Preservationists object to plan for new colleges

Buildings to be demolished, clockwise from top left: Daniel Cady Eaton house, Hammond hall, Seeley Mudd Library, 88 Prospect Street.

“I find it very shocking that the total demolition of a giant site like this is still thought of as the way to proceed,” says Anstress Farwell ’78MA, president of the New Haven Urban Design League.

More seriously, she questions the wisdom of emulating the neo-Gothic architecture of Yale’s central campus. Calling it “a fantasy environment about what Yale has been in the past,” Farwell says, “I don’t think that if the university succeeds in this plan, the debate will ever go away: why did Yale do something retardataire at a moment when architecture is looking to be innovative?”

Preservationists object to plan for new colleges Carol Bass Yale Alumni Magazine 7/7/09

-Chris

Mixed-Use Strategy Helping New Haven’s Science Park Grow

MARK MIRKO / HARTFORD COURANT

After a decades-long slow start, the 60-acre complex of vacant firearms factories that the state, city and Yale University have been redeveloping for bioscience companies is roaring to life under a broadened, mixed-use strategy that envisions general office, retail and housing uses.

The university’s investment effectively expands the campus northward from downtown and westward from Prospect Street, helping to transform an area near the future dorms that is widely considered unsafe.

Mixed-Use Strategy Helping New Haven’s Science Park Grow Eric Gershon Hartford Courant 11/11/08

Posted by Chris

Population growth spurns airport innovation in Japan

Japan’s Spectacular Floating Airports Travelcounsellors.co.uk 6/3/08

“At present there are four such constructions in Japan (there are also examples in Hong Kong and Macau), each built on its own artificial island offshore and each backed by the community it serves. The first of these incredible engineering wonders to be built, and the first of its kind in the world, was Kansai International Airport in Osaka Bay… In total the project has so far cost around $20 billion but has already saved some expense by surviving both an earthquake and a typhoon in the last 15 years, in addition to being open 24 hours a day due to its location.”

Related: Shibuya subway station

Posted by Chris

Hugo Chavez and High-Modernism

Charles Lane explores the motivations of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as he undergoes a massive project to move the poor of his country into Utopian ‘socialist’ metropolis’.

Chavez challenges nature as well as democracy Charles Lane The Morning Call 12/02/07

“Chavez acts on an ideology that anthropologist James C. Scott of Yale has called ‘high modernism’…Central to high modernism is an aesthetic sense that prefers straight lines and right angles to the crooked pathways and sprawling gardens of spontaneous rural development…Architecturally and ecologically unsustainable, high modernist projects always collapse of their own weight sooner or later.”

More on Chavez’s planned ‘socialist cities’ here.

Posted by Chris

Center for Land Use Interpretation

From the CLUI exhibit Loop Feedback Loop:
The Big Picture of Traffic Control In Los Angeles

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is, “Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.”

Additionally, “The organization was founded in 1994, and since that time it has produced over 30 exhibits on land use themes and regions, for public institutions all over the United States, as well as overseas. Public tours have been conducted in several states, and over ten books have been published by the CLUI. CLUI Archive photographs illustrate journals, popular magazines, and books by other publishers, and have been used in non-CLUI exhibitions, and acquired by art collectors.”

The site also includes The CLUI Land Use Database, “an on-line computer database of unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States. It is a free public resource, designed to educate and inform the public about the function and form of the National landscape, a terrestrial system that has been altered to accommodate the complex demands of our society.”

See a list of CLUI exhibitions here.

Posted by: Ian M.