Design Public

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.

I am almost as obsessed with fashion magazines as I am with home magazines (it used to be the other way around). The delivery of the huge W every month is always exciting and this month it is incredible. I am so glad to see that some people are working hard to make sure the rest of us do not forget that New Orleans is still in dire straits. The April issue of W has an amazing 60-page spread of New Orleans shot by Bruce Weber. Since shotgun houses have been on my mind this week (and I’ll be sharing some more about some other shotgun houses next week), I thought I’d share this image with you today. So many houses like this one were lost in Katrina. Let’s make sure they are not erased.

To learn more about how to help rebuild the 9th Ward, check out The Make It Right Foundation. This is a really cool project that deserves its own blog post, so I’ll tell you a little more about it next week. Explore the site - the pink project (the color is so very Christo) and the tour of the affordable housing is very cool and inspiring.

Also, on a disaster-related note, for those of you in the Atlanta area who would like to help out with the tornado recovery in Cabbagetown this weekend, click here for more information.

photos by Bruce Weber for W magazine

Sheeeeeeee-yit! I am so happy to report that the best show on television starts up again tomorrow night - the final season of “The Wire” airs on HBO at 9 p.m. EST. Of course, I’ve cheated and watched it on On Demand twice already. I love to try and hold out for the Sunday night time and get my dose when I should, but I could not sit at home for a week with a cold, when all the other shows on TV seemed to involve Tila Tequila, people losing weight, or reruns about sex crime forensics, and NOT watch the first episode of “The Wire.” I mean, I’ve been re-upping on all of the other seasons and interviews for months now in preparation for this episode!

My favorite scene had to be the Xerox scene, though usually the drug dealers and little hoppers are MUCH smarter than that. Did you notice that the latest package is being branded as “Greenhouse Gas?” A few years ago, it was “WMD.” They keep up with the times. I can’t believe how the show (more…)

Ahh, a place where the green trend is not getting on my nerves in terms of its trendiness and actually is effecting change*:  Chicago is greening its alleys. This is the type of move I would expect from a landscape architecture studio student thesis, perhaps completed in Portland Oregon, or somewhere deep in Vermont. Yippee, these forward-thinking ideas are moving west!

Chicago is chock-full of non-permeable alleys, a major source of non-point-source pollution, and they are in the midst of changing that. In today’s New York Times, there was a fantastic article all about it - check it out here. As I am sure I won’t be able to stop myself from boring you with Atlanta drought stories in the upcoming weeks, I promise to send a copy of this to Mayor Shirley Franklin and Governor Sonny Perdue. While Mr. Perdue seeks to hoard water away from other states within the watershed in court case water wars and make a big show of praying for rain, let’s see if he actually will try to do something about our situation like Chicago is doing.

*I have nothing against the green movement, but the way I feel about it was summed up perfectly in 30 Rock’s NBC Green Week episode that featured David Schwimmer as Greenzo. It’s starting to get like the grunge trend; sometime after the movie Singles was released, Blaine Trump started showing up at fundraisers in haute couture wool and flannel, and soon after the trend went away while glamour made a big return. I don’t want the trendiness of the green movement to reach the tipping point and cause the backlash return of hedonistic wastefulness.

photo by Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

OK, trying to relate this to a design blog is a stretch (Piedmont Park is an awesome F.L.O. Sr.-designed park in the middle of midtown Atlanta - it even has a Noguchi playground in it), but I received the following police report from my safety-conscious neighbor and I had to share it with SOMEONE - it just gets more and more bizarre with each paragraph, especially paragraph three. I’m off to rent “Paris is Burning” and forward this to Creative Loafing…

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In 11th grade I had a history teacher named Mr. LeClerc who was a self-proclaimed architecture buff. When he taught us about Levittown, he played this goofy folk song about ticky tacky boxes. It’s such a perfect theme song for Showtime’s Weeds. Since season two, different bands have submitted their own versions of the song to Weeds so that it changes every week (the original was recorded by Malvina Reynolds in 1962). Over at Showtime’s website, you can listen to a bunch of the versions - the musicians range from Elvis Costello to Death Cab for Cutie.

Season three will include versions from Linkin Park,  the Silversun Pickups, Randy Newman, the Shins and even Billy Bob Thorton!

“Little Boxes” was a commentary on suburban sprawl.  I wonder what today’s version of the lyrics would be, since they little boxes have been torn down and replaced by  McMansions and Poltergeist neighborhoods.

Levittown photo from tigger.uic.edu 

I was just looking through one of my favorite blogs, Archidose (a great spot to get a daily dose of architecture), which turned me onto another amazing website. As a huge fan of Great Streets (one of my favorite tomes and a bible for any urban planner/landscape architect), I was so excited archidose found and shared StreetSections.com. Sometimes designers/planners tend to get lost in plan view and forget about the most important view, the section. I can’t tell you how many planning board meetings I suffered through where shady developers NEVER showed the 9′ high septic system or the 50′ retaining wall in section. It seemed so innocuous to the untrained eye as a big green spot/narrow stone sliver in plan - when represented in section with a scale figure next to it one can see how awful the design was. (more…)

I have been meaning to write about this great project for quite some time, and just remembered when I was browsing Walter Hood’s website. It was a timely reminder, as the next round of installations starts on March 17. In an effort to preserve existing row house architecture, give artists projects to present to the public, and support single mothers, the Houston Project Row House sprung up.

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Has anyone out there had a chance to catch a ride on the new Aerial Tram in Portland Oregon? Portland, which is always on the cutting edge of responsible urban planning, has built the second commuter tram in the country to connect OHSU’s hilltop campus to its new development along the Willamette river. According to the NYTimes, the jury is still out on whether it was a stroke of genius or a folly. As with most projects like this one, it came in at about four times the original projected budget, and the fares are much higher than in original plans. It sure looks spectacular to me, I think I’d enjoy the ride if I could get Roosevelt Island Tramway breakdown paranoid thoughts out of my head.
Further description from PortlandAerialTram.com: (more…)

Really, is there anything better than Sunday brunch complete with Bloody Mary’s with Absolut Peppar and The New York Times Magazine?  Is there a better issue than the annual Year in Ideas?  I love it. I thought I’d share some of the ones I found interesting.  I’d also like to hear which ones you liked.

1) Creative Shrinkage    The example, as you may have seen in Metropolis earlier this year, is Youngstown Ohio.  Youngstown’s population boomed at 170,000 back when the Rust Belt was in full industrial swing, and after a long decine in industry and population, it is now trying to transform itself to a prosperous town of 80,000.  It is a very interesting model and I want to see how it all shakes out.  The idea that it could "become a culturally rich bedroom community serving Cleveland and Pittsburgh, both of which are 70 miles away" seems a bit irresponsible and unrealistic to me unless some sort of effective and efficient public transportation is put in place.

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