urban design » Absurd Intellectual

Microlawns, and their secret histories

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 22 October 2011 Modern Life

Oct 222011

I do believe that I am mildly in love with David Yoon, who runs the Tumblr called “Microlawns,” in which he features photographs of tiny patches of grass. But rather than bemoaning the rise of the concrete jungle, and the loss of green space, Yoon instead imbues each of these grass patches with a whimsical tale of its own.

The one above, for example:

Pound-cake style specimen, matching both the weight and size of its namesake. Underneath, however, is found not wax paper but a village of glassy white grubs worshipping a small leather door which leads to the dark, endless underground ocean containing the Ghosts of Flushed Pets.

Yoon, I find out, also runs a “Narrow Streets” blog, wherein he takes photographs of very wide avenues and, through some Photoshop-style magic, narrows them until they have more human proportions. I thought I had blogged about it previously, but can’t find it.

He is a good man, this David Yoon.

See more Microlawns!

In Times Square, you must be garish. It’s the law

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 13 August 2010 Modern Life

Aug 132010

If you’ve never been to New York City, I recommend you go. And if you do go, I recommend that you experience Times Square the way that Amy and I did (that’s her picture, above).

First, take Amtrak to get to NYC. Then, switch to the subway, and take the subway to your hotel in Queens. This will ensure that you see almost nothing of midtown Manhattan.

After checking in to your hotel, take the subway back to Times Square. At this point, it should be night time. Then, take the escalator up from the subway station and emerge into the jawdropping hustle, bustle and light show that is Times Square.

You’ll recover, but if you’ve never been there before, it can be kind of overwhelming to go from zero to 60 all at once like that.

Anyway, I feel confident in giving this advice on the Internet, where it will live forever, because I’ve just found out that Times Square will always have its garish light shows. Why? Because it’s the law.

The Wall Street Journal explains:

What appears totally haphazard to the untrained tourist’s eye is actually planned down to the last square foot, with copious rules about how much of any surface must be covered in signage.

Own a building on Broadway but detest the flashing lights? Too bad. As the code states:

There shall be a minimum of one #illuminated sign# with a #surface area# of not less than 1,000 square feet for each 50 linear feet, or part thereof, of #street# frontage.

There are instructions for precisely which direction Times Square’s signage must face and extraordinarily detailed diagrams for how the brightness of mandatory illuminated displays shall be measured.

Does your building feature a blinking sign? The rules require that the unlit phase not exceed three seconds. When can the bright lights be switched off? No earlier than 1:00 a.m.

Why is that? Because advertising defines Times Square:

“This was a result of a preservationist instinct to not have this area turn into another 6th Avenue,” says Ellen Goldstein, vice president of policy and design for the Times Square Alliance. “Even when Times Square was at its most degraded — you know, when there were porn theaters and grindhouses — it was always defined by lights. If you preserve the advertising, you preserve the character of the neighborhood.”

(via Gawker)

Commuting by catapult

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 31 July 2010 Everything Else

Jul 312010

Deliciously impractical. I would love to read a sci-fi story where this was actually some kind of shared public transit:

Read more at Commutapult.org, where they are trying to get the idea, ahem, off the ground.

Your roads are wrecking your cities

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 24 July 2010 Modern Life

Jul 242010

I’ve long been convinced that, even in frigid Prairie Canada, where I live, pedestrian-oriented urban design is the only way to go.

Too much of my city is a barren wasteland, from a pedestrian perspective, because the last 50 years have been devoted to making things easier and easier for the car.

Perversely, we built a gigantic new box mall (just as they’re going out of style) with humongous parking lots — only to cry and complain about the traffic chaos it generated. Oh, and did I mention that the parking lot was designed so that buses couldn’t turn into it?

Now, to alleviate that chaos, we’re in the midst of a multi-year campaign to double the traffic capacity to and from that mall.

It’s been a multi-year mess, and this summer has been the worst.

But even when it’s complete, although it might make for a smoother drive, I don’t think the new roads and big, expansive intersections will actually make the city any better.

I point, for example, to this wonderful post about what freeways (and the iconic Arch) did to poor St. Louis:

Cities generate wealth by bringing large numbers of people into proximity with one another. Two adjacent high-density neighborhoods will be richer than either could be alone because businesses at the edge of each neighborhood will be enriched by pedestrian traffic from the other. Driving a freeway through the middle of a healthy urban neighborhood not only destroys thousands of homes, it rips apart tightly integrated neighborhoods. Pedestrians rarely walk across freeways, so businesses near a new freeway are immediately deprived of half their customers. Similarly, residents near a new freeway lose access to half the businesses near them. The area along the freeway becomes what Jacobs calls a “border vaccuum” and goes into a kind of death spiral: because it contains little pedestrian traffic, businesses there don’t succeed. And because there are no interesting businesses there, even fewer people go there, which hurts the sales of businesses further from the freeway. The harms from such a freeway extends for blocks on either side.

Where I live isn’t “high-density urban” by any stretch of the imagination — we’re a fairly smallish service centre for the tiny towns that surround us. But I think you could make a case that our relationship with these bedroom communities is similar to that of a large city’s downtown with its suburbs.

Blogger Timothy Lee has a number of other posts where he re-examines urban neighbourhoods in the light of classic Jane Jacobs. They’re worth the read.

A real-life Mobius bridge

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 10 June 2010 Modern Life

Jun 102010

Okay, this isn’t really a Mobius bridge, but it’s still pretty cool. Imagine you live in a place where, like most of the world, you drive on the right-hand side of the road. And now, imagine that inhabitants of a neighbouring place prefer to drive on the left-hand side of the road.

Now imagine that you want to build a bridge across from one place to another.

And that’s what you’ve got, if you want to build a bridge from Hong Kong to mainland China. And here’s a proposed solution:

It may not be the most practical solution (uh, don’t they have ships there? Or floods?) but it sure is purty!

(via Gizmodo, which has an additional pic and more inf0)

The perfect SimCity3000 city

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 17 April 2010 Modern Life

Apr 172010

Sim City 3000 was released over 11 years ago, but it’s got staying power. Unlike games that you can play through and “win” after the final boss, SC3K has no end point. It just goes on and on and on, with a continuing struggle to balance the needs of your city’s population with the limited resources you have.

Of course, just like completists who play through video games trying to capture every single bonus Easter egg, someone’s got to try and maximize their Sim City.

How big can it get? How little crime? How little pollution? How much civic happiness?

Well, you may have your answers, in this seven-minute video that tracks multiple attempts to optimize a Sim City population until a “perfect” solution is found.

If you know your Sim City, it’s a pretty stunning achievement.

(via BB)

Can you tell me how to get to … Boozetown?

Posted by T. Keith Edmunds on 16 February 2010 Everything Else

Feb 162010

You’re sitting at a table with a number of other potential investors. As it’s 1952, you’re probably a man and so are all the other Mad Men-attired individuals. All of you are listening to Mel Johnson give his pitch:

Just imagine, he asks his audience, a resort entirely centered on the culture of alcohol. A boozer’s paradise built expressly to facilitate drinking and the good times that naturally follow. Where the bars, clubs and liquor stores never close. Where the police force is there to help drunks, not hassle them. Where even the street names salute sweet mother booze: Gin Lane, Bourbon Boulevard and Scotch Street. An adult playground like no other. Just imagine.

Johnson loved the drinking culture and travelled the world to experience it. As much as he enjoyed his adventures, he never found the one place that was it. The one perfect location where everyone could enjoy their drink and everything involved in the occassion. Thus, Johnson decided, a city devoted solely to drinking would have to be built.

At the end of 1950, Mel was a man obsessed. Made restless by his extensive post-war travels, he spent every waking hour sketching in the details of his dream. First, of course, he’d need to put a name to his drunkard homeland. He considered many possibilities, including El Dorado, Boozeville and Lush Land, before finally settling on the portmanteau BoozeTown.

During the first stage of BoozeTown’s existence, Johnson envisioned a resort consisting solely of themed bars. His headquarters and home would be a giant martini glass in the middle of the city.

The second stage would entail building an onsite brewery, distillery and perhaps even a winery to supply the many outlets in BoozeTown. Additional infrastructure would be built within the city to help patrons move about. Think moving sidewalks.

Finally, BoozeTown would focus on establishing a permanent population. This new city would surely, according to Johnson, attract artists famous and not-yet-famous alike.

Yes, BoozeTown was to be a drinker’s paradise.

Every bar and liquor store would be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Furthermore, you’d have the right to bring your drink with you anywhere you liked, including banks, post offices, and places of worship.

BoozeTown would have its own currency (BoozeBucks), security force (The Party Police) and newspaper (BoozeTown Bugle). There was almost no aspect of BoozeTown that Johnson had not planned for. Unfortunately, he was never able to raised the funds he needed.

By 1960, Johnson completely abandoned his plans for Boozetown.

Two years later, he was hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia. He died in that same hospital four years after his admittance.

It is said his ghost still haunts the now-abandoned Bartonville Mental Hospital. No word on whether the spectre likes to drink or not.

(Read more about BoozeTown at Modern Drunkard.)

Haunting hotel, pre-gentrification, in photo essay

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 11 January 2010 Photography, Vintage/Retro

Jan 112010

There’s something about urban decay that tugs at me. Whether it’s abandoned buildings, back alleys chock-full of debris, or fictional depictions of empty cities, the thought of a once-bustling population now gone really leaves me rapt.

I’m also taken with the idea of urban renewal, and rebirth. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a rambling old Victorian-era house, surrounded by continual renovations and the idea that, as the family grew, we could simply not rent out one of the apartments that had been carved out of the house, knock down some walls, and expand our own living space. We were simultaneously making things new and better and restoring them to the way they were.

That’s probably also why I find myself actually offended when developers purchase old buildings, then strip them of all their vintage detailing and turn them into modern condos.

I love seeing old warehouses become lofts, but please — restored oak trim has so much more to offer than MDF.

So that’s why I was so happy to see the latest photo essay on website Good.is.

A collection by photographer David Sotelo, the photos are a collection of work that he did two years ago, just as the historic El Dorado Hotel in downtown L.A. was being turned over to new owners and vacated.

The new owners have turned the former hotel into high-rent condos, now, but Sotelo’s photos capture a time in transition — before the gentrification, but after the previous inhabitants have been told to move along. Some of the rooms are empty, others almost-so. But others, like the one above, seem to have a lot of life still in them.

From the Good.is page:

“The initial compulsion came from the immediate experience of the interior of the building—feeling the intimacy of the spaces and these people’s lives,” says Sotelo. “I went back there for at least fifteen times. I would go on a Friday at about three in the morning and climb up into this building with my equipment, as well as power bars and toilet paper and water. I would lie down and wait for the sun to come up, and then I would chase the light around the building all day, photographing obsessively. I was there alone with all of this history. I felt a little bit like some of these archeologist poking around in tombs, except that I could easily read and identify with what I found.”

Awesome. See it all here.

Strategy for making sidewalks — don’t

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 25 November 2009 Modern Life

Nov 252009

BoingBoing pointed me towards a post on the Sweet Juniper blog, called “Streets With No Name.” It’s a lyrical look at the paths that Detroit pedestrians have carved through fields and vacant lots, in the absence of real sidewalks or roads that go precisely where they want to walk.

But I was touched by a couple of comments at Boing Boing which went further into the concept of calling them “Pathways of Desire.”

The third comment, by Zadaz, says, “A very old rule about deciding where to build sidewalks is to plant grass the first year and the second year lay sidewalks where the grass has been worn down.”

That’s something I had never thought of before. But which sounds so wonderfully right in hindsight.

Oddly, I was just thinking about this yesterday, when I walked from Brandon University, where I teach a class, back to my car — several blocks away so that I didn’t have to pay for parking.

BU has a large open grassy area in front of its main buildings, and there were three separate strands of paths walking towards the same crosswalk I was headed to. There was also a sidewalk, but it looked oddly decorative, and it didn’t seem to be placed in the most advantageous position.

So it was serendipitous that I came across these posts. Now I’ll have a phrase for those paths. A pretty phrase, too, if it’s not too fey to say so.

Innovative idea for a roof-mounted windmill

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 25 October 2009 Modern Life

Oct 252009

If this works as advertised, I think it’ll be fantastic. Although the picture here is small, you can get a good idea of the design of this roof-mounted windmill on the RidgeBlade website:

The RidgeBlade is fitted on the ridge line at the top of a building and uses the existing roof area to collect and focus the prevailing wind. This is where the wind is forced to travel over the roof surface, accelerating the airflow though the turbine.

If I had to describe it, I might say it’s like a long, skinny water wheel. The low profile makes it ideal for places where NIMBY-types want to preserve their views of the skyline, and I’d wager it would be easy to install — almost a DIY project.

(via PatJ’s Twitter feed, retweeted from Canadianmags. Ah, Twitter.)

New condo development in Toronto is so good (no cars!) and yet so bad (demolishing a heritage building)

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 16 September 2009 Modern Life

Sep 162009

I am really torn on what to make of a new condo being planned in Toronto. According to the Toronto Star, the 42-storey structure would house 315 units, mostly one-bedroom condos. And, they’ll be about $20,000 cheaper than comparable condos in the city.

Where are they saving all that money? By not building an expensive underground parking garage. The Star notes that the planned building will provide only nine (9!) parking spaces for a car-sharing service, but will boast 315 spaces for bicycles. Similar buildings would provide about 140 parking spots.

Now that’s innovative. And, in a downtown area, there’s probably enough density to make it work. The location is right beside a subway station, for example, although it’s 10 blocks from the nearest grocery store.

Unfortunately, the news isn’t all good. That wonderful building is planned for 426 University Ave., currently home to the Royal Canadian Military Institute.

The Institute is a century-old heritage building. From its website:

Today, the heritage building is well known to the public as a city landmark – an Edwardian edifice flanked distinctively by two 19th-century cannons, with substantial space devoted to Museum galleries displaying exhibits drawn from the Institute’s extensive collections. It also houses a 15,000 volume research Library whose holdings include significant books detailing Canada’s military history.

The Star says that the condo development will preserve “elements” of the facade and will provide space for the Institute and its holdings — they even house the seat of Baron von Richthofen’s Fokker Triplane, which is pretty amazing — but in my experience, facades are not the same as the buildings themselves.

From the article:

Though the institute’s board has approved the project, several members at large oppose it.

Member Brian Lawrie told the community council that in 2007 Vaughan had “enthusiastically endorsed” keeping the building intact, calling it a “rare remnant of University Avenue’s early days as a quiet boulevard dominated by trees, not highrises.” He noted that the councillor had done a “180-degree turn” the next year by endorsing the demolition and condo project.

That’s ironic, because just a couple of paragraphs later, a city councillor is quoted as saying that the development brings the building into “better conformity” with its surroundings.

So let me get this straight: a 102-year-old building, which used to be surrounded by other, similar buildings, which have gradually all been replaced by steel-and-glass towers, now should be torn down because it doesn’t fit the aesthetic of the street? Where was that sentiment when the first tower was built, destroying what was then a “quiet boulevard”?

I’m all in favour of the car-free aspect of it. That excites me. But why does it have to come at the expense of heritage?

The future of the suburb was built a century ago in vintage medieval style

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 29 August 2009 Vintage/Retro

Aug 292009

In this photo, from Joe Shlabotnik’s photostream on Flickr, you can see the types of townhouses they have in the suburb of Forest Hills Garden, in Queens, New York. Based on the style, you’d never guess that it was part of a planned community, built using pre-fab concrete decades before anyone else thought to, right?

There’s a fascintating slideshow on Slate about Forest Hills Garden and how it came to be. It was ahead of its time — we’re just now starting to come back to its mixed-use, transit-oriented, walkable community plan. Says Slate:

Forest Hills has a variety of single-family houses: attached, semidetached, and freestanding. The aim of having many housing types was partly to give more choices to buyers and partly to create the kind of visual variety found in old towns. This is very different from the sort of homogeneity that characterizes most modern suburbs.

Homogeneity and, I would argue, soullessness.

Excellence in government architechture torn down by government less than a month after it opens

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 27 July 2009 Modern Life

Jul 272009

This is depressing. Border crossings these days are already stressful enough, so I was really jazzed when I read about the one at the Canada/U.S. crossing between Cornwall, Ont. and Massena, N.Y. It’s named the Three Nations Crossing in honour of the Mohawks who also live there. You may have heard about their recent occupation of the Canadian side of the crossing, closing it temporarily.

Anyway, the new American port of entry was heralded as a new era in government design — functional but also architecturally worthwhile. One of the key design elements was the giant yellow sign, half-hidden, that spells out United States.

Now, less than a month after completion, the sign is being dismantled. Apparently, the government now feels that the big yellow sign is perhaps too bright, and could make border officers a target. This according to a story in the New York Times that’s worth reading just for this line:

The move is a depressing, if not wholly unpredictable, example of how the lingering trauma of 9/11 can make it difficult for government bureaucracies to make rational decisions.

Hear hear. Remember right after 9/11, when you were told “if you don’t do this or that, then the terrorists have won”? This is exactly the type of stuff that hands a victory to the forces of terror (overwrought intensity intentional).

I know that hardened borders and security paranoia have happened in the past, and I’m confident that in the future, openness and a welcoming attitude will return to the world. But I worry that it will be a generational thing.

Great rail stations of America … that were torn down

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 23 June 2009 Vintage/Retro

Jun 232009

It’s too depressing to link to the pictures — eleven beautiful train stations that were lost to the wrecking ball (and what replaced them):

Almost like a rite of passage, cities across the country embraced the era of Interstates, Big Macs, and suburban sprawl by tearing down their train depots. (Frequently, they just did the Joni Mitchell thing and put up a parking lot.) But time and experience are showing that train stations are vital organs in a healthy city, and removing them deadens the entire organism …. One lesson of this legacy is that what replaces a well designed and centrally located rail depot can is rarely of equal worth to the city.

It’s heartening to know that I don’t live in the only city that hates its own history and heritage. But it’s still depressing.

You know, even the crappiest, cheapest warehouse from 75 years ago is more appealing than a concrete, metal and glass slab from the past 20. The different is that there’s nothing interesting about new buildings — they’re flat and boring.

Even the “designed” ones tend to be barren of architectural grace notes. I have a theory that it’s because modern buildings are meant to be seen from a distance and perhaps at highway speed — they’re not built for interaction on a human, pedestrian level.

The great early skyscrapers in places like New York City have gargoyles and carvings up so high that no one can ever see them. Eventually, builders stopped doing that, replacing it with flat, bare sides. And now that design ethic has filtered down to street level.

(via BB)

Well, this is depressing: The future of the shopping mall is just like the past

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 6 June 2009 Modern Life

Jun 062009

A New York Times reporter heads to an industry convention touting the future of shopping malls. This is what she finds:

Despite near-non-existent consumer spending, the declining popularity of shopping as America’s favorite pastime and the chilling effect foreclosed homes in housing developments are surely having on nearby malls, most entries in the ICSC competition responded less to the future of the shopping mall than to the glory days to which we’ve recently bid adieu. I was struck by how little attention entrants paid to things like sustainable architecture, alternative transit or changing consumer attitudes about consumption. Architectural visions tended toward iconic futurist forms — domes or similarly curvy buildings that felt right in line with World’s Fairs past. Distressing to think that in 2059, we’ll finally get to live as the Jetsons did back in 1962.

I saw very big, very ambitious projects designed with an eye to [return on investment] more than consumer need/enjoyment, including one from a Japanese architecture firm proposing four and a half acres consisting of ballpark, retail and dining along with an array of “extreme” attractions (exactly what was “extreme” about them was left to the imagination). A Turkish mall project mixed a stadium, tri-level sports lifestyle center, Olympic swimming pool and 25,000 square meters of retail. I was excited by an entry that seemed to propose a new purpose for abandoned big-box retail until I discovered the idea was merely to transform the store into a massive digital billboard — a mediocre solution for say, an abandoned store in Union Square, and a totally inappropriate one for an exurban mall.

The role of technology seemed largely confined to all the ways one could shop using an iPhone and to body scanning (a trick straight out of the 2002 film “Minority Report”).

The full post is lengthy, but a great read. I do a lot of thinking and reading on urban design like this, and it strikes me that the number one problem is integrating each new thing into an existing community. Shopping malls are too self-contained and isolated to fit well into the larger city that they’re in. But big-box power centres are even worse — each store in those “malls” are isolated from the others.

There’s a real need for strong and motivated civic government to step forward with design standards that word force commercial devlopment to fit well into existing infrastructure. Unfortunately, too many city halls and city managers have fallen hook, line and sinker for the economic development argument, which neglects all other forms of development.

No, that’s not entirely true — the problem is that economic development, artistic development and recreational development are all done in isolation (there’s that word again) when they need to be considered together.

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