I’ve kept my eyes on Dubai’s development ever since hearing stories about $300 slices of cake served in the restaurant atop the Burj Al Arab (the world’s fanciest hotel, apparently, and certainly not the most reasonably priced). Just the lobby of the building is large enough that clouds formed in it when first built. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, as Dubai has embarked on mega-project after mega-project, including a whole series of islands, a downtown core, the world’s largest amusement park, and much more. Before they had even completed work on a record-breaking 800m high Burj Dubai, they began drawing plans for the 1200m high Al Burj.

On a certain level I have to respect their vision. Financial-crisis aside, oil is most-likely running out, and they seem to have embraced tourism and trade as replacements. They’re trying to build a world-class metropolis from the ground-up.

Aside from many glaring questions about whether this is sustainable financially and environmentally, my main concern is the sheer speed of expansion. A city is an incredibly complex web of various factors, and I personally believe that it is well beyond the capabilities of any designer or design team to draft up a fully functioning city in the middle of a desert in one fell swoop.

They may well get lucky and come up with the right mix of ingredients, but in my eyes a city is something that builds itself over the course of decades. Only time will tell, but the speed here certainly is alarming.

For a summary of recent Dubai building projects, I suggest the aptly, if not overly-simplisticly named Dubai is Nuts.

When in California recently, I dropped by a fantastic architecture and design bookstore called William Stout. I ended-up picking up Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I learned in Architecture School, among other things. It’s basically a bathroom book for the architecture and design crowd, with short little bits of information that take about 30 seconds to read.

Here’s #18:

Any design decision should be justified in at least two ways.

A stair’s primary purpose is to permit passage from floor to floor, but if well designed it can also serve as a congregation space, a sculptural element, and an orienting device in the building interior. A window can frame a view, bathe a wall in light, orient a building user to the exterior landscape, express the thickness of the wall, describe the structural system of the building, and acknowledge an axial relationship with another architectural element. . .

Opportunities for multiple design justifications can be found in almost every element of the buillding. The more justifications you can find or create for any element, the better.

There are 100 more of those in the book. Much of it, like this example, can be applied to virtually any type of design or creative work.

The Book Vase

I can’t imagine this is durable or easy to clean, but it looks neat.

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Swipe Keyboard

It’s little wonder that making an efficient and accurate keyboard on a small mobile device is very, very difficult. Here is a video of one which looks promising. These devices need everything they can get.

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The CO2 output of Concrete

Concrete is responsible for 7-10% of CO2 emissions worldwide, making it the biggest climate change culprit outside of transportation and electricity-generation.

An oft-neglected environmental problem is the CO2 created by cement production. This article outlines the problems and some possible solutions.

Athens Olympic Venues Unused

Living in a former Olympic City with an unused main stadium we only managed to pay off two years ago (the Montreal Olympics were in ‘76) I’m not at all surprised to see this video showing the unused state of the venues from the Athens Olympics. There’s something about the Olympics that seems to make architects think they can just drop their stadiums and athletic facilities in the middle of a field of concrete with no regard for how they’ll be used for the decades after the games. There’s little wonder that they’re often abandoned and somewhat depressing as soon as all the crowds leave.

The planning committees should have retrofits in mind when they build the facilities to keep them functional when they’re done with - including covering up some of that ugly and barren concrete with something practical.

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Elevator Group Behavior

A classic clip from Candid Camera which shows just how easy it is to get people to bend to group behavior.

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HP Packages New Laptops in Messenger Bags

A simple solution to reducing packaging, so long as those messenger bags are at least somewhat decent in quality.

Ignore That Logo Under the Tape

Apparently the authorities in Beijing are banning all corporate logos in the olympic venues, except for those of the official sponsors. This means that all sinks, toilets, fire extinguishers, security systems etc. have ugly bits of white tape on them.

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Shipping Container Hotel

A hotel made from stacked shipping containers, which comes out looking like a somewhat conventional hotel. It was apparently much cheaper, faster, and caused less waste on site.

Unfortunately, however, the shipping containers, which form the rooms, are put together in China and shipped halfway around the world. So basically they’ve figured out how to outsource the construction of buildings.

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Amazing Shadow Performance

Looks like it’s from the Conan O’Brien show, but I don’t know anything about this.

Word Clock

Fun clock screensaver that simply changes text highlights to denote time. Not at all practical, but fun.

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Boy or Girl Paradox

in a random two-child family, one of the children is a boy. What is the probability that the other one is a girl?

It’s very unintuitive, but it’s 2/3. Very neat.

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Bruno Taylor’s Public Play Spaces

71% of adults used to play on the streets when they were young. 21% of children do so now. Are we designing children and play out of the public realm?

This project is a study into different ways of bringing play back into public space. It focuses on ways of incorporating incidental play in the public realm by not so much as having separate play equipment that dictates the users but by using existing furniture and architectural elements that indicate playful behaviour for all.

Stewart Brand’s book, How Buildings Learn, is one of the best design/architecture books I’ve ever read. It rails against the spartan, impractical, and wasteful aesthetic of “magazine architects” — those designers whose buildings are conceived more as a piece of art than a functioning building, like the MIT Media lab by IM Pei pictured on the right.

It’s a study of buildings and spaces after being built, an important and oft neglected facet of the architectural field.

The accompanying BBC series is similarly down to earth and practical. It takes someone with a particular straightforwardness and insight to interview the men who wash the windows on Frank Gehry’s Prague-based Dancing House, rather than the superstar architect himself.

The whole 6-part series has been put on Google Video. Watch parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six, all for free, of course.

Via Kottke.

As a follow-up to last week’s post of a Kunstler-esque critique on ridiculous suburban buildings. Here’s a doozy - a motel with a facade of a quaint little small town called Jacuzzi Adventure Suites, also in North Conway, New Hampshire. The image of urbanism has been turned into a cheap sideshow on the side of a very non-urban highway.

All of the supposed amenities of urban life are represented, a bakery, a stable, a barber shop, and even a train station. The reality, on the inside, are bizarre theme rooms like Motorcycle Madness, which caters to the many bikers who come to the state to ride sans helmet, or The Cave, complete with “Bats and Panthers”. It’s such a strange mish-mash I don’t even know where to begin.

Alexander is one of my favourite authors, not only because his content is excellent, but also because the books he creates are beautiful artifacts which are a pleasure to look at and read.

While A Pattern Language is great, I’m more fond of A Timeless Way of Building, Alexander’s design manifesto. On the surface it’s an architecture book, but its principles can be applied to a wide variety of design fields. In fact, the book has a positively spiritual tone to it, which turned me off until I began to realize that it was trying to describe something larger and more nebulous than just architecture.

A decent amount of attention has been drawn to his ideas, but I would like to also draw attention to how he designs his books, as it’s a great example of attention to detail. The very way the book is structured is nothing short of brilliant - he has built in a system that makes it easy to skim the contents of the whole book incredibly quickly.

Basically, certain passages are italicized. For the reader who wants to speed through in “less than an hour”, you simply read the bits in italics. For everyone else, read through as normal. The description is deceptively simple, as the real effort went into writing and editing the book to be read in two different modes.

Here is a scan of the first page:

He says of his formatting:

What lies in this book is perhaps more important as a whole than in its details. If you only have an hour to spend on it, it makes much more sense to read the whole book roughly in that hour, than to read only the first two chapters in detail. For this reason I have arranged each chapter in such a way that you can read the whole chapter in a couple of minutes . . .

The great thing about it is that it takes virtually nothing away from the reader who wants to read everything. It is easier to scan, but it’s also great for going back and refreshing yourself on the contents, which at nearly 550 pages would otherwise take some time.

I’m going to try channeling James Howard Kunstler, an urban planning and architecture critic who is generally known for his strong anti-suburban rants. He argues that much of this space is soulless and not really worth caring about, and I generally have to agree with him.

Here’s a page from what Kunstler would possibly refer to as “the tragic comedy of suburbia”. In a misguided attempt to inject some classical urban charm into the North Conway, New Hampshire location of Lowe’s, someone thought is would be a good idea to build-in a pretty hilarious row of fake second-story windows on their otherwise completely suburban box-store.

Multiple stories and mixed-uses are one of the most important principles of classical urban design. The stacking keeps the population density high enough to allow for varied street life, public transportation, and general walkability. The mixed-uses ensure that there are almost always people in the immediate area - either working, living, or shopping, which keep things interesting and makes sure there are usually eyes on the street, which is good for community and security.

This, though, does none of those things. It’s a sad attempt to channel the quaintness of a small-town America which barely even exists anymore.