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The startling truth about San Juan, a metropolitan area of 1.4 million people in Puerto Rico, is that most of it looks like New Jersey. It is a landscape of ugly roadways lined with strip malls, American franchise restaurants, and glass office towers overlooking impenetrable limited-access highways. Sure, there is Old San Juan, the sixteenth-century fortified city with its tiny cobblestone streets. But that citadel of the picturesque, which sits on a point of land in the harbor, is a tiny speck in San Juan's overall breadth. » click to continue
Typefaces fall into the ebb and flow of fashion just like, well, fashion. In recent years, a font called Bell Gothic has gained favor with art directors the same way denim jackets and Kate Spade bags are de rigueur with teenage girls. And since the creation of the even more popular Griffith Gothic in 1997 (a kind of remastered version that's so good it's its own thing), these related typefaces have become a bona fide trend. In the past four years, they've been used in everything from El Espectador in Bogotá to Jane magazine. » click to continue
IBM's 2000 annual report, designed by Chicago--based VSA Partners, bears a startling resemblance to an unlikely source: McSweeney's, the eclectic literary journal founded in 1998 by Dave Eggers, author of the best-selling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. IBM's report, like several issues of McSweeney's, uses an all-text, center-justified cover, varying only the type size and occasionally using italics. » click to continue
As a workplace, the asteroid 433 Eros has a decidedly downtown allure, a raw--one might even say painful--charisma. Situated more than 14 million miles from Earth (that's nine months by rocket), Eros is devoid of both air and water; its daytime temperatures average 212 degrees Fahrenheit. And yet San Diego visionary Greg Nemitz is now developing a plan for a spartan miners' colony on Eros, a 21-mile-long potato-shaped rock that is three percent iron and therefore, Nemitz concludes, would yield $325 quadrillion worth of platinum. » click to continue
There's a giant sausage on your computer screen. It's inflatable, it floats, and it's bigger than the Oktoberfest feasts of a dozen German villages. Scroll past the sausage and you'll find French Revolution balloons and early versions of flying machines, all taken from historical photos and digitally rendered into a seamless black-and-white timeline of dirigible success and failure. » click to continue
Though we might feel more secure walking through an urban parking lot that's drenched in light than one in shadows, that sense of security is socially constructed, says Boulder, Colorado, lighting engineer and designer Nancy Clanton. And besides blinding us with glare, blazingly lit outdoor spaces are something we won't be able to afford in an increasingly energy-strapped world. In fact Clanton, who is a pioneer in using low-level lighting to solve unusual problems, has been enlisted by the California Energy Commission to find ways to halve the state's use of outdoor illumination without reducing its effectiveness. » click to continue
Now is a pivotal time in Tijuana's history. As one of the fastest-developing cities in Latin America, the Mexican border town is evolving into a place of possibility rather than just poverty and protest. "For us, the time when our friends used to throw things over the border and yell 'Fuck Bush' ended long ago," Raul Cardenas Osuna says. "It got you a high five when we bailed you out of jail--and that's it. Now we want to change what we have into something better." An architect, teacher, and overall idealist, Cardenas is the founder and creative catalyst behind the design collective Torolab, a workshop of architects, artists, designers, and musicians looking to provoke change through observation. » click to continue
Peter Eisenman is dead. Long live Peter Eisenman. Gone is the iconoclast whose designs were so complexly embedded with Chomskyan and Derridean theory that they required a graduate seminar to unpack, and whose celebrated critiques of institutions and power made him a favorite of cultural avant-gardists worldwide. In his place stands a plays-well-with-others type whose mantra is "come to terms with." As in "you've got to come to terms with the client who wants a big garage for his two Mercedes," or "I'm coming to terms with instant replay." » click to continue
We may be long past the point of mobile phones as novelties, but we are not yet near an understanding of them as the harbinger of a new paradigm of place. In 2000 more than 20 million Americans signed up for cell phones, bringing the total number of subscribers past the 100 million mark. Today well over 50 percent of American households have at least one. Yet beyond the superficialities of antennae-tower NIMBY-ism and restaurant rudeness, there are very few critics of the technology--especially among architects and planners. But with the arrival of a new location-tracing technology this fall, the way mobile phones shape where we are may become too substantial to ignore. » click to continue
The South Bronx is one of the places Jane Jacobs mourned in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When Robert Moses brokered the Major Deegan and Bruckner expressways, the neighborhood was axed to become a thruway to more desirable destinations--and to facilitate what has since become a great American pastime: the commute. On ramps above the area, tides of cars head elsewhere. The land in their shadows seems functionally abandoned. » click to continue |
