2012-03-29
Avenues and Alleyways
A few weeks ago, I posted to Twitter that I’d managed to micro-optimise my commute home by heading through an alleyway between a hotel and conference centre, then through a car park, and finally passing through a department store and shopping mall, direct to the metro station.
It only saves a minute or two (although it’s slightly drier on the rare occasions when it rains), but I enjoy doing it partly as a minor piece of urban hacking. The land is almost all the weird hybrid of public but private, or vice versa. The section through the hotel’s car park feels least welcoming, but the municipal car park requires a walk by the internal ramps, and using a shop that you never buy anything in feels a little odd to me too.
In the wake of mentioning it, I pointed friends at the latest in a series of New Yorker articles written by those who aim
to walk from the Empire State Building, on West Thirty-third Street, to Rockefeller Center, on West Forty-eighth, without ever setting foot on Fifth or Sixth Avenue — to knife through tall buildings in a single bound, or at least in stepwise forays. A writer for this magazine accomplished the feat in 1956, and a photographic attempt appeared on our Web site last year.
I was reminded of all of this because there’s recently been a proposal to turn an area a little way from this - from Fifty-first to Fifty-seventh, between Sixth and Seventh avenue - into an official path.
The New York Observer has more on how this space came to be, and it also explains the tiny POPS logo in the bottom right of the map:
If it seems strange that all these public passageways should line up, that is how it was always meant to be. These spaces are a legacy of the same era that brought us Zuccotti Park. Privately Owned Public Spaces, or POPS, as they are often called, have been much in the news lately, thanks to Occupy Wall Street. The spaces in Midtown are at once similar and different. While none are as big as Zuccotti, they were all built to add precious square footage to the towers to which they are connected.
Sometimes this meant little more than opening up the lobby to the public, while other times developers would build soaring open air arcades. The stretch contains one of the greatest POPS in the city, the UBS Gallery at 1285 Sixth, the southern anchor of 6½th Avenue, which houses works from the Smithsonian and not only runs north-south but also east-west.
The article goes on to note that the plan isn’t quite signed off yet, with the mid-block crossings the sticking point - also a problem on my walk, since I have to cut across Howard (Mission does have a mid-block crossing between the shops and parking). Still, it’s an interesting counterpoint to London’s declining highwalk system and its still-thriving backstreets, and I’m curious to see how it turns out.
2012-03-27
2012-03-23
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Pentagram: New Work: Grand Central:
The new logo takes as its inspiration one of the landmark building’s most well known icons—the century-old Tiffany clock atop the information booth in the center of the Main Concourse. The stylized version of the clock, drawn by Joe Marianek, has its hands positioned at 7:13, or 19:13 in trainmaster’s time, a nod to the opening year.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who makes subtle references using time.
2012-03-21
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Fast Co Design: What If We Put A School Atop Every Building In Manhattan?
Maybe the educational movement just needs to reignited with a big, brash idea. And Schools in the Sky, a project by Ana Luisa Soares, Filipe Magalhães, and André Vergueiro as part of a competition to repurpose roofs, is just that. It asks, what if we put a school on top of every (non-pointy) building in NYC and then we painted them bright, eye-melting yellow?
The team calls the plan “a provocation.” By giving schools the most valuable and visible space in the city, education becomes something we’ll need to intrinsically value more, or, at minimum, something that we can’t possibly ignore.
“The yellow comes from the buses and taxis (if you say that you saw them everywhere, we wanted that you saw the schools everywhere, too),” writes student and project co-designer Ana Luisa Soares. “The shapes of the windows came from basic shapes games for kids.”
(via notational)
2012-03-14
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![Monument to Civilization: Vertical Landfill for Metropolises:
Skyscrapers are meant to wow, to impress. But other things within cities are also impressive, [Lin Yu-Ta] says: “New York, for instance: If we put its annual garbage on a area of a typical tower footprint, we’ll get a 1,300 meter high landfill tower, which is about as three times tall as the Empire State Building (450 meters). Isn’t that spectacular?”
(via)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0w2qaGGDK1qz4vjro1_500.jpg)
Monument to Civilization: Vertical Landfill for Metropolises:
Skyscrapers are meant to wow, to impress. But other things within cities are also impressive, [Lin Yu-Ta] says: “New York, for instance: If we put its annual garbage on a area of a typical tower footprint, we’ll get a 1,300 meter high landfill tower, which is about as three times tall as the Empire State Building (450 meters). Isn’t that spectacular?”
(via)
2012-02-24
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More from Ptak Science Books: Fantastic Cover Art: a Picture of the Future of Television:
This image is that of the television antenna of station WNBT and for many years it sat on top of the Empire State Building. WNBT was the flagship station of NBC, which was owned by RCA (Radio Corporation of America, 1919-1986) which (according to its name) was really the first national broadcasting radio network in the United States, and which (as experimental station W2XBS) became the first to broadcast a television picture (of a papier mache Felix the Cat) in 1928. This fantastic cover art for a 1947 promotional for the company pictured the famous antenna, the great visual of the company’s external hardware, right there on top of the world’s tallest building.
2012-02-21
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Maps of London and New York by Isotype Institute (1944)
I rarely repost things that are this popular, but how could I not note this comparison of the growth of two of my favourite cities, and the wonderful way the Isotype designers made their growth clear?
As well as the obvious difference between the organic and grid layouts in the two, I also noticed the small changes in water use (note the new Millwall docks on the Isle of Dogs) in London and the much more obvious infilling in New York and New Jersey.
(via seanaes)
2012-01-30
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Photographs from the series Homage to Wilson A. Bentley by Yuji Obata.
I’ve been to New York City four times in the last year, most recently last weekend. Having finally ticked off most of the major exhibition spaces, this time I visited some of the smaller Chelsea galleries, and this was the best discovery.
As Liz Danzico quoted earlier today,
Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake.
Obata takes that as a starting point, but goes further. As the Danziger gallery’s biographical notes say,
Like Bentley, Obata was obsessed with the challenge of doing something no one had done before – in his case photographing snowflakes in freefall rather than on a flat surface without digital or any other manipulation. It took Obata five years to achieve but his breakthrough resulted in the capture of pictures that allow the snowflakes to relate to each other in space and size, creating dynamic compositions and scenes. Obata chose the location to shoot the series, in the mountains of Hokkaidō, based on its history as the place where Dr. Ukichiro Nakaya did research that led to his invention of artificial snow.
The reproductions here (taken from James Danziger’s blog) give you an idea of the beauty of the photographs, but if you’re in New York between now and the 25th of February, it’s well worth visiting the gallery to see the works in person.
(Also nearby: Weegee’s Naked City and Vivian Maier next door at the Steven Kasher Gallery; Damien Hirst’s Complete Spot Paintings at the Gagosian; and, at the Mary Boone gallery until the 4th of February, Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds. All are worth at least popping in to if you’re in the area.)
2012-01-20
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New York at Night by Berenice Abbott. As seen at the Night Visions exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, which ran from April to September 2011.
