Ever notice that a lot of houses look like faces? There’s a reason for that, and it’s more important to your brain than you might realize.
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A guide for making your urban spaces more fine-grained.
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When it comes to housing, do aesthetics have to come at the cost of affordability?
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Many critiques of “boxy buildings” focus on aesthetics. But the big problem isn’t so much the shape as the scale.
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Strong Towns member Michael Smith and colleague Aaron Holverson are working to make Rockford, IL a more economically resilient place.
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Good urbanism can save bad architecture any day—if your goal is to create a place worth being and maintaining and belonging to.
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Good fences—good edges of all kinds—make for good neighbors. They can also boost the economic vitality of our downtowns.
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Our cities need buildings that are “boring.” Here’s why.
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The godshuizen of Bruges offer a strikingly beautiful example of homes designed for elderly to age in place.
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The oldest buildings in your city have endured for a reason. They’re also the ones most likely to be around long into the future. Why not show them a little love?
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To save cities, build cities worth saving.
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What do Soviet-era construction and 21st-century American construction have in common? More than you might think.
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Making places strong isn’t all about big, “sexy”, top-down projects. And the fact that we call these things “sexy” might be a part of the problem.
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Turns out, the things worth writing home about are the same things that make a place worth calling home. What would it take to develop postcard-worthy places again?
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People might think of city life as necessarily “hard.” But the creative director at a Copenhagen-based urban design firm begs to differ. There are a few simple principles that can “soften” our city, drawing us closer together and radically improving our quality of life.
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Ancient cities reveal the extent to which humans have co-evolved with their complex human habitats. As we were making our cities, they were making us. And yet we’ve discarded much of this hard-won wisdom of the past.
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The Poet Laureate of Mississippi reflects on her adopted South and on the Southern tradition of front porch-sitting: “No other architectural space is so deliciously not/and: not inside, not outside. Not public, not private. Not house, not garden.”
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Once ubiquitous, then endangered, the American front porch is making a comeback. From rocking chairs to rock music, a conference near Oxford, Mississippi celebrates the past, present, and future of the surprisingly powerful front porch.
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“Sustainable” is a buzzword that often conjures images of technological wizardry aimed at solving environmental problems. But what if our ancestors knew a lot more about sustainability than we give them credit for?
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Traditional architecture has evolved through millennia of trial and error to harmonize with our unconscious impulses, make us feel comfortable and encourage positive social behavior. Modernism too often throws those lessons out the window—and one architect thinks the trauma of World War I had something to do with why.
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