Rios Clementi Hale Studios has transformed a dull space into a vibrant community plaza in Los Angeles by creating the new Sunset Triangle Plaza under the auspices of Streets for People (S4P), an initiative of the City of Los Angeles Planning Commission and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. Rios Clementi Hale Studios contributed its time and talents to transform an underutilized public right of way into a safe, pleasant, and vibrant public space for pedestrians and cyclists alike. Located at Griffith Park and Sunset Boulevards in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, Sunset Triangle Plaza opens on Sunday, March 4, 2012, at 11AM, for a community celebration. Continue reading Sunset Triangle Plaza opens in Los Angeles on March 4
Part of bustling Ballarat St in Yarraville, Australia (a suburb of Melbourne)has been transformed into a “pop‐up” park for a short term project which is introducing more open space into the Yarraville Village. The pop‐up park is one of a few installed in Australia on a public street and is inspired by similar parks installed overseas in New York, San Francisco and London.
As the next step in a planning process begun in the mid 1970’s, the vision presented here is a proposal for the revitalization of the Northeast Riverfront District, the City of Wausau’s former industrial land along the Wisconsin River. Prior to this, the City had substantially developed its plan for the central downtown and completed its purchase of most of the long dormant Northeast Riverfront District. At the next stage, the City hired a team of graduate student architects and planners with UW-Milwaukee’s Community Design Solutions (CDS) to adopt relevant recommendations from previous plans, integrate input from the community, and apply their skills and knowledge of modern design principles to create an urban landscape vision that stimulates further public input, planning, and decision-making. City officials and City Planner Brad Lenz had decided to bring an outside student group in for this project to provide fresh eyes for the task of creatively revitalizing a landscape that for so long had symbolized Wausau’s industrial decline. Continue reading Wausau North East Riverfront Masterplan | Wausau Wisconsin | Community Design Solutions
REWRITING A CITY IN NATURE | Diana Balmori | Urban Design Review “Our understanding of nature has changed radically. Our ideas about urbanism must catch up. By rewriting the city (a semantic departure from “planning”), we will jar the public to this major scientific and philosophical shift in the interaction of nature and the city.”
A new model of compact, environmentally enhanced urban design by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) for the rapid development of satellite cities along Chinese high speed rail corridors has won an international design competition with its Beijing Bohai Innovation City master plan. The winning SOM plan leverages the economic and lifestyle assets of the Beijing-Tianjin corridor by centering the new environmentally friendly district along the high-speed-rail line linking the national capital to the port city of Tianjin. The city expansion will host 17.6 million square meters of mixed-use development, with a focus on providing a premier headquarters location for advanced industries in the dynamically growing Bohai Rim, a region that already accounts for more than a quarter of China’s GDP.
