Exporting totalitarian architecture to the rest of the world
And finally, showcasing Nazi architecture was not limited to Germany. When the International Exposition Dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life was held in 1937 in Paris, the two most prominent pavilions were those belonging to Germany and the Soviet Union, which were located directly across from each other. With a height of 500 feet, the Nazi pavilion designed by Albert Speer, was topped with a tower displaying a gigantic swastika and eagle, symbols of National Socialism.
Like the Zeppelinfield in Nuremburg, at night Speer used floodlights to illuminate the structure. The pavilion’s purpose was to showcase German pride and the strength of Nazi Germany as a bulwark against Communism, symbolized by the Soviet pavilion directly opposite.
DOING IT DIFFERENTLY
It’s all about creativity and innovative entrepreneurship, pop ups, collaboration and the sometimes seemingly crazy. Doing it Differently looks at a range of creative and innovative solutions to the challenges of urban living. Creativity in all its forms is essential to the healthy evolution of urban environments, particularly when undergoing such rapid change.
Kylie Legge is a founding Director of Place Partners, a multidisciplinary place making consultancy based in Sydney Australia.
The Spontaneous City
This book presents the concept of the Spontaneous City as an alternative direction of design thinking and urban planning opposed to traditional rigid city planning. The era of large-scale urban planning is over.
For the people, by the people. A visual story of the DIY city
For the People, By the People by Afaina de Jong is a visual story about how people influence change in the city. The collapse of faith in top-down planning has been followed by a renewed interest in the self-generating wisdom of bottom-up urban initiatives. What does it mean when people act as the urban change agents that direct the life and death of the world’s cities? Fusing her photography with a manifesto-like text, architect Afaina de Jong marks the people in the streets as the starting point of all urban trends and cultural innovation. And calls upon us all to become architects of our environment.
“Why Don’t Real Estate Developers Just Ask Us What We Want?
Emily Badger. March 8, 2012
It’s not all that difficult to identify what kinds of new development a neighborhood needs. There’s no pharmacy, no grocer, no gas station for miles? These are pretty obvious missing pieces in a community. It’s much trickier, though, to identify what the people who live therewant. A bagel shop? A vintage store? A vegan farm-to-table karaoke bar?
Real estate developers typically handle this question by not asking it at all. If you’ve got a hole in your neighborhood, a street frontage of a certain size on the vacant ground floor of a certain kind of building, you’re probably getting a Starbucks. That’s the safe bet that can shoulder the highest rent, regardless of whether or not it’s also the business that locals really want.
And so the vegan farm-to-table karaoke bar never comes to pass, and the people who’ve been coveting one must continue daydreaming. Technology, though, could potentially bridge this disconnect between what communities want and what developers are willing to give them, returning neighborhoods to something similar to that earlier time when building owners stood in front of empty storefronts and asked people, “what do you want to see here?”
Hardly anyone literally does this anymore. But the Internet can.
“Real estate development a long time ago was done by a family, or a person who generally had some sense of being in the community,” says Dan Miller, a developer with WestMill Capital in Washington, D.C. “They built something that they wanted, that they cared about, that they tended to own for a long time. It wasn’t always corporate development.”
He and WestMill unveiled a web tool in December aimed at helping neighborhoods that want local businesses instead of national replicas to communicate that to the people who might make such places possible. The site, Popularise, is currently asking what potential customers want to see inside a property WestMill owns, a 4,250-square foot building on Washington’s eclectic H Street Northeast, that had previously been an underutilized convenience store.”
Via: The Atlantic
Image: Popularise.com
I have just finished this book and I have to say it is one of the best books I have read. It´s not only about architecture or landscapes. It is a complete study of how urban economy, urban planning, history, lifestyle, sociology and the future of work link.
Pastoral capitalism as a marketing idea to complete suburban lifestyles for white-collar workers after II world War. Pastoral capitalism as a set of social values to take headquarters and laboratories out of city centres.
This is the way we organized professional services in the last decades BUT, WILL IT LAST? The way we work is changing. Do we need these big spaces?
Shadows on the horizon: The rise and rise of skyscrapers
Super-tall skyscrapers are popping up all over the place. A sign of growing prosperity, presumably? Far from it, says a new report. Tom Bawden discovers why prestigious high-rises tend to presage economic doom
The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper
The skyscraper is perhaps the most recognizable icon of the modern urban landscape. Providing offices, homes, restaurants, and shopping to thousands of inhabitants, modern skyscrapers function as small cities- with infrastructure not unlike that hidden beneath our streets. Clean water is provided to floors thousands of feet in the sky; elevators move people swiftly and safely throughout the building; and telecom networks allow virtual meetings with people on other continents. How are these services-considered essential, but largely taken for granted- possible in such a complex structure? What does it really take to sustain human life at such enormous heights?
Exploring the interconnected systems that make life livable in the sky is the task of Kate Ascher’s stunningly illustrated The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper. Ascher examines skyscrapers from around the world to learn how these incredible structures operate. Just how do skyscrapers sway in the wind, and why exactly is that a good idea? How can a modern elevator be as fast as an airplane? Why are skyscrapers in Asia safer than those in the United States? Have new safeguards been designed to protect skyscrapers from terrorism?
What happens when the power goes out in a building so tall? Why are all modern skyscrapers seemingly made of glass, and how can that be safe? How do skyscrapers age, and how can they be maintained over decades of habitation? No detail is too small, no difficulty too big to escape Ascher’s encyclopedic eye.
Along the way, The Heights introduces the reader to every type of person involved in designing, building, and maintaining a skyscraper: the designers who calculate how weight and weather will affect their structures, the workers who dig the foundations and raise the lightning rods, the crews who clean the windows and maintain the air ducts, and the firefighters-whose special equipment allows blazes to be fought at unprecedented heights.
More than a technical survey, Ascher’s work is a triumphant ode to the most monumental aspect of modern civilization. Saturated with vivid illustrations and unforgettable anecdotes, The Heights is the ultimate guide to the way things work in the skyscraper.
