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Steve Mouzon
61.1K posts
Steve Mouzon
@stevemouzon
architect, author, blogger, & curious. instagram.com/the.originalgr…
- What is the 15-minute city? It's every city ever built by humans on this planet until a century ago, but with a catchy new name. And if the old parts haven't been destroyed in the last century, it's where the tourists go. And people travel across oceans to see the best of them.
- The left image is Renaissance Florence; on the right is an Atlanta interchange, shown at the same scale. This was my first image to go viral, thanks to a repost by Lloyd Alter at Treehugger. For weeks, I had to keep proving that the scale was the same; I still have proof. 1/
- A French farming village surrounded by farmland, with nobody more than a couple blocks from long views into the countryside. An allee of trees welcoming you to town, the nearby expressway skirting by, leaving the village unmolested. What needs to change to do this in the US?
- Street design in the French Quarter breaks every rule of transportation engineering. This curb radius is about 6', and the gallery columns are about 6" from the street. It's important to study seemingly impossible things & ask "why does this work?" & "are the rules wrong?"
- An architect saying “ugly buildings are completely fine” is utterly unthinkable. If this attitude overtakes the profession publicly as it has privately for a century, many will ask “why does this wretched profession even exist?ugly buildings are completely fine
- Street design in the French Quarter breaks every rule of transportation engineering. This curb radius is about 6', and the gallery columns are about 6" from the street. It's important to study seemingly impossible things & ask "why does this work?" & "are the rules wrong?"
- The five-over-one type does not require the nonsensical & pastiche Ransom Note Style. The exact same type could look like this. There is no excuse for foisting the unlovable upon the city.
You might not like the way they look, but Five-over-Ones have unlocked walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods for hundreds of thousands of people over the past decade. The YIMBY and urbanism movements wouldn’t be half as popular as they are today without these. - You periodic reminder that 5-over-1s could look exactly like this if the architects had enough humility to learn things long proven to work. But no, it’s trained out of us in architecture school, where I spent 5 years. Been trying to make up for it ever since.
- This is urbanism. Build more urbanism. Build less sprawl. Real places for people. Places people love. End auto domination.I would KILL to have this built outside of Austin. It would instantly become the most popular city in Texas.
- It’s beautiful. Who whines about beautiful buildings except architects?Seven storeys. Nobody minds
- Why did we quit building operable interior transoms? They share light between rooms and, when opened, ventilate between rooms as well. Natural daylighting & ventilation, plus they look cool... what's not to like?
- Would it offend anyone you know to have a cottage court in your block? This is Missing Middle Housing.
- Millions of Americans say they don't want density, but what if the density looked like this? And these aren't complex buildings; just boxes with regular windows. So let's be clear: objections to density are often objections to ugly, but ugliness has no power in open debate.
