In May, we have reported on a competition by A Vision of Europe called The European prize 2008 for the best urban neighbourhood in Europe.
Now, we got a comment which advised us of the results of the competition (thanks to Bertille Amaudric from Fondation pour l’Architecture).
The International jury of the 2008 Philippe Rotthier European announced the TOP-10 urban neighbourhoods. The 88 selected neighbourhoods come from 30 European countries and from big cities such as Lisbon, Bilbao, Paris, London, Glasgow, Brussels, Berlin, Dresden, Bologna, Palermo, Tirana, Istanbul, etc., as well as from beautiful medium-size cities such as Santiago de Compostela, Hammamet, Gladbeck, Alessandria, Hoje Tarstrup, Knokke, Dorchester, Brandevoort, etc. Among the 88 entries selected, these are the best New Urban Neighbourhood built in Europe in the last 25 years:
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One factor of the current poll is “Gardening and landscaping”, which is defined as maintenance of public green areas. It also means creating and building new public green areas and there is an interesting project to find in New York City: A defunct stretch of railroad on the Far West Side of Manhattan is destined to become a park in the sky.
The High Line is an abandoned 2.33 km (1.45 mile) section of the former elevated freight railroad of the West Side Line, along the lower west side of New York City borough of Manhattan between located in the West Village. The High Line was built in the early 1930s by the New York Central and has been unused by freight service since 1980. It is in a state of disrepair, although the elevated structure is basically sound. Wild grass and plants grow along most of the route.
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General @ 12 May 2008 08:01 am by Eurohypo
City of Frankfurt and Eurohypo AG announce pupil competition "PerfectFrankfurt2020" on PerfectCity.
How will people live, work and spend their leisure time in Frankfurt by 2020? What will Frankfurt’s urban face look like? Will Frankfurt remain a tolerant and cosmopolitan city? Answers to these and many other future questions still need to be found, so that the Main metropolis remains a modern, liveable city within the next twenty till thirty years.
To contribute to this discussion, the German city Frankfurt/Main and Eurohypo AG have created a pupil competition called “PerfectFrankfurt 2020” on PerfectCity. This competition challenges young people to generate ideas for the city of tomorrow. Pupils in the fifth grade and up, from any school in Frankfurt can take part individually, in a group or as an entire class. Frankfurt mayor Petra Roth says “Within our competition it is not urban planners, architects or politicians that are in demand, but young people. They have a lot of imagination, creativity and are not afraid to take risks to find solutions." Bernd Knobloch, CEO of Eurohypo, regards Frankfurt as an ideal environment for the competition: "Frankfurt is an international, cosmopolitan and innovative city - that is exactly the right place to create new ideas."
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General @ 05 May 2008 07:08 am by Robert Schmidl
Today it is hard to sell huge real estate property without a certificate of an advantageous environmental audit and energy balance. The German Government has agreed to hard commitments to reduce environmentally unfriendly greenhouse gases and yet further plans of the European Union. Thus, the value of conventional buildings is affected, because they are still ahead of traffic when it comes to pollution.
To discuss this issue representatives of different departments (political, economical and scientific) met in a think tank called ENRESO 2020 initiated by RWE Energy AG, a subsidiary of German electric power and natural gas public utility company RWE AG. The meeting was held in Frankfurt. The acronym ENRESO stands for Energy Real Estate Economy Society. For the first time there was a presentation of criteria for an environmental certification which has to meet international standards.
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We found out that one of our blogroll partner A Vision of Europe has a new interesting campaign: The European prize 2008 for the best urban neighborhood in Europe. This prize is launched in occasion of the 25th anniversary of the European Prize for the Reconstruction of the City, the Philippe Rotthier Foundation for the Architecture in Bruxelles, together with A Vision of Europe and CivicArch Lab at the University of Ferrara.
The European Prize promotes the characters of excellence in the designing and building of new urban neighborhoods and aims at enhancing the European genius of building the fundamental matrix of the traditional city: the mixed-use urban neighborhood. It also aims at encouraging the creation of new mixed-use urban neighborhoods conceived and designed according to the principles of Sustainable Development and the EU Green Paper for the Urban Environment.
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General @ 31 Mar 2008 09:12 am by Robert Schmidl
The Eiffel Tower is an iron tower built March 31, 1889 (hoisting the flag to the top) for the Universal Exhibition in celebration of the French Revolution on the Champ de Mars beside the Seine River in Paris. The tower has become a global icon of France and is one of the most recognizable structures in the world.
Now, the Société d’exploitation de la Tour Eiffel has just announced that the tapering signature of the Eiffel Tower is to be reshaped, altering the skyline of Paris, in time for the structure’s 120th anniversary next year. Serero Architects of Paris have won the open competition to redesign the structure’s public viewing platform and reception areas as a celebration of the 120th birthday of Gustave Eiffel’s original creation. Aiming to “create a temporary horizontal extension of the third floor of the tower in order to increase the quality of the access of the public as well as experiencing the fantastic 360 degrees sight of Paris.”, the designers project will extend the top floor plate of the tower by grafting a high performance carbon Kevlar structure on it. The winning design (above), which will be 276 metres (905ft) above the ground, will not require any permanent modification of the existing structuref. It will double the capacity of the public viewing area on the tower’s top floor.
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General @ 11 Feb 2008 02:05 pm by Robert Schmidl
This January, The History Channel (an American cable television channel) initiated a design and engineering competition called “City of the future”. Together with sponsors Infiniti and IBM architects and designers from all over the United States were challenged to compete in City of the Future competitions in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Atlanta.
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In the light of our PerfectCity Charter and the poll on City Architecture, we would like to go to detail on another factor. After having brought articles on City History and Architectural Styles, we are focussing on Visual Excitement. Visual Excitement is the feeling that people get when they see beautiful or interesting buildings. This maybe because of the scale of the building (as in it is just huge) or it may be because it is very intricate design that leaves a person in awe as to how it was built.
So, we were looking for a ranking of the most beautiful cities of the world. If a city is beautiful, it must be visually exciting! But we did not find a representative survey or a ranking. What we found were statements of people with different opinions: some named Sydney or Paris to be the most beautiful cities of the world, other named Vancouver, Isfahan, Hamburg, New York, Cape Town…
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In 2008 a special monument celebrates its 50th anniversary. The monument we are talking about is the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium.
Even though the Atomium was not intended to survive the Exhibition of 1958 and was originally planned to remain standing only six months, the monument has been an impressive and amazing sight of Brussels for 50 years.
Designed by the Belgian engineer André Waterkeyn for the International Exhibition of Brussels in 1958 the Atomium is a structure that is half way between sculpture and architecture, symbolising with the help of nine atoms a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times.
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