Life in Elgin Photos of the Week!

Here are the photos of the week from the Life in Elgin flickr group for the week of May 25th - 31st. Click the photos to visit their respective flickr pages.

By Apes of Wrath

By Apes of Wrath

By architekt2

Tags: 10K, 5K, architecture, Carswell, community, Elgin, flickr, Fox Trot, Illinois, Life in Elgin, Memorial Day, photography, photos, running
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Seven Architectural Wonders of Elgin.

Did you know someone created a myspace page for Elgin, Illinois? Well someone did. I don’t know who, but it says he’s male, 18, and an Aries. Anyway, the other day he named the seven architectural wonders of Elgin, based on a survey of his myspace friends. Neat! Check it out, the blog post is complete with photos.

Tags: architecture, blog, Elgin, Illinois, myspace
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Pretty Elgin homes.

On a freak warm day in February I grabbed my dog and took a walk around Elgin looking for the Gold Coast neighborhood. Not too sure if I ever made it there since I don’t know what the boundaries are, but I did take some photos of nice houses on my way. & the whole thing got me thinking…should Elgin have a neighborhood map like Chicago’s? I’ll answer my own question: Yes! I’m thinking some Judson architecture students should get on that.

That porch looks like it’d be great for sipping lemonade on a summer’s day.

Love the little guy out front.

Tags: , architecture, Chicago Neighborhood Map, Elgin, Gold Coast, homes, Illinois, Judson University, neighborhoods
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Suburban Living in the House!

Two things:

1) Check out the December/January issue of Dwell! The theme is suburbs, and some of the articles are still available online. They acknowledge the downsides of suburbia, without uniformly slamming it without basis. The following quote shows how balanced Dwell was in handling the suburbs, which was probably difficult because there is a huge anti-suburban bias out there in designers (and as I’ve mentioned before, urban planners).

But the suburbs–and their inhabitants–are not only ripe for resistance to conformity, they also have rich social and cultural potential. Demographic studies reveal that suburbia is diversifying; no longer the land of white flight and middle-class nuclear families, its shape and character is changing. (p. 134)

2) This one is for the grad students! (And for a brief second, made me a little sad that I am no longer one.) Global Suburbs–an interdisciplinary grad student conference put on by the University of Michigan. March 7-8, 2008.

This conference has five broad themes: Suburban politics and the history of suburbs, Sustainable development and environmentalism, Suburban life, Suburban form, and Rethinking suburbs. The following quote sums up the purpose pretty well.

Suburbanization is no longer solely the province of developed Western countries. Peripheral metropolitan expansion is now a global phenomenon and must be considered in new ways, be they within a metropolitan framework, independently of central cities, or with reference to rural surroundings. This conference seeks to examine global suburban development broadly to understand not only the past and present character of suburbia, but also with the hopes of understanding and guiding future development.

Tags: architecture, design, Dwell, Global Suburbs, graduate conference, interdisciplinary, planning, policy, suburban living, suburbs, University of Michigan
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