Category: Design

New Sim City coming

Although this might seem like a shameless plug for my brother Scott who is a programmer at Maxis working on the new Sim City game, I wanted to share that its an amazing piece of virtual real estate.


The Urban Land Institute recently featured the game in its magazine – the article can be found here.

My kiddos and I were fortunate enough to try a beta, and I’ve got to admit the realism is amazing and the game play is addictive.

Pre-orders are being taken for a March 2013 release date for $59 for Mac or PC.

Building a 30 story building in 15 days


Surpassing a previous record of building a 15 story hotel building in 6 days, the Chinese company, the Broad Group has constructed a 30 story building in only 15 days.

It would appear a majority of the building was built off site in panels that were lifted into place, a practice that is likely to become much more common in the near future. A 6 minute time lapsed video can be viewed here.

Thanks to Gizmodo.com for the original article.

While big boxes are downsizing, Apple credits iPad sales to their physical stores


Within 24 hours of each other these two stories became headlines:

Apple announces their update to the iPad – the iPad2 and as part of Steve Job’s keynote speech and presentation he indicates that 2010 was the year of the iPad, that its sales have outpaced anything they thought possible, AND, were due in large part to its retail stores.

The Wall Street Journal indicated today that most big box retailers are downsizing, subleasing or vacating their big box locations in pursuit of a better retail model.

The article goes on to indicate that it may have less to do with the size of the store than the quality of the experience and, in fact, the article mentions the “customer experience” of an Apple store.

From a CCIM market analysis standpoint, if retail big boxes truly downsize, we can anticpate a glut of retail to hit market in the next couple of years. If you haven’t taken CCIM 102, and would like to be able to calculate the impact of this spatial change in your market, the course provides the tools and processes to help you calculate what this will do to occupancy, rents and values.

How cars have shaped modern society…

vwgarage
A good friend, developer, proffesor and author friend of mine, Chris Lienberger, wrote a fabulous book titled “Option of Urbanism” a couple of years ago. One of the items I was stunned to learn is that GM designed and presented their vision of a future metropolis – centered around cars.

Some sixty years later, many of our cities resemble that comment.

It is interesting to see how some communities are dealing with this issue by designing parking structures that don’t resemble parking lots…

Thanks to Gizmodo.com for sharing with us this lot from VW and this automated lot in Russia complete with a photo gallery.

garagecar

Those of you interested in Chris’s book can purchase it here:

From one extreme to another in housing

image courtesy wikipedia.org / wikipedia commons[/caption]

Having visisted Graceland right before driving to Asheville, NC to see the Biltmore Estate, it was very clear this house was and still commands the status of an “estate”.

biltmore

image courtesy wikipedia.org / wikipedia commons

And I must admit that as a destination/tourist magnet, the property is one of the best run venues I’ve been to – on part with how well Disney runs their entertainment venues.

Changes in real estate

graceland

Our family was at Elvis former mansion and last resting place this week, Graceland , and I was struck by the fact that housing has changed a lot since Elvis’s hey day.

In 1970 the average house size was 1,100 sf. Today it’s over 2,200 sf. Elvis’s big amenities were 3 TV’s, and a hundred disc record player.

The style, size and even taste of the house might be something any of our neighbors might have and besides the large lot it sat on, the house itself hardly seemed to qualify as a “mansion” by today’s standards.

(images courtesy wikipedia.org and bing maps)

How to maximize space

The New York Times has an article about a Hong Kong born/based architect who has maximized his 344 square foot studio apartment. Gary Chang has lived in this apartment for the last 32 years and recently spent over $200,000 improving it to by creating 24 different floorplans, uses and spaces.

He does this with moving walls, murphy beds, and hydralics.

It would be an understatement to say this is a cool apartment, in fact, it bares some similarities to Harrison Ford’s apartment in Blade Runner.

hongkongapartment

If it has a garage, is it real estate?

mobilehomewgarage

There is often a fine line between real estate and personal property.

Manufactured homes are often considerd personal property, unless they are affixed to the ground, wheels removed, and the appear to be even more like real esate if a garage is added.

So what happens when you add a garage to a mobile home ?

Well the result isn’t inexpensive, but it sure is cool!

Thanks to the guys over at Gizmodo.com for the tip on the latest in mobile real estate.

FAA approves Upham, NM for a space port…

The old adage about location, location, location certainly applies to Upham, NM.

Whats that you say? Where the H-E, double hockey sticks is Uphan? As a native NM who was born not too far from there, I’m afraid to tell you I didn’t know where Upham was until a couple of years ago when the Governor and Sir Richard Branson announced their plan to launch tourists, I mean paying astronauts, into space.

What is now a slab in the ground will soon look like this:

Courtesy Virgina Galactic, Dekker/Perich/Sabitini
Courtesy Virgina Galactic, Dekker/Perich/Sabitini
Rides into space are selling for a rumored to be selling for about  $200,000 – New Mexican’s can book travel here with All World Travel .
More on the FAA’s approval process can be found at ARStechnica.com .

So how does location fit in? Upham, New Mexico is located just west of the WhiteSand Missile Range which is one of North America’s largest no-fly zones and as the FAA report mentions, there isn’t much out here to be impacted by a rocket launch…