Tag Archives: By E. Padjen

Competitions: What’s the Real Prize?

You win some, and you also don’t lose some. A recent conference on design competitions drew a range of views on what constitutes hitting the bull’s-eye.

By Elizabeth S. Padjen

BEDIT_0431_Atmosphere
Mohsen Mostafavi, Francine Houben, and Craig Dykers discuss at the Keynote Panel moderated by Cathleen McGuigan.

In the opening scene of the first episode of Mr. Selfridge, an American businessman, Harry Selfridge, tries on a pair of kid gloves in a proper Edwardian department store. When he decides he wants to try something else, the clerk asks what he would like to see. “Well, maybe I don’t know until I see it,” he answers. “Why don’t we get a whole lot of them on the counter and then we can see what we like?” The clerk explains that’s not how things are done. “Come on,” he cajoles, “let’s have a little bit of fun”—and soon a drawerful of gloves is heaped on the counter. Continue reading Competitions: What’s the Real Prize?

Boston Faces the Rising Sea

Yet another coastal city that’s looking for a way to “avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable.”

By Elizabeth S. Padjen

Can Boston take action—enough action—to protect itself from rising waters before the next big storm? Or will the city tragically require its own Katrina or Sandy in order to muster the will to protect itself against repeated catastrophe? Continue reading Boston Faces the Rising Sea

The Trouble with Brick

Disability watchdogs have decided that brick sidewalks are nothing but trouble.

By Elizabeth S. Padjen

Rian K. Long.

Brick, beans, and cod—you know we’re talking about Boston. But nobody bakes beans anymore, and the feds have clamped down on cod fishing. Now, even brick is under siege. In the country’s most famous walking city, the dominance of the venerable paving material has been challenged by the decidedly more pedestrian concrete and asphalt. Continue reading The Trouble with Brick