Roland Beinert

I think Olmsted and earlier people like Capability Brown designed with emotion and sentiment in mind. I think they were partially inspired earlier landscape painters.

You’re right. The American Seminar Leaders Association (ASLA) has no reason to change their name.

Yes, of course. Mostly on the physics of electromagnetism. Start studying.

My ipad has definitely been useful, and will probably be more useful when I start working again. It’s more dependable than my laptop (which crashes fairly often), and has several apps which are useful to landscape architects. I enjoy the sketching app a lot. I have more and more books on it. I take notes on it. There are several CAD apps and at…[Read more]

Very true about the seating areas. I see plenty of them that are never used. I think the location of the seating areas may be just as much of an issue as their design. That’s why we designers should get outside and walk and observe like Jacobs suggests. That’s what Jan Gehl did, and he came up with some surprisingly detailed suggestions about seating.

Last year I read Jan Gehl’s book Cities for People (a book I highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t read it). I knew Jacobs had influenced him, but didn’t realize how much of what he said was based on her work. The title of his book is obviously based on the title of this article. He also expanded on her argument that urban design should focus less…[Read more]

Good article. I think the critics in LAM tend to be fairly good about writing in a way people understand.

The Land Matters section in the mostrecent issue of LAM was about food production. Did anyone else read that? New Urbanists also seem very interested in food garden design lately. Steve Mouzon recently wrote about the aesthetics of food gardens on his blog (http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/the-agricultural-aesthetic.html). I’m glad to see this topic…[Read more]

Good points. There’s a lot to be said for the human scale, vitality and history found on a lot of streets in older cities.
I’ve only seen woonerven in pictures. Some show streets with playgrounds on them or residents sitting around tables in the middle of street. Other pictures show sterile places like you describe. I still like the idea behind…[Read more]

I think Lombard Street in San Francisco is both beautiful and interesting.
Unfortunately, I haven’t done any traveling in the Netherlands, but I imagine some of the shared spaces over there are well designed. They are certainly more complex and interesting than any of the streets here in the US, even our attempts at woonerven.

It was a really weird problem. The seat post got stuck in the seat tube, because I never oiled it. It got all corroded. I took it to a bike shop, and they tried getting it out without any luck. They told me they couldn’t get it out without destroying the bike. So I took it home and tried every suggestion I could find on the internet. Nothing…[Read more]

I had a montague for a while, and I really liked it. Unfortunately, it’s unusable now, so I got a non-folding Kona. Eventually, if I ever have excess money again, I’d like to get a Brompton. They aren’t full sized, but many people consider them to be the best folding bikes out there. I tried riding one at a shop in Seattle and really liked it. A…[Read more]

Is it a recumbant trike? Several years ago I got fascinated by both recumbant trikes and the idea of folding bikes. I seriously considered getting a scorpian fx, which is a folding recumbant trike. It fits into a car trunk when folded, so you can take it on trips, and takes up a lot less space when you’re not using it.

I got a notice about that, and have sent off the forms.

You made it seem like you really, really wanted someone to ask your opinion.
I agree it’s an old idea to use a parking lot as public space. I also think the less we coddle drivers by giving them acres and acres of parking (and super wide lanes and huge turning radii, etc), the fewer people will choose to drive (and the safer everyone will be).…[Read more]

What IS your opinion on this, Trace?

I’m not sure how any code could address taste, feel or smell, but most codes address sight to some extent. Form based codes probably do the best job of bringing about a unified look to entire neighborhoods.

Can’t a complex metric bring about a visceralaesthetic?
I think part of the problem with a lot of urban design, and design in general, is that it does not respond to climate. We group things into styles based on climatic regions, but then we use them anywhere we want without thinking about the consequences for the users.

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-12-21-cops-mock-seattle-jogger-nearly-killed-by-a-truck
Stay in your house or your car, folks. No walking, biking or jogging. If you do walk, bike or jog you will get hit by a car, and, of course, that will be entirely your fault, because drivers have a basic right to speed and not pay attention. If you must go out,…[Read more]

You say potato; I say potatoe.
Not sure why I spelled it that way. My brain switched on for the last one.