City Comforts, the blog

Is this helpful? Or even accurate? Or let me count the number of issues with Duany's remarks....

The Man Who Reinvented the City

But I think the most interesting experiment of all is Singapore. Singapore had nothing going for it. No raw materials. And you got a kind of top-down government that was almost completely enlightened, putting education first and so forth, and you have this city that is extremely livable. 

While democracy does most things well, I think we need to confront the fact that it does not make the best cities. And that the cities that were great were rather top-down. You know--Paris and Rome, the grid of Manhattan. What would those have been like if there hadn't been some top-down stuff? Every landowner would have done a separate little pod subdivision. That's one of the things that's naive about Americans--extremely naive, I find, as an outsider having lived in places that are possibly less democratic, like Spain. This idea that you have an individual right to do whatever you want with your land is very democratic, but the result is pretty questionable.

Unfortunately, it's hard to have a debate in this country about certain things. We talk about bottom-up planning. And by the way, I make my living doing this bottom-up planning. But if you unfilter what people want--they don't want poor people, they don't want income diversity, and they don't want shops anywhere near them and they don't want rapid transit and they don't want streets that connect and they don't want anybody bicycling past their yards and they don't want density. So you can't just do unfiltered bottom-up planning. We need to educate.

Only in California?

I am planning a trip to New York and part of the program involves sightseeing from Washington Square Park to the new High Line Park, about 1.5 miles away.

Google Maps gives me the routes. In fact it gives me car, transit and walking routes. So far so good.

I figure out how to do it and I want to save my walking route so I can quickly find it on my iPhone or discuss it with others or whatever: I want to save my work.

I spend probably 20 minutes trying to figure out to do a "Save my map." But lo-and-behold Google Maps will only let me save the car trip routing -- in Manhattan, New York! Only in California would a company (in this case it is Do No Evil Google) set up a fantastic system to be able to go just about anyplace in several modes and then remove the ability to save only the driving map!

It's fantastic. I can hardly believe it. But it's so. Only in California!

No it is not a plot and no doubt Google will (and already plans to) save all versions, car, walk, transit and I assume bike.. But it shows you how expectations favor, even in Manhattan, the car. How far the lack of such "Save my walking route" functionality exists — say in Paris, or San Francisco or Hong Kong — I have no idea. Maybe Manhattan is an exception and I will be happy to be proven wrong.

And indeed maybe I did it wrong — so double-check my work. Maybe there's a way to save a walking or transit route but I couldn't figure it out. Here are the three versions.I found:

 

 

   

The issue was design criticism, not design

They Revived the Pritzker

Martin Filler responds to my comment in the New York Review of Books blog (NYRB),

Perhaps if David Sucher followed the link to my New York Review piece on the New Museum he would have found the degree of detail he deems lacking in my necessarily shorter blog posting, but I suspect that no amount of argument could persuade him of SANAA's merits.

Alas, my issue is not aimed to the designer — SANAA — but to the critic — Filler. In fact I think that the Museum is pretty nice and appears to be a good urban building — I'll check it out soon in person. But here it is, below, as annotated.

Among other things Filler's specific point (in his NYRB post) says that SAANA did a "thrifty" job — at $800 SF. That strikes me as preposterous, and once opening up the question by specifically addressing cost. NYC is expensive but not that expensive and a series of boxes with few windows even with cantilevers should in fact be a thrifty and astute design — but not at $800 SF.

The other thing really odd about his post is that 
1. he additionally states that the interior, as a museum, is not all that good
2. he doesn't even mention that the Museum is in fact a good urban building in terms of urban design, in how it addresses the street, which incidentally is far better than the Modern.

Read his whole post and the comments. To some degree I wondered if I may have treated Filler a bit harshly in comments. But the NYRB is the big time, as is the Pritzker Prize and the New Museum. So he should get it right if he is going to be an architecture critic.

 

iPad

Paul Biba acquires an iPad

I did too. The author is not enamored. Pretty-much, I am, espcially since it is a first-generation iPad.

But it is not perfect and the flaw I see is a surprising and major one:  the iPad ergonomics are terrible. Its edge is too thin and tapers. Its case is slippery. I found that I am scared of dropping it so there is constant tension in the fingers. But the overall ergonomic issue is not so much weight as awkwardness. 

Apple can easily solve the problem in 2nd generation iPads. 

And in the short run I bought a 1337 Gaming Case (whatever a "gaming case" is) from Incipio and it solves the problem nicely. The case is a tad heavy in itself (which does not help the iPad) and has unusual but practical corner grips. But it works amazingly well and I am sure that Incipio can yet improve it. Here's what it looks like. The corners are extra thick and offer a good grip:

 

What will be the big digital issues in January 2011?

For obvious reasons — including 'porting' City Comforts to ebook format — I am fascinated by questions on What will be the big digital issues in January 2011 — a conference organized by Mike Shatzkin, who is encouraging fresh thoughts. I am not in the publishing business but also in it, if only because I did write, photograph, publish (including experts in editing, graphic design, and so on) and marketing/distribution (enough to know difficult it is.) So in a way I have replicated all the issues involved, save needing a publisher to coddle a prima donna author. I've beed anticipating the ebook in general for at least ten years and so now it is pretty amazing to see it actually happening — and with my own title.

Take a look at the wide-array of questions to stimulate your thinking on ebooks. I'l offer some of mine.

Hard to fathom

After Housing Bust, Builders Dust Off the Boom Machine

Home prices in Las Vegas are down by 60 percent from 2006 in one of the steepest descents in modern times. There are 9,517 spanking new houses sitting empty. An additional 5,600 homes were repossessed by lenders in the first three months of this year and could soon be for sale. 

Yet builders here are putting up 1,100 homes, and they are frantically buying lots for even more.

Maybe there is a madness afoot.

One of America's great thinkers: not

Camille Paglia says:

This whole thing about global warming — I am absolutely incredulous at the gullibility of people. What is this hysteria over drowning polar bears? And finally I realized, people don%u2019t know polar bears can swim! For me, the answer is always more facts, more basic information, presented without sentimentality and without drama. To inflict this kind of anxiety on young people is an outrage.

Good call, Fred Kaplan

Three lessons from the Times Square bomb

2. Jane Jacobs is, once again, right. In her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, self-taught urban scholar and activist Jane Jacobs observed that sidewalks and their users are "active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism" (by "barbarism," she meant crime) and that a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there —  "the natural proprietors of the street — provide "eyes upon the street." 

Jacobs, who died in 2006, would not have been surprised to learn that it was two street vendors who first notified police of the suspicious Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just off Broadway. 

Lane Orton and Duane Jackson, both disabled Vietnam War veterans who were hailed as heroes after their roles in the foiling became clear, have been keeping their "eyes upon the street" for years and%u2014like many of their fellow vendors%u2014have frequently tipped off police to strange and illegal activities.