Even before any drawing or formal decision, the place now occupied by Praça do Mercado in Parque Realengo, Rio de Janeiro, already pulsed with movement. Improvised stalls, informal gatherings, music, children running, and adults gathered beneath temporary shelters composed a vibrant landscape, sketching an ephemeral architecture.
In 1895, an eccentric businessman named Henry Gaylord Wilshire began developing a luxury residential community on what was then the western edge of Los Angeles. In a gesture of civic pride, or perhaps shrewd self-promotion, he cut a strip of land running four blocks down the middle of the subdivision and donated it to the city for a grand boulevard. But his gift had two conditions. The first was that the road be named for him. The second was that rail lines be banned from the thoroughfare.
Fulton-Howard West shows what's possible when we treat public land as a public good. This project will help longtime Bed-Stuy residents stay in their neighborhood while creating new space for the organizations and services that communities rely on every day. And as this process moves forward, neighbors will help shape what gets built here, from the housing to the public space to the services that will serve this community for decades to come.
Until the last decade, it has had sunshine on it, which is part of the beauty of the building and why it's architecturally important. An atheist would agree with that.
The Tour & Taxis Towers project combines offices, housing, and public amenities across 58,000 m², forming a landmark in the neighbourhood and reaching 126 metres at its highest point.
"The '15-minute city' model is based on the original concept of a city: having the things we want and need closer to where we live. The idea is that we should be able to get to our everyday essentials within, ideally, 15 minutes on foot, bike, or public transit."
The podium-tower is a hybrid structure consisting of a high-coverage, low-rise podium supporting one or more slender vertical towers, maximizing urban density while maintaining a 'human-scaled' street wall.
Access to public toilets is a universal need that we all have, and we shouldn't shy away from talking about it. One public toilet per 15,000 people simply isn't good enough and, without action, that figure will keep rising as we lose more facilities.
Coun. Josh Matlow expressed concerns about the potential impact of the airport expansion on housing supply, stating, 'If we need smaller buildings on the islands, what will the ability be to actually create these affordable housing projects?'
I understood at a very early age how much place matters and how impactful government services can be on one's life. The Mayor's Office of Equity and Racial Justice was really focused on working with agencies to think about how they're addressing inequity, whether it's through budget as a lever or personnel as a lever, procurement, policymaking. But land use is a lever as well.
The initial challenge was to create a club that valued the view of the lagoon without obstructing that landscape with the building. The solution was an architectural design in two levels.