well as providing street-level continuity for those walking and driving through the city. Mark Wilson compares it to a combination of historical fortifications and suburban shopping centers: “around the stadium’s heart, architects will build a castle-like perimeter of restaurants, a hotel, and a sports college. From the street, the stadium just looks like a block-wide mall.”

stadium interior space design

The stadium itself features a spectator-optimized design intended to provide the best view possible for all visitors as well as a removable roof to allow for play in various conditions.

stadium side view

There are many structures that arguably should stand out from their surroundings – civic buildings like city halls, for instance – but sports stadiums rarely look good in and of themselves, and far too frequently interrupt what is going on in the cities around them. Typically, “even the most beautifully designed stadiums are an eyesore. They’re sprawling moles protruding from the skin of an urban environment, distended to accommodate a wide footprint of seats low to the ground.”

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Urban Observatory: TED Co-Founder’s New Civic Data Platform

01 Aug

[ By WebUrbanist in Gaming & Computing & Technology. ]

urban observatory splash page

This new project brings a whole world’s worth of metropolitan data to your fingertips via both an online application and an upcoming installation at the Smithsonian Museum, courtesy of TED founder Richard Saul Wurman. A rich virtual resource, it represents the work of over 15,000 contributing cartographers and designers from 200 countries.

urban observatory monitor picture

Collecting and data big and small, static and live, the multi-media Urban Observatory allows (and encourages) comprehensible and comprehensive visual comparisons between cities on various fascinating fronts.

urban observatory touch screens

While it continues to solicit data sets to expand its offerings, already people can look into housing and population density of young and old urban residents, transit patterns for cars, trains and planes, open spaces and much more.

urban observatory chart detail

Want to learn about how traffic patterns differ between a spread-out city like Los Angeles versus central London, or see how home prices differ between New York and Tokyo in an intuitively interactive way? Now you can do all of these in one place and using a straightforward and user-friendly interface. From its creators: “The Urban Observatory is an interactive exhibit that gives you the chance to compare and contrast data from cities around the world–all from one location. It aims to make the world’s data both understandable and useful. Brought to life by Richard Saul Wurman, Radical Media, and Esri, it is the first exhibit of its kind.”

urban observatory demonstration installation

The spatial installation component is coming to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, in 2015. More from VentureBeat: “It was a massive undertaking. Cartographers and computer scientists used big data sets, helped by 3D graphics and Landsat, NASA’s satellite program that captures incredibly detailed images of the earth’s surface, to look back at the last 40 years of city development. It provided scientists insight into how the planet is developing – and how to help save it.”

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Civic Secrets: Urban Patterns Revealed in Street-Side Snow

14 Feb

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

urban sneckdown intersection image

Ingenious and contagious, the idea is spreading: after it snows, document where cars do not go, then use that to understand where sidewalks and other public areas can be expanded without any spatial cost to vehicular commuters.

urban public space activism

Jon Geeting of This Old City shows how these so-called ‘sneckdowns’ can work after a snowstorm in Philadelphia. Starting with simple phone-camera photographs, he added colored-line highlights that illustrate actual traffic patterns. These captures implicitly suggest ways to eliminate  car parking, introduce pedestrian plazas and potentially much more.

urban snow implied space

As for the strange name, he explains: a sneckdown “is a clever combination of “snow” and “neckdown” – another name for a curb expansion – that uses snow formations on the street to reveal the space cars don’t use. Advocates can then use these sneckdown photos to make the case to local transportation officials that traffic calming interventions like curb bumpouts and traffic islands can be installed without any loss to car drivers. “

urban post snow photos

Bypassing cumbersome urban planning studies, this approach is a free, easy and highly visual way for people to first understand and then communicate possibilities for future usage to local politicians and business owners. Simple cell phone photos provide the backdrop, allowing activist citizens to argue for everything from sidewalk and green space extensions to the creation of entire urban islands, outdoor seating for restaurants or other civic functions … all in places where, as the snow shows, no one generally drives anyway.

While the phrase and phenomena are gaining all kinds of fresh traction, the idea is not new to those in the know – Street Lessons from a Blizzard (above) by Streetfilms talked about the same process a few years back, and others have discussed it before as well. With the rise of Instagram and Twitter, however, more and more ordinary citizens are snapping shots locally, tagging them and spreading the word.

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Baroque Parking Garage Challenges Blind Civic Historicism

04 Oct

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

baroque car park entry

Challenged with designing something to fit a historic city-center context in “baroque, classic, neo-classical, romantic and neo-romantic style” is itself difficult if not paradoxical, but making that work for a multistory parking structure without devolving into kitsch seems nearly impossible.

baroque structure street level

Set in Skopje, Macedonia, the competition-winning solution by Milan Mijalkovic and  PPAG architects (images by Darko Hristov) is at once traditional in its aesthetic undertones and distinctively contemporary at the same time. It stems a careful study of cultural context and revisiting of architectural history in a place with a complex geographical and political past.

baroque car garage interior

From the designers (via ArchDaily): “The façade interprets the wish for a historicist appearance without explicitly using the traditional language of historicism. It adapts the baroque idea of creating reality by the means of illusive perspective. Baroque artworks expand into the real space as well as vice versa the reality merges into the illusive perspective of the artwork.”

baroque building modern detail

The finished product is thus neither faux-historical nor fully modern – it is interpretive yet highly original, playing on baroque themes without looking like a poor attempt to mimic past styles.

baroque panel system patterns

The pattern itself was derived from a single photograph of period residential architecture, distorted through a series of iterations rendering it intentionally unrecognizable.

baroque parking garage facade

Beyond the aesthetic accomplishment, there is a pragmatic balance of form and function in the project. The underlying garage is utilitarian while the overlapping exterior panel system provides shade and visual relief at various scales.

baroque natural context image

More from the architects on the origins of this bold approach: “Almost twenty years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, this project is reinventing and re-affirmating Macedonia´s separable, undeniable and glorified national identity through urbanism and architecture. Macedonian culture is celebrated by a large number of memorials, religious symbols and new public buildings which are mostly designed in a historicist style. Neo-baroque is the favorite one, with its connotation of power and impact on the masses. The extensive use of these styles is supposed to establish Skopje as the European, Christian, bourgeois city that it has never really been – and to deny its oriental, Islamic as well as it socialist, modern past.”

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Civic photo diary ‘Snap/Shot Galleria’ features raw street scenes of L.A.

30 May

Screen_Shot_2013-05-28_at_9.49.18_AM.png

In this article, the founder of photo site Snap/Shot Galleria Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin explains why he wanted to create a platform for images true to the ‘experience’ of living in LA. The site features four core photographers who use mobile devices and more to capture city life as they see it, and their gritty visions of street-level Los Angeles highlight the gulf between entertainment industry glitz and everyday struggles. Learn more at connect.dpreview.com.

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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2012 Honda Civic Si from WINDING ROAD Magazine

24 Jan

John Snyder narrates as we explore the sound of the new engine in the 2012 Honda Civic Si. Come along for the ride to see and hear the new Si singing in the rain. Enjoy watching our videos? Stay updated on our new video content by subscribing to the Winding Road YouTube Channel. www.windingroad.com https www.facebook.com Music: “Over Under” by Kevin MacLeod www.incompetech.com Licensed under Creative Commons “Attribution 3.0” creativecommons.org incompetech.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5

 
 

JDM 97 Honda Civic Type R EK CTR GT5 Suzuka Seasonal Gran Turismo 5 RHD

07 Jan

www.flickr.com I decided to switch my gear box/shift stick onto the other side since most of the cars that I drive are JDM and are right hand drive. I know this edit is not the greatest nor is the quality or my driving skills but its fun driving like this. All driving aids are off. EK CTR is all stock other then soft, racing tires. Everything was captured with a Nikon D90 and the pedals/footwork was filmed with a GoPro HD Hero. —– GT5 Gran Turismo 5 Honda JDM Type R EK 97 Honda Civic Civic Type R CTR MOMO G25 Playseat Modified PS3 Reverse mounted pedals RHD Right Hand Drive Suzuka Circuit Japan Rules! Japan Suzuka mikeschmeee Logitech G25 Modified Logitech G25 mikeschmeee

 
 

Franklin Perez’s 1994 Honda Civic Ferio Full Length Feature

15 Nov

Vtecturtle’s RHD Civic in all it’s glory. Song: Lil Wayne – “Something You Forgot”

 
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Urban LEGOs: Conceptual Cure for Civic Blight Blindness

30 Oct

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Chances are, you’d notice all of the vacant lots in your city if massive LEGO structures were used to call attention to the wasted space. ‘Habit Makes Us Blind’ is a concept by Spanish studio Espai MGR, digitally filling in unused areas of Valencia with colorful fantasy buildings suggesting how the space could be used.

As years go by, vacant lots – often walled off with ugly temporary fences that are soon covered in spray-painted tags – can almost become invisible to those who pass them on a regular basis.

With urban populations continuing to grow, space is at a premium. While the LEGO structures by Espai MGR aren’t practical in a real-world sense, they do illustrate just how much vertical space is still available, leading one to wonder what it could potentially become.

“This photographic work aims at calling people’s attention, just like painting those isolated walls yellow would. It demands the recreational use of those vacant lots through the eyes of a child, by filling them with impossible constructions, surrealistic installations in line with the problem. A children’s game as a neighbour’s shout, demanding the right to take part in their city.”


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