slightlyslack

I have been having lots of problems lately getting the SKU1_638 patch to install properly on my XP64 system. I've been able to get that going just fine, but now for some reason I cannot use the alt-shift-control-R command to render a region from a JPEG. I get the file selection menu and can select an image from which to render, but nothing happens. When I intentionally select an image that does not correlate with the size of the config.bmp, I don't get the usual error message, either. Electronic Arts has said that it does not offer technical assistance on importing regions. (One wonders whether they expect everyone playing SC4 to hand-terraform every map on which they play.) Has anyone else had this problem, and are there any known fixes?

I must say, louisville327, that your Kunstlerian invective is getting wearisome. JHK's incredibly arrogant writing style has done more harm to New Urbanism than a thousand pages of screeds in Reason.

Date: 10/17/2005 3:51:20 PM Author: The Terminator actually if you take HBLR or the Newark City Subway, they go pretty fast. Inbetween Washington Street and Military park on the Newark Subway, i swear they go 60 MPH! quote> Yeah, there are some really fast light rail lines out there. The aforementioned Exposition Boulevard light rail line will be doing 50+ in some stretches. However, LRT has been marketed in many places as a revived streetcar, and in street-running mode it can't go any faster than the speed of traffic--which, if it's sufficiently congested, is slower than walking.

You haven't lived until you've driven up the Harbor Freeway on a smog-free day and seen the San Gabriels rising behind downtown Los Angeles. On its own, it cannot compete with Chicago (let alone Hong Kong), but I can't think of too many cities in the world that are more geographically dramatic. http://rlux.com/LA_Skyline_B2.jpg align=baseline>

kmannkoopa: Monorail advocates are notoriously fast-and-loose with the numbers, much more than highway or conventional rail advocates. I have no idea why; perhaps it's the curious science fiction obsession so many of them share.

Date: 10/16/2005 5:37:01 PM Author: danielanzaldua BLUE LINE TRAM IN Los Angeles Also known as...the busiest light rail line in the United States. None of the lines in Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, or Dallas can come close to competing with it. I don't have passenger-miles traveled statistics readily at hand, but I do know that the Blue Line has over 70,000 daily boardings. Unlike the idiotically conceived nowhere-to-nowhere Green Line and the pointlessly slow Gold Line, the Blue Line has been a massive success from its first day of operation. It is one of the key factors in the revitalization of downtown Long Beach, which is now a very cool place (as long as you don't mind breathing sulfurous diesel smoke from all the ships docked at the Port of Long Beach). On a related MTA note, the Exposition Boulevard light rail line (Expo Line) is in the advanced planning stages. The environmental reports have been released to the public, and almost all necessary construction funds have been procured; the MTA board will vote on it in December. Mayor Villaraigosa, who also chairs the MTA, has gone on record as a big supporter of the Expo Line, so I have little doubt that it will go through. I predict that it will be a huge success, since it--like the Blue Line--will run through a very densely populated and heavily transit-dependent area on its way to the Metro Center station downtown. (It will also allow me to get to USC from my home in the Palms district in under a half-hour. ) I just wish that MTA could get the money together to do one of these three things: A) Build a new light rail tunnel directly from Metro Center (the northern terminus of the Blue Line and the planned eastern terminus of the Expo Line) to Union Station; B) Modify the existing Red Line subway tunnel so that catenary-powered light rail vehicles could run on tracks that presently can only carry third-rail-powered subway cars; or C) replace its current catenary-only light rail vehicle fleet with dual-power ones like those used in Bordeaux. Doing any of these would allow the Expo Line and the Blue Line to go to Union Station, where Metrolink trains and the two Gold Lines terminate. (The Pasadena leg of the Gold Line was originally called the Pasadena Blue Line, but the connector was never built.) By then increasing service on Metrolink commuter trains, the need for seat-hopping would be eliminated, making the rail system a much more attractive alternative to driving than it currently is. I eagerly await the day when someone from even the furthest-out suburbs could take a fast, comfortable Metrolink train to Union Station and then hop the Blue Line to Staples Center for a Lakers game or the Expo Line to the Coliseum for a USC football game, and be able to take a train back even after midnight. It might be a decade or more off, but I am trying to do my part to bring it to fruition.

Davis is insightful on a lot of things, especially on race relations, but his characterization of downtown Los Angeles as some sort of fortress is faintly ridiculous. If Bunker Hill business interests wanted so badly to keep out black and brown undesirables, why did they get behind a rail system that funnels tens of thousands of them into the CBD every day? Now, the residential towers in the area and the Westin Bonaventure hotel can accurately be categorized as impenetrable, but those were never more than a footnote in the grand scheme of things. Still, once you get outside of downtown it is clear that this is a security-obsessed city, which has led to some absurdities. You will not find any other American city with so many private security cars on the streets, representing tens of millions of dollars a year in expenditures--money out of the pockets of people whose property tax-fuelled temper tantrum in 1978 led to a 20% reduction in the size of the intentionally skeleton-crewed LAPD. It would not be a stretch to say that Prop 13 and its after-effects returned Los Angeles to its roots as a Latin American city--one in which the language of the elite is English and not high castellano, but a Latin American city nonetheless, with all that implies.

Point taken. Still, the building's closure to the street is probably less of a reflection on the starchitect than on the defensible space obsession of a city government that would approve such a design. Related: why is it that the same Republican voters who advocate such a muscular foreign policy can such craven pansies in the face of crime at home? Gated communities, high fences, enclosed shopping malls, hotels and office towers that are nearly impossible to enter at street level--these do not reflect very well on the courage of the people demanding them. On the other hand, given the design of new American embassies--fortified, bomb-proof compounds set far back from arterial roads--perhaps this fear has begun to manifest itself in the GOP's foreign policy. The high Modernist embassies of the 1960s may not obey traditional laws of proportion, but their glass curtain walls were emblematic of an openness and optimism that we would do well to rediscover.

About the San Antonio Library: The key thing to remember with this is that the architect is Mexican. In Moorish and Arab cultures, which are clearly evident in most Latin American countries, street life does not exist in the form that commonly know it in the West. Viewed from above, the typical Arab residential warren is strongly reminiscent of a typical American cul-de-sac subdivision. This has very much continued in Mexican culture, and since South Texas is basically northern Mexico with a few more white people, I'm not at all surprised that the SA library looks like something you'd see in white portions of the D.F.

I must say, I am quite taken with Calatrava's pending 80 South residential tower in New York. I'm sure louisville327 would hate it, but I find it to be a wonderfully grand experiment in integrating high-rise living with the suburban demand for quiet space, and the New York waterfront is actually a pretty great place to do something like that (as opposed to, say, Central Park West or the Chicago lakefront).

Date: 10/12/2005 3:49:00 PM Author: louisville327 I find it especially ironic that New Urbanism is hated most by American conservative Republicans, when it is in fact very conservative at its roots.  New Urbanists like Kunstler repeatedly refer to traditional and historical architecture and urban planning as the ideal, the pinnacle of human achievement, and then face withering criticism from right-wingers who are supposed to be champions of past virtues!quote> I'm not at all surprised, for two reasons. 1. NU's immediate intellectual predecessors were 1960s Marxist social critics. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that New Urbanism draws the same crowd as the SMASH THE STATE! types did in the '60s. I'm not sure how many young New Urbanists would subscribe to the movement (independent of its very real virtues) if they knew that Duany and Calthorpe were heavily inspired by the New Left. The irony is, of course, that New Urbanism absolutely requires a capitalist system to function properly, because a true socialist system leads to Le Corbusier. 2. The urban form espoused by NU only came into its own with the Progressive-era reforms of the 1900s and 1910s, and ever since the 1912 presidential election the GOP has pitted itself against Progressivism. Notice that Karl Rove wants George Bush to be the new William McKinley, not the new Teddy Roosevelt. If high-speed private transportation had been available in 1870, wealthy exurban enclaves would have developed that early, and they would not look especially different from today's cul-de-sac suburbs. The Progressives--most of whom were wealthy, or at least upper-middle class--essentially said, Look, we know that a capitalist system organized around large cities is the only thing that's gonna work, so let's try to make this arrangement as painless as possible. The GOP has been rebelling against the Progressive legacy, in various ways, for 90+ years.

Date: 10/12/2005 11:52:48 AM Author: hdorriker I mean 1950 through 1980 was as valid a space of time as any other period in history. (I'm not saying that any other period of time is less valid. I'm just saying that history is a continuum and didn't just stop when we decided to abandon some of the architectural concepts from it for a while.) quote> Oh, you'll get a lot of disagreement from the New Urbanists on that. I am surprised that more of them don't wear tweed jackets and bow ties, but I suppose those have been co-opted by College Republicans.

Date: 10/12/2005 5:20:44 AM Author: GaryReggae I must say, I am not keen at all on this style of building where the structure looks more like a sculpture than a building.  It is anything but functional and must cost a lot kore to build than a standard building.  It is pure arrogance.quote> Ironic that a guy who's into Brutalism would say that. I view nonfunctionality as a totem of wealth--if it were anything else, there wouldn't be a city in the world that would approve some of these ridiculous projects.

Now, if you're going to do architecture as abstract sculpture, putting it in a park is a great way to do it. The new De Young art museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park is a Temple of Art much like pretty much every art museum built ~1830-1980, but with a twist: instead of the same tired old Neoclassical or Egyptian Revival influences, it has a decided Mesoamerican look (with the obligatory postmodern twist). The architects are Herzog and De Meuron. http://www.calendarlive.com/media/photo/2005-10/19919157.jpg align=baseline>