For more than 50 years, a bluff-top site offering some of California’s most spectacular ocean views was a gated trailer park for 268 mobile homes. The 30-acre (12 ha) site was not only an eyesore filled with increasingly dilapidated structures; it also prevented much-desired public access to the beach. Although as many as 37 developers tried to develop the land over the years, the community consistently opposed these plans, even after the mobile home park closed in 1996. Locals knew the oceanfront site as “Treasure Island,” after the movie that was filmed there in 1934.
The new 35-story headquarters of the Agbar Group, a Spanish multinational holding company, stands out like a lighthouse against the Barcelona skyline. Agbar Tower (Torre Agbar) is the cornerstone for new development in the new “22@ district,” an emerging neighborhood that is transforming 198 hectares (489 ac) of Barcelona’s 19th-century industrial Poblenou district into a 21st-century mixed-use district for the global knowledge-based industry. Its location alone, at the 22@ district’s apex closest to Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes—the remarkable double-decker roundabout at the intersection of three of Barcelona’s major boulevards (Gran Via, Diagonal, and Meridiana avenues)—accords Agbar Tower a landmark status. The multicolored, bullet-shaped tower contains 50,903 square meters (547,915 sf) of space, including 33,210 square meters (357,469 sf) of office space in 32 above-ground stories and 17,693 square meters (190,446 sf) of parking, an auditorium, a service area, and a loading bay on three subterranean levels. The total investment cost was €120 million.
Melbourne has always felt the need for a grand civic square, which was promised—but never delivered—in the 1837 plan for the new town on the River Yarra. Federation Square finally meets this need, creates a new gateway to the heart of the city, and completes the family of welcoming institutions—the Flinders Street train station and St. Paul’s cathedral—that occupy the intersection of Flinders and Swanston Streets. On the southeast corner of this intersection, Federation Square replaces the Jolimont railyard that served Flinders Street station and an offensive eyesore, the “Gas and Fuel” towers—land uses that additionally created a barrier between the center of the city and the Yarra.
If the physical archetype for traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) in the United States is colonial Charleston, Savannah, or Annapolis, the holistic prototype has always been Chautauqua. Founded in 1874 on Lake Chautauqua in southwestern New York state by two Methodist ministers as a summer retreat for Sunday-school teachers, it has grown to be ecumenical in its religious, cultural, educational, and recreational programs, and it has grown in size as well, from 129 acres (52 ha) at the beginning to 600 acres (243 ha) today. “Chautauqua,” a Seneca word meaning “one has taken the fish out there,” soon came to mean leisure time adult education with a somewhat evangelistic but nondenominational fervor, and today it means, more broadly, a retreat from daily life for reflection, discussion, and instruction in the company of like-minded people.
The new Pueblo del Sol, containing 377 rental apartments and 93 for-sale attached houses, replaces a 685-unit public housing project, Aliso Village, that was built in 1942 and condemned in 1998. It was not so much that the buildings were structurally unsound, as that uncontrollable drug gangs made them unsafe. Located in predominantly Latino East Los Angeles, Aliso Village was part of Pico Aliso—the largest public housing complex west of the Mississippi and home to 11 active street gangs.
Even if this luxury condominium building were built on land, it—and the Walsh Bay revitalization going on around it—would be marked as a special development. That the environmentally aware residential structure incorporating both car parking and boat slips was built over water marks it as extraordinary and innovative. Imagine a 200-by-24-meter (656×79 ft.), seven-story multifamily building atop the typical below-grade parking towed out to the harbor and anchored on pilings—a fair approximation of Pier 6/7’s concept.
The neighborhood Nassim Hill was the favored residential enclave of the British colonials who used Singapore as a trading outpost until the republic gained independence in 1965. Close to downtown, this area also benefits from a high elevation and sea breezes that temper the tropical climate. Embassies make their home here and Orchard Road, the commercial connector to downtown Singapore, is nearby, making Nassim Hill a convenient residential location.
No single building complex since Rockefeller Center has had the opportunity to exert such a positive impact on New York City. In July 1998, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority selected the development team—a partnership of the Related Companies, LP, and Apollo Real Estate Advisors, LP—to redevelop the approximately 3.4-acre (1.38 ha) site of the demolished New York Coliseum on Columbus Circle in the heart of Manhattan. The development team put together a dynamic and synergistic mix of components, generous public spaces, and breathtaking views to capitalize on this exceptional location that is the gateway to midtown Manhattan, the Upper West Side, and Central Park. Time Warner Center is a city within a building more than it is a building within a city.
Among the commercial corridors radiating out from Washington, D.C., the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor is unique in being served along its entire length by a Metrorail line. The post-subway development that has occurred along this spine has sometimes leapfrogged from one commercial center to another, leaving a number of underutilized segments with intact nearby residential enclaves. The Market Common, Clarendon fills one such void with a mixed-use development providing stores and restaurants, office space, housing, public open space, and public parking.
Hangzhou, an important tourist destination in China, is 180 kilometers (112 mi.) southwest of Shanghai. It has served ancient emperors as a capital city and is still a cultural center. To the Chinese, Hangzhou’s West Lake is as familiar an icon as the Great Wall or the Forbidden City. Marco Polo visited Hangzhou in the late 13th century and called the city “beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world.” For the Chinese, a pilgrimage to Hangzhou is an essential life experience. Of the 30 million tourists who visit West Lake each year, 2 million are foreigners.
