no2self.net

Once again I am but the outlet for the work of others. Here’s another installation in the series of lecture notes belonging to my colleagues at the office (we’re architects in birmingham, in case you hadn’t already heard*).

I can announce today that I may have finally persuaded aforementioned colleague to officially release further work as an ongoing series, as opposed to me snaffling stuff while he’s looking the other way. I’ll be cross posting on the office site too.

For this installment there are three PDF files on offer: 1, 2 and 3.

Here’s an excerpt from the typology matrix contained on one them:

And here’s the premise of the lecture:

Making Urban Places
Lecture 2: An Urban Vocabulary

That the urban spaces which make up our cities is merely a collection of spaces left over between buildings, is an opinion which is spatially, socially and culturally bankrupt. Urban space, for the urban designer, is a public theatre for a complex mixture of social, political, economic and individual behaviour vital to all of us. Such spaces are of equal, if not greater significance, to our growth and development as the architecture we inhabit.

Historically urban space was not merely an extension of architecture, but space created from elements of a distinctively urban character. In this lecture we set out to examine this urban vocabulary with two intentions:

1. To group the vocbulary under the perceptual headings of Kevin Lynch and relate them to a common human experiences in space.
2. To reveal the dynamic rules of combination (syntax) underlying such a vocabulary which permits us to create a rich and diverse language of urban forms.

References:

Gorden Cullen: Townscape
Kevin Lynch: Image of the City
Camillo Sitte: City Planning on Artistic Principles
Rob** Krier: Urban Space

Carry on with the matrix in the empty spaces and send it me back!

Related entries: Mythical City (previous lecture notes), Pepe le Pew on Townscape, Here and There

* last time, I -cough- promise
** I think there’s a typo on the PDF that says Leon when it should say Rob

I work at Axis Design Collective and we are architects in Birmingham.

Ignore me, normal service will resume shortly. This post exists only to provide myself some Google juice. Alternatively, if you’re feeling extremely generous, find a way to use the phrase architects in Birmingham on your blog and link my other site. After all, it wouldn’t be a testimonial. merely a statement of fact. I keep getting phone calls from a guy who wants me to pay him to get me to the top of the list for the phrase architects in Birmingham and I’d rather get there under my own steam.

Flickrmap have just announced version 2 of their photo/map mash up service. They’ve improved the Google Earth network connection that you use to tag photos with GPS and also introduced a Google map rendered option as well as their own stylised version.

Here’s mine:

(which, of course, doesn’t appear in the RSS feed)

And I’ve set up a Google map version here: Google Flickrmap

The subscription rate has gone up, but at $9.75 for a year it’s difficult to grumble. Worth a look if you want to easily tag your photos with GPS info and spit out a map easily at the other end.

This is the system I used to quickly tag the photos to accompany podcast episode 2 - ArchWeekWalk.