I remember looking toward the edge of town and thinking that something seemed off. We had stopped here before crossing the Continental Divide, in one of those typically charming Colorado mountain communities. Yet a few blocks away from its railroad-era Main Street lined with historic 1890s structures, there were almost cartoonish versions of those same buildings, arranged in an unnaturally tight grid.
The average New Yorker generates about three pounds of trash every day, and a huge amount of that is food waste—which could be composted, if only we had the space. Enter "Green Loop," a proposal to build massive composting islands off the coastline of NYC.
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If you could build your own High Line, what would it look like? That’s the question the QueensWay Project, an effort to turn an abandoned stretch of railway in Queens into an elevated pedestrian and bike path, recently asked designers to answer. Some of the winners announced today are truly wild.
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A bridge that deploys huge inflatable buoys to slow storm surges. A barrier reef grown from minerals harvested by electrical currents. An artificial island protecting the most surge-prone neighborhoods. Most of us are bracing for a blizzard this week, but the winners of a recent design competition, Stormproof, are imagining how to protect cities for the next summer storm season.
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For the past century, an obscure mathematical principle called Zipf’s law has predicted the size of mega-cities all over the world. And nobody knows why.
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It’s hard to imagine that the vast skylines of our major cities were once empty space and unused tracts of land. But the rapid urban growth over the last century is nothing short of astounding, especially when condensed down to simple two minute animations.
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The East River? Oh, we dammed that thing up and threw a new City Hall on top. The Hudson? Filled it with traffic years ago. New Yorkers have never been prudes about changing the natural landscape of their city, but if you dig into the archives, you’ll find dozens of ideas so radical, they make present-day Gotham feel like a nature reserve.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
