Architect Magazine and the Congress for the New Urbanism with praise for the elegant and beautiful expansion of the Savannah College of Art & Design’s Museum of Art.
SCAD Museum of Art draws national praise
Category: Urban Form
Good intentions + Conflicting agendas = Bad design
Savannah City Council approves One West Victory development
One West Victory, with plans for 121 apartments as well as a relatively small amount of commercial space at the corner of Victory Drive and Bull Street, won fairly easy approval at today’s City Council meeting. I’m a little surprised by the investment that Jamestown and Greenstreet Properties is willing to make there, but I’m generally thrilled about it.
“Why spend all that money to tear down our perfectly good flyover? Where will all the cars go?”
I hear those two questions all the time when the I-16 flyover removal comes up. And I’m expecting to hear them a lot more in the next two months.
ArchDaily: How to Save Suburbia?
There’s a recent 2-part series by Vanessa Quirk at ArchDaily that succinctly covers some important practical and theoretical ground: Saving Suburbia Part I: Bursting the Bubble and Saving Suburbia Part II: Getting the Soccer Moms On Your Side.
Atlanta Food Truck Park opening Thursday
As the food truck movement has grown in cities like Atlanta and Charleston, it has stalled in Savannah.
Good urban design = More human connections
I’ve been writing and reading a lot lately about urban design issues — especially streets.
Thanks to a Twitter post, I found Is Bad Urban Design Making Us Lonely? at The Atlantic Cities, which included a link to a lengthy and well-researched study of urban design and social connections in Australia: “Social Cities” by Jane-Frances Kelly for the Grattan Institute.
Tom Vanderbilt on NPR this morning: Americans should be walking more
I’ve already posted links, comments, and excerpts for Tom Vanderbilt’s 4-part series at Slate about the state of walking and pedestrianism in America. This morning he talked to NPR’s Morning Edition about these issues — and made a compelling case…
Tom Vanderbilt in “Slate”: “How America can start walking again”
I’ve already posted a few Savannah-centric comments about as well as links to Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt’s 4-part series in Slate about walking in America. My posts are here, here, and here. Why do Americans walk less than most other…
Walk Score: Slate series on pedestrian issues weighs validity of widely used metric
Tom Vanderbilt, in the 3rd part of his excellent 4-part series on pedestrianism and walking in America, focuses on Walk Score, “the company that tracks the “walkability†of locations around the world.”
Tom Vanderbilt on pedestrian habits in part 2 of “Slate” series
From Tom Vanderbilt’s Sidewalk Science; The peculiar habits of the pedestrian, explained:
[William “Holly”] Whyte, in his films of New York City street life, identified the street corner as an important factor in urban dynamics. Here was a zone of serendipity where people encountered one another beneath the blinking walk man, where they paused to chat before parting, where they formed small convivial islands just as pedestrian flow was surging most strongly.
Tom Vanderbilt, author of “Traffic”, on “The Crisis in American Walking”
Slate is in the midst of publishing a four-part series by Tom Vanderbilt, author of the acclaimed book Traffic, about pedestrianism — or just plain old walking — in America.
Vanderbilt’s opening from part one — The Crisis in American Walking; How we got off the pedestrian path — might be especially interesting to readers here in Savannah [. . .]
Savannah River Landing: will Oglethorpe plan be part of its future?
Savannah River Landing was intended as extension of the Oglethorpe Plan of 1733, but recent news casts doubt that we’ll ever see the grid and squares replicated.
Zoning reforms in Seattle echo goals of some in Savannah
I was a member for several years of the technical committee that met monthly overseeing and discussing the work of local planners hoping to overhaul and update antiquated, overly rigid zoning codes. Regrettably, that process of creating a Unified Zoning…