Everyday Architecture: The Background of Our Lives Stop for a minute and just think about the places you spend your time every single day: your apartment, your workplace, even the route you take to get around. Do you ever really pause to think about how these walls, these spaces, influence…
Category: Urban
Urban
Continue Reading
The Rise of Co-Living Spaces: Building Community, Brick by Brick (and Beyond!)
The way we live, you know, how we work, who we connect with – it’s all changing so fast. And our homes? They need to keep up! Remember when a white picket fence was the ultimate goal? Now, people are craving something deeper: A place to belong, a way to…
Urban
Continue Reading
The Impact of Zoning Laws on Architectural Innovation
I still remember pitching my ambitious design for a community center – a building designed to practically breathe with passive solar heating and a clever rainwater harvesting system. The planning board’s reaction? Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly a standing ovation. I was met with this wall of non-compliant issues:…
Cars, Parking and Planetizen: A Mess of Externalities
Planetizen has two early July 2010 essays and two comments on road and parking externalities and subsidies that are as good examples as any of (a) how fundamental the concepts of externality and subsidies are to evaluating public policy and (b) how hard they are to explain, or even understand….