streets
The street of an old town
Greenfill
The stoop is a space of spectatorship
Exuberant diversity in a city's streets
Equipped to handle strangers
The city's most vital organs
Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
Drawing pictures of cities
Off the Grid...and Back Again?
An Article by Geoff BoeingMy article “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design” has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association and won the 2020 Stough-Johansson Springer Award for best paper. It identifies recent nationwide trends in American street network design, measuring how urban planners abandoned the grid and embraced sprawl over the 20th century, but since 2000 these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns.
Combinations and arrangements
Everything designed has an element of arbitrariness in its form. Loewy described how groups of his designers used to go about designing a new model automobile. Different groups were given different tasks, such as the front and rear of the car, and the conceptual work began, to be cut off at some predetermined time by deadlines that were imposed at the outset. After a time, there were "piles of rough sketches," and Loewy saw the design proceed as follows:
Now the important process of elimination begins. From the roughs, I select the designs that indicate germinal direction. Those that show the greatest promise are studied in detail, and these in turn are used in combination or arrangements with one another. A promising front treatment can be tried in combination with a likely side elevation sketch, etc. From this a new set of designs emerges. These are then sketched in detail. After careful analysis, they boil down to four or five.