via The Business Standard

Respect for the design of Chandigarh, India, is growing, even as the modernist city is showing wear. But who will care, if access to its most impressive monuments is restricted?

By Ashish Nangia for Design Observer

But just as São Paulo’s streets are certain to be gridlocked for hours during each day’s rush hour, they’re certain to be eerily empty during important mega-events like the World Cup.

A group of bicycle and pedestrian activists took advantage of the carless streets during the games to paint zebra-style crosswalks and add other signage and warnings to the city’s woefully pedestrian-unfriendly streets.

The do-it-yourself street makeovers are part of a growing worldwide trend to make streets more inviting to walkers and bikers…without waiting on local officials to initiate the work. In New York City, people recently painted  “guerrilla bike lanes” and other street signage in Brooklyn, as Treehugger reported. And in Washington, D.C., street artist Steed Taylor and a group of volunteers gave the District’s downtown Vermont Avenue a “road tattoo,” which BeyondDC described as “an installation of pavement art that makes the space seem even less like a normal street and more a public plaza.” Other “Urban Repair Squads” from Los Angeles to London do their part to fix urban spaces.  So it was only a matter of time before urban activists resorted to painting guerrilla crosswalks like these in Brazil.

via The City Fix

by Hugh Pearman – This is one of the most purely enjoyable architecture biennales I’ve been to, and I’ve been to a fair old few over the years. Why so? Because, for once, it’s not all about the next big icon building. New icons are getting to be an endangered species anyway, but like most of us I’d got well bored by such landmark projects and their starchitect designers, some years back. The recent recession thankfully knocked most of them on the head.

Full article here

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user Thomas Birke.

Despite the impulse to marvel at Hong Kong’s sophisticated planning for and investment in infrastructure and urban density, might people there welcome some New York-style urbanism? Norman Oder, author of the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report, recaps two conferences that suggest that New York’s mechanisms for community input on development projects, imperfect as they are, may themselves be worthy of a little envy from concerned citizens facing top-down urban planning regimes. -C.S.

via Urban Omnibus

Architecture is an agent of change, which is why a leader like Mahatma Gandhi is called the architect of the nation, writes Charles Correa in ‘A Place in the Shade: The new landscape & other essays’ (www.landmarkonthenet.com). “Neither the engineer, nor the dentist, nor the historian. But the architect, i.e., the generalist who speculates on how the pieces could fit together in more advantageous ways. One who is concerned with what might be.” And to do this, in the context of the Third World, we must have the courage to face very disturbing issues, he adds.

The author invites architects to offer their ideas and energy to the society and resurrect the ‘shared aesthetic’ that once existed. Tracing the historic precedent to such sharing, he informs that for throughout most of Asia, the architect’s prototype in the past was the mimar or mistri, i.e., an experienced mason/ carpenter who helped with the design and construction of the habitat; even today in the small towns and villages of India, the practice continues.

“Owner and mistri go together to the site, and with a stick scratch out on the earth the outline of the building they wish to construct. There is some argument back and forth about the relative advantages of various window positions, stairways and so forth. But the system works because both builder and user share the same aesthetic – they are both on the same side of the table.” It was exactly this kind of equation that produced the great architecture of the past, from Chartres to the Alhambra to Fatehpur Sikri, reminds Correa.

Imperative read on a contemplative afternoon.

via The Hindu

OpenHAUS Architecture and DARCH invites design/architecture professionals and students to create an ‘Advertisement for Architecture’. The most outstanding of these entries will be exhibited at the award winning Surry Hills Library and Community Centre, Sydney, Australia from 20 October until 07 November 2010.

Entry + Registration Deadline: 20 September 2010
For more information visit http://openhaus.org/exhibitions/aa2010/
View entries from last year’s edition here

Most of us have used Google’s Street View on Google Maps before- the feature that allows us to virtually navigate the streets of the world via our computer screens. To make this happen, Google sends off cameras fixed onto roving vehicles to document each street around the world and then digitally piece these images together to re-construct the built environment.

What if, the view of the street life that Google captures were constructed as an artwork? This is what the “Street with a view” project attempted to do. Through assembling a cast of characters, a pseudo-street life was created on Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh and has since been immortalized in the Google servers. Watch the video and head on over to the project’s website and be amazed at ‘the most exciting street in the world’.

via GOOD

1. Project for a New Dimension – prepared by Office for Metropolitan Architecture, led by Mr Rem Koolhaas.
2. City Park – prepared by Foster + Partners, led by Lord Norman Foster.
3. Cultural Connect: Key to Sustained Vitality – prepared by Rocco Design Architects Limited, led by Mr Rocco Yim.

OMA

OMA’s proposal revolves around the concept of creating 3 villages, connected by public spaces, all of which with a strong emphasis on creating vibrant street life and cultural production through which activating the cultural district. The connections with its immediate surrounding is also critical in the proposal with the ambition that this will encourage a vibrant neighborhood.

–

Foster + Partners

A massive waterfront city park anchors the project, becoming a venue for outdoor performances and  activities while offering views of the harbour and Hong Kong Island. A series of outdoor terraces and promenades will also link the cultural buildings to the waterfront. On top of that, what’s most encouraging of this proposal is the sinking of vehicular routes underground thus restoring the ground plane to bicycles and pedestrians and also its carbon-neutral ambitions.

–

ROCCO

With a distinct 3-band urban grid comprising of the Green Terrain, the Cultural core and the City link. Focusing on connections, both physical and visual, the masterplan’s strength lies in its ambition to create multiple activity nodes along the area not only at various key buildings but also the in-between spaces that results.

See all three proposals via the WKCDA website
More at Dezeen