Electricity Out Of The Blue - World’s First Osmotic Power Plant Opens in Norway
APT6 exhibition | Zhu Weibing, Ji Wenyu | People holding flowers (detail) 2007
Posted November 23, 2009 at 5:10pm
Posted November 22, 2009 at 2:00pm
Paris, France
“Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, a French aristocrat during Napoleon’s reign, was the Tim Zagat of his era. A true gourmand, he financed his voracious appetite by writing a series of guidebooks to the Paris’s finest culinary establishments. Two hundred years later, some of his favorites like Au Rocher de Cancale, left, are still thriving.”
On the Historic Trail of a Parisian Gourmand - The New York Times
Witold Rybczynski On The Four Paradigms of American Cities
1. The Garden Suburb
The Garden Suburbs, as envisioned by Olmstead with Riverside, were much like modern suburbs, without retail or industry; he considered them part of the city, connected by rail. Rybczynski calls them a huge success, and considers the New Urbanist themed communities their direct descendant.
2. The Ville Radieuse
Although designed by Le Corbusier in the twenties, we had to wait until after World War II to see an explosion of the Radiant City. While it didn’t work particularly well for social housing, in cities around the world, from Vancouver to New York to Hong Kong, it packs them in tight, achieving densities and efficiencies unmatched in any other form. Rybczynski considers it a huge success.
3. Broadacre City
Frank Lloyd Wright loved cars and the freedom they brought people, and thought that we no longer needed cities at all. Rybczynski suggests that FLW might not have been a bit disappointed at how it all turned out, but that he was “right about everything except the helicopters.”
4. The Jane Jacobs Downtown
Rybczynski calls her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities “arguably the most successful and influential in the second half of the twentieth century.” But in the end he is dismissive, noting that only a few cities have the kind of character and energy to make it work, and that it has become incredibly expensive, an urban playground for the rich.
