ciao Pittsburgh. ciao Italia.
This Sunday I leave for a month long practitioner residency in Italy.
cityLIVE! 34 – best and brightest
In addition to the myriad of great things Pittsburgh has to offer, we also have some of the brightest minds and best ideas. cityLIVE! has a history of featuring some of the most established of these brilliant minds and ideas, but now it’s time to hear from the up-and-comers!
urban is hip now
Now this is worth writing about. Today the WSJ reports that there are signs of recovery in the office space market. Great news. Perhaps the miserable economy is finally righting itself.
a gift to the city
Twenty-seven young architects in training put their minds to downtown Pittsburgh this fall. They explored, documented and analyzed the compact neighborhood carefully, logically, with no preconceptions.
walker’s paradise
This is where I live. In walker’s and rider’s paradise. My car is lonely. My shoes are well worn. My office is right next door.
My walk score is 100. What’s yours?
things to learn from Paris #3
Remember this story? Mon dieu! You don’t have to spend $1010 on a trash can.
things to learn from Paris #2
Its my third coffee shop of the day and I’ve overdosed on coffee so this time I ordered tea. Tea and a palmier.
things to learn from Paris #1
Paris is a dense city. There is not much space here. Streets are narrow and crammed with cars.
A typical parking space in Pittsburgh measures twenty feet long by eight and a half feet wide. This smart car fits into a space just nine feet long. I measured it. Fill a city with tiny cars and there’ll be twice as many parking spaces.
dreaming red
We sold our Lake House a couple of years ago. It had become a burdensome retreat, large and a lot to care for. Most days we’d sit in the tiniest room just off the kitchen, reading and looking at the gorgeous lake view.
celebrating buses
Our bus stop shelters are as dreary as January in Pittsburgh. While they may be utilitarian they are quite pedestrian and uninspired. The essential bus stop sign hasn’t even been integrated into the shelter. It stands all alone, attached to a nearby post or pole, an afterthought. What a shameful solution for a bus system that has more riders than most other cities in the US.
the wage debate
Everyone deserves to earn enough money to pay for their daily essentials. On face value alone the proposed prevailing wage bill in Pittsburgh makes sense. It speaks to the basic decency of employers and their willingness to take some responsibility for their employees lives.
10 people. 3 minutes
Back by popular demand! We’ve gathered 10 more brilliant Pittsburgh minds to tell you about their funkiest, biggest, hairiest. most brilliant ideas for change. Give us 30 minutes on December 9, and we’ll change the way you see the city at this cityLIVE! event. Forget feasibility, funding or anything as ridiculous as consensus-building. We asked for ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘outside the box’.
sleepless in LA
Just back from Australia, with my internal time clock still off kilter, I’ve turned around and headed back to Los Angeles for an intense, but fun, three day project. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has invited me to participate as a panelist in an SDAT in Downtown Los Angeles. What an honor.
laksa lust
Often, when I’m traveling that horrendous thirty hours from Pittsburgh to Australia, I day dream about laksa. This Malaysian soup is worth the trip and I eat it whenever I can.
melting pot
Richard Florida ranks it as a city “where the kids are heading”. Melbourne, the second most populous city in Australia, with 4,000,000 residents, has also been ranked one of the top three most livable cities in the world by the Economist Group’s Intelligence unit, since 2002.
upside down under
While I write this at four in the afternoon, in Pittsburgh the day I have just enjoyed has not yet dawned.
the shrinking city
This lovely little city, Pittsburgh, is under siege. Every day the media describes yet another crisis. Eight more schools to close. Library branches to be shuttered. A court order to fix the water and sewer system. Underfunded pension funds. Property and business taxes that are burdensome. Disappearing bus stops. Disappearing mail boxes. And the latest, a mayor who wants to tax our local college students to balance the city’s books.
a concrete step
This weekend I helped a relative move into a pretty little house in Cranberry. She had finally found a home just 2.5 miles from her job. Since she likes to walk I assumed her days of commuting by car were over. But I had forgotten this fundamental thing about the suburbs. There are no sidewalks.
churn
Will we always be second best?
Over the last month I have been corresponding with a young man from Tokyo. He will be moving to Pittsburgh for a job, with wife and baby daughter in tow. He is in fact an American but has lived abroad for years now. He believes that America can offer a better life for his family.
