Philadelphia is living through a golden age of park-building and landscape improvements. Consider that in the last five years, the city has completed the Race Street Pier, Sister Cities Park, Hawthorne Park, an uber-deluxe dog park on the Schuylkill River trail, and - opening next week - a lavish new skate park (Look for my review on Friday). The gardens around the Waterworks have been lovingly restored to their original beauty. Urban farms are sprouting in West Philadelphia. All around the city, parklets and pop-up parks like The Porch are taking over forgotten spaces.

There's a reason the city is so focused on outdoor public space. The generation of millennials that is helping to repopulate the city are a particularly social bunch who place a high priority on good quality outdoor spaces. It's not just Philadelphia that is on park-building spree. Other cities are working as fast as they can to restore their parks and green landscapes, in an effort to attract new residents and businesses.

The James Corner-designed Race Street Pier has hogged the most attention of any Delaware Waterfront improvement, but it is not the only pier on the river that has been turned into a public park.

Two years ago, the rotting timbers of Pier 53 were converted into a beta version of a park, one that would that become more lush and interesting as it naturalized. Located at the foot of Washington Avenue, it was rechristianed Washington Avenue Green. The idea was to make it a destination for migrating birds as well as neighborhood residents.

With the help of Conshocken's Applied Ecological Services, which received a $1.5 million contract from the Delaware River Waterfront Commission, the city has been steadily making improvements. On Saturday, you can see what they've accomplished so far and enjoy a day on the river. The waterfront agency is sponsoring "Eco-Fest" a morning-long series of events that includes a guided bird-watch and craft-making.

Barely a month after two Harvard architecture students started an online petition to force the vaunted Pritzker Prize to recognize one of America's most famous female architects, Denise Scott Brown, their campaign has become an international steamroller. Scott Brown, you may recall, spent decades working alongside her celebrated husband, Philadelphia's Robert Venturi, but was not honored when he was awarded architecture's top prize in 1991. Since the students took up her cause, almost 11,000 people, including starchitects like Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, have signed the petition on change.org urging Pritzker to give her the award retroactively.

As part of the campaign, the Architects Newspaper's William Menking will conduct a public conversation with Scott Brown this Sunday (April 28) at UPenn's Architectural Archives, in the Furness Library. The conversation will start at 3 p.m., but get there early because seating is limited. After Menking interviews Scott Brown, now 82, she will take questions from the audience. The archive is located in the back of the library and can most easily reached from 34th Street, just south of Walnut Street. Advocates hope the Pritzker will relent and recognize Scott Brown in time for the May 29 ceremony in Boston to award this year's prize to Toyo Ito.

There's something about Paul Manship's Duck Girl sculpture in the fountain at Rittenhouse Square that makes people dress her for the holidays. Here, she's all decked out for the Easter Parade with her own duck - and a visitor.

I went down to the Philadelphia Navy Yard yesterday to take a look at the architecture of the new GlaxoSmithKline building (by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and Francis Cauffman) but what really caught my eye was the desks, er, workspaces. Glaxo’s new offices are organized around the concept of hoteling, where employees aren’t assigned their own desk or cubicle. Instead, they’re encouraged to float around the building, checking in where they’re most comfortable. This might one of the comfy, colorful chairs in the light-saturated atrium, a big all-purpose table near a corner window overlooking Lincoln Financial Field or at a café table in the coffee lounge. For the more traditional, there are work tables that can be raised and lowered, depending on whether you like to work sitting, standing or perched on a yoga ball. When they need to work collaboratively, people coalesce into teams at one of the many large tables.

The big advantage of this arrangement for Glaxo (Though , maybe not for Philadelphia’s Center City)  is that it has been able to cut its office space needs by 75 percent from its old space 15th and Vine. Even though there are roughly the same number of employees at the Navy Yard, about 1,300, it didn’t seem the least bit crowded. Amazingly, 30 percent of the company’s space is set aside for amenities, like the atrium.

I’m going to be reviewing Glaxo’s new headquarters on April 5, so look then for a fuller treatment of the architecture, interior design and planning implications of its move.

I went down to the Philadelphia Navy Yard yesterday to take a look at the architecture of the new GlaxoSmithKline building but what really caught my eye was the desks, er, workspaces. Glaxo’s new offices are organized around the concept of hoteling, where employees aren’t assigned their own desk or cubicle. Instead, they’re encouraged to float around the building, checking in where they’re most comfortable. This might one of the comfy, colorful chairs in the light-saturated atrium, a big all-purpose table near a corner window overlooking Lincoln Financial Field or at a café table in the coffee lounge. For the more traditional, there are work tables that can be raised and lowered, depending on whether you like to work sitting, standing or perched on a yoga ball. When they need to work collaboratively, people coalesce into teams at one of the many large tables.

The big advantage of this arrangement for Glaxo (Though , maybe not for Philadelphia’s Center City)  is that it has been able to cut its office space needs by 75 percent from its old space 15th and Vine. Even though there are roughly the same number of employees at the Navy Yard, about 1,300, it didn’t seem the least bit crowded. Amazingly, 30 percent of the company’s space is set aside for amenities, like the atrium.

I’m going to be reviewing Glaxo’s new headquarters on April 5, so look then for a fuller treatment of the architecture, interior design and planning implications of its move.

One thing you can say about Carl Dranoff’s taste in architecture is that it’s getting better.

On Wednesday, he held a lavish ground-breaking extravaganza for his latest, and smallest, apartment building on South Broad Street, aka, the Avenue of the Arts. SouthStar Lofts isn’t great design, but it’s not pink, either, like his first foray, Symphony House, by BLT Architects.

His new, 85-unit project is a straightforward, loft-style building and was designed by JKRoller Architects, the same firm that did Dranoff’s 777 Broad Street project. They’ve dropped the frou-frou, art deco flourishes this time in favor of clean lines and big windows. Although we still need to see the materials and detailing, the design shown in the renderings has also improved since its original iteration in 2011, when it was called Casa Verde. (see my review below) The best thing about the project may be the 10,000 square feet of retail that strongly anchors the South Street corner. The entrance is on Broad Street, at the northern end of the building, and the retail wraps around to South Street. If Dranoff is able to secure a strong tenant, this project could help tie together the two rebounding ends of South Street.

Andrew Stober,  Mayor Nutter’s point person on transportation, had the unenviable task Thursday night of trying to defend the planned reconstruction of the least loveable piece of infrastructure in Philadelphia - the 10-lane stretch of I-95 that cuts off Center City from the Delaware River - before a crowd that thinks the highway should never have been built in the first place.

Stober was speaking at “Reimagining Urban Highways,” a panel organized by Diana Lind of the group Next America City and previewed here. In an effort to start a conversation about the future of I-95, which comes up for a federally mandated overhaul in 2040, Lind assembled some of the nation’s top highway removal experts to share their experiences.  City Hall had initially refused to participate in the event, but at the last minute Stober was dispatched by his boss, Deputy Mayor Rina Cuter, to make the administration’s case for keeping I-95 exactly as it is. That alone was progress. Until Thursday, Cutler had squashed any talk in City Hall of burying, capping, narrowing or eliminating I-95.

Stober did a good job of putting the administration’s views in a larger context, and made a compelling argument for prioritizing mass transit, calling SEPTA “an incredible inheritance.” But it also became clear that Cutler’s office rejected a redesign for I-95 without ever having done a comparative, cost-benefit analysis of the possible scenarios. Until that happens, Philadelphia can’t have a truly informed debate on the issue.

Bill signing ceremonies are generally pretty rote affairs. City Hall staffers and a few interested parties pack the seats in the portrait-bedecked hall known as the mayor’s reception room. The politicians deliver a list of obligatory ‘thanks yous,’ and that’s that. But there was a sense that history was being made at today's signing for the new zoning code – in more ways than one.  

The new streamlined code is historic, of course, because it replaces a bloated and busted rulebook dating from the Kennedy era. It took four, excrutiatingly long years to rewrite the zoning code, and another half a year to convince council to pass it. Things got pretty ugly in the final months. The reform effort  became a legislative sumo match, with council heavyweights vying to squash the life out of the proposals before council went out of session. So the mere fact that Mayor Nutter had a bill to sign was a big deal.

But what really made the event special was that the room was filled with many regular citizens who devoted large chunks of personal time to the seemingly arcane project. Unlike so many things in Philadelphia, the new zoning code was not the product of top-down, backroom deal-making (although there was certainly a little of that) but a true citizen effort. The project involved people on all sides of the development spectrum, from high-priced zoning lawyers to neighborhood activists. Hundreds of meetings were held, all of them public.