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Schouwburgplein: More than meets the eye
Dutch cities are known for many things, but grand plazas aren’t one of them. Whilst there are many older plazas in the inner cities of Amsterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, one plaza in Rotterdam counters the typical image of the Dutch plaza: the old-city center point surrounded by mainly low or midrise buildings. Schouwburgplein (Theatre…
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Architecture of Love and Death (Part I)
This post is about funerary architecture of two different people in different times and places, ancient Egyptians and Muslim Mughals in India. Both of these people built great pieces of architecture to their dead. In Part 1 I will focus on the religious thought or absence of it behind these great pieces of architecture, i.e. Pyramids and Taj Mahal. I believe the former…
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Moose are Dying Off
Mankind is often self-involved and indulgent. It becomes apparent when we talk about the perils of climate change, too; we are primarily concerned about how these changes will impact our economies, our cities, and our way of living. However there are thousands of other species of plants, insects, and animals who are at far greater…
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Architecture of Death
While New Orleans is probably the best known city for its cemeteries, New York has some really lovely ones. A magnet for history buffs and bird watchers, Green-Wood is a Revolutionary War historic site (the Battle of Long Island was fought in 1776 across what is now its grounds), a designated site on the…
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Sydney Sings!
There is a pretty amazing film project documenting an unusual choir in Sydney being done by a friend of mine, Albert Lecoanet. His wife, Liz, is directing a choir of volunteers from all walks of life: Rather than having a choir made up of ‘just’ homeless people, or ‘just’ employees or ‘just’ school boys’,…
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The Farnsworth House
This spring I made my first visit to Chicago. And while I did greatly admire the architectural richness of that city, making a visit to the nearby Farnsworth House was irresistible. Built in 1951 near Plano, Illinois, the residence designed by Mies van der Rohe is considered one of the most famous examples of modernist…
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Urban Design: A literature review
Whilst a grad student, I learned that the opinions on what urban design is, vary greatly between planners, architects, and landscape architects. It’s only fair to admit that most urban designers in the United States today are trained as architects. Some of them might argue that urban design is essentially a large-scale architectural exercise, where…
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Elevated Trains
I am coming to the end of my cell phone contract and have been going through the data stored on my phone. In the course of this rather banal task it became apparent that I have taken a large number of photos of two things: my dog and elevated train stations (or views from…
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Alice Munro Wins 2013 Noble Prize for Literature
The genesis of plaNYourCity was when some planners started to ask around for books of fiction that portrayed a distinct sense of place, particularly a city. Some of the first titles to surface were Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of Vanities which describes the racial tensions and environment of 1980’s New York, and Erik Larson’s The Devil in…
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