Cities plodding along according to post-war principles that privileged roads for cars–not people–do so at their peril theglobeandmail.com/arts/why-the-c…
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From Lisa Rochon's chasing home — Exhibit Wins Top Prize at Venice Architecture Biennale: 700 Families Squat Abandoned Caracas Office Tower

An abandoned office tower in the middle of Caracas – that deeply troubled and dangerous city – has been squatted by more than 700 families. An exhibition and installation by architecture critic Justin McGuirk, Caracas-based Urban-Think Tank and Dutch photographer Iwan Baan which documents the ingenuity and will to survive in the Torre David skyscraper has received the top prize at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. Read more: caracas hits venice « chasing home

Caine's Cardboard Arcade in East LA

A 9 year old boy who built an elaborate cardboard arcade in his dad's used auto parts store is about to have the best day of his life.

From The Globe and Mail

LISA ROCHON

Creative muscle in a digital world

LISA ROCHON From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Caine’s Arcade is an Internet video sensation about a nine-year-old boy in Los Angeles whose imagination and capable hands allowed him to construct a multi-game arcade using scissors, tape and cardboard boxes from his dad’s auto-parts shop. If Caine Monroy’s fantasy design hadn’t attracted the attention of L.A. indie filmmaker Nirvan Mullick, whose subsequent short documentary has had more than 2.4-million YouTube hits, we might have been inclined to pity the kid. He was forced to spend an unscripted summer without the diversions of overnight camp, art lessons or World of Warcraft to while away the hours. Instead, we are mesmerized and moved by the determination of a kid with nothing to do but design and build an idea from his mind.

From The Globe & Mail — Is Vancouver Ready for Danish Architect Bjarke Ingels?

Expo 2010 Shanghai structure, a crowd-pleaser
for its bicycle ramp running around its double spiral.

LISA ROCHON
Is Vancouver Ready for Danish Architect Bjarke Ingels? Here’s Hoping

Architecture reflects the consciousness of a society, where it’s at and where it wants to go. So when an international sensation – the Danish free-styling architect Bjarke Ingels – comes along and lands skyscraper commissions in Vancouver on an intense triangular site next to the Granville Bridge, and in Toronto next to the modern-tony Shops at Don Mills, it’s important to ask: Will he be allowed to soar in Canada?

For the corner of Beach Avenue and Howe Street, Ingels has been commissioned by developer Ian Gillespie – Vancouver’s self-styled Medici of art and architecture, who hails not from Florence but Port Coquitlam – to create a skyscraper landmark on one of six freshly designated sites created in the city for extra-tall towers. BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) has proposed a twisting tower of deeply recessed windows, a kinetic building that resembles something chiselled out of Lego, a gateway rising – sashaying – above the Granville Bridge.

LISA ROCHON

The Business Case 

For Beautiful Libraries

LISA ROCHON | Columnist profile | E-mail

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Feb. 10, 2012

The public library is a city’s epic living room – that’s why the French neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée designed his utopian library as a monumental, barrel-vaulted hall big enough to hold the memory of the entire world. That’s why the New York Public Library is a source of enlightenment and architectural pilgrimage. And it’s why every year 19 million people flood into Toronto’s libraries, many of them exhilarating, award-winning structures. Now, under constant fire from cities desperate to save money, libraries are figuring out how to get the message across that they are crucial to a vibrant civic life.

The business case for beautiful libraries - The Globe and Mail

Lisa Rochon in The Globe and Mail

 Gi-Da-Gi-Binez Youth Centre

LISA ROCHON

The Cornerstones of a Better Attawapiskat

LISA ROCHON |

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Dec. 16, 2011 

"The arrogance and gloss of a top-down bureaucracy, ruled by paternalistic machinery, was nowhere to be found. Instead, there was a willingness to sit down, and start with the basics..."

The cornerstones of a better Attawapiskat - The Globe and Mail

LISA ROCHON: CITYSPACE
Squaring Public Space
With Human Needs

LISA ROCHON | Columnist profile
Paris— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Nov. 25, 2011 3:30PM EST

Place des Vosges always draws me to its magnificent truths whenever I visit Paris. But, last weekend under a cloudless autumn sky, the 17th-century square seemed especially ageless – and, for the makers of public space back home in Canada, freshly instructive.

The prototypical European square was packed with children in classic blue cardigans playing make-believe in the sandboxes and with teenaged boys playing raucous games of soccer on the fine gravel. Along the edges of the square – past the geometric lawns of grass – friends, lovers and families were folded into conversations at tiny restaurant tables under the sheltering, arched arcade. Girlfriends peered into the artisan shops and haute-couture boutiques. Tired-looking fathers cradling babies, and elderly couples in stiff woollen coats gathered on the wooden benches near the rows of clipped, leafless linden trees, bathed in the warm rays of sun.

LISA ROCHON: CITYSPACE

Sherbourne Common: Clean, Green, Brainy and Blue

LISA ROCHON

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jul. 29, 2011 5:00PM EDT

Sherbourne Common marks the end of the park. Or, at least, the end of the conventional park. Here is a beguiling landscape, injected with rays of electric blue at night, that sits atop a vast, brainy infrastructure. Below a splash pad, where kids frolic by day, polluted water from Lake Ontario pours through ultraviolet cleansing tanks before being pumped up through celebratory water sculptures. A park of this kind may be a first for Canada and even North America, but it surely will not be the last.

LISA ROCHON: CITYSPACE

Ai Weiwei: Planting originality, reaping Beijing's fury

From Saturday's

Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jun. 10, 2011 5:00PM EDT

Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern... by vernissagetv