2012-05-09
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NYTimes.com: A Digital Manhattan in ‘The Avengers’ (via mappeal):
We also had a team doing something called LIDAR, which is being able to create geometry of the city by scanning it,” Mr. White said. “We take those spheres of photographs and we project them onto the geometry.
Everyone likes LIDAR and 3D flat-textured 3D renderings, right?
2012-05-07
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The Metrocard Project (via nevver, cesart):
The Metrocard Project is an ongoing project that aims to redesign the iconic New York City Metrocard in a fresh way. The project was created by Melanie Chernock, a graphic designer studying at the School of Visual Arts.
2012-05-03
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Piggyback Space Shuttle Enterprise over NYC.
In 1983.
That’s probably the year the shuttle prototype came to Stansted. I remember it happening, and regret that, for some reason, when my dad got out of the car to take a photograph of it, I didn’t go with him.
Still, I expect I’ll finally get to see it Enterprise at USS Intrepid some time later this year.
(Photograph: Richard Drew / AP)
2012-04-12
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Viewfinder panorama from the Empire State Building, New York (via chriswoebken).
2012-04-03
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Housing in towers, a 1964 proposal by Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao for Harlem in upper Manhattan.
(I’ve seen the proposal for a dome over Manhattan, but these cooling-tower like structures are new to me.)
2012-04-02
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“Ne travaillez jamais!”—Never Work!— is as much about a resistance to the notion of productivity, of participation in a capitalist enterprise that codes the idea of “good” activity as that which begets profit, as it is a utopian battlecry; likewise, the Situationist dérive is a mode of unproductive walking: traversing space for the sake of experiencing it rather than as a way to get from point A to point B, a rejoinder to the the capitalist city rather than a kind of updated flânerie.
The ethos of the High Line, on the other hand, is to take the unproductive spaces of the city and make them work—work in the sense of performing a function, imbuing them with productive life.
”Rachel Wetzler has some interesting Thoughts on the High Line, if only because it’s good to hear a contrary view.
I do like the High Line; I’ve visited now in spring, summer, and winter, and (coming from the seasonless West Coast) that’s definitely part of the appeal, as is the art and the people watching. However, it’s definitely not wild; it’s tamed, and nice, in the worst sense of the word. On balance I’m happy it’s there, but I hope it’s not the model for every park (and every reclamation of industrial heritage) to come.
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)
