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philippe rahm
doesnt seem to add up to interesting art though. looks marsscape orange. how alienating
more light and ion therapy
giant pumpkin seeds
In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil’s most important city, São Paulo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known on one hand for being the country’s slick commercial capital and on the other for its extreme gang violence and crushing poverty, São Paulo’s “Lei Cidade Limpa” or Clean City Law was an unexpected success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab.
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One Brazilian city has cleansed its streets of all advertising and billboards. Should we [UK] do the same or would an ad-free future leave us cold?
Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of São Paulo, passed a law last year banning all advertising from the Brazilian city. The place is now being held up by activists worldwide as an example to us all: an image of an anti-Orwellian future, where The Man is no longer in control of our day to day choices. But does the planet's first "clean city" really live up to the hype? Stripped of its flyposters and neon signs, São Paulo now resembles a war zone, with empty hoardings and rusting frames replacing the soft drink adverts and the blown-up faces of Brazilian actors.
Tony de Marco, a photographer and typographer, has put up a series of images of today's São Paulo on Flickr. To me it looks like Stanley Kubrick's vision of Saigon shot in a deserted London Docklands in the 80s.
"If you want to be apocalyptic," Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas writes in "Al Manakh," a new study of Persian Gulf cities and their beanstalk towers, "you could construe Dubai as evidence of the-end-of-architecture-and-the-city-as-we-know-them."
To be apocalyptic, you will probably not be surprised to hear, is precisely what Mike Davis wants. His own views on Dubai are included in "Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism," a timely if uneven collection he edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk, and they possess all the razor-sharp pessimism he's spent a career perfecting.
Davis' view of Dubai -- one of the seven city-states that make up the United Arab Emirates, and for the last decade the biggest construction site this side of Shanghai -- is marked by stories of greed, exploitation and enough conspicuous consumption to make a hedge fund manager blush. In classically over-the-top fashion, he characterizes Dubai as "the ultimate Green Zone," a fantasyland built on the backs of overworked and underpaid foreign workers who are violently brought into line every time they try to organize. It's a place, Davis says, that "earns its living from fear," with a skyline that is "a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly."
But as Blakely himself is quick to note—in his quiet, professorial, and vaguely irritated way—he is exactly the right man for this job. He has authored or co-authored several urban planning texts, is chairman of urban and regional planning at the University of Sydney in Australia, and is the namesake of the Edward J. Blakely Center for Sustainable Suburban Development at the University of California, Riverside. He got his expertise in post-disaster planning in his home state of California (he grew up in San Bernardino), where he was involved in rebuilding after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake and the 1991 Oakland fires. He also happened to be teaching at the New School University in Manhattan in the fall of 2001 and assisted with neighborhood planning after the World Trade Center attacks.
In speeches after he started work, Blakely put forth some big-ticket ways in which New Orleans could reinvent itself and rise above selling trinkets to tourists. (“We have an economy entirely made up of T-shirts,” he said in a speech last spring.) New Orleans should strive to once again become a trade and travel gateway to Latin America, he said. He hoped that well-orchestrated investments could build the city into a major bioscience research center. He'd like to see tax credits help revive the grand old theaters of Canal Street and create a “Broadway South,” just as tax credits have made Louisiana into Hollywood South. (It's third, after California and New York, in attracting moviemaking expenditures.)
And he believes the underused Mississippi riverfront, which contains some of the highest ground in the city, could become a centerpiece of development for the new New Orleans. After attracting entries from teams that included Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind, the New Orleans Building Corp.'s “Reinventing the Crescent” competition was won last December by the team led by architects Enrique Norten and Allen Eskew, landscape architect George Hargreaves, and urban planner Alex Krieger, who together will craft a plan to bring parkland and other public uses to a six-mile stretch of wharves
A Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans Still at Risk
After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcher’s Gentilly neighborhood.
Looking over the maps that showed other possible water levels around the city, Ms. Pratcher grew increasingly furious. Her house got four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and still stands to get almost as much from a 1-in-100 flood.
By comparison, the wealthier neighborhood to the west, Lakeview, had its flooding risk reduced by nearly five and a half feet.
“If I got my risk reduced by five feet five inches, I’d feel pretty safe,” said Ms. Pratcher, who along with her husband, Henry, warily returned home from Baton Rouge, La. “Six inches is not going to help us out.”
New Orleans was swamped by Hurricane Katrina; now it is awash in data, studied obsessively in homes all over town. And the simple message conveyed by that data is that while parts of the city are substantially safer, others have changed little. New Orleans remains a very risky place to live.
Space-age cubes, rooftop pods, giant caravan cities and garden sheds you can practically live in ... Steve Rose chronicles the rise of portable architecture.
Ever since Le Corbusier and the Italian futurists salivated over biplanes, steam trains, ocean liners and automobiles in the early 20th century, architecture has been in awe of moving machines. But, as much as the modernist pioneers eulogised these dynamic inventions, they never dared disobey the sacred rule that says buildings stay where they're built. Architecture is architecture. Unleash it from its static condition and you're in some hazy no- man's-land between the disciplines of building, product and vehicle design. Yet this nebulous zone is becoming an intriguing place to visit.
The Hill Country Jacal (a Mexican term referring to a lean-to structure) is a weekend retreat located on a rock ledge above Bear Creek west of San Antonio. The simple screened cedar pole structure is oriented towards the prevailing summer breeze and creek while its stone wall shelters the living space from the northwest winter winds. The thick limestone wall houses an outdoor shower, bunk beds and composting toilet. The screened living sgood find justin!
deconstructing deutsche bank
What I saw, Pietrucha knew, was what we all may see soon enough as we rush along America’s 46,871 miles of Interstate highways. What I saw was Clearview, the typeface that is poised to replace Highway Gothic, the standard that has been used on signs across the country for more than a half-century. Looking at a sign in Clearview after reading one in Highway Gothic is like putting on a new pair of reading glasses: there’s a sudden lightness, a noticeable crispness to the letters.
The Federal Highway Administration granted Clearview interim approval in 2004, meaning that individual states are free to begin using it in all their road signs. More than 20 states have already adopted the typeface, replacing existing signs one by one as old ones wear out. Some places have been quicker to make the switch — much of Route I-80 in western Pennsylvania is marked by signs in Clearview, as are the roads around Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — but it will very likely take decades for the rest of the country to finish the roadside makeover. It is a slow, almost imperceptible process. But eventually the entire country could be looking at Clearview.