Veritas et Venustas"Renewing Tradition for the 21st Century." Keywords: architecture, urbanism, classical architecture, traditional urbanism, New Urbanism, Classical Liberalism, ProgressivismThe second semi-annual Slouching Towards Alphaville Award goes to Zaha Hadid's Expocentre exhibition halls and residential tower project in Russia- March 21, 2007 It's cold. It's winter. It's minus 20 degrees, an arctic wind is blowing in from the Russian steppes, and you're walking on the biggest street in Moscow. Above you in the swirling snow loom three towers that increase the wind chill factor to minus 100 degrees. All the vokda in...http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/the_second_semi.html Cities need both order and richness —- March 21, 2007 but most buildings of the last 50 years have only supplied one or the other. Many of the glass and metal office boxes built in Manhattan in the 1950s and 60s had plenty of order but got their richness from the older buildings around them and from their contrast...http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/cities_need_bot.html New Urban Myths Numbers 1 & 2: New Urbanism is just for the suburbs; New Urbanists are just a bunch of traditional architects.- March 20, 2007 THE PRINCIPLES of the New Urban Charter work at the scale of the region, the city, the town, the neighborhood, the block, the street, the building, the farm, the forest and the rural preserve. You can find the text of the Charter here. The New Urban Transect works from the...http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/new_urban_myths.html “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”- March 19, 2007 MATERIALISM is the marvel of the modern world. With capitalism, modern science and engineering transformed the world in two centuries. First in the west, and now all over the world, we have gone from agrarian societies to the world of the internet, air travel, a cure for cancer and global...http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/there_are_more_.html Eat food. More vegetables. Less meat.- March 19, 2007 Is it coincidence or convergence that the New Urbanism, the Slow Food movement and Peak Oil are all coming together at the same time A few days ago, I picked up an interesting magazine I'd never seen before, The Valley Table, about regional farming in the Hudson Valley. Of course...http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/eat_food_more_v.html Not That There's Anything Wrong With That ...- March 13, 2007 This is where George Costanza thought he would be working: Architects & city planners at the office. The photo's from a Banana Republic ad that shows architects at work. Gawker.com asked a young architect who works at "a large firm downtown with an eccentric, megalomaniac starchitect at the helm" what...http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/not_that_theres.html Sponge Worthy Architects- March 12, 2007 SEVERAL times on Seinfeld, George Costanza disclosed that what he always wanted to be was an architect (or a marine biologist). After the discounted wedding invitations he chose killed George's fiance, her parents set up the Susan Ross Foundation, to give Susan's (unexpected) fortune "to anyone but" George. In the...http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/sponge_worthy_a.html The Smell of Maple Syrup in the Evening- March 11, 2007 THE last couple of years there have been sporadic reports of New York neighborhoods smelling like maple syrup. The maple danger got so strong that buildings were evacuated and some PATH trains shut down. The first time, Mayor Bloomberg said the problem was a gas leak in the West Village....http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/the_smell_of_ma.html If God were an engineer ...- March 8, 2007 (Engineering humor) A group of engineers are sitting around at a party, discussing the nature of the God, and who designed women. The mechanical engineer states that God must also be a mechanical engineer because "if you look at all the pulleys and levers that drive the body, how the...http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/if_god_were_an_.html The Way We Build Now — Never Trust the Bureaucrats- March 8, 2007 In the year 2007, the Lord came unto Noah, who was now living in the United States, and said, "Once again, the earth has become wicked and over-populated, and I see the end of all flesh before me. Build another Ark and save 2 of every living thing along with...http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2007/03/the_way_we_buil.html |