Construction Maison

A proposed 276- unit apartment complex set to go on the southwest corner of Airport Road and Clover Basin Drive has surrounding Longmont homeowners worried about their home values as well as traffic and space for schoolchildren. The Renaissance Village apartment complex , being developed by Longmont- based company Actis LLC , would be housed in 16 three- story buildings spread over roughly 21 acres. The complex would feature a clubhouse, pool, pocket parks and pavilion, according to plans submitted to the city. There have been two neighborhood meetings between the developer and the community and the project will be on a planning and zoning committee meeting agenda once the city planning department staff completes its review. Kirk Christoffersen, a Clover Creek HOA board member , said the meetings did not go well at all and the community doesn't feel the developer is listening to them or responding to homeowner concerns. Richard Groves, with Actis LLC, did not return calls se...

The Late Victorian period in the United States—roughly the last third of the 19th century—produced some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the history of Western civilization . It also produced some of the most hopeless slums. In response to the crisis of industrial cities, the modern discipline of city planning emerged . The tools of this new profession helped clean up many unhealthy aspects of urban industry , but also stifled some of the best innovations of Late Victorian urbanism . By the 1920s, planners in the industrial world had established the legal authority to promulgate land-use regulations, and over the next generation, they succeeded at slowing the construction of slum housing and segregating noxious industries from incompatible activities, such as housing and office space. Through some of the same devices, however, planners curtailed some positive features of 19th- century urbanism , including the rich variety of free- form industrial development and the adaptiv...

The tools we design with have a unique effect on the way we work, constraining and empowering us while we explore, examine and create. Variable fonts give us a new, wide open typographic space with which to work. Instead of prescribing value to individual UI elements in a vacuum, we should take a hybrid and calculated approach to variable font interfaces . How do we structure our design tools to adapt to the new advantages variable fonts provide us with? Article Continues Below 3 comments Despite being ahead of their time, variable font precursors—Multiple Master and GX—didn’t see widespread adoption for several reasons—one key reason being the lack of effective user interfaces that could communicate their creative utility to designers. Since their introduction, variable fonts have moved forward quickly , landing with various degrees of experimental support across major browsers. With this comes the exciting ability for fonts to responsively adapt to different layouts and contex...

Capitalism is “a process of creative destruction” according to Austro- American economist Joseph Schumpeter . That is working out right now as new communications technologies are revolutionizing sectors like short-term housing and short- distance human transportation . I use these wordings rather than “hotel” and “taxi” because companies like Airbnb and Uber are changing the very meaning of these historic terms. Much of this is to the good, enabling society to get more satisfaction of human needs and wants from a given set of resources. But Schumpeter’s insight that economic creation inevitably is linked with destruction still applies. Innovations also destroy outdated businesses and products.  Airbnb is the one in the news right now as the St. Paul City Council considers new rules to limit the fraction of rental housing units that can be converted to short- term Airbnb units . That is an issue in many other cities. Airbnb and its small competitors also raise the same issue as Uber...