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Tag Archives: Jane Jacobs
My Jane Jacobs river tour
Wednesday would be the 100th birthday of Jane Jacobs if she had not died in 2006. Saturday at 1 p.m. is my third tour of Providence’s new riverfront for Jane’s Walk, the international conspiracy to spread her urbanist wisdom around … Continue reading
Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Books and Culture, Development, Landscape Architecture, Preservation, Providence, Providence Journal, Rhode Island, Urbanism and planning
Tagged Bill Warner, BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh, Infrastructure Observatory, Jane Jacobs, Jane's Walk, Providence RI, Robert Moses, Tim Hwang
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Architecture and happiness
In “Why the ‘happiest’ cities are boring,” John Kay of the Financial Times makes a series of very important distinctions between happy cities and great cities, and in doing so he challenges most of the reigning official definitions of happiness … Continue reading
Sniffing at Corbu and E-1027
Anthony Flint has an intriguing piece in Architect magazine, “Restoring Eileen Gray’s E-1027.” It’s about restoring the rather Corbusian seaside dacha designed by the Irish furniture designer (and lesbian) Eileen Gray. She had befriended the founder of modern architecture, Le … Continue reading
Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture History, Books and Culture
Tagged Anthony Flint, E-1027, Eileen Gray, France, Jane Jacobs, Le Corbusier, modernism, Robert Moses
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Between the lines of the NYT
Steven Bingler and Martin Pedersen, the architect and the writer who called on architects to pay more attention to public taste, do not seem to realize it, and would probably not admit it, but their essay in the New York … Continue reading
Choo-choo afternoon
Spent an hour at the model train show in the Pawtucket Armory on Sunday afternoon. Superlative setups, though not as many as we had hoped, and most were linear, with mostly HO-scale trains choo-choo’ing up and down long, narrow platforms … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Rhode Island, Urbanism and planning
Tagged Jane Jacobs, Model Trains, Pawtucket, Railroad, Tourism
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The lady on the waterfront
In her chapter “The curse of border vacuums” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs considered waterfronts a potential assassin of liveliness in city districts, not intrinsically so but because they were often poorly used. But … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Development, Providence, Urbanism and planning
Tagged Jane Jacobs, Mayoral Race, Patrick Conley, Providence, Waterfront
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Attack on Kennedy Plaza
My last post may have unintentionally dissed Burnside Park and Kennedy Plaza, leaving readers with the impression that they were failures, and that Providence civic leaders and city officials, along with the state transit authority, were valiantly riding to the … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Development, Providence, Urbanism and planning
Tagged Burnside Park, Jane Jacobs, Kennedy Plaza
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Jane Jacobs and KP
Jane Jacobs had some interesting things to say in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) about parks, and while Kennedy Plaza is not a park (though it has Burnside Park right next to it), some of it … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Development, Providence, Urbanism and planning
Tagged Jane Jacobs, Kennedy Plaza
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Radiant Garden City Beautiful
If wizards like Henry Hope Reed can be wrong on occasion, so can Jane Jacobs, who in our era is even more famous for her own pathbreaking book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Its chief claim to … Continue reading
