Design
fromArchDaily
3 days agoElevated Infrastructure and Public Space: Reclaiming the Ground Below
Elevation creates secondary spaces beneath infrastructure that are often underutilized and informally occupied.
Architecture can no longer be conceived as an isolated object, detached from the technical networks that sustain contemporary life. This condition calls for new readings and approaches.
"This project is symbolic of what we've done over the last 12 years, reshaping the streets and the city," Christophe Najovski, the city's deputy mayor in charge of green spaces, stated during the opening ceremony.
Two decades ago, the state created a fund with tens of millions of dollars that was supposed to be in a lockbox to crack down on insurance fraud - but instead was funneled simply to law enforcement agencies' general operating funds. As a result only a tiny portion was spent actually fighting fraud.
Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district.
In the 1950s, the Air Force designed cockpits for the average pilot by measuring thousands of pilots and calculating the average for ten key physical dimensions-height, arm length, torso size, etc. They assumed most pilots would be close to average in most dimensions. When researchers actually checked, they found that out of 4,063 pilots, exactly zero were average on all ten dimensions.
Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection.
My family had Slide Show Night when I was growing up. Not every Saturday, but a whole bunch of Saturdays. Either my sister or I would be in charge of setting up the projector, the screen, and loading the carousel. During the show, there'd be a few landscapes or skylines taken during vacations, but almost all the shots were up close. Like most dads, mine wasn't a professional photographer, but he did a good job of capturing memory triggers: faces, gestures, and decorations.
Hundreds of preventable fatalities and more than 13 million metric tons of climate pollution would be avoided by 2045 if Congress passed legislation that answered advocates' long- time demand to require state DOTs to set declining annual fatality targets - and reallocate highway money to safety projects if they don't meet those goals, according to a new analysis from Evergreen Action.
The design, which has a cycle lane between the stop and the kerb, is intended to allow bus passengers to get on and off safely while cyclists continue moving. Sarah Gayton, street access campaign co-ordinator at the National Federation of the Blind of the UK, said: "It does not address the concerns that blind and visually impaired people have and it's totally insulting to think that we'll accept this."
Judge Jeannette Vargas of Federal District Court in Manhattan had ordered the Trump administration to end a four-month suspension of funding, but as the Daily News, The New York Times, Gothamist and amNY reported yesterday, Vargas stayed her own ruling until Thursday to give the piqued president a chance to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
A lot of what we can do at DOT is ... is focusing on designing our streets, designing our infrastructure, to make it easier for delivery workers to make safe choices, to operate safely, to reduce conflicts between them and other users, whether that's basically wider bike lanes that can accommodate a wider range of users,