Topics+of+Interest

 Being an Architect
=== If you have a passion for the intricate combination of art and science that is the architecture, you might want to consider a career as an architect. This is a demanding and challenging, but rewards can far exceed their struggles. The architects have done some of the most important advances in history, literally, the formation of societies in its image .=== === An architect is more than just a designer, and many other skills are needed , along with creativity. Most architects use the knowledge of handling graphics, drawing, engineering, and critical written and oral communication. An architect must not only be able to envision an idea, also communicate the details of that idea to builders and construction workers is carried out .=== === There is also the factor of technological advances, and an architect should be ready and prepared to adjust their knowledge as new information becomes known. Accreditation by the National Board of Architecture ( CSSA) provides minimum standards that must be met by all professional architects, but many of the 105 schools that offer a degree in architecture have different ways to bring students up to par. It is important to carefully choose your school, as a program tailored to their learning style and interests , as it will be much easier to complete .=== === The road to becoming an architect is a long, four to five years of study and another two to four years experience before passing the rigorous examination of four days. A career as an architect, however, can also be very rewarding , many architects do salaries of six or more figures and be able to leave their mark on society with its famous buildings .===

Sketches of Planning //by Giorgio Piccinato//

Most planning history books tell us of the planning ideas of rebels, anarchists, federalists, visionary architects, religious fundamentalists, journalists and novelists. All this under a genre of royal indifference to the mode of construction of the real city, where billions of us live today. It is not necessary to look to urban utopias for this purpose. We can limit ourselves to analysing some of the main slogans, or should we call them theories, which accompany the 20th century city, such as the garden city, the historic centre, and the global city. At the turn of the 21st century, it is appropriate to reflect on the gap which exists between planning ideas, and their description, their use in marketing the 20th century city and planning ideals they vehicle. Most planning achievements cease to exist as new problems appear.

1. There are different definitions of the 20th century. The shorter period espoused by E. Hobsbawm spanning from 1914 to 1989 and the longer version of Ch. S. Maier sets from 1860 to 1980. The latter is more relevant to planners, because we locate modern planning in this same interval. Such planning is based on land, not on the city form. It is land, urban land, which plays the central role in the great undertaking that is the construction of the industrial city. Reorganisation of urban land is the object of many professions. Land speculation is one of the main forces determining the configuration of the modern city. The task of public authority is to delimit territory, to assign appropriate functions to every parcel, and to ensure to any parcel the certainty of rights and therefore market value. Producing wealth, within the public realm, is up to the private sector. German textbooks, where for the first time urban issues such as circulation, environment, land use- are dealt with systematically, establish the foundations of modern planning. They do it in a more convincing and comprehensive way than the much quoted British town planning acts, which were not that different from the many pre-industrial European urban regulations.

2. Such a disciplinary approach, culminates in an urban master plan, fully coherent with principles of responsibility, enlargement of rights, and definition of territorial and institutional boundaries that characterise the new central Nation-state. In the struggle among professional corporations to get hold of the new operational field, it was the logic of the "scientific" professions that won, especially that of "engineers", after the first harsh confrontations with medical doctors, surveyors, agronomists, and architects. It went this way in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, where the central States dominate. That kind of systemization became "planning". It developed more and more as a normative body, within which planning that followed had to adapt.

The New School is now offering an undergraduate degree in urban design. //Urban Omnibus// talks with the program's director about why the program was created and what it intends to accomplish.
 * [|The New Urban Design Undergrad]**

The concept of "urban design" is just about 50 years old, amking it a relatively new concept. This new undergraduate program aims to expand the concept of urban design beyond being a specialty of planners and architects. "This year, Parsons The New School for Design is launching the nation’s first undergraduate degree in urban design, which prompted us to ask the program’s director, Victoria Marshall, what exactly is being taught and what exactly it means for the training of a new generation of urbanists with a different relationship to the urban realm than the designers that came before. Marshall says she is most interested in teaching “how to see the city as a designer” rather than, say, how to design the city or its spaces. And from the diverse coursework offered, the education the program provides is, indeed, much closer to an overview of urbanism — the history, the theory, the social science — mixed with fundamentals of design — section, plan, model, 2D layout — than it is to a foundation course in how to propose physical interventions to shape the constituent elements of urban space. With that in mind, there’s a chance a degree offering such as this just might respond to the tremendous civic interest in cities and how they work, especially on the part of young people less and less interested in the traditional disciplinary alignments of the 20th century."

=[|The World's Water-Smart Cities]=

This collection of city profiles looks at cities around the world that are making major improvements to the way they handle and provide water.

//National Geographic// finds some of the smartest water cities in the world, from Tianjin to the slums of Uganda to Singapore. "Singapore has become the poster child for urban water efficiency and innovative water recycling technologies, drawing investment dollars and talent from major corporations such as Siemens and GE, which are hoping to expand their water-recycling businesses in the growing cities of Asia. Singapore itself is investing $240 million over five years in water technology research. The city-state’s national water agency, PUB, employs a strategy it calls Singapore’s Four National Taps to ensure an adequate supply of water for its five million residents and the economy, with the end goal of total water self-sufficiency."

[|Lofty Living: 11 Modern Additions to Urban Rooftops]
When more living space is needed in cramped urban conditions where every last square foot of land is spoken for, there’s literally nowhere to go but up. Luckily, flat city rooftops offer the ideal space for creative lofts, pods and unusual additions, whether temporary or permanent, prefabricated or carefully custom-designed to fit in with older surrounding architecture. These 11 rooftop additions & expansions make a sharp juxtaposition perched atop museums, Victorian warehouses and metropolitan skyscrapers.

MVRDV Rooftop Expansion, Rotterdam


Famed architecture firm MVRDV added a stark, bright-blue addition to a rooftop as their first project in their hometown of Rotterdam. “The addition can be seen as a prototype for a further densification of the old and existing city. It adds a roof life to the city. It explores the costs for the beams, infrastructure, and extra finishes, and it ultimately aims to be lower than the equivalent ground price.”

Loftcube
Want to add a room to your rooftop? The easiest way to expand upwards is with a Loftcube, specifically designed for rooftops and transportable by helicopter. Sleek and ultramodern, with lots of glass and a surprisingly roomy interior, the Loftcube could potentially provide low-cost, eco-friendly tiny living with an amazing view.

A Room for London
It may look like an unlikely concept design, destined to live an ephemeral existence on paper, but this boat-shaped rooftop prefab is coming to the Southbanke Center in London in 2012. Chosen as the winning design for ‘A Room for London‘, it will serve as a temporary self-contained hotel with an expansive view of the Thames.

For nearly two years, Hotel Everland graced the rooftop of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, giving guests a view of the Eiffel Tower unlike any other. A modern pod created as an art exhibit, Everland traveled to various European cities before it was retired in 2009.

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Months after the Hotel Everland made its way back home to Switzerland, a new prefab rooftop structure took its place – Module Electrolux, a pop-up restaurant. Architect Pascal Grasso designed this glass rectangle, covered with a metallic skin in the center, as a temporary building that would be easy to set up and remove. It housed a twelve-seat dining room serving Japanese food.======

There are few places in London where a family of six can enjoy enough space to sprawl out – unless, that is, you’re willing to pay millions, which Zad Rogers and Lucy Musgrave were not. The couple took a novel approach: building a 2,800-square-foot glass home atop a Victorian warehouse. Rogers’ father, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Rogers, designed the new apartment, which hangs from a steel frame bolted to a system of peripheral concrete beams on the warehouse’s roof.