Reinventing Cities Winners

The finalists for the Reinventing Cities competition have been announced. This open ideas competition was aimed at reinvisioning 'new urban infrastructures'. It's hard to tell too much about the entries themselves w/o any appreciable explanatory text to accompany them, but some views of the graphics. I hope we can get more detail about the entries and winners to see what is behind the graphics.

1: take smoke, makes water - 100m2



2: dynamic transformation in border condition - pyo arquitectos



3: living the outsite - rita topa



4: performative landscapes - david newton



5: infrastructural armature - fletcher studio



In related news, the entry by myself and Brett Milligan '(re)volutionary infrastructures: urban ecotones' (entry #2804) was one of the 9 additional selected projects that were included but didn't officially place. As there were over 200 entries, it's a great honor to be included in this group. Look for some more info as these get collected in publications... for instance an upcoming issue of future architecture magazine. More soon.

Best of... the Rest

Well, finally back at it after a bit of time off and some flurry of activity around Parking Day 2009. More to come on our 'award winning' most playful entry to the Seattle People's Parking Lot, and the beauty of oversized Connect Four - and stay tuned for more posts upcoming.


:: 4-Play - image via CoJourn

A few resources that popped up in my inbox in the interim. Landscape+Urbanism made a couple of lists, including the Top 50 Construction Blogs (#44) and the 100 Innovative Blogs for Architecture Students (#1). Many thanks for the love there.

Large Parks

In the spirit of one of the finest collections of writing on parks (and landscape urbanism) 'Large Parks' (edited by Czerniak & Hargreaves) a recent post on The Infrastructurist catalogs 10 of the world's greatest large parks. "We thought it would be fun to take ten of the world’s largest, most famous, and most beautiful city parks–some combination of those virtues, anyway–and view them from above, all at the same scale, to get a sense of how they’re situated in the fabric of their respective cities and how they work as a whole." Not sure what the reference of what makes them 'great', not it's completeness - and they admittedly have a Western influence but the idea of parks that are reconciled to a similar scale is pretty cool. Very similar to the graphic in the Large Parks book comparing them in B/W figure ground.

A few of the examples:


:: Central Park (NYC) - image via The Infrastructurist


:: The Tiergarten (Berlin) - image via The Infrastructurist


:: Hyde Park (London) - image via The Infrastructurist