Signs of the Times: Clutter, Culture, and Corridors
By Antonia Medina Abell, Urban Designer (Photo: Felipa Celaya of La Oaxaqueña and Antonia Medina Abell) Design Guidelines are typically crafted by municipalities and consultants to introduce a sense of order and a common language of design to otherwise chaotic urban spaces. They can address a multitude of issues and scales, ranging from the massing […]
Bridging the Gap: Overcoming Infrastructural Obstacles in Neighborhood Planning
By Tania Bronsoiler Seemingly overnight, but actually a generation in the making, the Rindge neighborhood in Cambridge has experienced significant growth and development, with an influx of thousands of units of residential development and new commercial activity. The growth is due, in part, to the proximity to the MBTA’s busiest subway train, the Red Line, as well as the wealth of […]
Shifting from a zero-sum game to a spectrum of possibilities
by Antonia Medina Abell Even before we set foot in Rochester, we were warned about the “Legends building”. If the name sounded fantastical, the details were far more pedestrian: a humble yellow-brick, one-story building (which we later discovered were two separate constructions, enmeshed in a maze of doors and insensitive renovations) from the Great Depression, […]
Enhancing the public realm of medical districts
by David Gamble, AIA AICP LEED AP Urban medical districts are places of sensory overload, with a wide variety of activities occurring at the same time: valet parking, people seeking out the emergency rooms, students racing to class, employees changing shifts, ambulance sirens wailing, patients being admitted and discharged, visitors seeking a cup of coffee […]
Wrapping the patina of the past
by Alyson Tanguay, collaborator with Gamble Associates Building uses change, but forms endure. This 10,000 square foot adaptive reuse project in Piqua, Ohio has had many lives. Over the last century, the structure has been a successful granite and marble tombstone business, a car dealership and motorcycle repair store, a barber shop, ladies hat retailer, […]