As part of his recently released plan for New York by the year 2030, entitled PLANYC: A Greener, Greater New York, Mayor Michael Blooomberg is actively promoting a scheme for congestion pricing in the busiest parts of Manhattan. Modeled on programs in Singapore, London, and Stockholm, the system is intended to curb vehicular traffic (and raise money for public transportation) by imposing charges ($8 for cars and $21 for trucks) to enter the borough below 96th Street. The proposal has the support of virtually every bien-pensant urbanist in town, although it has met some resistance, particularly from the outer boroughs

Spaces of free access The contraction of the public realm, however, extends beyond these Orwellian developments. Public space is produced from the private: In democracy, the commons is always a compact about what is to be shared, what reserved; about where we choose to interact with the other. There’s been a lot of criticism from certain academic quarters about traditional notions of public space, about overidentifying the idea with streets, squares, parks, and other historic settings for face-to-face interactions. This critique is predicated both on the idea that these spaces fail to acknowledge the existence of multiple publics and that

L. William Zahner is the president of A. Zahner Company in Kansas City, Missouri. His firm has designed and fabricated stunning metal façades for high-profile projects by Frank Gehry, Morphosis, Kieran Timberlake Associates and other notable architects and firms. RECORD’s November 2005 cover featured Zahner’s exterior envelope for San Francisco’s de Young Museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Zahner has authored two books on architectural metals, and his family-run company has won dozens of awards. On Oct. 10, Zahner will speak at the 2007 Innovation Conference in NYC. The title of his presentation: “Torqued, Punched, and Folded: Making Metal

Alexander Gorlin, FAIA, has wanted to be an architect since the age of seven, when he would fill the floor of his parents’ living room, in Queens, New York, with model cities—complete down to the toy cars and miniature people that populated them. Now aged 52, Gorlin notes that his career has marked a “seamless” progression in scale. As the principal of his own atelier, he designs everything from individual residences to community master plans. Photo © James Murdock Alexander Gorlin holds a photo of himself as a child constructing a model city. Click here to watch a six-minute feature

A shift in the architecture profession, already entrenched with issues of control and authorship, affords the engineer an expanded role during initial project design discussions, not just as consultants after the fact.

Enabling collaborations Today, shared Building Information Models (BIM), rather than just physical models, as with Otto’s early projects, allow for feedback and integration between all the building professions, including that of the construction team. Adams Kara Taylor (AKT), a London-based structural and civil engineering firm of 40 people, will engage an architect’s ideas for a project design, but, as engineer Hanif Kara says, they “do not pretend to be the architect.” Key to the firm is teamwork and a constant dialogue with the architect. An in-house mathematics think tank with computational specialists assists teams, and it is common to see

For too long, too much of the discussion about urban mobility and its relationship to sustainability has been locked into an increasingly sterile debate between proponents of public transit and advocates of the automobile. Both sides ignore some inconvenient truths. Image: © Franco Vairani/MIT Smart Cities Project Six to 8 stacked City Cars can fit into one traditional parking space. When located at major origin and destination spots, such as transit stations, they can carry people the last mile to their final destinations. Transit enthusiasts point out the inherent efficiencies of high-capacity public-transportation networks, but often neglect to mention that,

Although City Cars can work quite nicely as privately owned vehicles, they provide the greatest sustainability benefits when they are integrated into citywide, intelligently coordinated, shared-use mobility systems. The idea is to locate stacks of City Cars at major origin and destination points, such as transit stops, airports, hotels, apartment buildings, supermarkets, convenience stores, universities, hospitals, and so on. You just swipe a credit card, drive a vehicle away from the front of the stack, and return it to the rear of another stack at your final destination. From the user’s perspective, it’s like having valet parking everywhere. Image: ©

Arrive in KL for the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture, a triennial event, after 20-hour flight via Stockholm. Bleary-eyed, check into the business-chic Traveler’s Hotel, so new the furnishings still have scraps of wrapping tacked on.

The skyscraper has had more comebacks than Cher. From its humble, naive beginnings in Chicago after the fire of 1871; its idealistic representation in early European Modernism; its apex as the glam symbol of American corporate eminence; its bimbo phase in Postmodernism; its more recent dalliance with high-tech engineering; and culminating with its supposed demise on September 11, 2001, the skyscraper is one helluva contender.