Rethinking the NYC cab

Great visualization of a more exciting NYC taxi... by Steven Johnson.

Suburbia Reborn

And the results are in: "Build a Better Suburb"
read more about it here

City Grid as Canvas

"...Over the last four years hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have walked by or on top of the orange lines have unwittingly passed what is possibly the biggest graffiti tag in the world. The tag, which is so vast that all parts of it cannot be viewed simultaneously, was created in 2006 by an artist known as Momo and consists of a paint line that he said runs about eight miles long and spells out his name.
It runs from the East River to the Hudson River and extends north to 14th Street and south to Grand Street. The line runs over curbstones and subway grates and zigzags around lampposts and manhole covers. Its route begins at the edge of a West Side pier and ends after crossing a footbridge over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive..."

Wheeels

Interview with Wheeels creaters, David Mahfouda and Alex Pasternack.

"Transit, and the hard infrastructure that undergirds it, is a system that could obviously benefit from greater efficiency and less waste. But it was the less tangible infrastructure of the Internet that led to her eureka moment, ten years ago: “This is what the Internet was made for, sharing a scare resource among many people.”...

Small Scale, Big Change

New Show opening at the MOMA...NYC
"...This exhibition presents eleven architectural projects on five continents that respond to localized needs in underserved communities. These innovative designs signal a renewed sense of commitment, shared by many of today’s practitioners, to the social responsibilities of architecture...."

James Corner Interview

Interview by Jill Fehrenbacher at Habitat.com with James Corner on the topic of the High Line in NYC.

Icons and Development

This recent article highlights the latest debate of historical preservation vs. development.
Its a matter of icon, history, memory and perhaps ego. How long to be hold onto images? Who has the right to fight for them, and what this the reason we move forward, change, alter and adapt? In this case, the all mighty recession is given the reason to build, leaving the Empire State Building in the shadow. But what is reassuring about this recent development plan is the possibility that New York City isn't dead yet. Not dead as in debt, no jobs or a defunct rail system. But dead in the sense of soul. What are the global cities of today? Dubai, Doha, Shanghai. And what is it about them that sparks the excitement of city, of living and of a future tomorrow. Wasn't New York City THE one city that brought all those terms to mind? When the city was at its explosive youth, it set the standards for codes, setbacks...It redefined an urbanity, it created an synergy and it imagined a future. Now, bogged down in its own history, stagnate from its own memory, its own inhabitants are themselves holding back its greatest potential - that to evolve.

Sure, this is just one building, but numerous other projects in the city can attest to the old age amnesia the city and its inhabitants have taken on...while the young, restless and future-seeking global cities leave it in the dust.

Taxi Mapping

Another great New York Times info-mapping of Taxi's in the city

The Foodprint Project

Foodprint NYC is the first in a series of international conversations about food and the city.

The free afternoon program will include designers, policy-makers, flavor scientists, culinary historians, food retailers, and others, for a wide-ranging discussion of New York’s food systems, past and present, as well as opportunities to transform our edible landscape through technology, architecture, legislation, and education.


related link at Urban Omnibus

Cars, Culture and the City

“Cars, Culture and the City,” an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. The show opens on Thursday at the museum, 1220 Fifth Avenue at East 103rd Street, and runs through Aug. 1.

the story of NORCS

Great research on elderly communities of New York City by Interboro.

The Cab Ride

There is something so simple and effective about this study that I just keep coming back to. Rachel Abrams gives us a play by play of how she "see's" the taxi ride and gives us a great tool for exploring the world of transportation. Here at Urban Omnibus

The Counterfeit Triangle

New York's Street of Schemes
 By ALEX KALMAN and LOLA SINREICH
The New York Times

Mapping the Buzz

Mapping the Cultural Buzz, by Melena Ryzik

"The research, presented in late March at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, locates hot spots based on the frequency and draw of cultural happenings: film and television screenings, concerts, fashion shows, gallery and theater openings. The buzziest areas in New York, it finds, are around Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers, and down Broadway from Times Square into SoHo. In Los Angeles the cool stuff happens in Beverly Hills and Hollywood, along the Sunset Strip, not in trendy Silver Lake or Echo Park.

The aim of the study, called “The Geography of Buzz,” said Elizabeth Currid, one of its authors, was “to be able to quantify and understand, visually and spatially, how this creative cultural scene really worked.”"

Mini-Gulf Courses for a City in Recession

Queens:

Miniaturized Entertainment? Whats going on with all the putt-putt courses?
Downsized Golf...manageable landscapes?
















Governors Island:














Brooklyn:

wow, adjust, compromise

Battle Between Budget and Beauty, Which Budget Won

By Nicolai Ouroussoff

Published: June 8, 2009

"...Typically, a developer comes to the city with big plans. Promises are made. Serious architects are brought in. The needs of the community, like ample parkland and affordable housing, are taken into account. Editorial boards and critics, like me, praise the design for its ambition.

Eventually, the project takes on a momentum of its own. The city and state, afraid of an embarrassing public failure, feel pressured to get the project done at any cost, and begin to make concessions. Given the time such developments take to build, sometimes a decade or more, we then hit the inevitable economic downturn. The developer pleads poverty. Desperate to avoid more economic bad news, government officials cut a deal.

It’s a familiar ending, made more nauseating because we have seen it so many times before. And it can’t be solved by simply crunching numbers. It demands a profound shift in mentality. What we have now is a system in which decent architecture and the economic needs of developers are in fundamental opposition. Until that changes, there will be more Atlantic Yards in our future."

Taming Times Square

Bloomberg announces plans to make portions of broadway at Times Square more pedestrian friendly by closing off the traffic and installing new public spaces.

related website

What is it that makes a public space "friendlier"? And what sort of models are out there comparable to the likes of Times Square? What is the experience of Times Square...what are the infrastructures, systems...schedules? And what is the user experience without the cars?

related articles.
Times

EXYZT Presents Situation Room

Storefront for Art and Architecture
EXYZT presents Situation Room
Feb 20 2009 - Mar 31 2009

" The architecture .../... will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space... It will be a means of knowledge and a means of actions."
Gilles Ivain alias Ivan Chtcheglov, 1958

We will act to defend architecture that is plural, used, complex, diverse, real and alive; architecture that is about action and interaction, formation and deformation, transormation and appropriation.

Situation Room as playground for [re] creation, collective action, active occupation, open demonstration, and social games will be intuitive, interactive and collective performance, showing an everyday life tools and knowledge Directory. For architecture of process, of fabrication, reaction and interaction, members of Exyzt will inhabit the gallery space, making use of the furnishings as though it were a domestic space.

More than showing past projects, we choose to set up a platform for creation and solidarity inviting people to transform the classic use of the gallery, to experiment diversity of programs and activities with basic cheap materials as moving boxes activated with the Storefront staff.

We propose a platform for action, defending an architecture that is alive. EXYZT shakes up the idea of architecture as an independent field. Working on experimental projects, EXYZT invites architecture, video, graphic-design, botany and any other concept to become devices of expression and creation.

Like a series of disparate notes, ready-to-assemble elements will be put together in situ to create this modular, domestic place, rapidly assembled viral constructions that can be implemented to create and augment a social space. Little by little, each limb of this strange apartment will grow new functions, allowing its users to do more and more things, to occupy and work in its ever-changing space. After the basic living space has been assembled an essential urban infrastructure will be added: water, electricity, radio, TV, Internet, etc... Once complete, a vast variety of individual modules will occupy the gallery space to be used for a moment, a day, or a whole night. Lightness, speed and flexibility will be essential ingredients of the Set-up.

The collective carries out temporary setups. Each project is in line with precise and determined time and special frame. The units can be shaped and rearranged to become a living and sitting space, a workspace equipped with a desk, computers and tools, or a dining room, among other forms. From week to week the space will evolve, taking on different ephemeral forms and functions with the public. The situation becomes the physical medium through which a creative and collective game is expressed. The series of projects questions the relationship between public and private and encourages the audience to move from being a spectator to be an actor too.

Exyzt invites the audience to reconsider occupied areas in a well-defined time-frame. The collective conceive and organize each project as a ludic playground where cultural behaviours and shared stories relate, mix and mingle.

Created in 2003 on the initiative of five architects, they produced and organized a first self-construction and self-documented project on a abandoned plot of land in Parc de la Villette, in Paris. By opening up to various fields, the collective group attempts to render architecture into a different perspective.

Our team is now a community of people who have chosen to act under the same principle of sharing knowledge and abilities, imagining the environment as the terrain of a participatory game, a site for play and appropriation, creating 'transient micro ambiances' as Guy Debord described the constucted situation.

Construction will constitute the first movement. Act!

Text by Philippe Rizzotti & Dimitri Messu

Urban Omnibus

new urban forum/blog/newsletter

http://urbanomnibus.net/features-forum/

Seeing the Corner

another person...just seeing the city

Cornerville .... exerpt from Joseph O'Neil

"...I see twin phone booths; a pole with those multiple parking signs that demand the application of advanced logic to figure out what the devil the parking situation actually is; and a pole with a yellow crosswalk sign showing a faintly Hitchcockian man and woman on foot (Why does each carry a kind of briefcase? Why do the figures look so weirdly lethargic? Most mysterious of all, which person looking at this sign has not already realized that there is a crosswalk here?). There are also a very cluttered pole on which are mounted two pedestrian lights and a vehicular traffic light; a one-way sign; a sign alerting us to the possible presence of blind persons; a no-left-turn sign; a chirping yellow gadget (presumably for the blind); and, at the pole’s overhanging extremity, a streetlight..."