Category Archives: Culture

Top Seven Reasons Behind the Shanghaiing of New York (#Dubai-on-Hudson)

by John Massengale Posted on October 29, 2014

Big Finance: Most people don’t realize that Big Finance is the engine driving the global movement that has the Mayors of New York, London, and Paris promoting shiny Starchitecture indistinguishable from the shiny Starchitecture in Dubai, Mumbai, and Shanghai (always in … Continue reading →

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Ferguson, Missouri and the Cost of Sprawl

by John Massengale Posted on August 26, 2014

ENGINEER CHARLES MAROHN makes his usual insightful and interesting points in a post about Ferguson, Missouri on the Strong Towns blog (below). I happened to read the post just before reading an article in the Guardian that had many long quotes from … Continue reading →

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Maybe I was wrong: Pedestrians Gone Wild, The Movie

by John Massengale Posted on July 10, 2014

A few days ago I wrote, Why? Because the pedestrians and cyclists are not killing the drivers: drivers going fast enough to kill any pedestrian they hit are causing one-hundred percent of the fatalities. If the drivers slowed down to … Continue reading →

Posted in Bicycle, Culture, Current, Joke, New York, Pedestrian, Street Design, Video | Comments Off on Maybe I was wrong: Pedestrians Gone Wild, The Movie

The 21st Century Will Be Different Than The 20th

by John Massengale Posted on July 6, 2014

We’re starting to see that people in the 21st century are rejecting many of the trends of the late 20th century. Just as architecture and urbanism in the second half of the 20th century were very different than they had been … Continue reading →

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We used to make the countryside more beautiful, but now that we’re richer than ever we rarely do

by John Massengale Posted on June 1, 2014

Technology can supply some of our favorite and most-loved things, but most of the time, we use it in a way that inadequately expresses human experience and aspirations.

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“Buildings endure. Fashion rarely does.” (comment at the Design Observer)

by John Massengale Posted on May 19, 2014

THIS IS WORTH REPOSTING because it was through this post that I met my friend Robert LaValva, who founded and runs the New Amsterdam Market. I made the following comment at Design Observer in response to a post on the … Continue reading →

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An Oldie But Goodie—sung to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”

by John Massengale Posted on March 27, 2014

COLUMBIA ARCHITECTURE PROFESSOR and architectural historian Ken Frampton was once asked about “the cult of New Urbanism.” It’s “ersatz kitsch colonialism for the modern middle class”, he said. Faced with a statement like that, what can one do except write … Continue reading →

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You Thought Architects Designed Perfect Chairs? (Good, Better, Best)

by John Massengale Posted on March 26, 2014

THIS EXCERPT from an old post at Veritas & Venustas comments on some of the same issues that Witold Rybczinski just wrote about in a post and a Tweet: Good, Better, Best (originally published February 2004) .. The concept is a … Continue reading →

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Two types of architecture: good architecture, and the other kind

by John Massengale Posted on January 17, 2014

                    THE ARCHITECTURE CRITIC for New York magazine wrote about the work of Robert A.M. Stern in an article entitled Unfashionably Fashionable. I commented: “There are two kinds of music,” Duke … Continue reading →

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