Category Archives: Urbanism and planning

“The People vs. Modernism”

Malcolm Millais has sent me another video, this one entitled “The People vs. Modernism.” What a glorious compiliation! Beneath a score of ominous music selected from the depths of the minor key, its creators, who refer to themselves as ArchitectureMMXII, … Continue reading

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My 15 minutes of fame!

James Howard Kunstler, coiner of the word “crudscape,” author of great books from The Geography of Nowhere to World Built By Hand to The Long Emergency, lecturer extraordinaire, has picked up my denunciation of the new T entry at Government … Continue reading

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5th Ave., 8 BR, city view

A friend who used to be a big wheel in Providence development circles, Lee Juskalian, keeps tabs through me (and others) on development around here (though he has lived in California for years). Lee, who now travels and surfs, has … Continue reading

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Classical cataclysm in Nepal

The death toll from earthquakes in Nepal have reached well into the thousands. Coverage of rescue efforts has understandably taken priority over news of the terrible cultural cost of the disaster. The Nepalese capital of Kathmandu and other ancient centers … Continue reading

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Follies at the CNU in Dallas

The big buzz at the annual meeting (the “congress”) of the Congress of the New Urbanism, under way in Dallas, is how lame Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster was. Anyone familiar with his writing cannot have been surprised. … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Blast from past, Development, Landscape Architecture, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Boston’s spooky new T entry

An undercover source in deep infrastructure sent me a surreptitiously snapped photo of the new T entrance at Government Center the other day. The photo was too hot to handle, too ugly even to look at, so I left it … Continue reading

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Lord Jim’s “Skeffonomics”

Last Friday, when the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission bowed to pressure and let new PawSox owners James Skeffington and Larry Lucchino address the commissioners in public, the wheels of cynicism started spinning furiously. On Monday, when I arrived at the … Continue reading

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Long city planning grind

James Fallows has written “Nice Downtowns: How Did They Get that Way?” for the Atlantic, about how active city downtowns arise not naturally or organically but are planned. He takes the example of Seattle, which was a hollowed-out reject 50 … Continue reading

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Join my Jane’s Walk again!

I will be giving my second annual Jane’s Walk waterfront tour of downtown Providence on Saturday, May 2, at 1:00 p.m. We will meet at the Crawford Street Bridge – the new and beautiful bridge, not the late, unlamented Guinness … Continue reading

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Kimmelman swoops Whitney

It took Theodore Dalrymple, an essayist for the Manhattan Institute’s splendid quarterly, City Journal, to pull back the curtain on the operatic vapidity of New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. The latter has written his architectural review of the … Continue reading

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