Danish architect Jan Gehl is a world renowned expert in all things related to urban design and public spaces. He obtained this expertise by publishing numerous books, and later, from his consulting firm Gehl Architects that he founded in Copenhagen, his hometown, to make cities for people. The firm celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2016.
During a recent visit to New York, Gehl gave a lecture at the Van Alen Institute, which takes a very similar approach to the importance of design in the quality of life of people. The architect discussed five tips that were published by Fast Co.Design and explained what he believes is the way to go about having livable, healthy, safe and sustainable cities.
The 5 points he mentioned are:
1. Stop Building ‘Architecture for Cheap Gasoline’
Climate change and public health are two factors that Jan Gehl says should be of utmost importance to planners, especially considering that “for 50 years, we made cities in such a way that people are almost forced to sit down all day in their cars, in their offices, or in their homes. This has led to serious situations health-wise.”
What causes that? According to Gehl, it is cars and the availability of cheap gasoline that created the suburban construction period, but when gas starts to become more expensive, it’s no longer a good idea.
This line of thinking is reflected in a recent study published in The Lancet which found that those living in city centers have a longer life expectancy than those living in the outside areas because they walk more often over the course of their lives when making their daily commutes.
The research was conducted on 6,822 people from 14 cities in ten countries with participants who were between 18 and 66 years old. The studied noted, among other things, each person’s ability to walk and their access to public transport and parks.
In 2009, the City of Copenhagen enacted “A Metropolis for People“, a plant inspired by a theory from Gehl Architects that allowed for the design of a vision and goals for urban life in the Danish capital in 2015.
Thanks to that, we’re able to see that six years ago public figures in Copenhagen set out to make it the most livable city in the world, ie. a sustainable city in which, through their public spaces, people are invited to have a unique and diverse life.
To move towards this goal, the plan was structured in three main components: walking more, spending more time in public spaces and getting out of “private cocoons” more. As Gehl explained during his stay in New York, this made the city more exciting, interesting and safer, as well as promoted social inclusion.
To explain this point, Gehl uses Venice and Brasilia as examples, stating that if you want to have an experience where the senses are active and therefore, more pleasing, you should visit the former. However, if you don’t want something like that, go to the Brazilian capital city.
These examples show how people living there have lost the opportunity to enjoy their surroundings through their senses, since as Gehl says “we have broken all the rules to make automobiles happy.”
In contrast, what cities should be doing is building around the body and senses of human beings to take advantage of our capabilities, so that people can enjoy their cities to their fullest potential.
4. Make Public Transportation More Equitable
Promoting equality in cities has become a mission in various parts of the world. We can achieve more equality if public transport becomes accessible, efficient, and a reasonable alternative to cars.
This way, people who live in the suburbs, because the land there is cheaper and more suited to their income, don’t need to spend so much of their budget on transportation, something that people who currently live in city centers don’t need to worry about.
According to Gehl, the car is not a smart way of getting around, especially in cities that have populations of 10 million or more, like in South America, Africa, and Asia.
In the latter region, Gehl uses Singapore as an example, by saying that it is a very small island, and as a result of the large number of cars there is almost no more free space on the streets, even when in a dense city it’s possible to get everywhere much faster either on foot or by bicycle.
He also argues that “it is no secret that the good days of the automobile are over.”
Observing the architectural landscape today it’s clear that the type of work which is currently ascendant, particularly among young practices, is very different to what came before the financial crisis of 2008. But what, exactly, does that architectural landscape look like? In an essay titled “Well into the 21st Century” in the latest issue of El Croquis, Alejandro Zaera-Polo outlined a 21st-century taxonomy of architecture, attempting to define and categorize the various new forms of practice that have grown in popularity in the years since—and as a political response to—the economic crisis.
The categories defined by Zaera-Polo encompass seven broad political positions: The “Activists,” who reject architecture’s dependence on market forces by operating largely outside the market, with a focus on community building projects, direct engagement with construction, and non-conventional funding strategies; then there are the “Populists,” whose work is calibrated to reconnect with the populace thanks to a media-friendly, diagrammatic approach to architectural form; next are the “New Historicists,” whose riposte to the “end of history” hailed by neoliberalism is an embrace of historically-informed design; the “Skeptics,” whose existential response to the collapse of the system is in part a return to postmodern critical discourse and in part an exploration of contingency and playfulness through an architecture of artificial materials and bright colors; the “Material Fundamentalists,” who returned to a tactile and virtuoso use of materials in response to the visual spectacle of pre-crash architecture; practitioners of “Austerity Chic,” a kind of architectural “normcore” (to borrow a term from fashion) which focuses primarily on the production process, and resulting performance, of architecture; and finally the “Techno-Critical,” a group of practices largely producing speculative architecture, whose work builds upon but also remains critical of the data-driven parametricism of their predecessors.
As a follow-up to that essay, Zaera-Polo and Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal set out to apply the newly-defined categories to the emerging practices of today with a nuanced “political compass” diagram. They invited practices to respond to their categorization in order to unveil the complex interdependencies and self-image of these political stances. For the first time, here ArchDaily publishes the results of that exercise.
During the last decade, there has been a growing interest within the architectural debate about the possibility of a political re-engagement of the discipline, a subject which had been remarkably absent from the disciplinary debate since the 1970s, but which seems to be back in the spotlight.
Based on the political categories outlined in the text “Well into the 21st Century,” published in El Croquis 187, and deeply inspired by the infamous diagram from Charles Jencks in Architecture 2000, we set out to make a synchronic map of contemporary emerging architectural practices.
We have selected 181 world-wide emerging practices, which we have located on a dial where the political categories were laid out, trying to set their adjacencies with some sense of continuity. Starting from the Techno-critical, we move clockwise to the Technocratic, then to the Cosmopolitical, then to the Austerity-chic, Activists and then to the Material Fundamentalists, Constitutionalists, Historicists, Revisionists, Skeptics and finally to the Populists.
We mapped the emerging architectural practices following their estimated political inclinations inside a circular field comprised in the dial. While there was an interesting adjacency between the different political categories, and we could place them nicely around the circular field, some of them had to be placed in less evident adjacencies.
The difficulties of locating the practices are evident: some of the practices were often bridging non-adjacent categories, so they were difficult to locate. Practices are not homogeneous and sometimes shift positions between projects and sometimes, between partners. We nevertheless tried to place every one of the emerging practices that we thought were significant on the map, to the best of our judgment, which is obviously limited. This is Version 0.1, so we will hopefully do later iterations where a different mapping technique could be used, further categories added or more precise information about the practices can be included.
Then we asked all practices for a self-assessment, so we could see the deviation between our estimated location and their desired one. We sent the practices a list of the political categories and the empty compass, deleting the names of the practices that we had located, so they could position themselves without being affected by the proximity of other practices, or by our own hypothesis about their location.
We asked them to position themselves on the map: the closer they locate to the outer border of the compass, the more orthodox they consider themselves in respect to the neighboring category; the closer they go to the center of the circle, the more hybridized they would consider themselves.
Assemble take an "Activist" stance in their work. This is reflected not only through the production method which focuses on communities and self-building, but also in the aesthetic, which uses traditional forms and soft, pastel colors. Image Courtesy of Assemble
Analysis of Data
101 practices entered into the self-assessment (56%).
50% of the practices placed themselves graphically. The other half seemed to be more comfortable with a verbal description of their position in respect to the categories.
15% matched almost exactly our hypothetic location.
20% located themselves close to our hypothetical location, mostly tending toward the center or toward neighboring categories.
20% placed themselves in a different location, with a general tendency toward a more central, hybridized location, many of them pointing towards the “Cosmopolitical” category.
10% set themselves in an opposite area.
5% said that they do not fit into any of the categories, and proposed alternative categories for their own practice. “Utopian” and “Pragmatic” are some of the requested political grounds which were not available.
5% wanted to be into two categories or in overlaps which were currently unavailable in the map.
<5% suggested different positions for each of the partners.
5% asked for a change of their political location after seeing our full compass hypothesis.
<5% distributed their projects over the map saying every project has a different political stance and there is no overarching political stance in their practice, as it is related to the specific situation of the project.
<5% were happy with any location we gave them.
<5% described their practice according how they approach each category.
<5% provided specific coordinates of their location or suggested that a more precise geometrical diagram could simplify their answer.
5% expressed interest but did not send any answer.
5% showed gratitude for including them but refused to participate because of being extremely busy or because they considered the experiment inadequate to capture the profession, irrelevant, or they thought the categories were subjective, imprecise and disputed.
There is a logical reluctance in the practices to accept our categorization. Given the current resurgence in politics in architecture, we expected emerging practices to have a more ideological stance to practice than the previous generation. Instead, we noticed a general refusal to take a clear stance. Perhaps our categories were not sufficiently varied. Some practices requested the category “Utopian” which was missing from the reference text, and the categories on offer. This was particularly true of those in the categories of the Activists and the Populists. We had excluded Utopianism simply because we do not believe any of the practices included can be considered truly utopian. We do believe there may be Utopian practices in architecture today but rarely within the selection of practicing architects which we have adopted for our analysis.
There were several requests for a “Pragmatic” label, as if Realpolitik was still alive and well within the emerging generation, despite the general claim for a more “engaged” architectural practice. We had deliberately avoided Pragmatism as a political option, as it was one of the most common claims of the previous generation of “neo-liberal” practices, and it appears to imply a lack of a strong ideological conviction as a driver of the practice. However, several practices appear to reclaim pragmatism as a political stance, even referring to authorities such as Latour, Marres, etc. Perhaps a difference should be made between ideological and tactical politics in further iterations of this experiment. Many of the practices tended to express a wish to move toward the center of the chart, to remain in a more ambiguous position, including those positions which claimed that every project develops its own political stance. Some of them even claimed that every partner has a different political stance, which is both probably true and interesting.
Other than the tendency toward the center, Activism and Cosmopolitical are some of the most coveted locations for emerging practices. Those located in the Populist area did not agree with their location and tended to complain of oversimplification of their position. This may very well be true, as populism is more of a style of delivery and we ourselves believe that, while it may be predominant in some practices, we can probably have populists among the Cosmopoliticals, the Activists or the Material Fundamentalists.
Those practices that we have located in the Material Fundamentalism or the Cosmopolitical tended not to respond to the experiment by a large margin. The same is true for the people we located within the Activist and Austerity proponents. That seems to be consistent with their political stance of prioritizing the actual building itself, the cosmos or the engagement with the community…
The Global compass was not as global as we had wanted: we did not manage to engage a sufficient number of Asian practices, despite their disproportionate weight in the global construction output by comparison with other regions in the world. The scarce engagement of Asian practices in the study may be an index of a general disbelief in architectural politics, or perhaps the reluctance to engage with a possibly too-Western political perspective.
80% of the contributors expressed a positive attitude towards the classification. Even some of the ones who refused to take part in the quest qualified the experiment as “nice,” “intriguing,” “amazing,” “maniac,” “genial,” “funny,” “great,” “very cool,” “super interesting,” or “fascinating,” and they appeared to like the fact that a magazine best known for monographs of established architects was willing to open this debate. To all those who engaged in the experiment, in whatever form, our deepest gratitude. We hope to continue the debate that was initiated here with all of them, to produce more sophisticated versions of this map.
When it comes to what men like, everyone is different. There are some general things, however, that are famous for impressing men and making them more interested. If you are single, these are things that you really should know.
Caring About Her Appearance
The first thing that a man will notice about you is the way that you look. It is not that they are superficial. It is just that before you have a chance to speak to a man, first impressions will already be made.
If you look good and care about your appearance, it will be noticed. If you have certain features that you don’t like, there are makeup tricks that you can use to downplay your more unflattering features. If you don’t know how to properly apply your makeup to accentuate your best features, you can get tips from experts like makeup artists.
Good With Children
When men are looking for their life partners, they will appreciate seeing a woman who is genuinely fond of and good with children. They know that they can start a family with a woman who enjoys children.
A Good Work Ethic
Men want to be with a woman who has a strong work ethic. This doesn’t mean that you need to work three jobs and 22 hours a day to get a man’s attention. If you are successful in your career and have been working at the same job for a long period of time, it shows the man that you are a hard worker and you can help in providing for your family if needed.
Men like a woman who can stand on her own two feet. They want to see you as a strong woman who doesn’t need anyone else to support them or take care of them.
When it comes to being independent, you need to walk a fine line. While men love independent women, they also like to feel needed once in a while.
Also, you may need a shoulder to lean on at times. You shouldn’t be in a relationship where your needs aren’t being taken care of just because you want to come off as being independent. You can be independent and still ask for help when you need it.
Men want to be with a woman is level headed. Most don’t want to be with a woman who will fly off the handle at the smallest little problem. If you are not level headed, it can lead to embarrassing moments when you are out in public. Also, if you direct your fury on him, he will likely end the relationship as quickly as it started.
This doesn’t mean that you should change your entire personality. Being levelheaded is a personal goal that you should work towards. Not only will it benefit you in your relationships, it will also help you out in your everyday life.
There are many women who don’t know this, but there are ways to turn a man on outside of the bedroom. If you want to get the attention of a quality man, you should consider the points listed above.
Akvareli is a residential project designed by Geometrium for a young family. It is located in Balashiha, Moscow, Russia. Akvareli by Geometrium: “This apartment in Balashiha, region of Moscow-city with total area 66 square meter projected for the young family. The customer main wish was to create a calm and modern interior with the interesting details and décor. That it wasn’t become boring with the times and it was easy to change some décor and transform the interior in a new..
Papermaker GF Smith has opened its first show space in London, which includes a gallery filled with an undulating installation of colourful paper rolls. Read more
