notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

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.

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)

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)

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.

vizualize:

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)

New York, in New York. Taken from a weeknote by Casey A. Gollan.

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.)

Lineposters, prints of city transit systems around the world, for sale at Etsy.

(Source: lineposters)

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.

theidiotsheet:

steven meisel for vogue italia, 8/02

(Source: foudre, via saintfactory)