AndrewBlum.net

The Big Apple Store (Metropolis)

New York tourism gets a 21st-century interface. (link)

(Photo Albert Vecerka/Esto/courtesy NYC & Co)

The challenge of being a tourist is getting a map of the city inside your head. This is easier in New York than in most places—thanks to the grid—but in January it became easier still, at least for visitors to the city’s new official tourist office, in a storefront at the northern edge of Times Square. This isn’t Ye Olde New-York visitors’ center, filled with pictures of smiling hot-dog vendors, yellow cabs, and fake street signs. Rather, it’s a place for postmillennial digital New York, where everyone’s on the phone and the mayor’s an information tycoon.

Resembling an Apple Store that has run out of iPods, the room is empty except for five billiard-size tables and the underlit supergraphic i’s—for “information”—that float above them. The glow makes their message clear: step inside the network here. On some of the tables, touch-screen Google Maps displays offer listings selected by an in-house editorial team. The idea, says Jake Barton, whose media-design firm, Local Projects, cocreated the visitors’ center, is to deliver digital information in a way that reflects the act of walk ing around town. “It’s all about the actual experience of being in the city itself, but collapsed into this interface,” Barton explains. “It’s all space based.”

Visitors start by placing a cardboard puck in the middle of one of the electronic tables. Then they create their own itineraries by zooming in and out on the map, and send themselves the results via e-mail or text message. Black-clad reps stand by, ready to help. Guests can also carry their pucks to the back of the space and set them on one of two white pedestals, which cue either a printout, or a Google Earth fly-through projected on a video wall, of their soon-to-be-real journeys. It’s a polished combination of familiar technologies—touch-screen table, clickable map—but the bells and whistles matter less than the sense of geography. The tables lay out the electronic maps horizontally (like the city) and allow groups to gather around them. And the tactility of the puck makes plotting a course in this virtual city somewhat physical—a little more like navigating concrete streets.

Local Projects collaborated on the 2,000-square-foot, $1.8 million project with WXY Architecture + Urban Design, which is known for small parks and public buildings in New York—important because the information center has to act more like a public space than a store. “We needed to brand this as a space for information, versus a space where you either waited for something or bought things,” says Claire Weisz, the W in WXY. “We wanted a level of abstraction.” The point wasn’t simply to banish the kitsch but to keep people moving. However engaging the space or its technology, the visitors’ center never forgets that it’s designed to send tourists back out into the real city.

Redesigning the Sky (Wired)

Nearly all US flight delays can be traced to the snarl of jets over New York City. How do you squeeze more efficiency out of an archaic air traffic control system? Redesign the sky. (link) (photo by Jeffrey Milstein)

Inbound JFK. The turns start while you're still in the clouds. Engines howling, flaps down, the plane lurches and dives, jerky as a taxi in Midtown. Seatback upright and tray table locked, you're oblivious to the crowded flight paths around you. But the air above New York City is mapped: a dense and nuanced geography nearly as complicated as the city below.

More than 2 million flights pass over the city every year, most traveling to and from the metropolitan area's three busiest airports: John F. Kennedy, Newark, and LaGuardia. And all that traffic squeezes through a network of aerial routes first laid out for the mail planes of the 1920s. Aircraft are tracked by antiquated, ground-based radar and guided by verbal instructions issued over simplex radios, technology that predates the pocket calculator. The system is extremely safe—no commercial flight has been in a midair collision over the US in 22 years—but, because the Federal Aviation Administration treats each plane as if it were a 2,000-foot-tall, 6- by 6-mile block lumbering through the troposphere, New York is running out of air.

This is a nightmare for New York travelers; delays affect about a third of the area's flights. The problem also ripples out to create a bigger logjam: Because so many aircraft pass through New York's airspace, three-quarters of all holdups nationwide can be traced back to that tangled swath of East Coast sky.

Six years ago, Congress green-lit a plan to solve this problem. The Century of Aviation Reauthorization Act calls for a new system, dubbed NextGen, that uses GPS to create a sort of real-time social network in the skies. In theory, it should give pilots the data they need to route themselves—minus the huge safety cushions.

But NextGen needs some serious hardware: roughly $300,000 in new avionics equipment for every cockpit. That's a lot of peanuts for the struggling airlines. Add to the tab nearly 800 new federally funded ground stations to relay each plane's location and trajectory to every other plane in the sky and—by the time NextGen finally launches in 2025—the price tag could reach $42 billion. In the meantime, the New York-area skies have seen a huge traffic bump over the past two decades—including a 48 percent increase between 1994 and 2004. So the FAA has set out to coax new efficiency from old technology.

To help reorganize this airspace, the FAA called on Mitre, a Beltway R&D firm that works exclusively for the government. Mitre's scientists and mathematicians, in cooperation with some of the region's air traffic controllers, are completely rethinking the flow of aircraft in and out of New York City. Current flight patterns evolved like a rabbit warren, with additions tacked on to an existing architecture. As airports grew busier and airplanes started flying higher and faster, that architecture became increasingly inefficient. The plan, the unfortunately named New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan Area Airspace Redesign, aims to bring order to the air.

Infrastructure: Tracking the Future (Metropolis Mag)

On the eve of Barack Obama’s New New Deal, a series of compelling photographs illustrates the divide between repair and renewal, despair and hope. (link)

As a young man, Timo Stammberger would travel Berlin’s subways—on foot—tagging the tunnel walls. “My personal engagement was through graffiti,” the 28-year-old says. He has since changed his medium. Rather than marking the walls with his own presence, he uses a six-by-seven-inch analog camera to capture the specificity of what’s already there. His interest is taxonomic: he is fascinated by the way Stockholm’s deep Tunnelbana is rough-hewn, nearly rustic, while the newer U-Bahn, built in the 1970s in Dortmund, Germany, is regimented and rectilinear; or how the Metropolitano, in Lisbon, Portugal, is capped with barrel vaults, as if the engineers couldn’t help but add a bit of grace, while his home city of Berlin—a place always defined by layers of history—has a varied underground landscape, some¬times neoclassical, sometimes drably functional. “These tunnels are used by so many people every day and are a big part of the infrastructure,” Stammberger says. “But nobody sees them. Their perception is limited. I try to reveal the unseen.”

But if Stammberger’s starting point is discovery, the photographs that result share another quality: a happy-sad mix of civic aspiration and the inevitable decay that follows. Precisely placed lights wash a dirty white wall. An elegant S-curve ends in the entropy of rocks and trash. His images don’t fetishize infrastructure but instead reveal its hard truths: The city begins crumbling as soon as it has been constructed. Beneath every new project lies the rubble of another.

In the United States today, that’s an important insight. Infrastructure is being revealed, in the sense that it’s attracting more attention than it has in decades. But that attention is divided between repair and renewal, despair and hope. The recent I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis put a catastrophic face on what engineers had been warning for years: our roads and bridges are rotting faster than they can be repaired. Worse, that acknowledgement comes at a moment when repair isn’t enough. As far below baseline as the schools, trains, planes, and power grids have fallen, the baseline itself is rising. Reducing the out¬put of greenhouse gases necessary to reverse global climate change requires building a new transportation and power system, retrofitting buildings, and re-thinking industrial agriculture. Maintaining our existing infrastructure is a totally insufficient task. We need a new infrastructure.

In Praise of Slowness (Urban Omnibus)

Thoughts on Writing About the Future of the City (UrbanOmnibus.net)

“To bring New York down to date, a man would have to be published with the speed of light – and not even Harper is that quick.” – E. B. White

In 2005, the corner of Plaza Street and Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn was a weedy parking lot for Union Temple, the oldest congregation in the borough. As of this writing, in the first days of 2009, there’s a smooth gray sidewalk, a few freshly planted saplings, and a 15-story, 102-unit glass condominium building, designed by the architect Richard Meier, being busily punch-listed for its first occupants.

Does that change – this particular building and rebuilding of the city – seem fast or slow? It’s a question I find myself asking twice most mornings: first, while walking by that construction site on my way to Prospect Park, and then again an hour or so later, sitting down at my computer to write, as a journalist, about buildings and the city. What strikes me is how different the question seems in each context – how sharp the disconnect is between the immediacy required of journalism and the sheer evolutionary slowness of the city itself.

This is not a new concern of architecture journalists, but it is one more often put in spatial rather than temporal terms. Do we write about figure or ground, the building itself or the building in context? Maybe it’s the prospect of a few years of stillness, but I’ve recently been thinking more about time. And what’s obvious is that the city is slow, and we write too fast.

James Corner: The Long View (Metropolis)

By embracing the city’s industrial past—reclaiming landfills, remediating brownfields, developing neglected waterfronts—James Corner has helped reinvent the field of landscape architecture. (MetropolisMag.com)

(photo by Alessandra Petlin)

As a 20-year-old intern in the London office of Richard Rogers, James Corner could barely contain his frustration. It was the early 1980s, and they were working on the first pieces of the transformation of the London docklands from derelict industrial port to stylish commercial district. But at that scale, on so complex a site, Corner saw only limitations. “All the architects knew how to do was put awnings on existing buildings,” he recalls. “All the landscape architects knew how to do was put trees everywhere. And all the traffic engineer knew how to do was to optimize getting cars in and out of the development.” Over pints at the pub, Rogers and his partners “would complain that they didn’t have the conceptual or imaginative tools or techniques to do the whole thing synthetically.” Corner, who grew up outside of Manchester, left soon afterward to study at the University of Pennsylvania—where he is now head of the landscape-architecture department—but he never let go of the lesson: “There is a desperate need for a different kind of professional who isn’t so Balkan ized, who is capable of seeing a bigger picture and choreographing a bigger team.”

Corner has spent the last 25 years becoming that guy in a deliberate attempt to reinvent the field of landscape architecture by pushing aside its second-fiddle status and antiurban tendencies and claiming a more ambitious agenda: to design the postindustrial city. Rather than wielding bushes and trees—the proverbial parsley around the roast of proper architecture—landscape architects are, as Corner sees it, the best prepared to tackle the complex, large-scale, often environmentally damaged sites that have become the hallmark of urban regeneration. He approaches them with the intellectual assurance of a philosopher and the political bravado of a pow er broker. “I don’t want to be embarrassed to be a landscape architect because we’re thought of as tree people who come in at the end of the day,” he says.

Planning Rwanda (Metropolis)

Thirteen years after the genocide, the tiny African nation begins imagining its future. (link)
Just before nine one morning in May, I arrived at the Alpha Palace Hotel, not far from the center of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. A team of American architects waited nervously outside, dressed in blue suits and holding battered travel tubes of drawings. In them was the conceptual master plan for the future of Kigali: a sweeping vision to turn today’s red-dirt ad-hoc city into a verdant capital with tree-lined boulevards, mixed-use neighborhoods, a new university, parks, and a network of wetlands to mitigate storm-water runoff. OZ Architecture, from Denver, along with EDAW, a landscape-architecture and urban-planning firm, had been quietly working on the scheme for three years. This morning, 13 years after Rwanda’s genocide, they would present it to an audience of local planning officials, foreign consultants, and politicians. I had come to watch, to see what American-style urban planning looked like in Rwanda, and what it could possibly do to help transform a place of poverty and struggle into one of prosperity and peace.

Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change

Originally published in the book "Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," coinciding with the exhibition "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," at the Municipal Art Society, September 25th 2007 - January 5th 2008.

My block in Brooklyn plays a good Hudson Street—at least at first glance. Each morning, the cigar-store owner throws open his gate, the barber puts out his chairs, the baker begins her muffins, and the old man a few doors down takes up his surveillance from the second-floor window. When I make my own first entrance a little after seven, with the dog, the newspaperman calls me “boss.” It may all look like Jane Jacobs’s glorious sidewalk ballet, but this is no longer Jane Jacobs’s city.

When I “look, listen, linger and think” about my corner of the world, I am persistently confronted with the broader world beyond. The barbershop chatter is in Creole, the cigar store might be closed for the end of Ramadan, and the cyclical chanting of capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, echoes from an upstairs dance studio. Planes pass overhead on their way to La Guardia. And at all hours people pause at the top of the subway stairs to finish their cell-phone conversations.

This last activity is remarkably dominant and has come to define the character of the place. They lean against the station railing three or four at a time, talking with one hand to an ear and their heads cocked high. Like a lot of things here, they are deeply connected to other places. Their attention is divided. And, by extension, so is ours. While this feeling is common to all cities over time, cell phones bring the tangible immediacy of the faraway to the street. Helped along by media and the global logistics networks that define our material lives, our moment-to-moment experience of the local has become increasingly global. And so have our problems.

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism. Thanks in great part to Jacobs, we talk a lot about preserving neighborhoods, which most often means keeping them the way they are. But for me, preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires recognizing the global community behind it—for better or worse, in the face of both nostalgia and change.

San Francisco Federal Building (AIASF podcast)

San Francisco Federal Building from AIA San Francisco on Vimeo.

Produced for the exhibition STREET CRED San Francisco: Architecture and the Pedestrian Experience, this podcast features architect Thom Mayne, principal of the Los Angles-based firm Morphosis and designer of the new San Francisco Federal Building, in conversation with Andrew Blum, a Brooklyn-based writer and contributing editor at Metropolis and Wired magazines. Mayne discusses the social implications of his most recently built project—both in terms of how it serves federal employees and the public. Produced and edited by Melanie McGraw, with photography by Keith Baker, Tim Griffith, and an introduction by exhibition co-curator Julie Kim. (link)

The Big Pixel (Print Magazine)

The future of "mediatecture" (link)

In his 2001 book, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, architect James Sanders describes the relationship between the city and iconic films like Annie Hall and Miracle on 34th Street. Recently, though, as he discussed at a recent event in New York, Sanders has been thinking a lot about Shark Tale. True, it’s a movie about talking fish, but Sanders sees in it a compelling vision of a city of the future, in which the lines between real events and their video representation become blurred. In one scene, TV newscaster “Katie Current” reports live on a battle against a villainous shark. At the climactic moment, the shark smashes into an outdoor video screen—which turns out to be the very screen we’ve been watching Katie on, in the center of Times Square. In an explosion of flashbulbs and falling fish, we are confronted with what Sanders sees as the coming urban reality: a city that is simultaneously itself and its media representation.

Illuminated signs in public spaces have been around for a century, but recent advances in LED and projection technology are bringing us closer to truly transforming buildings into video screens. Boosters of this phenomenon call it “mediatecture.” For advertisers, it’s obviously irresistible; for the rest of us walking around the city, it could be either terrifying or thrilling. What’s clear is that the final effect depends enormously on designers and their ability to wrangle a larger canvas than ever before. We’ve arrived at a strange time when many designers must scramble to create good solutions for tiny cell-phone screens and, at the same time, devise the best approach for a quarter-acre of pixels.

Since the Sony JumboTron debuted at the 1985 world’s fair in Japan, enormous public video screens have become a familiar sight. But LED technology, with its lower operating temperatures, eliminates the need for big cooling mechanisms to be built behind the screen. The tipping-point products in this more streamlined genre have been developed by ag4, a German architecture and media design company, in partnership with GKD Metal Fabrics (which produces woven metal fabrics for interiors and exteriors). Mediamesh and Illumesh embed LEDs, along with all power and control cabling, into a structural metal mesh resembling an elegant security grate. The electronics are sleek enough to be transparent, so the screen can be used on a full facade without blocking daylight in or views out. For the same reason, it doesn’t look like a blank black wall when turned off. This doesn’t come cheap—prices hover around $200 per square foot—but that hasn’t prevented installation on a handful of buildings in Europe (including projects for Adidas and the 2006 Cannes Film Festival) and, soon, outside shopping malls in California.

The Dream Life of Toronto

(Originally published in ROM, the magazine of the Royal Ontario Museum)

Places may seem like physical things, but they come to life only when imbued with meaning and memories. And that’s what thrills me about the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the ROM: more than just a museum of objects, it seems destined to become the leading repository of the dream life of Toronto. And not a moment too soon.

In 2001, not long before the ROM began its expansion project, I moved to Canada from New York—for love, and  to study human geography at the University of Toronto. My academic focus was “sense of place,” which I soon found to be a very complicated thing. In the old formulation, a sense of place was most closely identified with traditional villages, where people share a history and build that history into the landscape with their homes and monuments. But my new city was proving itself to be a different kind of place altogether—seemingly bent on reinventing the idea of cosmopolitanism.

As an American in Canada during those charged months after September 11, I felt this personally, as I faced what it meant to be a global citizen of a changed world. And I watched as the city faced it physically, as this current crop of architecturally ambitious public buildings, helped along by the Ontario SuperBuild Fund, brought that old question back to the fore about Toronto as a “world city.” With the release in the newspapers of each new set of architect’s renderings—wild squiggles and flying tabletops—the questions became clearer and the arguments in the press and at the dog park more tense: What is Toronto’s place in the world? What should the city become? And what does that have to do with architecture?