Common Edge • October 13, 2021 The Subversive Urbanism of Pixar Movies As it turns out, Pixar is preoccupied with the urban condition, and we’re all just poisoning and consuming ourselves to the brink of extinction.
Common Edge • September 8, 2021 Rethinking the Role of Experimental Cities in Combating Climate Change When considered collectively, the onus for solving our climate crisis is being left largely to municipal governments and private actors, making most solutions piecemeal, at best. But what happens when all related solutions can be applied within a single, controlled ecosystem, when environmentalism and urbanism are not at odds, but working in concert?
Revitalization: The Journal of Urban, Rural & Environmental Resilience • September 1, 2021 Restoring Rondo: A proposed redevelopment in St. Paul reconsiders how to repair neighborhoods ravaged by highways “Rondo will be a coalition of people, of public and private philanthropy, a composite of the very best of 21st-century thought. It will take something that’s not there now and create a model that other communities can use.”
Common Edge • August 10, 2021 Why “Use Is the Best Form of Preservation” My Q&A with Meghan Elliott, Founding Principal of New History in Minneapolis.
Common Edge • July 8, 2021 Remembering Kristen Richards A tribute to Kristen Richards. Writers and critics on the role she played in helping build and sustain design culture.
Common Edge • June 21, 2021 At the Intersection of Critical Race Theory & Urban Planning Critical Race Theory is ultimately about reframing the narrative—and to that end, consider that the issues touched on by urban planning are, at the end of the day, associated with positive rights, like access to food, shelter, clean air, reliable transit, healthcare, education, and public space.
Common Edge • June 1, 2021 The American Car Dealership Is Doomed Considering that the average dealership has a floor area of about 21,000 square feet, that equals roughly 383.5 million square feet of retail space devoted to selling one type of product, and that doesn’t include the acres of parking and storage that are often part of these behemoths. Given these figures, it should concern nearly every community in the country that this is dead real estate walking.
Common Edge • April 26, 2021 How Do We Solve America’s Housing Crisis? The saga of the American suburb is a long one, often stained by blatant acts of poor planning, bad design, and outright racism. But the suburbs are key to the housing crisis conversation because fixing (not “abolishing”) the American suburb is a big part of the solution, whatever that may be.
Common Edge • March 23, 2021 Marschitecture: The Glory and Folly of Space-Age Manifest Destiny Colonizing space has been the periodic obsession of governments, industrialists, and artists alike for decades. It’s not hard to realize why. What grander objective is there than conquering the infinite? It’s Manifest Destiny without a compass.
Common Edge • March 1, 2021 What -isms Can Tell Us About Architecture’s Preoccupation with “Human” Design So if, suddenly, circa-2010, the “human experience” was the new bottom line, then we should inquire: What hole existed beforehand that (some) architects felt compelled to fill?
Common Edge • February 1, 2021 Elevated and Isolated: In Consideration of the Urban Skyway It’s time for these anti-urban relics to go.
Common Edge • January 4, 2021 Should Architects Continue to Design Airports in the Age of Climate Change? But the goal of climate commitments like Architects Declare, as well as ratings systems and certifications, is not to upend one’s business model; the goal is to be the North Star and facilitate a more rapid progression in due time.
Common Edge • November 23, 2020 Water Towers: Iconic Infrastructure, Underutilized Opportunity "Water towers loom large, they sustain daily life, and occasionally they bisect our horizon. But there is no mystery to a water tower; there are no rich metaphors or tall tales one can summon. They’re anti-lighthouses."
Common Edge • October 19, 2020 Hallmark Urbanism and the Future of Small Town America Coastal migration due to climate change might well spur a repopulation of small towns and cities.
Linked In • October 6, 2020 Defining workplace culture in the time of Covid “Is returning to the office mission critical to your business’ survival, or is this urge to ‘return to work’ grounded in some perceived need to return to your workplace culture?”
Unpublished • January 1, 2016 It’s A Space Issue: Necessary Disorder in New York The subways have always been a naturally occurring performance space, unsanctioned and unscripted, and made even more attractive to performers by their confines and mobility. Each car is a potential theater.
Siri Berg: Paintings: 1967-2013 • December 1, 2013 Catalog Introduction: Siri Berg Paintings: 1967-2013 She was not necessarily seeking perfection but perhaps a sense of closure, a cosmic equilibrium that successfully wed plasticity and nature.
Jason Covert: The Bridge (Exhibition Catalog) • November 1, 2012 Catalog Introduction: Every Mystery Needs Its Image (2012) The Bridge brings to the fore a truth that most of us wish never to face: although we define ourselves by our memories, which often come from photographs, the truths we locate and settle upon are utterly relative.
Anderbo • August 1, 2010 How Do You Feel About Modernity? Modernity embraces the idea that something “new” is still possible, and is, at the very least, the fathomable notion of the “New”; the conviction that pure archaism is not mankind’s prevailing legacy.
Gallery Crawl • May 12, 2010 DON’T MISS IT: Kate Gilmore’s “Walk the Walk” in Bryant Park The park’s grounds were bathed in ample afternoon sunlight, but the hundreds who milled about all braced themselves against the unseasonably brisk winds running through. Most folks were there because it was just another stop in their usual routine, but on this day something kept them milling.
