Tsinghua University, just north of Beijing’s core, is our home for the week. The campus is green, the supermarket is full of Chinese food and the spicy chicken and dumplings are delicious.
market day
Saturday is market day in Como. The only ferry from Bellagio to Como leaves early, at 8:13 am, too early for breakfast at the villa. Fresh eggs, fresh yoghurt, fresh fruit and fresh cappuccino will have to wait until tomorrow. Market day is just once a week. Today, with bread rolls in hand, we catch the ferry and arrive in Como by 9 am.
fog
Foggy brain. Foggy landscape. I have finally shed the fog of jet lag, and I see outside, through the window of my study, that the mountains in the distance have shed their fog as well. Time for work to begin.
ciao Pittsburgh. ciao Italia.
This Sunday I leave for a month long practitioner residency in Italy.
310,000 and counting
From 700,000 to 310,000 in just 30 years. This is Pittsburgh’s heritage. Catastrophic and transformational.
Where did those people go? Many went to the suburbs that ring the city. Their children, educated here, went further, to other cities, looking for jobs that eluded them here. They may have left, Jim Russell contends, but they left their hearts in Pittsburgh.
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!
heads up Pittsburgh!
It’s year three! of 10 opinionated souls giving us outstanding ideas for change.
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?
creative and useful
You might not know that the Waffle Shop is my tenant. Jon Rubin, it’s creator, rented it from me a few years back, just for a few months, he said. Two and half years later, the Waffle shop is a creative institution. It serves some food, with an abundance of creativity and has made a mark on my building, my other tenants, the neighborhood and Pittsburgh.
don’t be square
In Spring 2010, Huffington Post listed Pittsburgh as their #2 pick on their Best Cities for the Newly Graduated list. “Pittsburgh seems an unlikely place for a renaissance but the city escaped the recession relatively unscathed and is moving forward in many areas”, Huffington Post noted. “Besides having bustling education and health care sectors, the city is also generous with arts initiatives.”
creativity + bureaucracy
On Wednesday night Czech architects Mjölk architekti made their presentation at the Pecha Kucha Night in Prague. They did not stop at the slide show. On Thursday morning they presented a gift to the city of Liberic. Eight hours of laboring produced a perfect little public sauna on an abandoned concrete platform near the local swimming hole.
I’m back
I’m back.
Summer is a mixed blessing. While others are casting off their business suits, my life gets busier. More time in the office and more time at my desk. Less time for biking, less time for blogging.
Cool air greeted me on the sidewalk this morning. Summer is gone and with it the crazy work schedule of my life. The fall is a new beginning for me.
what’s wrong with this picture?
Every day, when my daughter was growing up, I’d point at a photograph in the newspaper and say “What’s wrong with this picture?”. She’s gone now, 23 years old and in school in Japan. Yet still, when I turned to page A-10 of today’s Pittsburgh Post Gazette, I said those words out loud. ”What’s wrong with this picture?”
not very fast
Four hours and forty-one minutes outside Pittsburgh, anger slapped me in the face. How ridiculous is this, I thought. Only two hundred and thirty-three point eight miles in four hours and forty-one minutes? If I were flying, I’d almost be in Paris.
intoxicating
Outside, along the edge of the river trail, the smell of honeysuckle is intoxicating.
Go.
ownership
I was disappointed. And then I wasn’t.
Every month Kim, Sara & I host a cityLIVE! event. We are interested, as we believe our audience is, in understanding issues that impact our city and region. We are interested in holding a forum that allows everyone to attend. And we are most interested in nurturing a thoughtful exchange of ideas.
time to young up
The next time someone tells you that Pittsburgh is losing population, yell at them.
bike hero
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a weekend bicyclist, “might consider keeping his head down and his helmet on” suggests the Huffington Post this morning. ”A backlash is brewing over his new bicycling policy.”
