AndrewBlum.net

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."

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.

Infrastructure: Tracking the Future (Metropolis Mag)

On the eve of Barack Obama’s New New Deal, a series of compelling photographs illustrates the divide between repair and renewal, despair and hope. (link)

As a young man, Timo Stammberger would travel Berlin’s subways—on foot—tagging the tunnel walls. “My personal engagement was through graffiti,” the 28-year-old says. He has since changed his medium. Rather than marking the walls with his own presence, he uses a six-by-seven-inch analog camera to capture the specificity of what’s already there. His interest is taxonomic: he is fascinated by the way Stockholm’s deep Tunnelbana is rough-hewn, nearly rustic, while the newer U-Bahn, built in the 1970s in Dortmund, Germany, is regimented and rectilinear; or how the Metropolitano, in Lisbon, Portugal, is capped with barrel vaults, as if the engineers couldn’t help but add a bit of grace, while his home city of Berlin—a place always defined by layers of history—has a varied underground landscape, some¬times neoclassical, sometimes drably functional. “These tunnels are used by so many people every day and are a big part of the infrastructure,” Stammberger says. “But nobody sees them. Their perception is limited. I try to reveal the unseen.”

But if Stammberger’s starting point is discovery, the photographs that result share another quality: a happy-sad mix of civic aspiration and the inevitable decay that follows. Precisely placed lights wash a dirty white wall. An elegant S-curve ends in the entropy of rocks and trash. His images don’t fetishize infrastructure but instead reveal its hard truths: The city begins crumbling as soon as it has been constructed. Beneath every new project lies the rubble of another.

In the United States today, that’s an important insight. Infrastructure is being revealed, in the sense that it’s attracting more attention than it has in decades. But that attention is divided between repair and renewal, despair and hope. The recent I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis put a catastrophic face on what engineers had been warning for years: our roads and bridges are rotting faster than they can be repaired. Worse, that acknowledgement comes at a moment when repair isn’t enough. As far below baseline as the schools, trains, planes, and power grids have fallen, the baseline itself is rising. Reducing the out¬put of greenhouse gases necessary to reverse global climate change requires building a new transportation and power system, retrofitting buildings, and re-thinking industrial agriculture. Maintaining our existing infrastructure is a totally insufficient task. We need a new infrastructure.

In Praise of Slowness (Urban Omnibus)

Thoughts on Writing About the Future of the City (UrbanOmnibus.net)

“To bring New York down to date, a man would have to be published with the speed of light – and not even Harper is that quick.” – E. B. White

In 2005, the corner of Plaza Street and Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn was a weedy parking lot for Union Temple, the oldest congregation in the borough. As of this writing, in the first days of 2009, there’s a smooth gray sidewalk, a few freshly planted saplings, and a 15-story, 102-unit glass condominium building, designed by the architect Richard Meier, being busily punch-listed for its first occupants.

Does that change – this particular building and rebuilding of the city – seem fast or slow? It’s a question I find myself asking twice most mornings: first, while walking by that construction site on my way to Prospect Park, and then again an hour or so later, sitting down at my computer to write, as a journalist, about buildings and the city. What strikes me is how different the question seems in each context – how sharp the disconnect is between the immediacy required of journalism and the sheer evolutionary slowness of the city itself.

This is not a new concern of architecture journalists, but it is one more often put in spatial rather than temporal terms. Do we write about figure or ground, the building itself or the building in context? Maybe it’s the prospect of a few years of stillness, but I’ve recently been thinking more about time. And what’s obvious is that the city is slow, and we write too fast.

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.”

James Corner: The Long View (Metropolis)

By embracing the city’s industrial past—reclaiming landfills, remediating brownfields, developing neglected waterfronts—James Corner has helped reinvent the field of landscape architecture. (MetropolisMag.com)

(photo by Alessandra Petlin)

As a 20-year-old intern in the London office of Richard Rogers, James Corner could barely contain his frustration. It was the early 1980s, and they were working on the first pieces of the transformation of the London docklands from derelict industrial port to stylish commercial district. But at that scale, on so complex a site, Corner saw only limitations. “All the architects knew how to do was put awnings on existing buildings,” he recalls. “All the landscape architects knew how to do was put trees everywhere. And all the traffic engineer knew how to do was to optimize getting cars in and out of the development.” Over pints at the pub, Rogers and his partners “would complain that they didn’t have the conceptual or imaginative tools or techniques to do the whole thing synthetically.” Corner, who grew up outside of Manchester, left soon afterward to study at the University of Pennsylvania—where he is now head of the landscape-architecture department—but he never let go of the lesson: “There is a desperate need for a different kind of professional who isn’t so Balkan ized, who is capable of seeing a bigger picture and choreographing a bigger team.”

Corner has spent the last 25 years becoming that guy in a deliberate attempt to reinvent the field of landscape architecture by pushing aside its second-fiddle status and antiurban tendencies and claiming a more ambitious agenda: to design the postindustrial city. Rather than wielding bushes and trees—the proverbial parsley around the roast of proper architecture—landscape architects are, as Corner sees it, the best prepared to tackle the complex, large-scale, often environmentally damaged sites that have become the hallmark of urban regeneration. He approaches them with the intellectual assurance of a philosopher and the political bravado of a pow er broker. “I don’t want to be embarrassed to be a landscape architect because we’re thought of as tree people who come in at the end of the day,” he says.

This Is a Skate Park (Wired)

(photo by Jiri Havran) (Wired.com)

For years, architects have gone to great lengths to protect their buildings from marauding skaters. But as aesthetic trends move toward folded planes that transition seamlessly from wall to ceiling and back to wall, designers have been looking to their former adversaries for a lesson in flow.

"We have this fascination with buildings becoming topography," says Alejandro Zaera-Polo, a partner at London's Foreign Office Architects, "and skateboarders have that physical experience." So for a park in Barcelona, his firm extended paving stones up the sides of small hills—to shield vegetation from salty sea breezes. At least that's what it told city officials. But skaters got the message. The resulting quarter-pipe landed on the March 2006 cover of Transworld Skateboarding.

Architect Zaha Hadid shares the love. She wanted her Phaeno Science Center in Germany to be an all-inclusive venue for pedestrians and skateboarders alike. Liability issues prevented skate-park designation—though you'd never guess it from the YouTube videos of pro skaters "visiting" the museum. "We design spaces that are flowing and continuous, and—just by coincidence—skateboarders look for that kind of continuity," Dillon Lin, an architect (and skater) at Hadid's firm, says with a wink.

And though the new Oslo Opera House (shown here) was inspired by the image of two glaciers colliding, the architects at Snøhetta didn't call on glaciologists to help fine-tune the details. They enlisted real experts in twisted planes: skateboarders. "We spoke to them about surface textures and the areas they prefer," architect Simon Ewings says. His firm followed up the conversation with a statement in stone.

Snøhetta used different finishes of marble to guide skaters looking for rideable surfaces. Acoustically sensitive parts, like above the auditorium, got rough marble that's unpleasant to wheel over. But other areas silently beckon skaters. Surfaces rise up all over the place to become ledges, curbs, and benches—like the jagged facets of a glacier (or skate park). One particularly tempting spot is a 3-foot-wide railing of smooth stone. Snøhetta architect Peter Dang is, ahem, absolutely sure it's skatable. "Just make sure to fall toward the inside," he advises.

Instant Suburb: Prefabs Hits New York (Wired)

(Wired.com, illustration by Kerry Roper) Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.

Prefab is "modernism's oldest dream," curator Barry Bergdoll says. Since the industrial revolution, architects have been in thrall of the idea that houses could be built in factories, like any kind of widget. But reality hasn't been extremely cooperative. Whether because of conservative public tastes, unachievable economies of scale, or designers' less-than-stellar business acumen, their utopian visions have mostly remained fantasies.