The World in 2030: Four scenarios for long-term planning and strategy By Ross Dawson Recently I did the opening keynote to the top executive team of a major organization at their strategy offsite. It’s not appropriate to share the full presentation, however I can share the rough scenarios I presented for the world to 2030. The scenarios were presented after having examined the driving forces and critical uncertainties for the company. As always, a strong disclaimer comes with any generic set of scenarios like these – scenarios really must be created by the users themselves for specific decisions and in context (for the full disclaimer see my scenarios for the future of financial services). Why Don't Conservative Cities Walk? Wikimedia Commons Photo Reading Tom Vanderbilt’s series on the crisis in American walking, I noticed something about the cities with the highest “walk scores.” They’re all liberal. New York, San Francisco, and Boston, the top three major cities on Walkscore.com, are three of the most liberal cities in the country.
Broadcasting Architecture Worldwide - Part 892 I’m an Architect. I’m the most interesting man in the room. I’m wearing all black. I’m near sighted, but have compensated with extremely attractive and/or expensive eyewear. ACE The goal of the ACE Program is to dramatically enhance the accuracy, precision, and timeliness of intelligence forecasts for a broad range of event types, through the development of advanced techniques that elicit, weight, and combine the judgments of many intelligence analysts. The ACE Program seeks technical innovations in the following areas: (a) efficient elicitation of probabilistic judgments, including conditional probabilities for contingent events; (b) mathematical aggregation of judgments by many individuals, based on factors that may include: past performance, expertise, cognitive style, metaknowledge, and other attributes predictive of accuracy; and (c) effective representation of aggregated probabilistic forecasts and their distributions. The ACE Program will build upon technical achievements of past research and on state-of-the-art systems used today for generating probabilistic forecasts from widely-dispersed experts. Related Program(s)
Will that Starbucks last? - Dream City Everyone knows that cities like New York, Boston and Chicago have flipped the script over the past couple of decades, turning richer and whiter as their surrounding suburbs grow more diverse. Today, you’re more likely to hear Farsi and Thai spoken in the sprawling cul-de-sacs outside of Atlanta than you are in many parts of the Starbucks-soaked city center itself. Exactly how this happened, however, doesn’t get as much ink. We just assume that a lot of the kids who watched “Friends” in the ’90s decided they’d like to engage in witty repartee at Central Perk. But that’s just a small slice of what caused the massive shift that Alan Ehrenhalt details in his new book, released this week, “The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.”
AD Interviews: Paint and Architectural History, Natasha Loeblich Architectural paint analyst Natasha Loeblich traces the histories of structures from such as the Revolutionary War-era buildings at Colonial Williamsburg, by studying what’s on their walls. I spoke to her about her work and the field. What exactly is architectural paint analysis? Well, basically it’s just looking at the paints on the building and trying to figure out the original color. And a lot of people want to know not just the original color, but also what the building’s been painted over history. And then in those paints you’re trying to find specifically the pigments that are coloring the paints, but also what the binder was—so for example if it was an oil paint, or if it was a lime wash, or a distemper or something like that.
Science fiction no more: The perfect city is under construction - Dream City Formula One car racing is the most viewed sport in the world. On any given race day, half a billion people — one-fourteenth of the globe — are watching it on TV. But it’s what they’re not seeing that wins races today: More than 300 sensors are implanted throughout each vehicle to monitor everything from air displacement to tire temperature to the driver’s heart rate. A look into the life and work of Harry Weese When the Chicago Magazine shared Robert Sharoff’s piece on the late Harry Weese with us, it piqued our interest and we began to took a closer look at the life and work of this talented architect. As Sharoff notes, at Weese’s prime, he was the leading architect of Chicago – a man focused on historic preservation and focused on manifesting Miesian principles in a new light. Sharoff’s and our deeper look into Weese’s work is an attempt to infuse the architect’s reputation with positivity, not letting his architectural achievements become clouded by his later struggle with alcohol. More about Weese’s life and projects after the break. As Sharoff reported, “ Throughout his long life, Weese’s obsession never varied.
Detroitism What does “ruin porn” tell us about the motor city, ourselves, other American cities? Photograph by Yves Marchan and Romain Meffre courtesy Steidl. Red Dawn 2, the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. Inception: Architecture of the Mind New York’s heat wave gave us the perfect excuse to escape into the cool movie theater for a few hours to check out Christopher Nolan’s latest production, Inception (don’t worry, we won’t spoil the movie for you, we just want to share some thoughts about this very architectural-ish movie). The movie’s protagonist, Dom Cobb, assembles a skilled team to extract secrets or, in rare cases, to implant ideas deep within a person’s subconscious. Arguably the most important member, the architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), designs these dreams.
Rust Belt chic: Declining Midwest cities make a comeback - Dream City More than any other city in America, Cleveland is a joke, a whipping boy of Johnny Carson monologues and Hollywood’s official set for films about comic mediocrity. But here’s what else is funny: According to a recent analysis, the population of downtown Cleveland is surging, doubling in the past 20 years. What’s more, the majority of the growth occurred in the 22-to-34-year-old demo, those coveted “knowledge economy” workers for whom every city is competing. Pittsburgh, too, has unexpectedly reversed its out-migration of young people. The number of 18-to-24-year-olds was declining there until 2000, but has since climbed by 16 percent.
Multiplicity and Memory: Talking About Architecture with Peter Zumthor This interview was completely conducted and translated by Marco Masetti, done as his bachelor’s degree thesis in Italy. The idea of multiplicity is innate in Peter Zumthor’s projects since his very first works: works of art surrounding us put on various meanings, which do not always remain on parallel levels combining well with dialectical relationships. The vague is planned strictly, holding by the rules of the architectural language. Beauty is in the undetermined, the multiple, but it is obtainable only through precision.
The Ghost Station Volokolamskaya This abandoned station is often called “a ghost station”. During construction of the section Oktyabrsk field – Planernaya, under the airfield of Tushino they built a standard three-span station. But when the section started its work in 1975, Volokalamskaya was not listed with other stations. Her opening was delayed till better times, when the airfield will be built up with new houses.
An Architect in 140 characters or less Maybe these could be my new Twitter bio. Or, we could just think of it as an elevator speech… for the lonely. I’m just an Architect, standing in front of an ideology, asking it to love me; Also, I have a dollar. I’m an Architect, like Howard Roark from the Fountainhead, only fatter, and underemployed.