PLACES : RICHARD CAMPANELLA

Delta Urbanism and New Orleans: After

After Hurricane Katrina, the citizens of New Orleans engaged in passionate debate about how to rebuild the city — and more, about how to rebuild to prevent future catastrophe. As Richard Campanella writes, in the second of a two-part installment from his new book, "Everyone seemed to become a policy wonk, a disaster expert, an engineer, a geographer, and above all, an urban planner." At the heart of the debate was a hard question: Should the city rebuild as before, even in low-lying, flood-prone areas? World attention may have refocused on other disasters, yet a great American city remains vulnerable to calamity.
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CHANGE OBSERVER : AZBY BROWN

Bent by the Sun

During the Edo period, from the early 17th to the mid 19th centuries, Japan faced environmental problems similar to ours: large population, fuel scarcity, limited arable land, deforestation, a damaged watershed. Through well-thought-out policies that reinforced existing cultural values, and through technical and economic innovation, the nation brought itself back from the brink, and did it in beautiful ways. Being a designer, I hoped to find useful lessons there.
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PLACES : RICHARD CAMPANELLA

Delta Urbanism and New Orleans: Before

Almost five years have passed since Hurricane Katrina and the floods that followed devastated New Orleans. But as geographer Richard Campanella makes plain in his new book, Delta Urbanism: New Orleans, the immediate catastrophe — the one that could not be ignored, that attracted international attention and inspired relief efforts and planning proposals and federal promises — has given way to the slow-building potential for future catastrophe — one that seems all too easy to ignore. For the underlying conditions that caused the devastation remain much the same. Not only are the flood-protection systems that have been constructed to protect the low-lying city pathetically inadequate — "under-engineered, cavalierly inspected and poorly maintained," in Campanella's words; still more, a century of intensive environmental manipulation has neutralized or destroyed the natural systems — the coastal wetlands, barrier islands, etc. — that would buffer the effects of seasonal storms and cyclical flooding. Here we present the first of a two-part excerpt from Delta Urbanism: New Orleans. This first part comprises Campanella's precise and painful narrative of the storm itself, from its ominous approach to horrifying aftermath, and also his account — a kind of retrospective forensics — of the environmental engineering that made it inevitable that a "sufficiently strong tropical storm" would cause a catastrophe. We will feature the second installment, about the post-disaster planning efforts — what some locals have called "plandemonium" — later this week.
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OBSERVATORY : ALEXANDRA LANGE

Design Blogs: The Vacuum of Enthusiasm

When the grid of 1,000 lampshades descended on the Oscar stage, minutes before the uncomfortable-making Best Actor appreciations (I had to mute), I thought, Yes! This is a fuggable design moment. I struggled to think of something funny to tweet about lampshades, decorators, Alec Baldwin after the show but @marklisanti beat me to it.
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OBSERVATORY : ERIC BAKER

Today, 03.27.10

Here are Today's images.
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PLACES : GAVIN BROWNING, GRETA HANSEN, CHERYL WING-ZI WONG

Trans Siberia

In late January we featured "ink," a gallery drawn from an exhibition at Studio-X New York, a downtown extension of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia. Here we present a gallery based on the latest exhibition at Studio-X. Trans Siberia is a record of the 5,000-mile journey from Moscow to Beijing, undertaken by the artist-architect duo Warm Engine, on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Warm Engine paid particular attention to the administrative buildings of the Communist party in the former Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, a selection of which are shown here, photographed in the deep cold of a high-latitude winter.
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CHANGE OBSERVER : JONATHAN SCHULTZ

One World Futbol

Great minds converge in the development of an indestructible soccer ball for underprivileged kids.
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CHANGE OBSERVER: PROJECT ARCHIVE

Bigshot Camera

Report on a camera that children assemble to learn about science and engineering principles.
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OBSERVATORY ARCHIVE

PLACES ARCHIVE: FALL 2008

The New U.S. Embassy in Berlin

In creating a new U.S. embassy in Berlin, architectural design is just one of the challenges.
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Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design
R. Klanten

ecoDesign: The Sourcebook
Alastair Fuad-Luke

Reinventing the Automobile
William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird & Lawrence D. Burns

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