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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.”

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.

Hard Focus (Print Mag)

Digital technology is transforming photojournalism in hot spots around the world. (link) (photo by Riccardo Gangale)

What does conflict look like? Some people are fortunate enough to know only from the photographs they see in newspapers and on the web. But between the moment a picture is taken and its appearance on our computer screen or in our morning paper there exists a technologically remarkable chain of communication. Gone are the days when photojournalists lugged a chunky Rolleiflex TLR into the field and sent film home on planes. Digital technology has streamlined the process—while adding a few of its own complications. To find out more about how technology is changing photojournalism, I tracked down a few of the conflict photographers who travel around the world from hot spot to hot spot, snapping images and sending them back to their editors at home.

Bird Bath (Wired)

Sure, a Jet's Wings Need Scrubbing, But Its Guts Need a Flush, Too (link)

Philip Joshua eases his chrome-rimmed Ford crew cab into mid-morning traffic on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, keeping pace with a taxiing passenger jet. It doesn't take much. We're moving 5 miles per hour, if that, slowing even more for bumps on account of the 40 gallons of hot water in the trailer behind us. Also in tow is a 24-kilowatt generator and a mysterious black cart that could pass for a stadium speaker. Evidently, this setup is Pratt & Whitney's EcoPower Engine Wash rig, and we're on our way to bathe the business ends of a 767.

Air Travel Innovations (Travel & Leisure)

Breakthrough planes from Boeing and Airbus, fresh approaches to cabin design, and new services on the ground aim to change air travel for the better. (link)

Each step is familiar and unpleasant. I am getting on a plane from New York to Seattle to visit the mock-up of the new 787 Dreamliner, which Boeing promises will herald a more comfortable era of air travel. But since the Dreamliner won’t be flying until the end of the year at the earliest, experiencing this comfortable future means enduring the present: discolored wallpaper, worn cushions, tabloid-size windows, and fluorescent lights. A few hours later, all the familiar discomforts are there: my mouth and contact lenses are dry, I’ve got a wisp of a headache, and the walls have closed in. But the future will be better, right?

Blake Emery is Boeing’s director of differentiation strategy, responsible, in part, for making the company’s planes more comfortable than anyone else’s. When we meet, he’s talking about a dinner party where—not for the first time—a frequent flier eagerly shared ideas about how to improve passenger comfort. "I cringe. Not that I wouldn’t love to hear something different, but it’s like, Gee, you don’t have enough legroom? But that’s not going to change, because you’re talking about the most expensive real estate on the planet."

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.

New York Hotel Bar Uncorks an Interactive Wine List (Wired)

People who are about to drop $300 on a bottle of Chateau Margeaux want the experience to be awesome — bouquet, color, mouthfeel, yada yada. But what about the ordering? Avid wine snobs might think about a trip to Adour, the restaurant opening at New York's St. Regis Hotel in November. Pull up a stool at the goatskin-upholstered wine bote, tap the glowing word wines projected in front of you, and the list scrolls into view. Choose a type and a bottle — hand and finger movements reveal its details (grape, origin, tasting notes, cost). The info unfolds with an animated flourish out of a flower icon; think Minority Report meets Sideways. Behind the alcohol-enabling magic is a lot of technology: Cameras and object-recognition software track your hand gestures — and ignore stuff like glassware — following the motion with a trail of projected white pixel dust. And all that vino data stays safe on a dedicated Web server. Need help? Luckily, there's a sommelier on duty, so don't worry about getting transferred to a call center in Bangalore. (link) (Rockwell) (Potion)

Swim Laps in Your Own Private Ocean — With an Ocean View (Wired)

Olympic-size is for plebs. Thanks to advanced hydrotechnology, swimmers can paddle in a private ocean — like this $3.5 million, 20-acre, half-mile-long, 66 million gallon leviathan recently certified by Guinness as the largest pool in the world. Located in Algarrobo, Chile, about 70 miles west of Santiago and just yards from the Pacific, the pool at the San Alfonso del Mar condo complex handles water treatment like a surgical strike. While most pools filter all the water several times a day, the San Alfonso's 150 in-wall sensors focus the cleanup only on the dirty bits. Fernando Fischmann, developer of this "pulse oxidation" system, is cagey about specifics, but he says it uses at least 10 times less chemicals per gallon than conventional setups, at a 50th of the cost. Also helping to keep the water clear are a nonstick plastic liner and the immense volume of the pool itself, which dilutes the concentration of any contaminants. Do Fischmann's claims hold water? According to Ralph Keller, an expert in industrial hygiene, the principles are sound — for the short term. "For the first few years," he says, "it may just be the size of the pool that's keeping it clean." In the meantime, Fischmann's company, Crystal Lagoons, has been tapped to install half a dozen more super pools for some big backyards in Argentina, Panama, and — of course — Dubai. (link)

Rare Bird (The New Yorker)

Talk of the Town (link)

For all its eccentricities, bird-watching is a respectable hobby, practiced by psychiatrists, kings, and forty-six million Americans. But plane spotting—which also entails tramping around swamps to watch flying objects—somehow lacks the same cachet.

Phil Derner, Jr., the president of the Web site NYCAviation.com, estimates that there are fifty active plane spotters in the New York City area. At noon last Monday, nearly all of them were gathered, telephoto lenses in hand, in North Woodmere Park, which is situated at the head of Jamaica Bay and beneath the flight path to Runway 22 Left at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The occasion: the maiden arrival, from Frankfurt, of the double-decker Airbus A380, the largest passenger plane in the world. (It was on a promotional and “route-proving” trip organized by Airbus and Lufthansa.) During its development, the A380 had been trouble for Airbus, with production delays resulting in cancelled orders and layoffs. But the Airbus is big and she is rare, and that is more than enough to bring out a crowd of plane geeks.

A tenth grader named Matt—he asked that his last name not be used, since he was skipping school—had travelled from Westchester with his father, a lawyer. “I think the A380 is a landmark in aviation,” Matt said, explaining why he had come. “My mom was really against the idea.”

“It’s his passion,” his father said. “We were struggling for a while, because he wants to be a pilot, and we want him to be an engineer. We have only one kid, so a pilot seems kind of, you know.” Matt recently started taking an online course in Danish, to prepare himself for a job with Scandinavian Airlines. “They have a really good fleet, a lot of long-range A330s and A340s,” he said, before excusing himself to watch a Singapore Airlines 747-400 on its final approach.

The spotters had been nervous for days. J.F.K. has four runways, some as long as fourteen thousand feet, which can be used in either direction. That means dozens of spotting sites, some miles apart, and it wouldn’t be possible to know in advance which runway the Airbus would use. “The thing that will suck is that if we are at N. Woodmere, and they decide to send him to 31L or 31R,” someone had written on the group’s message board.

Small Hotels, Big Personalities (BusinessWeek)

Indie establishments serve up singular style (pillow menu anyone?) along with luxurious touches and 21st century amenities (link)

I once stayed at an unassuming little hotel in Paris tucked in an alleyway near the Seine. The rooms were decorated with playful mosaics, the hallways smelled of lavender, and in the mornings the manager himself served croissants and jam in the living room. I've been in enough Hampton Inns, Hyatts, and Sheratons since to pine for that place -- or, at least, a hotel with similar character.

Turns out such hotels are getting easier to find, even without a passport. On several business trips around the U.S. recently, I've discovered, via a quick online search, some gems hidden in plain sight. They are islands of individuality in a homogenized world, featuring everything from the works of local artists (Hotel Max, Seattle) and complimentary yoga classes (Hotel Vitale, San Francisco) to on-call Pilates workouts and a London-style taxi that shuttles guests to tourist attractions and business meetings (Hotel Ambrose, Santa Monica). Yet unlike many family-owned inns, they also offer 21st century amenities that business travelers want, such as Wi-Fi access (complimentary if you're lucky,) cordless phones, flat-screen TVs, and gourmet restaurants. The Hotel ICON in Houston, located in an historic bank building, features Bank Jean-Georges, created by renowned chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.