Places

Eat the City

By Richard Ingersoll
"Urban development has eaten away the clear edges of cities," writes Richard Ingersoll, "leaving ambiguous empty spaces." Ingersoll explores how innvovative landscape architects and urbanists are grappling with these "patchy areas," and he proposes an alternative approach he calls "civic agriculture" — the reconceptualization of cities as diverse agricultural zones, from productive parks to allotments, with the ultimate goal of a richer public realm.

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Observatory

A Father's Things

By Adam Harrison Levy
Contributing writer Adam Harrison Levy remembers his father and reflects on being a father himself: a Design Observer short film.

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Observatory

Life

By Bob Hicok
"A line will take us hours maybe," wrote William Butler Yeats. "Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,/ Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." Few things take more work than the illusion of ease, which should make the tossed-off appearance of Hicok's "Life" seem impressive not just for the felt effortlessness of his lines but for the ease with which they lead you through a range of experience. How could "drinking tea" and "eating lunch" be interesting?

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Observatory

Street Life

By Rob Walker
In praise of a specific variety of street art: Works and projects that treat the lowliest, semi-invisible features of the built environment as creative prompts. When successful, such street art not only transforms specific overlooked elements of the streetscape, they offer an alternative way of look at the streetscape in general. That's delightful.

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Places

Building Hyperdensity and Civic Delight

By Vishaan Chakrabarti
Americans are famously conflicted about urban development: somehow we've demonized both sprawl and density. But today there is a new conversation about the future of cities, driven by diversifying social desires, evolving technologies, and pressing environmental constraints. Here Vishaan Chakrabarti contributes a bold argument for hyperdensity. The very dense city, he says, not only promotes prosperity, sustainability and delight; it will also determine our strength as a nation.

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Observatory

The Whitney Identity: Responding to W(hat)?

By Francisco Laranjo
Immediately after the release of the new visual identity for the Whitney, social media rapidly reacted. “Great,” “bold,” “sweet,” “I'm really excited,” “I’m jealous” or simply “Love it!” were some of the initial glowing endorsements of the work designed by Experimental Jetset (EJ). However, what has been largely overlooked is EJ’s description and rationale for the project, which is a masterclass of ambiguity and ambivalence, one that builds upon gratuitous justifications, inconsequential buzzwords and the studio’s recurrently sought refuges.

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Observatory

That Personal Touch

By Alexandra Lange
After a 20th century of logos made with geometric symbols and shiny gradients, scripts are supposed to signal nostalgia, personal connection, with-love-from-me-to-you. Just look a recent attempts by News Corp., Instagram and Felt. But when anyone can make their handwriting into a font, has script lost its meaning?

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Places

Roads to Rails

By Eric W. Sanderson
Eric W. Sanderson investigates the physics of human transport (speed and energy cost) and argues that streetcars are the best way to travel. “I know what you’re thinking,” he writes. “Why didn’t they succeed the first time around?” After looking at historical models, he lays out his plan for a modern streetcar revival, supported by municipal investment in urban rail and short-term concession agreements.

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Observatory

Alaska Yukon Gold Rush Era Photo Album

By John Foster
Between the years of 1896 and 1899, over 100,000 prospectors flooded the Alaska Yukon region in what many then called “the Last Great Gold Rush.” Books and movies have told of the mass hysteria that hit the region during that time. When it was all over, very few struck it rich, with only about 4,000 prospectors finding any gold at all.

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Change Observer

Trust Is Not An Algorithm

By John Thackara
By some accounts the world’s information is doubling every two years. This impressive if unprovable fact has got many people wondering: what to do with it? The opportunities afforded by Big Data are real enough — but they also contain a danger: that we become be so focused on numbers that we lose sight of other opportunities.

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Places

Dakota Is Everywhere

Terry Evans & Elizabeth Farnsworth
For the past two years, photographer Terry Evans and journalist Elizabeth Farnsworth have been traveling regularly to North Dakota to explore the fracking boom that is transforming the prairie and disrupting the lives of the people who live there. As they found, North Dakotans are struggling to balance the boon of oil-related payrolls with the heartbreak of a ravaged environment.

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Observatory

The Best Management Memo … Ever!

By Owen Edwards
Everyone reading this post has, at one time or another, written a memo that seemed especially inspired and cleverly effective. Well, be not proud; I happened to witness the most masterful memo ever written, a mere eight words that changed a culture — instantly.

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Observatory

Home Improvement

By Alexandra Lange
Last week, the editors of The Wirecutter launched The Sweethome, extending their no-nonsense, one-recommendation-per-category approach from tech products to the home. The combination of the two categories fulfills a digital need I spotted long ago, and links to a number of discussions previously on Design Observer. I interviewed Sweethome editor Joel Johnson about audience, details, and the place of aesthetics in talking toaster ovens.

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Places

Unforgetting Women Architects: From the Pritzker to Wikipedia

By Despina Stratigakos
Over the decades women architects have received scant attention from historians and prize juries. As Despina Stratigakos writes, "The painful cancellation of Denise Scott Brown in the awarding of the Pritzker Prize solely to her husband and collaborator, Robert Venturi, is an important but hardly exceptional example of how female partners are written out of history by a profession suffering from Star Architect Disorder, or SAD." Stratigakos argues that it's time to write women back into history — and that the place to start is Wikipedia.

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Observatory

The Irresistible Attraction of Self Storage

By Rick Poynor
Concealed receptacles no bigger than wardrobes. Cavernous hangars the size of a four-car garage. The unfathomable mystery of locked doors, unknown objects left, sometimes for years, in darkened repositories, and secret chambers that must remain off-limits to all but the key holder, if they are visited at all. Self storage centers are places of private and public fascination and I always knew that one day I would succumb.

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Observatory

A Philatelist’s Dream

By John Foster
This week, I take you to a wonderful online museum called Memory of the Netherlands, where I discovered a collection called “150 Years of Design for the Dutch Postal Service.” Thinking I would find an archive only of printed stamps, I discovered something far more interesting — the preliminary sketches, production notes and overlays that tell a far different story. For me, some of these examples slip away from their hard realities and take on the momentary context of fine art collage and drawing.

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Observer Media

Maggie Macnab

By Debbie Millman
On this episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman talks to designer, educator and author Maggie Macnab about what designers can learn from nature, and what they can give back. "We've got this opportunity to make real in the world what we see our world being. And design is like a step towards that."

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Observatory

The Family Store

By Mark Lamster
A melting pot. A quilt. These are convtentional metaphors for the modern city, but if you ask me, a better choice is the sandwich. What's more urban than a sandwich, ideally a pastrami on rye, from a good deli? Throw in a Dr. Brown's and a pickle and you've really got something: a combination of flavors that together make something complex but with a little bite to it, something that may not be entirely good for you but sure tastes great and how could you live without it? That's a city defined right there.

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Places

An Interview with David Burney: On New York and the 21st-Century City-State

David Burney & Nancy Levinson
For almost a decade David Burney has been Commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction in New York City. In an interview with Places editor Nancy Levinson, he reflects on the urban design record of the Bloomberg years, focusing especially on PlaNYC, the ongoing post-Sandy recovery effort, and the potential for cities to take the lead in 21st-century sustainability planning.

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Observatory

The Fork and the World: Design 101

By Alexandra Lange
If you had to explain design to the uninitiated, where would you start? With tales from the literal trenches, where, in 246 BC, standardized bows and arrows allowed Ying Zheng to become the self-styled “First Emperor of China”? Or would you begin and end closer to home, exploring the design histories of the kitchen drawers and appliances you see before you, from fork to spoon to spit? Two recent books, Hello World and Consider the Fork, try different variations.

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Observatory

The Hyperdocumented Sunset Strip

By Rob Walker
Google Street View Hyperlapse gathers imagery into high-octane virtual road trips. That is, it's a tool for exploiting a machine-ennabled visual archive. Here's a (not-so-serious) experiment in using it to revisit "Every Building On The Sunset Strip," creating a short, disorienting journey that never ends.

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Observatory

Chinese Propaganda Posters

By John Foster
In the the 1950s and 60s, the heyday of what was then called Red China by the West, millions of posters like these were placed in shop windows and factory walls throughout the mainland — all designed to spread fear of U.S. Imperialism and promote the ideals of Communism.

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Observatory

At the Next Hospital

By Joshua Weiner
I admire the poem for its spareness, for the way the sadness of the pain of the body is simple and blunt like the wish to be known. It feels beleaguered, hollowed from impersonality. The loose ends of clues are as unlikely to lead anywhere as the exhausted thoughts of a patient. The poem really does feel like being a patient in too many hospitals.

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Places

Barranca

Thomas Locke Hobbs & Aaron Rothman
Thomas Locke Hobbs is interested in the subtle systems and forces that shape a sense of place in the urban landscape. The photographer lived in Buenos Aires for several years, and he uses that city's topography as the organizing principle of the series presented here. “After living in Buenos Aires for a while," he writes, "the flatness, the impossibility of having a vista from which to orient oneself, began to feel oppressive. I started taking pictures around a small but notable feature: the brief slant of the barely perceptible riverbank, or barranca.”

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Change Observer

Cycle Commerce As An Ecosystem

By John Thackara
At a workshop in Delhi a few weeks back, during the UnBox Festival, Arjun Mehta and myself posed the following question to a group of 20 professionals from diverse backgrounds: What new products, services or ingredients are needed to help a cycle commerce ecosystem flourish in India’s cities, towns and villages?

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