When I visited Philadelphia in April 2007, I stayed with my friend Emily in an improbably tiny house. She had explained that it was off a pedestrian alley off an alley – itself an unusual description – but when I entered I discovered the house had, apparently, just one room. A tiny, twisting staircase led […]
Transistasis: A Plan for Dallas’ Cedars Neighborhood
Last January I was a member of a student team at the University of Maryland that entered the Urban Land Institute Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition. Interdisciplinary teams of students were given two weeks to create a master land use plan and proposed ten-block development for a neighborhood just south of downtown Dallas, […]
An Architectural Aesthetic of Efficiency
“The principle of organic economy was too essential to the functioning of the society not to affect ethics and aesthetics profoundly.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, from the novel The Dispossessed Architectural sustainability, or the green building movement, is dominated by concern with buildings energy efficiency and use of sustainable materials. Left largely undiscussed is […]