NYC Bike Rack Design Competition

A jury including David Byrne is judging a competition to come up with a design for bike racks for New York City. The finalists are up and the winner is going to be announced in October.

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Smart Cookie

A cookie designed with a small indent for removing it from the package without breaking it. Pretty dang smart.

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Trading Places - The Demographic Inversion of the American City

This article from The New Republic examines what they call Demographic Inversion, a process allegedly occurring in some American Cities where affluent middle-classers from the suburbs are moving back into downtown urban environments, while poor inner-city minority populations are moving outside the city. I don’t think Houston is going to turn into Paris anytime soon, but the author cites Chicago as a prime example of a city where the process is already underway. I can definitely see signs of it here in my home of Montréal, where small urban condos are getting ever pricier, and formerly-working class inner-city neighborhoods are gentrifying like lightning.

Abandoned Pools

Walking Turcot Yards has a great link to a photo series of unused pools.

In the Thirties London’s outdoor lidos were at the peak of their popularity.

Gradually tastes have changed, resulting in a drop in attendances,

leaving the pools uneconomical to run.

Many fell into decay and many were demolished.

Only a handful of pools remain today as a symbol of a bygone era.

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Boing Boing TV Covers Long Now Clock

The Long Now Foundation is trying to build a clock which will run without human intervention for 10,000 years. It’s a marvelous and amazing piece of engineering. When visiting the Long Now in San Francisco, I tried to take photos of the prototypes of the various pieces, but low light left me with some grainy unusable photos. Thankfully, Boing Boing TV has a great piece about the various components of the clock, which I can attest were absolutely stunning.

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Reaction Ferry

A reaction ferry is a motor-less barge that is anchored to the shore by a rope or cable, and uses only the current of the river to move back and forth.They aren’t much in use anymore, but they exist in a few places.

I’m back from my trip to California. The Bay Area was fantastic, but I’m too worn-out to write much of anything. Here are some photos.

Clarion is a small, one-block long alley in the Mission. Practically every surface in the alley is covered in some sort of art. Here are some photos I took:

This escalator was a nice piece, but I thought what was most amazing was the inscribed date - 1993. In 15 years it had hardly been touched. Either the taggers backed-off out of respect, or the artist has been good about passing by and touching it up.

This one is hard to read; It says: “I’m not hiding my love anymore.”

As a follow-up to last week’s post of a Kunstler-esque critique on ridiculous suburban buildings. Here’s a doozy - a motel with a facade of a quaint little small town called Jacuzzi Adventure Suites, also in North Conway, New Hampshire. The image of urbanism has been turned into a cheap sideshow on the side of a very non-urban highway.

All of the supposed amenities of urban life are represented, a bakery, a stable, a barber shop, and even a train station. The reality, on the inside, are bizarre theme rooms like Motorcycle Madness, which caters to the many bikers who come to the state to ride sans helmet, or The Cave, complete with “Bats and Panthers”. It’s such a strange mish-mash I don’t even know where to begin.

The Gruen Transfer is the glassy-eyed, all-encompassing state of pure shopping consumers get in when they walk through the doors of a shopping mall or large department store. Douglas Rushkoff, in an article for PBS, describes it as:

a psycho-physical response to the overwhelming sensory data in a self-contained consumer environment . . .named for the gentleman who invented the shopping mall, where this mental paralysis is most commonly observed.

I’m going to try channeling James Howard Kunstler, an urban planning and architecture critic who is generally known for his strong anti-suburban rants. He argues that much of this space is soulless and not really worth caring about, and I generally have to agree with him.

Here’s a page from what Kunstler would possibly refer to as “the tragic comedy of suburbia”. In a misguided attempt to inject some classical urban charm into the North Conway, New Hampshire location of Lowe’s, someone thought is would be a good idea to build-in a pretty hilarious row of fake second-story windows on their otherwise completely suburban box-store.

Multiple stories and mixed-uses are one of the most important principles of classical urban design. The stacking keeps the population density high enough to allow for varied street life, public transportation, and general walkability. The mixed-uses ensure that there are almost always people in the immediate area - either working, living, or shopping, which keep things interesting and makes sure there are usually eyes on the street, which is good for community and security.

This, though, does none of those things. It’s a sad attempt to channel the quaintness of a small-town America which barely even exists anymore.

World Changing on Worldwide Energy Policies

A report on renewable energy. Not for everyone, but has some information on Germany’s renewable energy program, one of the most extensive in the world:

Germany generates 14% of its energy needs–a total of 31,000 MW–from renewable energy. This share has increased 1 percent each year for the past decade.

In Germany the typical consumer pays $1.97 USD/month (1.25 Euros/month) to invest in the renewable energy infrastructure.

Just goes to show how renewable energy doesn’t have to be as expensive as some people think.

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Martha Cooper’s Vintage Hip Hop, Graffiti, and B-Boy Photos

The Current has a piece on the great photography work done by Martha in the 70’s and 80’s, before Hip Hop had gone mainstream.

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OE Cake Physics Engine Toy

It’s a simple drawing/physics program that lets you build whatever you want from the ingredients they give you (springs, elastics, water, gas, fire, etc. Shown at left is a kettle boiling water and turning a small windmill.

If you’re anything like me you will be able to spend hours at this.

I have long been intrigued by the idea of growing my own food, but wasn’t sure how to go about it in the city. I had grown herbs in a window box, but nothing substantial.

This summer I decided to plant a small balcony-based container garden. I’m going to post again later in the summer when I start being able to cultivate the fruits of my labours, but I do have to say that the results so far have been incredibly positive. A dozen or so zucchinis are growing, a good thirty tomatoes, a half dozen hot peppers (enough for making a bottle or two of hot sauce), and more than enough herbs to easily meet my needs. All of this in three relatively small plastic bins and a few stray pots.

There are still a couple more months to go in the growing season, and I haven’t eaten much aside from some herbs and some zucchini flowers, but the results are pretty encouraging. Tending to the plants and watching them grow has been a great experience by itself.

As oil becomes ever more expensive, the peak oil theory is making our car-centric suburbs look like more of a burden than a blessing. Urban planners like Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander have been criticizing suburbs for decades, though mostly for social rather than economic reasons. I personally couldn’t imagine myself living in a cookie-cutter house in the suburbs, or living in a place that was more than a few minutes walk to a park, café, community centre, bakery, subway, restaurants, and grocery store.

This is a photo I snapped out the window of the plane as we were landing in Frankfurt, Germany. It’s a suburb, but it isn’t suburban in the North American sense. It’s small enough to easily walk across, yet large enough to have a station on the regional commuter rail line (and trust me, there isn’t much that the Germans seem to love more than their trains).

I have absolutely no background for this, but apparently there’s a monkey on top of Tel Aviv’s city hall. Pretty great photo by my friend Jax.

Update:

Ah, ok, it’s actually a duck. I jumped the gun a little bit by posting it without doing further research. Artist Dudu Geva thought Tel Aviv was so ugly he created some funny animals to liven things up a little.

“My initiative stems from the fact that the city is lost,” Geva wrote in 2003 in the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’Ir. “Tel Aviv is so ugly that you need to erase entire streets and start from scratch. At least let us decorate and celebrate in the streets. The city hall is a lost building. If a giant duck were placed on its roof, everything would change.”