I spent last weekend visiting Charleston for the first time and totally fell in love with it. Those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile know I have an almost unhealthy fascination with bridges, and I have fallen for the one over the Cooper River big time. Not enough to do the 10K Bridge Run that was going on that weekend, but almost*!

This striking bridge is a diamond tower design. From the restaurant atop the Holiday Inn, it looked like two big paperclips; the cool kind you get somewhere like MoMA. It is such an interesting contrast to look down and see cobblestone streets, then look up and see such a modern feat of engineering in the same place. For me, it really works. You can learn more about the Ravenal Bridge here.

*By the way, my friend who ran the 10K did not anticipate any hilly terrain in Low Country (it was her first one). Somehow she didn’t realize a bridge that is 186′ over the water would have quite an incline! New runners, consider yourself warned!

Athens GA has always been a cool town – not only the birthplace of great bands, but also a place where visual arts and architecture are celebrated. For example, right now they are in the middle of You, Me, and the Bus phase II. After phase one, four artist-designed bus shelters were constructed around town. The competition for the eight additional shelters is wrapping up as I write this. This is a perfect combination of public art form applied to an everyday function. Such shelters are usually banal and uninspired.

Has your town had its version of the Cincinnati pigs, the Chicago cows, the Outer Banks dolphins, what have you? I’m hard-pressed to find a city that hasn’t had some version of that project. Isn’t this shelter project a much better and original use of public art funds? What types of public art do you have in your neck of the woods? Would these shelters make you a little more likely to want to take the bus?

photo one by Trevor Frey for Athens Online

photo two by John W. English for the AJC

I find this really funny, unless there really were fast-moving zombies like the ones in 28 Days Later. That movie was really gross and scary.

Apparently, the D.O.T. is not finding these pranks funny. As long as they are not causing any accidents, they seem rather harmless. Other signs said “The End Is Near” and “Run For Cold Climates.” If you had access to these signs, what would you write? This seems like art to me. Would you classify it as art?

photo by Chris Nakashima-Brown for the Associated Press

I got a mule, her name is Sal…

Something about this article by Christopher Maag made me smile. I had no idea that the Erie Canal was still in use. I love that our old system of canals is being used again. Well, not the system, most of them are no longer navigable, but apparently, the Erie Canal still is, and it is regaining popularity in these days of high fuel prices. Once a route that made New York City the major port it is today, it was replaced by railroads which were later largely replaced by trucking years later. Now the canal seems like it’s ready to make a major comeback:

The canal still remains the most fuel-efficient way to ship goods between the East Coast and the upper Midwest. One gallon of diesel pulls one ton of cargo 59 miles by truck, 202 miles by train and 514 miles by canal barge, Ms. Mantello* said. A single barge can carry 3,000 tons, enough to replace 100 trucks.

I don’t know why this is so appealing to me. Maybe it’s my awe at the manpower, engineering and hyper-ambitious vision that made the canals possible back in 1825. Maybe it was working on a site in Valley Forge that had only remnants and hints of the canal, towpath and lovely crumbling old walls left. Maybe I’ve always wanted to take a really slow ride on a barge, or that tugboats are cute. Perhaps it was checking off “Modern Transit” as one of the tags for this post and grinning! Whatever it is, I love it!

*Carmella R. Mantello is director of the New York State Canal Corporation, a subsidiary of the New York State Thruway Authority that operates the Erie and three other canals.

images by Sung Park for The New York Times

Growing up my dad would commute via car to far away places for his job as a doc. The trunk of his automobile always housed all that he would need to live remotely for brief stints but it was by no means organized and he slowly developed the habits of a pack rat. Since he still has to drive on occasion to get to a shift I’m thinking maybe I should invest in something a bit more modern for my papa the nomad. I’ve seen the Casulo Mobile Living Furniture featured on treehugger.com and fokal.com…maybe this would be what my pa needs to transform his pack ratish-ness into a simple Euro living space all from a box? Check it out…

So last night I attended a meeting about The Beltline and found out about a fun website called walkscore.com. You simply type in a zipcode and the site shows you the most walkable neighborhoods. I put in my own address and it showed me all the walkable amenities close to me:

While the site isn’t perfect, it’s fun to see, and is very useful if you are researching a move.

By the way, the meeting I attended was about The Beltline:

OK, if you aren’t from Atlanta, you might not care about this. However, The Beltline is a huge urban planning project (thought up by a grad student for his thesis) that involves new development, land use, transportation,re-configuring roads and traffic patterns, historic preservation, new park space and greenspace, hopefully cleansing runoff, daylighting creeks, public art, et alia, and involves planning development at a very large scale for the next 30-50 years. Last night I attended a meeting about The Beltline and its effect on my neighborhood, which borders Olmsted’s Piedmont Park. Like most cities that did most of their growing after the invention of the car, Atlanta is a very car-dependent, pedestrian and bicycle-unfriendly city, and the Beltline is a loop that will connect MARTA to a new transit loop connecting many of the intown neighborhoods. Along with the development will be new connecting streets to alleviate traffic and potentially some traffic circles. I shudder at the thought of Atlanta drivers trying to navigate a rotary, as this city is truly full of the worst drivers I’ve ever seen this side of the D.C. Beltway.

The following image is from a pre-first draft conceptual plan they (EDAW) are calling “Concept A”:

One thing I’d forgotten about from my grad school days and planning board job is that urban planners talk in a bunch of acronyms. I’d also forgotten about the fugly magic-marker images they come up with, and in spite of the simplicity of their designs, no one could tell the difference between the shades of purple on this thing, which was the difference between 9 story buildings and mile-high buildings, which caused quite a ruckus. One really scary thing about The Beltline, which is supposed to be surrounded by parkland and bike paths, is that one legal option at the moment is to sell off the land for single-family homes (the red line and yellow line along The Beltline represent a new road and single family homes along Piedmont Park). Considering some of the vultures that have been trying to profit from this project already, a lot of the possiblities are scary and I can see what a tough job the color-challenged planners have in front of them.

In a city with such severe water problems, one can only hope all of this development, which has a goal of creating at least 15 dwelling units per acre (supposedly, this is the ideal transit-friendly figure), will provide some solutions instead of making the problem worse. I haven’t heard this issue addressed much in regards to the potential of The Beltline land. Kathy Poole was a huge influence on me, and I would feel much better if she had a voice in this project.

I just noticed this over at Urban Flea, who noticed it over at Home Rejuvenation. IKEA has moved into Monorail interiors; this one is the Kobe Portliner . I haven’t seen this much effort go into public transportation since Campbell Scott’s character in Singles campaigned for his SUPERTRAIN (“if you give them great coffee, and great music..I don’t know, people really love their cars.”).
 
Before that, it was probably Eero designing his new and exciting “moving waiting rooms” at Dulles. Although the interior design was sharp, they are actually shoeboxes on wheels that provide a bumpy stuffy ride over to the terminals. Saarinen or not, give me a people mover any day. Better yet, make me walk off my Biscoff cookie.Sadly, can you imagine how badly destroyed the interior above would be after one week in most U.S. cities? It would be tagged, burned, covered in lugees, etc.