The New York MTA Graphic Standards Manual

Joe Clark, on his quest to see the MTA Graphic Standards Manual:

I’ve been trying to get my hands on a copy of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority Graphic Standards Manual ever since Triborough managed to do so. This style bible, written by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda for Unimark, is the sword in the stone of transit wayfinding manuals.

He didn’t get his hands on one, but he did find a Flickr set showing the pages. It’s a pretty interesting look at the graphics of wayfinding and identity for America’s biggest city.

A Losing Strategy

Tumblr blog Drawing Nothing made this great animated gif of Cleveland’s warehouse district comparing the 1960’s to today:

As Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt notes:

There may be nothing sadder than distressed cities trying to compete with the suburbs by adding more parking spaces.

The Real Google Glass Experience

Mark Hurst, on the implications of Google’s new augmented reality glasses:

Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.

Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.

There is enough in there to scare most people - particularly those concerned with privacy. The idea of that much data in the hands of one entity is not pleasant - particularly an organization with as much cataloging, cross-referencing, and indexing chops as Google. However, I didn’t link this because of a concern for privacy or for worries about how much Google knows about all of us. What concerns me is the way such data collection changes the way we view the public realm.

This is a two-fold concern. First, as an always on piece of technology, it changes the dynamic of individual interactions. At least with smartphones, one must commit the social faux pas of digging the phone out of the pocket to take a glance. With a piece of technology that is always in front of your eye, there is no indication of whether that person is distracted or paying attention.

The second part of my concern is that the fact that such data collection is occurring will severely impact the vitality of the public realm. If you don’t want to be recorded, what is your option? Don’t go out. We are already a somewhat isolated society. We don’t need more reason to not go out and engage with our fellow humanity.

Sprawling Madness

Angie Schmitt, writing for Streetsblog, on the absurdity of our sprawling development patterns:

Behold: Two houses with adjoining backyards in suburban Orlando. If you want to travel the streets from point A on Anna Catherine Drive to point B on Summer Rain Drive, which are only 50 feet apart, you’ll have to go a minimum of seven miles. The trip would take almost twenty minutes in a car, according to Google Maps.

Crazy!

Via Mike Weich

Doodling in Thin Air

Wobbleworks CEO Peter Dilworth, on their newest product - the 3Doodler Pen:

We wanted to design a 3D printing device that could be used within minutes, without needing any technical knowledge, software or computers. We also wanted it to be affordable as well as fun, so that anyone could 3Doodle!

Cool! I think…

Check out their Kickstarter page for more information.

A Crisis of American Walking

Tom Vanderbilt, writing for Slate, on the crisis in American walking:

Which is what walking in America has become: An act dwelling in the margins, an almost hidden narrative running beneath the main vehicular text. Indeed, the semantics of the term pedestrian would be a mere curiosity, but for one fact: America is a country that has forgotten how to walk. Witness, for example, the existence of “Everybody Walk!,” the “Campaign to Get America Walking” (one of a number of such initiatives). While its aims are entirely legitimate, its motives no doubt earnest, the idea that that we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism nearly 4 million years ago—for reasons that are still debated—should now need “walking tips,” have to make “walking plans” or use a “mobile app” to “discover” walking trails near us or build our “walking histories,” strikes me as a world-historical tragedy.

For walking is the ultimate “mobile app.” Here are just some of the benefits, physical, cognitive and otherwise, that it bestows: Walking six miles a week was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s (and I’m not just talking about walking in the “Walk to End Alzheimers”); walking can help improve your child’s academic performance; make you smarter; reduce depression; lower blood pressure; even raise one’s self-esteem.” And, most important, though perhaps least appreciated in the modern age, walking is the only travel mode that gets you from Point A to Point B on your own steam, with no additional equipment or fuel required, from the wobbly threshold of toddlerhood to the wobbly cusp of senility.

Despite these upsides, in an America enraptured by the cultural prosthesis that is the automobile, walking has become a lost mode, perceived as not a legitimate way to travel but a necessary adjunct to one’s car journey, a hobby, or something that people without cars—those pitiable “vulnerable road users,” as they are called with charitable condescension—do. To decry these facts—to examine, as I will in this series, how Americans might start walking more again— may seem like a hopelessly retrograde, romantic exercise: nostalgia for Thoreau’s woodland ambles. But the need is urgent. The decline of walking has become a full-blown public health nightmare.

I’ve always disliked the word pedestrian. It is a marginalizing word and it discounts the basic humanity of people inhabiting the street.

It is becoming more and more clear that the way we develop our places has a direct impact far beyond just the physical form. Urban design is a multi-disciplinary endeavor that covers the whole range of public issues - from engineering to public health. What we build and how we build it matters.

Lloyd Alter on the City

Kaid Benfield has a great interview with environmental thinker Lloyd Alter. There is a lot of thought provoking material in the interview, but what particularly jumped out at me were a few choice quotes:

I used to be a committed modernist; then, while studying historic buildings, I learned how well they work. How windows could be tuned for maximum ventilation; how shutters provided security and privacy while maintaining ventilation; how really bad modern buildings are when it comes to being green and healthy. Those clean lines, lack of roof overhangs and walls of glass didn’t look so beautiful any more.

What makes a great building? A great city?

I am not certain that there is a great city in the world that wasn’t great a hundred years ago. I haven’t been to Singapore, but that is about the only example I can think of that might break the rule. But almost all of the cities we admire today were designed before the automobile became the motivator for every planning and urban design decision.

Cities that were built in an era of human focused design are the ones that we love to visit. They also tend to follow Alter’s philosophy of density:

I am convinced that they are wrong, that there is a “goldilocks density” that is high enough to support a vibrant, walkable community, but not so high that you can’t walk up to your apartment when the power goes out, that needs expensive infrastructure like subways and huge underground parking garages. Dense enough to build a sense of community, but not so dense as to have everyone slip into anonymity.

My favorite places tend to average 5–10 stories and are in cities that were great 100 years ago. There is a beautiful human scale and incredible versatility in the mid-rise urban typology.

The Perot Museum - Eyesore or Remarkable?

Speaking of Duncan Crary, my introduction to him was through his previous podcast: The KunstlerCast with the sharp-witted and delightfully critical James Howard Kunstler. On Kunstler’s blog, he regularly features the “Eyesore of the Month”. This months is the recently completed Perot Museum of Science and History in Dallas, Texas. Coincidentally, this same project was featured in the January issue of Architectural Record. The juxtaposition of the two different takes on this project is intriguing.

First up, Suzanne Stephens for Architectural Record:

“Forceful,” “acrobatic,” “muscular,” “raw,” even “gritty” are usually the operative adjectives to describe the architecture of Thom Mayne (2013 AIA Gold Medalist) and his firm, Morphosis. But not “refined.” Yet the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, which opened in Dallas last month, seems surprisingly restrained for a building by the Los Angeles firm. With its pale, crinkly precast-concrete panels enclosing a cubic volume, it appears rather sedate from afar. At the same time, there is a raw energy in the way the calm cube erupts from a craggy free-form plinth covered with shards of rock and local plants.

[…]

With its Cartesian cube and its free-flowing, lavalike plinth, the Perot museum is one of Morphosis’s most remarkable works to date. Like James Stirling’s architecturally synoptic Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1984)—“my model,” Mayne notes—the Perot combines traditional roomlike galleries with unconventional halls. It also mixes Euclidean geometry with hyperbolic curves, and juxtaposes fluid and restrained spaces. The striking design evokes the naturally sheared cube of black pyrite from Spain on view in the museum’s Lyda Hill Gems and Mineral Hall. The connection between natural and man-made artifact speaks of a flinty integrity that makes architecture meaningful.

Next, the Kunstler take down:

Behold the new Perot Museum of Science and History in Dallas, Texas in all its magnificent cubosity! Wow, what an original idea! A Modernist cube! Designed by Thom Mayne’s Morphosis company. Apparently this building “morphed” from a packing crate into a museum.

For full effect, check out the context of the building (below): a wilderness of surface parking, freeway ramps, and pointless ambiguous “green spaces.” Dallas has gotten exactly what it deserves, another monument to grandiosity and economic over-reach.

A Small American Village

I have been enjoying Duncan Crary’s new podcast endeavor - A Small American City. While each episode features entertaining insights into the intriguing and oftentimes quirky characters that populate Crary’s adoptive hometown of Troy, New York, the heartwarming look at the Kennedy family has been my favorite:

They say it takes a village to raise a child, or three. Here in town, just about everyone knows Annabella, age 10, and her twin sisters Scarlett & Evelyn Kennedy, age 6. And though they don’t have a playground, these little women do have lots of kooky adults to entertain them when they’re out and about.

This is a poignant portrait of what can and should be. Many people profess the belief that it takes a village to raise a child, but this endearing family has shown what it really means. As I was listening I couldn’t help but imagine, even long for, such a life for myself and my family.

A Concentrating Walk to School

Sarah Goodyear, writing for the Atlantic Cities, reports on a Danish study indicating that kids who walk or bike to school are better able to concentrate:

The survey looked at nearly 20,000 Danish kids between the ages of 5 and 19. It found that kids who cycled or walked to school, rather than traveling by car or public transportation, performed measurably better on tasks demanding concentration, such as solving puzzles, and that the effects lasted for up to four hours after they got to school.

The benefits of integrating activity into our daily lives are far reaching, perhaps even more than we have realized. This kind of activity provides for holistic well-being - we are healthier mentally and physically. We need to build our places to encourage, or at least allow, the kind of integrated activity that aids well-being. We need these walkable places. If not for ourselves, at least for our kids.