flynn050

In spite of a general understanding that land use and transit need to go hand in hand and the inclusion of the three letters "TOD" into the everyday lexicon of planners, development (D) that is actually oriented (O) on transit (T) remains scarce. All too often, the T and the D barely coexist, let alone provide mutual synergy. And so the promise of community improvement which is leveraged by transit remains often unfulfilled as well. Above the session description from the Conference program: Presentations → When the annual national " Partners for Smart Growth Conference " came to Baltimore this year, it was tempting to use the state's two current large New Starts projects, the  Red Line  and the  Purple Line , to highlight the transit and land use linkage and demonstrate what steps can be taken to make communities better alongside with the design of the rail projects and fueled by the investment in transit. As one of the presenters, I share here my presentation s...

Occasionally the mind needs to wander, be allowed to stray from the familiar pasture and seek answers that are found where they are not expected. That is a lesson that "design thinking" teaches us. So it happened that after watching the movie "the Imitation Game" in which it's protagonist Alan Turing makes remarkable progress in problem solving, it seemed that the film offers inadvertently a set of instructive lessons about how to solve problems and how to design, neatly packaged for evening entertainment, no less. Alan Turing, Mathematician Alan Turing  was a British mathematical genius, who can be seen as the inventor of the computer ( Turing Machine ) and definitely was the one who broke the German WW II code which was produced with an encrypting machine called  Enigma . Although dead since 1954 his name has been in the news lately because of a pardon Queen Elizabeth gave him posthumously in 2013 (he had been convicted of "indecency" because of homo...

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. (H.L. Mencken, the Libido for the Ugly, 1927) Neither natural ability without instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artist.   (Vitruvius, 10 Books on Architecture) That good design adds value to buildings and, on the urban scale, to entire cities, is an increasingly popular insight, yet, not a new one. Design review as part of development approval has been around for decades, a testament to the importance of good design, despite Mencken's spiteful observation. (One of the oldest review committees may be the   Vieux Carre Commission , established in New Orleans in 1936, admittedly for mostly historic preservation, a subset of design review). In Baltimore the importance of design is recognized wi...