Idea Days Bartram's Mile

  In this work shop we first did a walking tour along the west bank of the schuykill river from 49th and woodland to Bartram's Garden.

  Industrialism took hold along the river since the industrial revolution, many factories and mill still remain on the site today. The SRDC (Schuylkill River DevelopmentCorporation) have been trying to open up the banks to attract more people, as well as redeveloping the industrial sites into greener industrial buildings and corp offices. 

Seeing our beautiful city from this side of the river

This red building used to be a movie theater, and it was one of the first theaters in the country to have African American audience during the civil rights movement.

The iron work building here is designed by an Architect named Phillip Johnson (NOT the same Phillip Johnson we all know and love but still a pretty successful local Architect)

Idea days

I participate in the group of ‘Transient benches’, this is related to a 600 studio which is a homeless center. The benches are part of the design and will be real facilities of a community park. The benches will be finished two weeks later, now we just have wooden framework of permanent concrete benches. Unfortunately, we had a unexpected workshop and didn’t go to clean up the lot in NJ with my group. The lot will be the final site of the community park. I will continue paying close attention to these benches and I think it will be interesting to build something in concrete.

Sergio Fajardo: Urban Rainmaker

Everyone, I have a new hero.

Yesterday our studio arranged an audience with Sergio Fajardo, former mayor of Medellin, current governor of its home state of Antioquia, and potential next President of Colombia.  He's a wily, brilliant mathematician-turned-politician, and he's nothing short of prophetic.  I sat directly next to him for an hour as he laid out his ingenious strategy for the total transformation of an impoverished and crime-ridden city.  For instance, he took these neighborhoods of informal settlement which line the steep parts of the valley and once took 3 hours to ascend to through steep, narrow, drug-infested murderous alleys...

...and cautiously inserted these cable cars which connect to the central valley metro via free transfer and bring you through 3 stops to the top in about 12 minutes.

At the stops, and along the way, one will find stunning new architectural edifices, built around programs of culture, education, and learning, designed by renowned **Colombian** architects, built by Colombian contractors, and sourced with Colombian materials.  I offer into evidence one of his 5 "Parque Biblioteca" projects, a move which David Gouvernor has cleverly dubbed "archi-puncture":

Photos simply cannot do justice to the jaw-dropping topography of this city.  Many of the hills go beyond a 45 degree angle over the roughly 4000' ascent to the top.  

Inside was buzzing with activity:

And the surrounding neighborhood has, by all accounts, been completely transformed.  The cable cars caused informal settlers to clean their roofs and streets.  Crime has dropped precipitously.  Commerce and quality-of-life has picked up considerably for all informal settlement in these areas in the 3 years since construction.  Not bad at all!

This man hasn't just unlocked the full potential of modern architecture to empower and ennoble an oppressed city.  He has also solved the mysterious political equation that releases deadlock and channels completely the energy and resources of a city's general public, wresting control and power over the built environment back from corrupt power brokers that maintain the status quo.  It's nothing short of a magic act, and it has restored faith in my belief that architecture is fundamentally a political act.  Read on and enjoy :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/world/americas/15medellin.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Reading Viaduct Timeline+KeyPlayers [draft]

Below are a couple graphics ( timeline + key players) for the Viaduct

Input is welcomed.

PennDesign IDEA Days - High Performance Vaults

On Friday and Saturday, my group (the best group!) built three high performance vaulted structures under the guidance of Jonathan Dessi Olive (700 PennDesign student), Erik Leach (600 PennDesign Student) and the wonderful Franca Trubiano. There were two teams involved, PennDesign students and high school students from CHAD, an architecture focused charter school in Philadelphia. Together, we learnt how to build the vaults using thin bricks and gypsum. It was an amazing experience, the high school students were extremely focused and motivated and we were able to complete our task succesfully! Enjoy the pictures below.

-Leonie Badger

Link to a website where you can compare schools based on ratings of academics, safety, attendance, etc.

Shown in this comparison, Beeber Middle School (which is closing) and (moving into) Overbrook High School (which in turn is expanding its grades from 9-12 to 7-12)

School Comparison

"The truth is that a city has all the resources it needs; the key to unlocking these resources is seeing the urban landscape not as the end result of a previous creative process, but as the beginning of a new one—a landscape to design with, not for."

Design With Cities, Not Against Them

For the Viaduct Team (and others!)

Get embedded!  I would highly suggest someone attend this event and get some good dirt on what's going on in the neighborhood.

Rally for the Rail Park

Population and Birth Rate (about school abandon)

I think  one reason of school abandon  might be population decrease and low birth rate. So I did some research on that. Here is what I found.

Geography	Cumulative Estimates of the Components of Population Change
	April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2012
	Total Population Change [1]	Natural Increase	Vital Events		Net Migration
			Births	Deaths	Total	International [2]	Domestic
Pennsylvania	61,157	37,311	320,606	283,295	26,819	54,466	-27,647

Geography	Annual Estimates of the Components of Population Change
	July 1, 2011 to July 1, 2012
	Total Population Change [1]	Natural Increase	Vital Events		Net Migration
			Births	Deaths	Total	International [2]	Domestic
Pennsylvania	19,588	13,996	141,011	127,015	6,291	25,058	-18,767

In these two charts， we can see in fact the population is growing and the raio of births to deaths is over 1. There seem to be no problem of demographics. However, I read a paper about population spatial layout of megalopolis in northeastern part of United States. The author says that in well-developed megalopolises like Philly ,the Pyramid structure is obvious for urban hierarchy, population increases happened in outer suburban district rather than suburban. I think this point is very interesting and might be the answer of our question. Maybe we can find more datas of this and discuss on class.