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Changing Skyline: Zoning variances threaten character of Powelton Village
Powelton Village has every reason to top the list of Philadelphia's most desirable neighborhoods. Let's start with location. As the first residential area west of Center City, it is a brisk 15-minute walk from downtown. It boasts some of the best transit connections in town, a rich stock of Italianate villas and Victorian twins, and postcard views of the skyline. Geographically, it occupies the same urban niche as Georgetown and Cambridge.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: An energy-saving milestone planned for Philadelphia's Kelly Drive
A building that runs on half the usual amount of energy? How ho-hum. These days, most new construction in Philadelphia can do that without even trying, simply by adhering to the U.S. Green Building Council's basic LEED standards. What would be really interesting is if someone put up a major building that consumed no energy at all.
Categories: The Press
Anne Tyng, 91, groundbreaking architect
Anne Tyng, a pioneering woman architect whose ideas about geometry influenced Louis Kahn's buildings and who later had a child with him, died Tuesday, Dec. 27, in Greenbrae, Calif. She was 91, said her daughter, Alexandra, who lives outside Philadelphia.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: Suburbia's outer ring losing shine, some economists say
I set out the other day to find the outer edge of the Philadelphia suburbs and ended up in a Chester County subdivision called Oakcrest. Located 45 miles west of Center City, just outside Coatesville, Oakcrest has a network of immaculately paved streets, glossy utility boxes, and an active sales office. What it does not have is a lot of houses.
Categories: The Press
Quashing an attempt at another Family Court fast one
Family Court may go down in history as the ultimate stealth building.
Now under construction at 15th and Arch Streets, the scandal-tainted state courthouse was initially outsourced to a private developer and designed in secret.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: Zoning by fiat may be on the way out in Philadelphia
This has not been a good year for despots. North Korea's Kim Jong Il met his maker, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak is under arrest, and Syria's Bashar al-Assad faces a future that looks rocky. But in Philadelphia, City Council members get to rule their districts with an iron hand - at least for now.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: Design of Curtis Institute's Lenfest Hall has strong points but lacks spark
Lenfest Hall, the new dormitory and rehearsal hall for the Curtis Institute of Music, exhibits all the familiar tropes of a building by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown: the square windows, the ghosts of classical columns, the bold typography, the contrast of an overscale design element (a bay window, this time) with Lilliputian doors. Yet, technically speaking, Lenfest Hall is not a Venturi and Scott Brown building.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: Biology central
Was it only three years ago that Radar Magazine crowned Drexel University the "ugliest campus" in a roundup of American colleges? The charge seemed a bit unfair then, even if Market Street was still ablaze with Drexel's orange-brick relics. But it's clearly wrong today.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: Planned Chestnut Street skyscraper has pedestrian design
There are signs, ever so faint, that Philadelphia is starting to build housing again. Two companies just went head-to-head for the right to develop a high-visibility corner at Broad and South Streets. Northern Liberties is awash in orange zoning notices, just as it was in the boom years. A developer even wants to build a mid-rise condo building in quaint Chestnut Hill, on Magarity Ford's Germantown Avenue property.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: Warehouse-size billboard eyed for Philadelphia site near Delaware River
It's as much a Philadelphia landmark as the statue of William Penn on City Hall, though hardly something that aspires to be an emblem of greatness. Is there anyone who has traveled the south Delaware waterfront and not marveled at the four-story concrete skeleton that lurks behind the RiverView shopping center on Columbus Boulevard, its naked columns flouting both gravity and civic decency?
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: Vision of walker-friendly City Ave.
Besides being a busy commercial strip, a popular commuter route, and the boundary between Philadelphia and Lower Merion, City Avenue is a living, breathing, controlled experiment on how clashing policies affect two hoary American tribes - city-dwellers and suburbanites.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: Another blingy Broad St. building
When Philadelphia's big real estate developers find a neighborhood they like, they really dig in. Bart Blatstein has made himself the virtual lord of Northern Liberties with factory-style lofts and hip hangouts. Now Carl Dranoff is firmly on his way to becoming the boss of South Broad Street.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: Mercer Museum adds space with a well-crafted concrete addition
Nothing separates architects from the rest of humanity like concrete. Architects will go into raptures over its tough, tactile quality. But among the general public, who tend to associate the material with no-frills highways and bad public housing, concrete buildings evoke a visceral dislike. Maybe attitudes would be different if more people encountered Doylestown's Mercer Museum, a quirky French chateau formed entirely of concrete, window frames and roof included.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: A park on high
NEW YORK - It's easy to find the new entrance to the High Line park. Just follow the stream of people in skinny jeans and espadrilles heading west from the subways around Penn Station. The parade becomes a throng as you near 10th Avenue, once a lonely outpost where the blocks were lined with trucks and streetwalkers and not much else.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: A small-scale vision of Philadelphia's future
In 1960, Philadelphia peered into a crystal ball and tried to divine how the city would look 25 years in the future. The exercise in clairvoyance produced the city's first Comprehensive Plan, an amazing, 375-page document that showed the rough outlines of what would become Penn Center, Market East Station, and the revitalized Society Hill neighborhood.
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: BOWL ROUNDUP
TICKETCITY
Houston 30
Penn St. 14
FIESTA
Okla. St. 33
Stanford 30
ROSE
Oregon 45
Wisconsin 38
Categories: The Press
Changing Skyline: History vs. high-rises: An urban debate
Here's a little thought experiment to get you steamed: What if the celebrated urban planner Edmund Bacon had embraced the prevailing ideology of the 1960s and leveled Society Hill, replacing its blocks of outmoded, colonial-era townhouses with sleek modern high-rises for middle-class families? Would Philadelphia be a livelier, more successful place today?
Categories: The Press
9/11 memorial stirring — but backdrop fails to impress
NEW YORK - If Americans were certain about anything in the terrible days after the World Trade Center towers were flattened before our eyes, it was this: There would be a memorial here to the dead, and it would acknowledge the footprints of the two vanished skyscrapers that dominated the skyline for 28 years.
Categories: The Press
Transforming parking spots to parklets: Philadelphia joins an urban trend
How small can you make a park and still have it serve as a civilized refuge from the teeming city? Philadelphia is about to find out.
Categories: The Press

PlanPhilly: Planning Philadelphia's Future