urbanism

Panda Tower / UDG. Atelier Alpha | ArchDaily

Text description provided by the architects.

The Panda Tower is designed by UDG Atelier Alpha for the new campus of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. It is a new cultural landmark that combines observation, exhibition, and sightseeing. In addition, it is a work of practice that celebrates the combination of nature and technology.

The inspiration for the Panda Tower comes from bamboo shoots. Widely distributed in the Sichuan-Chongqing region, not only are the bamboo shoots the favorite food of the Giant Panda, but they are also considered one of the most popular food ingredients in Sichuan cuisine.

The main structure of the tower has 11 stories. There is a spacious viewing platform looking towards the central viewing area of the conservation park on each story. Without curtain walls nor gratings, the floor slabs and the buttresses are honestly exposed.

The main body of the tower is composed of floor slabs and arced structure units. The inspiration is the pedals of the hibiscus flower, the city flower of Chengdu. The number of pedal slabs decreases in an arithmetic progression from the bottom of the tower to the top. Viewed from the central courtyard, the space demonstrated the beauty of mathematics.

The top of the curtain wall system of the Panda Tower has a mechanical system that opens the façade units according to programmed angles and speed on special days, such as the birth of new Giant Panda babies, the return of Giant Panda from oversea facilities, and important holidays and festivals. The opening of the façade resembles the sprouting of a bamboo shoot. The interaction with the visitors is eco-friendly and uses clean energy.

GIF - https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/624d/62dc/3e4b/31f5/fd00/008a/original/41%E5%A1%94%E5%86%A0%E5%BC%80%E5%90%AF%E5%8A%A8%E7%94%BB_AtelierAlpha.GIF?1649238743

The Pada Tower is completely program-controlled. All the architectural elements are correlated through the constraints in the grasshopper definition. The geometric constraints define the space, the mechanical constraints limit the structural components, and the dynamics control the retractable device. This rigorous system of mathematical constraints is the most important design gene of the project, as well as the base of aesthetics of the resulted space.

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Full-size photos that I shrunk down - are on the bottom of this page - Panda Tower, The Confluence of Nature and Technology.

You can walk around a whole city without stepping a foot outside so how is that not good urban planning?

3262 Ridgeway Blvd, New Orleans, LA 70129 | MLS #2419017 | Zillow

After years of stealth purchases and the threat of a $510 million lawsuit against locals, California Forever’s CEO says he now calls Solano County ‘home.’

I'm assuming this is shortly before opening. All trains at this time were steam-hauled.

Here's the station today

Back when the Underground was brand new and steam-powered

Seriously, it's like these dudes are fed agitators trying to get all ebikes banned or something. They just cannot help themselves and are drawn to exclusively riding in places they are illegal, instead of using any of the copious number of spaces designated for dirtbikes.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1721717883363823724

If you're thinking in tickets and arrests, you're not really thinking about justice.

what did New Urbanist architect Andres Duany mean when he said Seaside was inspired by the New Towns of nazi lebensraum planning?

he's not being literal, right??

:

(continued below)

http://roundtail.ca/main/why_round

I thought circles were actually bad at flexing, so not compliant at all

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/don-t-time-anything-gen-201728182.html

A TikTok video of a young woman complaining about her work-life balance after getting her first 9-to-5 position after college—described as “Gen Z girl finds out what a real job is like” in an X post—has gone viral. But while many have perceived her rant to be about having to work, a closer listen shows it’s really about having to commute to and from the office—and what little time there is left in her day after that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Kahn_(architect)#In_the_Soviet_Union

https://detroit.curbed.com/2019/12/13/21012559/albert-kahn-russia-ussr-detroit-world-war-ii

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida

Seaside is an unincorporated master-planned community on the Florida Panhandle in Walton County, between Panama City Beach and Destin. One of the first communities in America designed on the principles of New Urbanism, the town has become the topic of slide lectures in architectural schools and in housing-industry magazines, and is visited by design professionals from all over the United States.[2]

The town was used as the main filming location of the 1998 film The Truman Show.[7]

Seaside is one of three planned communities on Florida's Gulf coast designed by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. The other two are Rosemary Beach and Alys Beach. The three are examples of a style of urban planning known as New Urbanism. As Seaside is privately owned, no other municipal governments had planning jurisdiction over Seaside, and therefore the developers were able to write their own zoning codes.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9s_Duany

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School,[1] who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He is a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar (1919).[2] Gropius was also a leading architect of the International Style.[3]

Bauhaus "public and camouflaged" nazis

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304028755_The_ghost_in_the_city_industrial_complex_Le_Corbusier_and_the_fascist_theory_of_Urbanisme

Abstract and Figures

In 1927 le Faisceau’s newspaper Le Nouveau Siècle printed a feature “Le Plan Voisin” on Le Corbusier’s 1922 redesign of Paris, including an extract Le Centre de Paris from his Urbanisme (1925). Le Corbusier’s book was considered the “prodigious” model for the Fascist state that the league’s leader Georges Valois called La Cité Française – after his mentor the French engineer and revolutionary philosopher Georges Sorel, who, originally on the radical left, would eventually be credited as the parent of twentieth-century fascist thought. Valois and Le Corbusier had inherited the longer genealogy of French thought from the turn of the century, namely the bitter opposition to the French revolution, and quarrel with the Enlightenment that was characteristic of many French intellectuals in the early twentieth-century. The final page of Urbanisme features a painting depicting Louis XIV ordering the construction of les Invalides (1670). “Homage to a great urbanist: This despot conceived great things and realized them.” The image was produced at the dawning of the French enlightenment: its contents would become the precise object of the fin de siècle reactionary movements of the 1880s that gave birth to le syndicalisme. Le Corbusier thereby historicises his project for the new Paris.

Le Corbusier’s image of the modern city in 1927 visualises the alchemical history of the pro-blem of modernity, its transformation from pure mind into action: from the transformation of enlightenment philosophy from Kant and Hegel’s response to Kant, to its French translation in the industrial models of Sorel, the anarcho-syndicalist movement, and its savage end in the third reich– the spatio-industrial organisation par excellence that modernised genoci-de and conceived of mass murder as an architectural regime. French fascism with its roots in romanticism, idealism and anti-enlightenment thought not only contributed to but was fundamental to Le Corbusier’s urban formulation that reproduced ideas forged in the reactionary constructs that appeared as early as the French enlightenment, the intellectual laboratory in which philosophical fascism gestated for 200 years. Le Corbusier represents through the disciplinary gure we call “Architecture” the historical event of putting the problems of enlightenment thought into practice aprés Kant and Hegel.

https://www.dot.state.mn.us/nlx/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Lights_Express

Top Speed: 90mph (~144 km/h)

Avg. Speed: 60mph (~96 km/h)

Projected Yearly Ridership: 700k

A one-way trip will take about 2.5 hours, roughly the same as driving.

The project has received $194.7M from Minnesota, meeting the 20% local funding required for federal grants

Cmon, don't fuck this one up

https://archive.ph/2023.10.23-201016/https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-23/hotels-are-replacing-striking-workers-with-migrants-from-skid-row-shelter

“I can’t believe they are forcing these people, who are so desperate, to cross the picket line,” Petersen said. “Instead of addressing L.A.’s housing crisis, the hotel industry prefers to exploit the unhoused as strikebreakers to avoid paying their own workers enough to afford housing themselves.”

https://fortune.com/2023/10/24/blackston-ceo-steve-schwarzman-remote-work-dont-work-hard-billionaire/