AndrewBlum.net

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.

Welcome to the Art Hotel (BusinessWeek)

Innkeepers around the world are tapping local artists to make their work an essential element of a new breed of hostelry (LINK)

"It's over for design hotels," says Ian Schrager, the man who invented them. "What once was the exception is now the general rule. It doesn't interest me anymore. I have taken it as far as it can go. This for me is a new beginning. I’m trying to change the game again."

By “this” Schrager means "art," at least as it's embodied in the 185-room Gramercy Park Hotel, set to open this August in New York City. Schrager, who famously worked with designer Philippe Starck on New York's Royalton and others, is collaborating on the property with artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel to create a "bohemian" spirit -- "but a bohemian with money," Schrager qualifies, describing their vision of “organized chaos,” with canvases propped up against the wall and a sense of "individuality and spontaneity."

Rather than just slapping art up on the walls of the lobby and guest rooms (although they'll do that too), its spirit will permeate the place. Picture flowers plopped into water pitchers set before a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

AROUND THE GLOBE.  If Schrager's track record is any indication, the "art hotel" is about to become a big deal. And yet this time around, the man who co-founded Studio 54 isn't the first at the party (even if he is arriving in style).

Hotels have always had artwork, but today the concept is being stretched to new limits, as boutique hotels replace hospitality-as-theater with hospitality-as-installation-art. Around the globe, hoteliers are working with artists (if they're not already artists themselves) to create environments with a sense of style and authenticity -- in explicit retort to the boutique hotel formula, with its contemporary furniture and dimmed hallways.

In part it's a backlash against the democratization of design: Now that there are "W" hotels by the dozen, hoteliers are seeking new ways of standing out. And yet, the hoteliers say, it also reveals the tastes of a generation that has come of age in a flat world.

America's First Entertainment Architects (Metropolis)

In Review: America's First Entertainment Architects
Long before Lapidus and Rockwell there was the sumptuous grandeur of Schultze & Weaver.

A couple of weeks after seeing the exhibition In Pursuit of Pleasure: Schultze & Weaver and the American Hotel at Miami's Wolfsonian museum, I went over to the Waldorf-Astoria to see how Schultze & Weaver's 1931 masterpiece was holding up. It's still the New York White House (even if the president doesn't like it much here); and Hilton Hotels, the current owner, has spent $400 million on restorations, primarily saving the place from its unfortunate disco-era alterations, such as a heavy dose of red-and-blue tasseled drapery. On the weekday morning that I walked through, the catering staff was busy setting up the grand ballroom for 1,100 guests. But the main event appeared to be a breakfast for vendors of Mastercard's PayPass wireless payment system, whose enthusiasm for wirelessness seemed to extend especially to their cell-phone headsets, judging by several of them pacing the Park Avenue lobby. Under their feet was an original floor mosaic made from 148,000 hand-cut marble pieces, by French artist Louis Rigal. In human-size figures of varying ages it depicts the cycle of life and is matched by an allegorical wall mural showing the pleasures of music, dancing, and eating. Since last November those figures have been joined by another, tucked discreetly into a corner of the lobby's lower level: the long-haired, vapid-faced, green-haloed goddess of Starbucks, which the hotel's recent press materials describe as "the world's best-known retailer, roaster, and brand of coffee."

Seventy-five years on, the Waldorf--more or less as Schultze & Weaver designed it--is alive and kicking, sometimes impossibly decadent, sometimes embarrassingly gauche, but always extravagant, varied, and humming. When it opened Lewis Mumford wrote in the New Yorker, "Some buildings defy criticism by their almost miraculous mixture of good and bad elements, as difficult to sort as a thousand grains of light and dark sand." I know what he means: the Waldorf may not be singular architecture, but it defines the culture, then as now.