new york glimpses: written city

For an amateur type-geek, New York is a veritable specimen book of fantastically quirky found signage and lettering. There are literally entire city-blocks worth of hand-lettered signs, molded plastic type, painted announcements, and bizarrely expressive awnings. If it weren't for my overwhelming fear of looking like a tourist, I would have been walking the streets with my camera out, wildly snapping photos of every storefront we passed.

I did still manage to take a few pictures of some of the awesome vernacular type I saw on our trip, mostly in Coney Island. To be honest, that was my main impulse for heading down to the boardwalk; Coney is like a musty old collector's basement full of ephemera. The beachfront is a collision of arcade neon and hand-painted, hyperbolic side-show banners. And it sadly won't be around for much longer before it begins to look like an Atlantic City resort. I try to imagine if Coney ever looked classy, or if it always just felt like a bit of working class exoticism. Either way, it has a uniquely nostalgic feeling that I hope they can preserve.

On that note, here's a little photographic interlude between our food-fueled travel stories:



If this slideshow was a little heavy on design and a bit light on edibles, you can always see the rest of our photos here.

unplanned city

This clip is a few years old, but I've always gotten a kick out of it:



It's goofy, but it's also such a simple conceit for an ad - just use the damn shoes, right? No celebrity needed. And yet, I think what really makes the ad so cool is that it is totally unexpected to see this guy vaulting himself over and across the urban spaces that are designed to move people in very different and proscribed routes. Cities dictate model for their own "ideal" usage, while individuals will invariably personalize and flaunt those impositions.

In Portland, as much as we pride ourselves on a DIY ethos, we also tend to *heart* our progressive city government. This means we often end up relying on a top-down sort of urban development. I think it's a good thing that our city can build lasting, meaningful infrastructure, but it also spares us (for better or for worse) the birthing pains of coming up with creative solutions on our own. I'm thrilled by every new bike lane the city stripes, even if they're handed out like candy, but sometimes the trade-off of this fast-track urban development means cluster-f**ks like the Rose Quarter re-development.

So what happens in other cities where citizens have to go it alone to create a livable environment? The Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal is holding an exhibit through this weekend called Actions: What you can do with the city, and I just came across their awesome Tools for Actions site, which shares all 99 projects from the show. The centre (er?) gathered both proposals and completed designs from around the world, all of which co-opt existing city structures to create the building blocks for new urban interactions.


Rather than treating existing city plans as obstacles, the groups featured in Actions employ them as unintended stages for talking about community and sustenance. The exhibit offers so many cool, new ideas based on everyday actions like mapping, walking, recycling, and biking, that you could easily spend hours reading the briefs and then tracking down more info on the firms and artists involved. I know I can be pretty food-focused, so it's no surprise that projects like urban foraging, plastic bag gardens, and a city-wide picnic caught my attention. Spend some time looking at all of the actions, some of which might inspire you to change your city on your own. A little guerrilla gardening, anyone?


I wish I was in Montreal to see this stuff live. And I wish Portland had museums that could actually draw these sorts of exhibits. Maybe that's a potential "action" itself.

things that make me feel smart, part 2

Psycho-geography.
Future ruins.
Experimental landscapes.
Urban spelunking.
Spatial theoretics.
Sonic architecture.

If UNIVERSE had enough indie cred to prevent me from seeming like a total geek, then this list of topics surely bursts that bubble. Well, I'm fine with that, because they're damn fascinating. So, while I know that we'll probably be seeing more food than architecture, it still seems appropriate that on the eve of our trip to New York I'd introduce you to one of my favorite urban spaces/architecture sites, BLDGBLOG.

Written by Geoff Manaugh, a Senior Editor at Dwell magazine (hey, that makes this sort of hip, right?), BLDGBLOG presents consistently thought-provoking ideas about the built environment and what if... scenarios for the future. When you start following the items and jaw-dropping photography (like this image of drainage spelunking in Canada) that Manaugh covers, you begin to realize that architecture is a lot weirder than you ever imagined.

Take for instance this story from the Guardian about a plan to construct a warehouse for unwanted books. To continue preserving books that no one is using, British libraries are constructing vast, windowless buildings in the industrial outskirts of London. Not for access, mind you, just for archival.

Or how about this urban design proposal that has been circulating for a few years now: What should Philadelphia do with it's overgrown, abandoned urban lots? Put them into production growing the city's food, of course. Enter Farmadelphia, a plan to revisit the agrarian past of Philly. But this project didn't just imagine a network of run-of-the-mill community garden plots; the designer's renderings proposed a full-scale agriculture of grazing livestock, rotational crops and wheat fields!

So, for a good sense of just how weird our constructed landscape is, take a look at:
- One of the posts that got me hooked on this site: San Francisco's foundations are built on abandoned, scuttled ships
- The construction of ultra-luxe zoos and their promises for future suburban development
- The role of environmental toxins in aging
- Olympic security in Beijing, CCTV, and the future of reality film-making
- The calls of city songbirds are actually changing their cadence and pitch
- First the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and now Dubai has purchased the rights to recreate and the city of Lyons

You might be able to speculate on it, but you just can't make this stuff up.