Olugbenro Ogunsemore via Esquire

When you hear the term “transportation commissioner,” you probably picture someone whose job it is to make sure a city’s planes, trains, cars, trucks, and subways get where they need to go. But for Janette Sadik-Khan, who oversees New York City’s staggeringly complex transportation system, vehicles are only a part of the whole: She’s working to give the streets back to pedestrians.

On Monday, April 8, Sadik-Khan announced the city’s new bike share program, which will launch in May (after long delays, largely due to damage caused by Hurricane Sandy) and will ultimately feature 600 docking stations and 10,000 shared bikes. “In just the last five years,” she wrote in the commission’s report, “New York City has made huge strides in creating modern, safer streets,” noting that in keeping with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC sustainability agenda, the city has “established more than 300 miles of bike lanes, 30 plazas and made expansive street safety redesigns to accommodate all street users citywide.” Read more!

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Photo: Iwan Baan

Hey, NYC architects: Do you have an idea that will revolutionize city living? Well, you still have a few days left to submit your scheme for our Pitch the City competition, a collaboration between Architizer and the Municipal Art Society of New York as part of the New Museum’s Ideas City 2013 festival. The winners will get to present their initiatives to a room full of urban enthusiasts, receive critiques from a jury of experts, and be featured on Architizer!

Interested? Send a brief description (250 words max) and four to six low-res images to editorial@architizer.com with the subject line “Pitch the City.” Deadline is THIS FRIDAY, March 8. More info here. Bon chance!

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PS1 will install a smaller version of its VW Dome in Rockaway Beach to host competition events and provide a relief tent. Photo courtesy of MoMA PS1.

Beyond the very pressing need to restore electricity, gas, and subway service to the parts of New York still reeling from Sandy, the larger problem of how to build more resilient communities remains. “The biggest question is: How do you build a sustainable, protected, eco-friendly coastline that’s not going to be swept away?” says MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach.

To spark a larger conversation about smart rebuilding in Rockaway, Queens, MoMA’s architecture and design department and PS1 announced a call for ideas. The museum is inviting artists, architects, designers, and the general public to submit proposals for protecting the coastline, rebuilding the boardwalk, devising alternative housing models, creating new social spaces, and more. The deadline is March 15, so get on it! Continue.

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LAX, Theme Building: perspective view, 1961, by Charles Luckman, William Pereira, Welton Becket, and Paul R. Williams. Image: The Luckman Partnership, Inc. | a Salas O’Brien Company

With shows exploring Los Angeles’ experimental architecture and fascinating unbuilt cityscape, Tinsel Town is poised to dominate the architecture conversation this spring. And as part of Pacific Standard Time, the four-month archi-thon that begins in April, the J. Paul Getty Museum will mount an ode to the city’s aptitude for growth, change, and a built environment that finds strength in diversity—freeway and generic tract-house stereotypes be damned.

“The title of the exhibition, ‘Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990,’ refers to the fact that this engine was cranking at an incredible speed and an incredible rate,” says curator Christopher Alexander, who organized the show with Wim de Wit, head of the Getty Research Institute’s architecture and contemporary art department, and Rani Singh. Divided into themes such as urban networks, residential architecture, and car culture, “Overdrive” will track LA’s attempts to keep up with its aggressive growth in the postwar decades, when new technologies and building materials, not to mention an explosion in population, shaped the city we know today. It’s no coincidence that a big marker of LA’s identity is not a civic building or traditional monument, but an airport. If the show has a mascot, it’s definitely the 1961 LAX Theme Building. Read more!

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Pereira & Luckman’s 1952 proposal for LAX would have united LA’s ad-hoc midcentury airport under one giant glass dome.

As modern metropolises go, Los Angeles and New York couldn’t be more different. But it only took a few failed proposals from the early 20th century to send LA into a self-reinforcing spiral of freeways and sprawl. If a couple of prescient planners had had their way, the city might have grown into a model of urbanism besting the Big Apple (or at least Portland), with hundreds of miles of subways and elevated rail, thousands of parks linked by parkways, and even a raised bicycle freeway connecting Pasadena with downtown.

If the Dobbins Cycleway, as it was called, had been approved in 1900, today hundreds of thousands of Angelenos would be cycling to and from work in a bumper-free paradise. ”It’s a very popular commute,” says Sam Lubell, the West Coast editor of the Architect’s Newspaper and a co-curator of the upcoming show “Never Built: Los Angeles.” On view from July 11 to September 15 at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum, the exhibition is part of the megashow Pacific Standard Time, a four-month-long fest of architecture exhibitions and events that kicks off in May. Lubell and his co-curator, the writer Greg Goldin, have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the remainder of the money for “Never Built.” Help them succeed, and come July you’ll experience the LA that never was through 3D animations, models, and installations—including an 11-foot-tall rendition of Frank Lloyd Wright fils Lloyd Wright’s 1931 proposal for a Catholic cathedral made from 65,000 LEGOs. Read more!

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It’s the end of the world as we know it — at least that’s what the 5,000-year old Mayan calendar says. But should the apocalypse really hit — on Friday! —  you’ll feel just fine riding it out in one of these bunker homes (just remember to stock up on plenty of canned goods). We scoured the globe and picked the 10 best windowless, square, sturdy boxes that should withstand any of the floods, plagues, and who knows what else 12/12/12 will bring. Click through to see our list, and make sure to share your favorites in the comments section below!

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SimCity 2000. 1994. Will Wright for Maxis, now part of Electronic Arts, Inc

Are video games art? The Museum of Modern Art in New York City thinks so! The venerable institution has acquired 14 video games for its permanent design collection, including beloved icons like Pac-Man and Tetris, as well as our (obvious) favorite SimCity 2000! The urban-planning game allows you to create your own metropolis from the ground up, from building residential towers, roads, and power plants to navigating pesky zoning laws — and definitely represents the kind of engaging design that MoMA champions. Read more!

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Designing a city has never seemed easier. Nearly every firm of note has produced a master plan or four in the last five years or so, usually at the bidding of an Emirate elite or as part of an elaborate slideshow for some “visionaries” conference. Needless to say, not many are taken too seriously, and the prospective cities quickly devolve into a “greatest hits” of the architects’ built and (mostly) unbuilt work. Still, it’s hard for an architect to turn down a chance to design the city of tomorrow. It’s a right of passage.

Cue “FREE City”, a new ideal blueprint by Fernando Romero Enterprise (FREE) for a future sustainable city that consists of a lot of flashy renderings and a sprinkling of ideology. FREE City is a prototype for emerging urban areas of the 21st century and which aims to become a model for urban planning for years to come. Currently being exhibited at the 2nd Creativity World Biennale, the master plan depicts an urban future in which everyone has access to security, healthcare, education, and the state-of-the-art technologies. If only. Read more.

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A 1902 diagram illustrating Ebenezer Howard’s concept for the Garden City, which sought to do away with the crowding and pollution of early-20th-century industrial life. Photo courtesy of SPUR

As we sit here in the perpetual LCD-screen glow of the 21st century, fantasizing about the floating cities and moon-bounce bridges that will populate the urban amusement park we all are apparently yearning to live in, we have much in common with our urban predecessors, all of whom wanted to remake their inherited spaces and carve out a new logic for living. The ancient Greeks used their colonies to roll out the rationalist grid system. The Renaissance Italians, frustrated by their narrow, crowded medieval streets, sketched ideal Vitruvian cities full of proportion and symmetry and devoid of people. In the U.S., 18th-century agrarian idealists organized Westward Expansion in an ever-unfolding grid of six-mile-square townships. Le Corbusier, grossed out by the dirt and disarray of the modern industrial city, compartmentalized every bit of urban space into its own safe little OCD box.

In the new exhibition “Grand Reductions: 10 Diagrams That Changed Planning,” the nonprofit urban think tank SPUR tracks the history of urban desire in its most distilled form: the diagram. On view at SPUR’s San Francisco storefront through February 15, “Grand Reductions” unravels the ideals and anxieties lurking behind seemingly unassuming maps. The orthogonal is political! Click through for some of our favorite diagrams from the show.

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Image © MVRDV

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