Seen around town: BC Place stadium all lit up for the season

A merry Ho Ho Ho to you and yours!

here are some recent reflections from around town

I’ve got some more pics here if you’re interested in checking ‘em out.

Kent Larson: ‘Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city’

From TED Talks via YouTube:

How can we fit more people into cities without overcrowding? Kent Larson shows off folding cars, quick-change apartments and other innovations that could make the city of the future work a lot like a small village of the past.

Here a few brick-heavy shots of Portland, Oregon from late April of this year. I was down there with a posse to explore the city and feast at the annual food cart festival. Good times, good times!

Urban Metabolism: ‘Cities, Scaling and Sustainability’ (Video)

From The Santa Fe Institute via YouTube:

Humanity’s greatest social innovation remains the city, says an article in the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic mentioning SFI research that finds surprising statistical regularities among cities, patterns the researchers relate to an underlying “urban metabolism.”

Related:

• ‘A physicist turns the city into an equation’ (New York Times)
• ‘Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations’ (TED Talks)

(Infographic: World Bank)

Around town: Six shots from the weekend

Clean Energy Future: ‘Artificial Waterfall Could Make 2016 The Greenest Olympic Games We’ve Seen Yet’

From The Creators Project:

‘As Brazil readies itself for the upcoming 2014 World Cup, the honor and burden of hosting an even larger global sporting event still sits on the country’s shoulders. In conjunction with the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, several new structures will be erected in Rio’s cityscape. One of the many projects creating huge buzz is the Solar City Tower, an artificial waterfall designed to generate clean, renewable energy.

…

The vertical structure’s design is conducive to multiple functions: its primary purpose is to capture and distribute solar power to the Olympic Village and to the city, but it doubles as an observation tower. The 345-foot structure will have solar panels around its base, used to store energy during the day, releasing it through turbines for use at night. For special occasions, the turbine will pump seawater into the tower and then shoot it back out to sea, creating a waterfall effect in the middle of the ocean.

Check out more pictures and the rest of the article here.

Public Space:

When they built the urban plaza in the Southeast False Creek neighbourhood (2010 Olympic Village) here in Vancouver they “put a bird on it.” Actually, they put two birds on it, but you can only see one of them in this photo.

I’m a big fan of artist Myfanwy MacLeod’s ‘The Birds’. Every time I’m down there I see people and kids especially reacting to them in such fun and curious ways, as if they are trying to figure out if they are friendly, menacing or something in between. I also like the reminder that they offer that nature is larger than us humans. As for the official explanation of the piece:

The work highlights both the lighter and graver sides of what can happen when a non-native species is introduced to an environment, how the beauty of birds can sometimes mask their threat to biodiversity.

If you’re interested, I’ve got more pics here.

A look south from the rooftop of the innovative, mixed-use Woodwards complex here in Vancouver. The New York Times reported back in 2009:

Woodward’s, a 1.1-million-square-foot project with an inclusive design. The project, which is costing 500 million Canadian dollars (about $475 million), is one of the biggest redevelopments in city history.

It is also controversial — because of a tangled history and a high-stakes social engineering approach. “There is so much riding on this project,” said Ian Gillespie, chief executive of Westbank Projects, one of the developers. “Everyone sees it as a panacea for huge social problems.”

When completed in January, the project will encompass four interconnected buildings with a central atrium on the edge of the Downtown Eastside, just a few blocks from the business district.

It will feature 536 market-rate condominiums, 200 “affordable” rental units, a supermarket, a drugstore and Simon Fraser University’s School for Contemporary Arts. It will also have 31,500 square feet of office space for nonprofit organizations, 59,329 square feet of federal and city office space, a bank, a restaurant and a rooftop day care center.

“It is a microcosm of the city,” said the project architect, Gregory Henriquez.

The other project partners are the Peterson Investment Group, the city government and Simon Fraser. The site, which covers a full block, originally housed the Woodward’s department store, which closed in 1993. That building has a contentious past, including several failed development efforts and a three-month occupation by advocates for the homeless.

Public Art: Terracotta Warriors in the City

Here’s a shot of one of many fibreglass Terracotta Warrior sculptures that have been painted up and started appearing around the city for the summer. Previous years have seen orcas, eagles and “spirit bears” serve as templates for artistic expression, some better than others. The concept began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1998 and has since spread to cities around the world. In the fall, the sculptures will be auctioned off in a fundraiser for charity. You can read more info on this year’s crop here.