Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 894

Hudson Yards officially opened today on the west side of Manhattan. More specifically, the eastern half of Hudson Yards opened. There's a second phase to come on the western yards. And the highly anticipated observation deck at 30 Hudson Yards -- the highest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere -- is also not quite ready. It is expected to open in early 2020.

Considered the largest mixed-use private real estate project in American history by square footage, Hudson Yards has been in the works for many decades and was previously part of New York's (failed) bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Dan Doctoroff, who is now the CEO of Sidewalk Labs, led the bid under the Bloomberg administration.

So today is a bit of a big deal.

To commemorate the opening, the architecture critic for the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, published this searing, but highly visual, piece about the project . I think it is fairly safe to assume that he isn't a huge fan (he doesn't seem to love developers either).

Here's an excerpt talking about Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel:

Purportedly inspired by ancient Indian stepwells (it’s about as much like them as Skull Mountain at Six Flags Great Adventure is like Chichen Itza) the object — I hesitate to call this a sculpture — is a 150-foot-high, $200 million, latticed, waste-basket-shaped stairway to nowhere, sheathed in a gaudy, copper-cladded steel.

It preens along the critical axis between the High Line and the newish No. 7 subway station at Hudson Yards, hoping to drum up Instagram views and foot traffic for the mall, casting egregious shadows over what passes for public open space, ruinously manspreading beside the Shed, the most  novel work of architecture on site, and the only building the private developers didn’t build.

If any of you have formulated your own opinions about Hudson Yards, I would love to hear from you in the comments below. I'm looking forward to exploring the neighborhood in person sometime soon. If you're interested in learning more about the project, Curbed also just published, The ultimate guide to Hudson Yards .

Photo by  Sandy Ching  on  Unsplash

MIT Senseable City Lab and the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization are hosting a conference next month on the impact that artificial intelligence is having on our cities. Here is a summary of the event:

As AI (Artificial Intelligence) becomes ubiquitous, it transforms many aspects of the environment we live in. In cities, AI is opening up a new era of an endlessly reconfigurable environment. Empowered by robust computers and elegant algorithms that can handle massive data sets, cities can make more informed decisions and create feedback loops between humans and the urban environment. It is what we call the raise of UI (urban intelligence).

The 2019 Forum on Future Cities, organized by MIT Senseable City Lab and the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization, will focus on four aspects of the UI transformation: autonomous vehicles, ubiquitous data collection, advanced data analytics, and governing innovation. Panelists include mayors, academics, senior industry leaders and members of civil society to explore such topics from different points of view, highlighting the scientific and technological challenges, the critical collective decisions we as a society will have to make, and the exciting possibilities ahead.

The forum takes place on April 12th in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And since it looks to deal with many of the topics that we talk about on this blog, I figured that some of you might be interested in attending. If so, you can register here.

As I wrote about last month in this pithy post , the relationship between building height and density are often misunderstood. They mean different things and so the implications for our cities can also be vastly different.

I woke up this morning to a couple of tweets by John Michael McGrath that I think hit the nail on the end with respect to this duality. If you can't see them below, click here .

https://twitter.com/jm_mcgrath/status/1105500872979742720

Paris is known, and largely celebrated, for its "European-scaled" mid-rise buildings. But as John points out, these buildings often line narrow streets (see above). They are typically also built across large blocks with compact internal courtyards and with few setbacks and/or stepbacks. The combined result is that Paris is one of the densest cities in Europe. It has mid-rise at scale.

The North American context is quite different. The large majority of our land is usually reserved for low density housing. (Here in Toronto this land has been nicknamed the " Yellowbelt .") We have a policy context that only allows intensification in select places, and that can create pressures to build up. It's a bit like squeezing a closed tube of toothpaste.

In 2012, Eurostat ranked Paris as the densest city in Europe with an average population density of approximately 21,516 people per square kilometer. Whereas, according to Wikipedia , the population density of metro Toronto was around 5,905 people per square kilometer in 2016.

What is it, again, that we love so much about Paris?