Visualizing Early Washington. A project at the Imaging Research Center of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County has reconstructed the original landscape of Washington DC before its radical transformation into a modern capital city. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole on Sep 2, 2008 - 21 comments

Welcome to Urville, the city that autistic Frenchman Gilles Trehin has been designing since he was 12 years old. The drawings, in particular, are incredible.
posted by jimmythefish on Mar 28, 2006 - 27 comments

Why We Should Build Apartments at Ground Zero by Paul Goldberger:
In an ideal plan, most of Ground Zero would be devoted to housing, hotels, and retail space. Lower Manhattan currently has a range of housing options: the converted lofts of Tribeca, the converted office buildings of Wall Street, and the retro-style apartment complexes at Battery Park City. The one thing missing is experimental architecture. Ground Zero would be the perfect place for an inventive alternative to the prim, packaged urbanism of Battery Park City. [...] With several blocks to build on, Ground Zero provides an opportunity to think not in terms of single buildings that are stand-alone works of sculpture but of ensembles that fit together to make coherent streetscapes and complete neighborhoods – something modern architecture has rarely succeeded in doing, in New York or anywhere else.

Martin Filler in the NY Review of Books on books about the proposals for Ground Zero, including Goldberger's 2004 addition, Up from Zero:
Goldberger's establishment-friendly attitude toward architecture has always lacked a discernible moral center. Although here he displays less of the maddening equivocation that has been his most defining characteristic as a critic, the targets he picks are most often easy ones, and unlikely to bar him from the corridors of power.
posted by gramschmidt on Jun 3, 2005 - 13 comments

Loftcube. I saw this in Playboy and had to look it up. [Flash and music].
posted by oflinkey on Apr 10, 2004 - 34 comments

"Utopian Architecture" is where it's at. Unfortunately, despite how many people seem to be interested in it, there's very little documentation concerning the subject. The only books I can think of are Yesterday's Tomorrow (1984, MIT Press), Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugo Ferriss and Impossible Worlds by Stephen Coates, and I don't know of any website on the subject.
posted by Kevs on Nov 19, 2000 - 20 comments