Urban Design Inspiration

By the New York Times

—with Jordan Beggs, production help + moral support.

Jenni Sparks’ Hand Drawn New York

Commissioner’s Map of 1811 for City of New York establishing street grid up to 155th Street. Read article in Urban Times: How We’ve Ignored the Complex Simplicity of the Manhattan Street Grid

This challenging mixed-use project is located at Eighth and Pearl Streets, three blocks to the west of Boulder’s Downtown Mall. Retail uses on the ground floor provided new homes for four local businesses including a bakery/cafe. Offices, including Wolff Lyon Architects’ home, are located on the second floor. There are five residential townhomes with front porches and small gardens. Landscaped upper and lower terraces provide the internal circulation to each suite. Forty parking spaces are cleverly hidden on-site with many of them located in a garage built into the hill. Roof-top terraces provide fine views of the Flatirons. Designed to respond to Boulder’s historic platting of 25’ wide lots, there are subtle changes in brick color and building articulation, which help the new structure fit into the existing neighborhood. The building is one of the first to be built in Boulder’s Business Main Street zoning district which Wolff Lyon helped craft with city planners. Finally, this mixed-use project provides a transition from the commercial character of Pearl Street to the traditional development patterns of the historic Mapleton Hill district.

The oldest Western Hemisphere photograph in the Getty Museum’s collection is a daguerreotype of Washington Square, New York, taken in 1839. We also have a pair of salted paper print portraits taken by O.B. DeMorat of Philadelphia in the 1850s, and several landscape views of San Francisco around 1855–56. Our oldest South American photographs are daguerreotypes from Chile and Peru from roughly 1850–55.

I’ll take Manhattan

Chicago in 1820. Fort Dearborn on the left, and first permanent settler John Kinzie’s house on the right.