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74-537: Perhaps the most unusual features of the U.S. Bancorp Tower are its shape and color. Pietro Belluschi was most concerned about the play of light and shadows on its surface; meanwhile, the SOM team had to work with a uniquely shaped lot due to the street grid . Because of the street grid, the tower features no right angles in its parallelogram footprint. This, in turn, makes it look either extremely slender or wide depending upon one's viewing angle. Belluschi carefully selected

148-480: A noise wall or a security gate —is completely separated from the road network except for one or two connections to arterial roads. In a way, this is a return to medieval styles: as noted in Spiro Kostof 's seminal history of urban design , The City Shaped , there is a strong resemblance between the street arrangements of modern American suburbs and those of medieval Arab and Moorish cities. In each case,

222-402: A 39% reduction. Simultaneously, block lengths increase from 200 × 200 feet to 1240 × 200 feet. When all five blocks have reached the ultimate size of 1,240 feet (380 m) four street lengths out of total eight have been eliminated. Block lengths of 1,000 feet (300 m) or larger rarely appear in grid plans and are not recommended as they hinder pedestrian movement (Pedestrianism, below). From

296-528: A Spanish civil engineer, defined a concept of urban planning, based on the grid, that he applied to the Eixample of Barcelona . The Eixample grid introduced innovative design elements which were exceptional at the time and even unique among subsequent grid plans: These innovations he based on functional grounds: the block size, to enable the creation of a quiet interior open space (60 m by 60 m) and allow ample sunlight and ventilation to its perimeter buildings;

370-544: A direct route. While the imposition of only one town form regardless of region could be seen as an imposition of imperial authority, there is no doubting the practical reasoning behind the formation of the Roman grid. Under Roman guidance, the grid was designed for efficiency and interchangeability, both facilitated by and aiding the expansion of their empire. As Japan and the Korean peninsula became politically centralized in

444-455: A few hundred settlers, became the nucleus for what is now a city of over 5 million people, the city of Melbourne. The unusual dimensions of the allotments and the incorporation of narrow 'little' streets were the result of compromise between Hoddle's desire to employ the regulations established in 1829 by previous New South Wales Governor Ralph Darling, requiring square blocks and wide, spacious streets and Bourke's desire for rear access ways (now

518-637: A formal grid. Many pyramid-cult cities used a common orientation: a north–south axis from the royal palace and an east–west axis from the temple, meeting at a central plaza where King and God merged and crossed. Hammurabi king of the Babylonian Empire in the 18th century BC, ordered the rebuilding of Babylon : constructing and restoring temples, city walls, public buildings, and irrigation canals. The streets of Babylon were wide and straight, intersected approximately at right angles, and were paved with bricks and bitumen . The tradition of grid plans

592-613: A grid as the ideal method of town planning had become widely accepted by the time of Alexander the Great. His conquests were a step in the propagation of the grid plan throughout colonies, some as far-flung as Taxila in Pakistan, that would later be mirrored by the expansion of the Roman Empire. The Greek grid had its streets aligned roughly in relation to the cardinal points and generally looked to take advantage of visual cues based on

666-502: A grid of straight streets, running north–south and east–west. Each block was subdivided by small lanes. The cities and monasteries of Sirkap , Taxila and Thimi (in the Indus and Kathmandu Valleys ), dating from the 1st millennium BC to the 11th century AD, also had grid-based designs. A workers' village (2570–2500 BC) at Giza , Egypt , housed a rotating labor force and was laid out in blocks of long galleries separated by streets in

740-544: A layout. New Haven Colony , one of the earliest colonies in America, was designed with a tiny 9-square grid at its founding in 1638. On a grander scale, Philadelphia was designed on a rectilinear street grid in 1682, one of the first cities in North America to use a grid system. At the urging of city founder William Penn , surveyor Thomas Holme designed a system of wide streets intersecting at right angles between

814-486: A majority stake in the building from Unico Properties; the building had an estimated value of $ 285 million at the time. LaSalle sold their stake in 2015, to TPF Equity REIT that is majority-owned by UBS . Unico Properties retains a minority share in the building. The sale price was $ 372.5 million, a record for any office building in the Portland area. In 2024, U.S. Bank announced it would not renew its lease and leave

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888-437: A majority stake in the tower was acquired by California-based Broadreach Capital Partners LLC, which bought-out JPMorgan and Wafra, but Unico continued to own 25 percent. At that time, 92 percent of the building was leased. In August 2006, a majority stake in the building was purchased by "institutional investors advised by JPMorgan Asset Management" for a price of $ 286 million. In 2008 LaSalle Investment Management purchased

962-405: A result, street frequency drops and so does the total street length and, therefore, the cost. In general, it is not the street pattern per se that affects costs but the frequency of streets that it either necessitates or purposely incorporates. An inherent advantage of the orthogonal geometry of a proper grid is its tendency to yield regular lots in well-packed sequences. This maximizes the use of

1036-475: A series of streets named after trees or plants, running northward alphabetically from Ash to Walnut. As in many cities, some of these streets have been given new names violating the system (the former D Street is now Broadway, the former 12th Avenue is now Park Boulevard, etc.); this has meant that 2nd, not 1st, is the most common street name in the United States. An exception to the typical, uniform grid

1110-760: A system which they spread around the Mediterranean and into northern Europe later on. The military expansion of this period facilitated the adoption of the grid form as standard: the Romans established castra (forts or camps) first as military centres; some of them developed into administrative hubs. The Roman grid was similar in form to the Greek version of a grid but allowed for practical considerations. For example, Roman castra were often sited on flat land, especially close to or on important nodes like river crossings or intersections of trade routes. The dimensions of

1184-457: Is 200 feet × 200 feet while Miletus' is half that size and Timgad's half again (see diagram). Houston, Sacramento and Barcelona are progressively bigger reaching up to four times the area of Portland's block. New York's 1811 plan (see above) has blocks of 200 feet (61 m). in width and variable lengths ranging from about 500 feet (150 m) to 900 feet (270 m) feet. The corresponding frequency of streets for each of these block sizes affects

1258-586: Is continuous in China from the 15th century BC onward in the traditional urban planning of various ancient Chinese states. Guidelines put into written form in the Kaogongji during the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC) stated: "a capital city should be square on plan. Three gates on each side of the perimeter lead into the nine main streets that crisscross the city and define its grid-pattern. And for its layout

1332-540: Is not dependent on pattern configuration. As with the street width, any pattern can have wide or narrow pavements. Of all three factors that affect cost, street width, street length and pavement width, only street length is pattern dependent. An objective cost comparison would, therefore, rely on this variable with the full understanding that the other variables, though optional, can play a role. Traditional orthogonal grid patterns generally have greater street frequencies than discontinuous patterns. For example, Portland's block

1406-471: Is now the city of Marzabotto at the end of the 6th century BC. Its layout was based on Greek Ionic ideas, and it was here that the main east–west and north–south axes of a town (the decumanus maximus and cardo maximus respectively) could first be seen in Italy. According to Stanislawski (1946), the Romans did use grids until the time of the late Republic or early Empire, when they introduced centuriation ,

1480-619: Is that spread through the colonies of the Roman Empire. The archetypal Roman Grid was introduced to Italy first by the Greeks, with such information transferred by way of trade and conquest. Although the idea of the grid was present in Hellenic societal and city planning, it was not pervasive prior to the 5th century BC. However, it slowly gained primacy through the work of Hippodamus of Miletus (498–408 BC), who planned and replanned many Greek cities in accordance with this form. The concept of

1554-840: Is the plan of Savannah, Georgia (1733), known as the Oglethorpe Plan . It is a composite, cellular city block consisting of four large corner blocks, four small blocks in between and a public square in the centre; the entire composition of approximately ten acres (four hectares) is known as a ward. Its cellular structure includes all the primary land uses of a neighborhood and has for that reason been called fractal . Its street configuration presages modern traffic calming techniques applied to uniform grids where certain selected streets become discontinuous or narrow, thus discouraging through traffic. The configuration also represents an example of functional shared space , where pedestrian and vehicular traffic can safely and comfortably coexist. In

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1628-548: The New Zealand Company , the plans for Wellington , New Plymouth and Nelson . All of these towns were laid out on a grid plan, so it was easy to divide the land into acre plots of one chain by one furlong , 66 by 660 feet (20 by 201 m) (approximately 0.4 ha.), and these became known as town acres. Adelaide was divided into 1042 Town Acres. Maps showing the divisions of the town acres are available for Adelaide, Nelson, and Wellington. Ildefons Cerdà ,

1702-554: The River Torrens . Two areas south ( the city centre ) and north ( North Adelaide ) of the river were laid out in grid pattern, with the city surrounded by the Adelaide Park Lands . Hoddle Grid is the name given to the layout of Melbourne , Victoria, named after the surveyor Robert Hoddle , who marked it out in 1837 establishing the first formal town plan. This grid of streets, laid out when there were only

1776-668: The Schuylkill River to the west and the Delaware River to the east, including five squares of dedicated parkland. Penn advertised this orderly design as a safeguard against overcrowding, fire, and disease, which plagued European cities. Holme drafted an ideal version of the grid, but alleyways sprouted within and between larger blocks as the city took shape. As the United States expanded westward, grid-based city planning modeled on Philadelphia's layout would become popular among frontier cities, making grids ubiquitous across

1850-489: The castra were often standard, with each of its four walls generally having a length of 660 metres (2,150 ft). Familiarity was the aim of such standardisation: soldiers could be stationed anywhere around the Empire, and orientation would be easy within established towns if they had a standard layout. Each would have the aforementioned decumanus maximus and cardo maximus at its heart, and their intersection would form

1924-499: The glass and granite for the exterior facing. The pink granite covering the building was quarried in Spain. The Pittsburgh Plate Glass used for the windows is also pink, an effect caused by its being "glazed in a semitransparent coating of copper and silver that looks pink from the outside". The windows can absorb or reflect light depending upon how much light is upon them, while the surrounding granite may appear darker or lighter than

1998-476: The '2-nd Line' on the eastern side, and the '3-rd Line' on the western side. After the reorganization of house numbering in 1834 and 1858 the even house numbers are used on the odd-numbered lines, and respectively odd house numbers are used for the even-numbered lines. The maximum numbers for 'lines' in Petersburg are 28-29th lines. Later in the middle of the 18th century another grid of rectangular blocks with

2072-411: The 'little' streets, for example Little Collins Street ). The city of Christchurch , New Zealand, was planned by Edward Jollie in 1850. The term "town acre" (often spelt with initial capital letters) may have originated with Edward Gibbon Wakefield who, in the 1830s, was involved in various schemes to promote the colonisation of South Australia and its capital, Adelaide , and, as founder of

2146-428: The 1960s. However, during the 1920s, the rapid adoption of the automobile caused a panic among urban planners , who, based on observation, claimed that speeding cars would eventually kill tens of thousands of small children per year. Apparently, at this early stage of the car's entry into the grid, the streets of major cities worldwide were the scene of virtual "slaughter" as the fatality rate in proportion to population

2220-504: The 7th century AD, those societies adopted Chinese grid-planning principles in numerous locations. In Korea, Gyeongju , the capital of Unified Silla , and Sanggyeong , the capital of Balhae , adapted the Tang dynasty Chinese model. The ancient capitals of Japan, such as Fujiwara-Kyô (AD 694–710), Nara (Heijô-Kyô, AD 710–784), and Kyoto (Heian-Kyô, AD 794–1868) also adapted from Tang's capital, Chang'an . However, for reasons of defense,

2294-584: The Americas were established according to this pattern, echoing the practices of earlier Indian civilizations. The baroque capital city of Malta , Valletta , dating back to the 16th century, was built following a rigid grid plan of uniformly designed houses, dotted with palaces, churches and squares. The grid plan became popular with the start of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. In 1606,

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2368-658: The British Isles, the planned new town system involving a grid street layout was part of the system of burgage . An example of a medieval planned city in The Netherlands is Elburg . Bury St Edmunds is an example of a town planned on a grid system in the late 11th century. The Roman model was also used in Spanish settlements during the Reconquista of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was subsequently applied in

2442-409: The amount of land that is devoted to streets, which becomes unavailable for development and therefore represents an opportunity cost . The wider the street, the higher the opportunity cost. Street width is determined by circulation and aesthetic considerations and is not dependent on the pattern configuration. Any configuration can have wide or narrow streets. Street length influences proportionately

2516-562: The beginning of the 20th century, with Sapporo , Japan (est. 1868) following a grid plan under American influence. New European towns were planned using grids beginning in the 12th century, most prodigiously in the bastides of southern France that were built during the 13th and 14th centuries. Medieval European new towns using grid plans were widespread, ranging from Wales to the Florentine region. Many were built on ancient grids originally established as Roman colonial outposts. In

2590-421: The building. Street grid In urban planning , the grid plan , grid street plan , or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid . Two inherent characteristics of the grid plan, frequent intersections and orthogonal geometry, facilitate movement. The geometry helps with orientation and wayfinding and its frequent intersections with

2664-554: The choice and directness of route to desired destinations. In ancient Rome , the grid plan method of land measurement was called centuriation . The grid plan dates from antiquity and originated in multiple cultures; some of the earliest planned cities were built using grid plans in the Indian subcontinent. By 2600 BC, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa , major cities of the Indus Valley civilization , were built with blocks divided by

2738-756: The city should have the Royal Court situated in the south, the Marketplace in the north, the Imperial Ancestral Temple in the east and the Altar to the Gods of Land and Grain in the west." Teotihuacan , near modern-day Mexico City , is the largest ancient grid-plan site in the Americas . The city's grid covered 21 square kilometres (8 square miles). Perhaps the most well-known grid system

2812-578: The city. The project of this architect for Vasilyevsky Island was a typical rectangular grid of streets (originally intended to be canals, like in Amsterdam ), with three lengthwise thoroughfares, rectangularly crossed with about 30 crosswise streets. The shape of street blocks on Vasilyevsky Island are the same, as was later implemented in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 for Manhattan : elongated rectangles. The longest side of each block faces

2886-557: The community unit at hand—the clan or extended family in the Muslim world, the economically homogeneous subdivision in modern suburbia—isolates itself from the larger urban scene by using dead ends and culs-de-sac . One famous grid system is in the British new town of Milton Keynes . In this planned city, which began construction in 1967, a system of ten "horizontal" (roughly east–west) and eleven "vertical" (roughly north–south) roads

2960-511: The consultant, the tower cost $ 60 million to construct. Ground was broken on May 29, 1981, and the building was largely completed in June 1983. It was dedicated on December 1, 1983. The tower adjoins U.S. Bank Plaza at 555 SW Oak Street, a 7-story, 497,800 sq ft (46,250 m) building constructed in 1974. A tower expected to rise about 37 stories was already part of the bank's long-term site plans at that earlier date, but that phase of

3034-463: The country. Another well-known grid plan is the plan for New York City formulated in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 , a proposal by the state legislature of New York for the development of most of Manhattan above Houston Street . Washington, D.C. , the capital of the United States , was planned under French-American architect Pierre Charles L'Enfant . Under the L'Enfant plan,

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3108-457: The delta of the Neva River . The peculiarity of 'lines' (streets) naming in this grid is that are each side of street has its own number, so one 'line' is a side of a street, not the whole street. The numbering is latently zero-based, however the supposed "zero line" has its proper name Kadetskaya liniya , while the opposite side of this street is called the '1-st Line'. Next street is named

3182-485: The edges of the superblock, along the arterial. This paradigm prevailed between about 1930 and 1960, especially in Los Angeles , where notable examples include Leimert Park (an early example) and Panorama City (a late-period one). A prominent 20th century urbanist, Lewis Mumford , severely criticized some of the grid's characteristics: "With a T-square and a triangle, finally, the municipal engineer could, without

3256-423: The forum, around which would be sited important public buildings. Indeed, such was the degree of similarity between towns that Higgins states that soldiers "would be housed at the same address as they moved from castra to castra ". Pompeii has been cited by both Higgins and Laurence as the best-preserved example of the Roman grid. Outside of the castra, large tracts of land were also divided in accordance with

3330-434: The grid further out from the centre, but maps also show that, in general, as the distance from the centre increases, a variety of patterns emerge in no particular discernible order. In juxtaposition to the grid, they appear random. These new patterns have been systematically classified and their design characteristics measured. In the United States, the grid system was widely used in most major cities and their suburbs until

3404-401: The grid within the walls. These were typically 730 metres (2,400 ft) per side (called centuria ) and contained 100 parcels of land (each called heredium ). The decumanus maximus and cardo maximus extended from the town gates out towards neighbouring settlements. These were lined up to be as straight as possible, only deviating from their path due to natural obstacles that prevented

3478-515: The headquarters of Louisiana-Pacific . Since a $ 4 million renovation in 2002, the 30th floor of the tower has been occupied by the Portland City Grill , Portland's top-grossing restaurant. It has been cited as the restaurant with the best view in Portland. In 2000, the U.S. Bancorp Tower was sold for a price of $ 165 million to a partnership of three firms: Unico Properties , JPMorgan and Wafra Investment Advisory Group. In 2004,

3552-457: The higher the frequency of the streets. As the frequency of street increases so does the number of intersections. Intersections normally cost more than straight street length because they are labour-intensive and require street and traffic signage. Pavement width influences the cost by affecting the amount of materials and labour required to provide a finished road surface. Pavement width is generally based on traffic engineering considerations and

3626-557: The hilly landscape typical of Greece and Asia Minor. The street grid consisted of plateiai and stenophoi (equivalent to Roman decumani and cardines ). This was probably best exemplified in Priene , in present-day western Turkey, where the orthogonal city grid was based on the cardinal points, on sloping terrain that struck views out towards a river and the city of Miletus . The Etruscan people , whose territories in Italy encompassed what would eventually become Rome, founded what

3700-443: The land of the block; it does not, however, affect street frequency. Any frequency of orthogonal streets produces the same packing effect. Orthogonal geometry also minimizes disputes over lot boundaries and maximizes the number of lots that could front a given street. John Randal said Manhattan's grid plan facilitated "buying, selling and improving real estate". Wayfinding Wayfinding (or way-finding ) encompasses all of

3774-612: The new cities established during the Spanish colonization of the Americas , after the founding of San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Canary Islands) in 1496. In 1573, King Philip II of Spain compiled the Laws of the Indies to guide the construction and administration of colonial communities. The Laws specified a square or rectangular central plaza with eight principal streets running from the plaza's corners. Hundreds of grid-plan communities throughout

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3848-699: The newly founded city of Mannheim in Germany was the first Renaissance city laid out on the grid plan. Later came the New Town in Edinburgh and almost the entire city centre of Glasgow , and many planned communities and cities in Australia , Canada and the United States . Derry , constructed in 1613–1618, was the first planned city in Ireland . The central diamond within a walled city with four gates

3922-405: The number of street components that have to be constructed such as pavement, curbs and sidewalks, storm sewers and drains, light poles, and trees. The street length of a given area of development depends on the frequency at which streets occur which in turn depends on the length and width of a block. The higher the frequency of streets the longer is their total length. The smaller the block dimensions

3996-488: The numbered streets appeared in the continental part of the city: 13 streets named from the '1-st Rota' up to the '13-th Rota', where the companies ( German : Rotte , Russian : рота ) of the Izmaylovsky Regiment were located. Many of the earliest cities in the United States, such as Boston , did not start with a grid system. However, even in pre-revolutionary days some cities saw the benefits of such

4070-508: The original District of Columbia was developed using a grid plan that is interrupted by diagonal avenues, most famously Pennsylvania Avenue . These diagonals are often connected by traffic circles , such as Dupont Circle and Washington Circle . As the city grew, the plan was duplicated to cover most of the remainder of the capital. Meanwhile, the core of the city faced disarray and the McMillan Plan , led by Senator James McMillan ,

4144-430: The pedestrian perspective, the smaller the block is, the easier the navigation and the more direct the route. Consequently, the finer grids are preferred. Patterns that incorporate discontinuous street types such as crescents and culs-de-sac have not, in general, regarded pedestrian movement as a priority and, consequently, have produced blocks that are usually in the 1,000 feet (300 m) range and often exceed it. As

4218-617: The planners of Tokyo eschewed the grid, opting instead for an irregular network of streets surrounding the Edo Castle grounds. In later periods, some parts of Tokyo were grid-planned, but grid plans are generally rare in Japan, and the Japanese addressing system is accordingly based on increasingly fine subdivisions, rather than a grid. The grid-planning tradition in Asia continued through

4292-405: The plans ended up being delayed until the 1980s. Originally, the building served as the national headquarters of U.S. Bancorp , and was the regional headquarters of that organization until a 1997 merger moved the corporate offices to Minneapolis , Minnesota . As of 2004, U.S. Bancorp had 480,000 sq ft (45,000 m) leased until 2015. During the 1980s and 1990s, the top floors held

4366-402: The rectilinear geometry, the wide streets and boulevards to sustain high mobility and the truncated corners to facilitate turning of carts and coaches and particularly vehicles on fixed rails. In maps of larger American cities, the downtown areas are almost always grids. These areas represent the original land dimensions of the founded city, generally around one square mile. Some cities expanded

4440-454: The relatively narrow street with a numeric name (in Petersburg they are called Liniya (Line) ) while the shortest side faces wide avenues. To denote avenues in Petersburg, a special term prospekt was introduced. Inside the grid of Vasilyevsky Island there are three prospekts, named Bolshoi ( Big ), Sredniy ( Middle ) and Maly ( Small ) while the far ends of each line cross with the embankments of Bolshaya Neva and Smolenka rivers in

4514-467: The river on 640 acres (exactly 1 square mile; about 2.6 km ). After surveying the land, Waller organized the almost immediate sale of 306 lots, and by the end of the year the entire Texas government had arrived by oxcart at the new site. Apart from the speed of surveying advantage, the rationale at the time of the grid's adoption in this and other cities remains obscure. In 1836 William Light drew up his plans for Adelaide , South Australia, spanning

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4588-422: The second were usually too wide for purely neighborhood functions... as for its contribution to the permanent social functions of the city, the anonymous gridiron plan proved empty." In the 1960s, traffic engineers and urban planners abandoned the grid virtually wholesale in favor of a " street hierarchy ". This is a thoroughly "asymmetric" street arrangement in which a residential subdivision—often surrounded by

4662-434: The slightest training as either an architect or a sociologist, 'plan' a metropolis, with its standard lots, its standard blocks, its standard street widths, in short, with its standardized comparable, and replaceable parts. The new gridiron plans were spectacular in their inefficiency and waste. By usually failing to discriminate sufficiently between main arteries and residential streets, the first were not made wide enough while

4736-461: The street length. A simple example of a grid street pattern (see diagram) illustrates the progressive reduction in total street length (the sum of all individual street lengths) and the corresponding increase in block length. For a corresponding reduction of one, two, three and four streets within this 40-acre (16 ha) parcel, the street length is reduced from an original total of 12,600 feet (3,800 m) to 7,800 feet (2,400 m) linear feet,

4810-541: The use of traditional wayfinding and navigation methods by the indigenous peoples of Polynesia . The ancient Polynesians and Pacific Islanders mastered the methods of wayfinding to explore and settle on the islands of the Pacific, many using devices such as the Marshall Islands stick chart . With these skills, some of them were even able to navigate the ocean as well as they could navigate their own land. Despite

4884-666: The ways in which people (and animals) orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place. Wayfinding software is a self-service computer program that helps users to find a location, usually used indoors and installed on interactive kiosks or smartphones . The basic process of wayfinding involves four stages: Historically, wayfinding refers to the techniques used by travelers over land and sea to find relatively unmarked and often mislabeled routes. These include but are not limited to dead reckoning , map and compass , astronomical positioning and, more recently, global positioning . Polynesian wayfinding refers to

4958-467: The westward development of the United States, the use of the grid plan was nearly universal in the construction of new settlements, such as in Salt Lake City (1870), Dodge City (1872) and Oklahoma City (1890). In these western cities the streets were numbered even more carefully than in the east to suggest future prosperity and metropolitan status. One of the main advantages of the grid plan

5032-572: The window panes, depending upon the time of day. The unusual color earned the building the nickname " Big Pink ". From 2013 to 2015, the entire building underwent interior design renovation. In October 2019, the building achieved the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Platinum certification for environmental sustainability from the U.S. Green Building Council . Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) with Pietro Belluschi as

5106-412: Was adopted to build a National Mall and a parks system that is still today a jewel of the city. Often, some of the streets in a grid are numbered (First, Second, etc.), lettered, or arranged in alphabetical order. Downtown San Diego uses all three schemes: north–south streets are numbered from west to east, and east–west streets are split between a lettered series running southward from A through L and

5180-461: Was considered a good design for defence. The grid pattern was widely copied in the colonies of British North America . In Russia the first planned city was St. Petersburg founded in 1703 by Peter I . Being aware of the modern European construction experience which he examined in the years of his Grand Embassy to Europe , the Czar ordered Domenico Trezzini to elaborate the first general plan of

5254-415: Was given its own name. The system provided very easy transport within the city, although it confused visitors who were unfamiliar with the system. The grid squares thus formed are far larger than the city blocks described earlier, and the road layouts within the grid squares are generally 'organic' in form – matching the street hierarchy model described above. Street width , or right of way (ROW), influences

5328-747: Was more than double the current rate. In 2009, after several decades of road safety improvements and a continuous decline in fatalities, an estimated 33,963 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes and, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children from 3 to 14 years old." Planners, therefore, called for an inwardly focused " superblock " arrangement that minimized through automobile traffic and discouraged cars from traveling on anything but arterial roads ; traffic generators, such as apartment complexes and shops, would be restricted to

5402-579: Was that it allowed the rapid subdivision and auction of a large parcel of land. For example, when the legislature of the Republic of Texas decided in 1839 to move the capital to a new site along the Colorado River , the functioning of the government required the rapid population of the town, which was named Austin . Charged with the task, Edwin Waller designed a fourteen-block grid that fronted

5476-432: Was used, with roundabouts at each intersection. The horizontal roads were all given names ending in 'way' and H numbers (for 'horizontal', e.g., H3 Monks Way). The vertical roads were given names ending in 'street' and V numbers (for 'vertical', e.g., V6 Grafton Street ). Each grid road was spaced roughly one kilometre along from the next, forming squares of approximately one square kilometre. Each square and each roundabout

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