Instilling a poetics of place is a goal of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), the famous landscape design firm that has created successful public spaces in some of the country’s most challenging urban sites. In these locations, nature offers not so much an escape from city living as a teasing dialogue with built structures. The whole experience is aimed, as critic Paul Goldberger notes, to “make you see everything, city and nature alike, with a striking intensity.”

Richly illustrated and handsomely designed, this is the first publication to explore a wide range of MVVA’s projects, focusing on the firm’s trend toward sites requiring complex technological solutions. Leading critics and historians look at twelve projects, dating from 1992 to the present, and each posing a challenge—such as contamination, isolation, and lengthy public approval proceedings. They explore the process through which the firm researches such issues and how solutions are embedded in the final aesthetics and spatial structure of the sites.

In an era in which the individuality and vitality of small towns are under threat from globalization, and city planning discussions tend to center on topics like metropolitan regions, megaregions, and global cities, the authors of this volume see a need to reflect critically on the potential of small towns. They show how small towns can meet the challenge of a fast-paced, globalized world, and they use case studies to introduce movements, programs, and strategies capable of effectively promoting local cultures, traditions, identities, and sustainability.

Think bigger. A lot bigger. Rather than tinker with the status quo and pay lip service to sustainability CJ Lim, Professor of Architecture and Cultural Design at the Bartlett and his colleague Ed Liu have come up with a manifesto to deal with the eco-monsters stalking our planet; overpopulation, climate change and insufficient food supplies. And they prefer to think big – hence the term Smartcity.

The authors realise that a return to an agrarian idyll of cottages and small holdings is impractical in our increasingly
urbanised world and point out that a well planned city can be incredibly efficient, sociable and sustainable. The solution, logically enough, is to develop a programme for new cities that aims to satisfy the conflicting demands of sustainability, economics and the sociological interaction of their inhabitants.

The city administration of the Linz decided to take an innovative step in the 90's: housing had to be built for over 10,000 people, which made a largescale city expansion necessary. Since conventional buildings consume large amounts of fossil fuel, the decision was made to pursue a purely ecological variant for the first time in a dense residential project.

The core of the urban planning on the site is the work of Roland Rainer. The design of the open spaces was conceive by Atelier Dreiseitl. The international READ-Group consisting of Thoma Herzog, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and the energy planner Norbert Kaiser was reponsible for the overall anergy/architecture concept. The urban planning of the second construction phase was realized by Martin Treberspurg.