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Imperial Library
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Index
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Relationships, not just parts
You’re 85% like everyone else 85% of the time.
We prefer enclosed spaces.
Invert your thinking.
Space doesn’t make space. Forms make space.
Cities aren’t always urban, and suburbs aren’t always suburban.
Urban design isn’t architecture writ large.
Honor the streetwall.
Knit some fabric.
Design streets, not blocks.
A street isn’t curb to curb.
Small blocks are friendlier.
If every building is a landmark, there’s no landmark.
Suburban streets collect. Urban streets interconnect.
Suburbanites walk perpendicular. Urbanites walk parallel.
“Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination.”
Narrow side to the street.
Make most buildings from 60' wide strips.
The town house: three rooms deep or less.
Draw badly, and often.
How to draw a one-point perspective of a street
Citizens, not the police department, make streets safe.
At the 4th floor, we tend to lose identity with the street.
Same densities, different outcomes.
A city is for the familiar and the strange.
Ordinary life isn’t boring.
If you’re designing a park next to a soup kitchen, it better be for the people using the soup kitchen.
What is the desired social order?
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
Porosity = possibility
Random hypothesis: more glass isn’t more open.
We’re lazy…unless there’s a reward.
If we can’t discern what’s in store for us, we won’t bother.
Activate, activate, activate.
Identify activities as well as uses.
Make parking lots very big or very small.
The front moves to where the cars are.
Passenger boarding drives the transit system.
Emulation beats imitation.
“You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”
The site isn’t flat.
Make the flood zone useful.
Elevate to honor. Lower to humble.
Every side can’t be a front.
Some trees are more urban than others.
You need more space and less space than you think.
Size matters
Measure yourself.
Simple, not simplistic.
Complex, not complicated.
Building taller is more efficient…up to a point.
Avoid a void.
Give the neighborhood a character.
Wayfinding
Order craves variety.
What’s the unifier?
How will it meet the ground?
How will it meet the sky?
See and be seen; watch but don’t be watched.
As we enter, we look for the exit.
If the edges fail, the space fails.
Keep the center available.
Plant the park trees outside the park.
Entice a few feet at a time.
Design for 3 mph.
Separating pedestrians from vehicles is risky.
Good design is more likely to happen if someone can make money from it.
A park is a wide spot on a path.
If it’s 18" high, people will sit on it.
Integrate rather than append.
Make streets high friction.
Capture the drifter.
A city needs a backyard.
Sort by magnitude over use.
Draw the other side of the street.
Land your helicopter.
1' vertical = 3' horizontal
Retail is fussy.
Use the tool that fits the thinking.
Too much information and too little information are both paralyzing.
Initiate on impulse; design intuitively; justify with data.
“Fools act on imagination without knowledge. Pedants act on knowledge without imagination.”
Don’t just design; respond.
Synthesis beats compromise.
Make every decision accomplish at least two things.
Sometimes you need to do one thing extraordinarily well. Most of the time, you need to do everything well enough.
How and where will people move?
Don’t be afraid to do the obvious thing.
“[No one] who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.”
While making big plans, consider the details. When mucking around in the little stuff, stay alert to the big picture.
The key to solving a wicked problem is to stop trying to solve it.
Without a crisis, there’s no breakthrough.
A design scheme is an argument.
Be brutally self-critical.
Place > space
Palimpsest
Change is constant.
Urban is how people live, not simply where they live.
If it can’t be urban now, make it easy for it to become urban later.
They’re not going to build what you draw.
Your work will go on after you.
Index
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