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Roman & Williams (Metropolis Mag)

Anachronistic tastes land Roman & Williams two of New York’s hottest hotels—and a quiet, little brick apartment building that looks like it might be more than a century old. (MetropolisMag.com)

On a cool, damp morning in New York, Roman & Williams—the noms de guerre of the husband-and-wife designers Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer—stand on a Nolita street corner looking up at a brand-new building of their own creation. With wood-framed, double-hung windows, intricately detailed brickwork, and the careful proportions of a Park Avenue manse, it seems to be a perfect replica of a time that has never existed. “Memory is important to us,” Standefer says, her hair in a tight bun, wearing a delicately ruffled black peasant blouse. Beside her, Alesch’s keys poke through the pocket of his thickly cabled sweater. With their stalwart building proudly be-hind them, they resemble the better-looking city relatives of the farm couple in American Gothic, the Grant Wood painting. Standefer grips a Black­Berry in place of a pitchfork, but the intense presence, the sturdiness, is the same.

We are living in quieter times. If the design pendulum is swinging back from its glittery mid-decade sheen, then Roman & Williams have caught it at its lowest point, closest to the ground, which is where the firm lies: in the world of found objects and craftsmen, in the thick line weights of Alesch’s charcoal drawings and the dirt of Standefer’s Montauk garden. Their spaces are an argument against flimsiness. “It makes me deeply unhappy to see Modernism falling apart,” Alesch says. “It feels like a broken dream or something. I’ve avoided it my whole life. There’s nothing more tragic to me than broken cutting-edge things.”

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.

Surreal Estate (Wired)

Turning a Manhattan Apartment Into a Puzzle Palace (link)
The first hint that something was up came in a letter stamped "Lost Post". It was addressed to the family of six who had recently moved into the sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment—and was apparently written by a former occupant who had died decades earlier. Inside the envelope was a poem full of riddles, the solutions to which were all around them: The home was filled with puzzles that had been covertly installed during an extensive renovation.

The letter led the family down a rabbit hole of hidden keys, secret compartments, and glowing boxes. Today, more than three years after they settled into their magic kingdom, they still haven't solved everything—even with the book of clues that architectural designer Eric Clough planted in a wall to guide them.

The elaborate project started with a casual aside. "Can we do something for the kids?" Clough asked his client, the CEO of a private equity firm, when he began work on the $1 million-plus job. Nothing complicated at first, just a few hidden lines of verse. But soon the carpenters were carving ciphers into radiator covers and adding secret compartments to the credenza. "I kept sneaking back into the apartment and hiding a few more clues," Clough says.

Even after the family decodes the last brainteaser, the game won't really be over: Someday the special keys for the secret compartments will be lost. The veneer will begin to warp. Someone new will move in, and they'll be enthralled by the enigmas around them. "Then," Clough says, "they'll find these clues in the archives of Wired."

WNYC Cityscapes: The Lifecycle of Streetscapes

Photo by Flickr user Stephen Harlow

Cityscapes has explored shifts in the skyline, new glass condos, and a major park. But the most meaningful pieces of the cityscape are often the spaces between buildings—the tiny details, from fire plugs to streetlights, that give New York its character.

I’m in Toronto right now for the holidays, and while this city often stands in for New York in the movies, the differences in their streetscapes are dramatic, if still subtle. In Toronto, the street signs are white (not green). The taxis aren’t yellow. The buses are red. The streetlights are a lot clunkier than our elegant and iconic NYC “cobra heads.” (I’m serious—this stuff matters.) And most glaring of all (but still easy to miss), in many parts of Toronto the power and telephone lines run above ground, which you almost never see in New York. These details add up to as distinct an experience of a cityscape as any number of new condos or museums.

They last longer than a single building and are more difficult to change—which struck me during Brian Lehrer’s show yesterday, when Paul Goldberger and Stephen Cassell were talking about the “life cycle” of buildings. The “greenness” of a building is determined not only by its energy usage on a day-to-day basis, but also by the energy required to construct it—by how the materials were made and how far they had to travel. As Paul pointed out, “The National Trust for Historic Preservation likes to say that the greenest building of all is the old one that you preserve.” We’re good at this in New York, turning industrial buildings into lofts and offices, office buildings into condos, or mansions into schools.

The life cycle of the streetscape is nearly as long. (Look at old movies for proof.) Which makes it even more surprising how dramatically the streetscape changed during the last boom—as part of a concerted effort by the Bloomberg administration. There are the big moves, like Broadway Boulevard, the Department of Transportation's plan to turn parts of Broadway into pedestrian plazas. But there are also thousands of smaller changes, like new bike lanes marked by green paint, planted traffic medians, and sidewalks widened to take back a full lane of traffic. These were design projects, as intentional as any new museum—and in many ways more enlightened. Their bible is the fascinating “High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines,” published in 2005 by the city’s Department of Design and Construction, in partnership with the non-profit Design Trust for Public Spaces. It provides a pattern book for everything from the permeability of pavement to the position of fire hydrants. It’s an anatomy lesson of the city’s streets.

Next Wednesday on the Brian Lehrer show, Michael van Valkenburgh will talk about his grand design for the 76 acres of Brooklyn Bridge Park, and also those little things that make up the feel of a street—like his firm’s work on the renovation of the Union Square farmer’s market, where they just finished laying the new paving last week.

In the meantime, architect Hugh Hardy trains his video camera on some favorite overlooked details of the cityscape.

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.

How-to Pack an SLR Into a Pocket Cam (Wired)

The best digital cameras are always the biggest. Squeezing in all the good stuff—light sensors and top-quality optics—inevitably results in some bulk. But lugging around a professional-caliber digital single-lens reflex is like pocketing a cantaloupe. The engineers at high-end camera maker Sigma were determined to shrink it all down to something more totable. It wasn't an easy task. Most pocketcams use a light sensor the size of a dime. Sigma chose a chip the size of a Wheat Thin: the same 14-megapixel Foveon the company puts in its top-shelf professional models. Getting enough light onto it would entail a correspondingly bigger lens, and keeping it cool would require plenty of room inside for air circulation. Or at least that's what everyone used to believe. It took Sigma two years to completely rethink the basics of camera design, but with the DP1 the engineers finally crammed the Foveon into a pocketable package. Here's how. (link)

1 // Heat
The DP1's densely packed innards generate a lot of heat, which can degrade the image. To compensate, engineers turned the entire front of the camera body into a metal heat sink.
2 // Lens
The DP1's optical protrusion may look telephoto, but this camera has no zoom. The lens, which extends outward when you power up, has the highly focused task of producing an image circle large enough to bathe the 13.8 x 20.7-mm Foveon chip in light.
3 // Focus
The six pieces of glass that make up the lens must be constantly shifted and adjusted to bring your image into focus. To keep the camera compact, Sigma sourced the smallest mechanical parts available and developed an internal focusing system that moves elements within the lens rather than the barrel itself.
4 // Processing
The Foveon draws more power than your average point-and-shoot, but without the benefit of a big DSLR battery. To save juice, Sigma reduced onboard processing, so the image comes out extremely raw. Pros call it pure.

Intel Cash Register Knows Who You Are, What You Want (Wired)

(Wired.com)

Asking the question: “Do you know who I am?” is not likely to score you any points at the store, even in these trying economic times. But Intel wants to change that with a proof of concept cash register that knows not only who you are, but also what you want. The prototype till, to be unveiled Monday at the National Retail Federation show in New York, aims to bring Amazon-style recommendations to the meatspace market.

Though Intel conceived of the machine, it’s not getting into the point of sale business. This prototype won’t go into production. Instead, it is meant to highlight a new direction for retail terminals — made possible (naturally) by the chipmaker’s newest processors. “We wanted to show the future,” says Ryan Parker, of Intel’s Embedded Computing Division. “And people don’t like looking at motherboards.”

Impossibly Starck (Wired)

(link) Philippe Starck's latest creation -- a plastic chair -- earned its name on the first sketch: Mr. Impossible. The French designer said it simply couldn't be made. The challenge? The weld. Polycarbonate chairs are typically formed using a single mold, but Starck's translucent design required two: one for the legs, one for the seat. Fusing the parts using existing methods would mean an unsightly seam, so the engineers at Italian furniture maker Kartell had to forge a new technique. The key was a very big laser. Trained at specially formulated polycarbonate, it left a seam smooth enough to create the illusion Starck had imagined: a chair that appears to levitate. We reached across the ether to elicit the designer's thoughts. Like Starck's design, our conversation seemed to float on air.

Wired: What was the inspiration for Mr. Impossible?

Starck: The speed of evolution of our civilization and the dematerialization that rules all our production. Take the computer: It was the size of a room, then a briefcase. Now it's a credit card. You cannot dematerialize a chair completely, because you must continue to sit on it. But you can make it invisible. That's why I made the Mr. Impossible with a double shell — it's basically made of air.

Wired: Recently, you have begun to look at the environmental impact of your designs. How does a plastic chair fit in?

Starck: The stupidity of the ecological movement is that people kill trees for wood. It's ridiculous. The best ecological strategy is to make products of a very high creative quality, so you can keep them for three generations. I prefer to make a very good chair in the best polycarbonate than make any shit in wood that will be in the trash one year later.

Wired: Why not use recycled plastic?

Starck: It's a little joke of a material. You can do almost nothing with it. And I also refuse bioplastic, which comes from something that people can eat. Scientists agree that we have a real food problem, a famine approaching. It's a crime against humanity to take something you can eat and make a chair — or use it as gas for your SUV.

Wired: How do you reconcile those principles with your position as creative director for Virgin Galactic?

Starck: Every project should fit the big image of evolution. You can consider Virgin Galactic as something only for rich people, but you can also analyze the incredible help that it will give us. The exploration of space is a vital part of our evolution. We don't have any future if we don't go into space. This world will explode in 4 billion years. We have time, but not so much.

Heaven for Hells Angels (Wired)

(link) The Harley-Davidson is more than a two-wheeled miscreant-hauler; it's one of America's most important indigenous technologies. The 45-degree V-twin engine has remained remarkably unchanged since it was introduced in 1909. Now the Harley has its own museum, which opened on July 12 in Milwaukee, the bike's birthplace. Inside the steel-framed compound, you'll find plenty of antique bikes and memorabilia, including the original outlaw: Serial Number One. There's also a "family tree" that shows how engineers modernized the distinctive two-cylinder engine without sacrificing its signature raw rumble.

But confining all that heavy metal thunder indoors would be sacrilege. So Pentagram, the chief design firm on the project, turned 20 acres of industrial land into hog heaven: The three buildings containing galleries, archives, and the obligatory store are arranged around an intersection of 60-foot-wide roads — broad enough for four rows of parking and two traffic lanes, just like at Sturgis — creating an ever-changing exhibit of visitors' bikes. "It's important to have a real museum," Pentagram architect James Biber says, "but also to have a kind of museum on the street." There's car parking as well, but the lots are a bit of a hike from the entrance; this is one stretch of pavement where motorcycles always have the right of way.

Work With Me (Print Mag)

A look at new technology that could change your desk-jockey ways (PrintMag.com)

In February 2006, a New York University research scientist named Jeff Han took the stage at TED, the big-ideas conference in Monterey, California. Standing behind a sort of glass easel, wearing a black turtleneck and jeans, he could barely contain his excitement. “I really, really think this is going to really change the way we interact with machines from this point on,” he said. As he began to demo his new “multitouch” screen—resizing photographs with a pinch, pawing across digital maps, and tossing documents around like playing cards—the audience gasped in delight. Hyperbole aside, Han was right. After two decades of pointing and clicking, here was the possibility of interacting directly with our data. With the sweep of a hand, he had softened the hard line between the physical and virtual worlds—the line that keeps most of us glued to a keyboard and a mouse day in and day out.

The next part of the story you already know. Last January, another man in a black turtleneck and jeans stood up in front of a bigger audience and announced the iPhone. A few months after that, you could buy one (more than four million of us have) and a new interface settled into everyday life. But we still only use it at a small scale, even if it’s obvious that the Han-style interface would “really really” change the way we work.