Tag Archives: Urbanism

New Pasila

Cino Zucchi Architects have updated their masterplan for Pasila redevelopment. It would add up to forty story 160m high skyscrapers to the Helsinki skyline, at the moment the highest buildings are about 100m high. Pasila was planned and built as an expansion of the centre of Helsinki, infact as early as Eliel Saarinens’ masterplan which [...]
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Helsinki Remapped

A wonderful post and map (seen above) from Locating Helsinki about the coast at the centre of Helsinki and how it has changed, and Darren found a list of islands some of them shown on the image above which have disappeared. Another set of large changes are due to take place over the coming years [...]
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Gaming the City

Did SimCity  programme a whole load of computer geeks with the failed assumptions of 60′s planning? Me, I think the idea is good but the wrong way around. Actually getting lots of people thinking about urban design or gaming the city is a fantastic concept and each iteration of the game has added complexity and [...]
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Slussen Proposal

BIG Architects and  NOD Landscape Architects have made a major proposal for the Slussen in Stockholm. This area one of the busiest transport interchanges in the city has become increasingly run down and inaccessible to cyclists and pedestrians. But the new proposal would reverse that completely. Watch the video below to see how the proposal [...]
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Star Wars a New Heap

Thirty years after the premiere of Star Wars, the strange chimpanzee crossed another threshold. For the first time in fifty-five hundred years of building cities, more of humanity now lives in them than in rural settlements. In the coming years there will be countless master plans for new mega-cities in Africa, Asia, and South America. [...]
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Buildings as Skateparks

Following on from my review of Skateboarding, Space and the City, Wired has a nice article about some recently finished buildings in which the Architects have conciously included for skate design. The Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta where skateboarders were consulted; “We spoke to them about surface textures and the areas they prefer,” architect Simon [...]
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Venice Floods

Yesterday Venice was being hit by the biggest flood it has had in the last 20 years (1.56m). An underwater dam called the MOSE project to help protect the city is due for 2011. The dam consists of a series of gates 20 metres wide and up to 30 metres high which lie at the [...]
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Locating Helsinki

The serendipity of the web lead me to Locating Helsinki, an excellent blog that documents urban Helsinki in all its quirks and small wonders. My favoutrite so far is the rather roughly built ski jump that sits on a hillside between two big developments.
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Skateboarding, Space and the City

Skateboarding, Space and the City by Iain Borden amazon.com|.uk Iain Borden effectively tells the history of the rise of skateboarding, board and boardpark history and the evolution of skateboarding itself. Lefebvre‘s The Production of Space is the main jumping off point for this book but necessarily reinterpreted through the attitude of skateboarders to the city. [...]
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Fortress Finland

When the Russians controlled Finland they built a nationwide network of fortifications. Afraid of a Barbarossa style attack and capture of the then Capitol St. Petersburg. Helsinki was also fortified although most of these fortifications were never used. Now much is destroyed or ignored, while some houses have old fortifications running through their gardens. Links [...]
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Laituri

Helsinki City Planning Department has a new public exhibition space, cafe and forum in the Centre of Helsinki called Laituri on Narinka square. The city which really boomed once after WWII is changing again over the next few years drastically and there are massive plans being made. This is a place where they can be [...]
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