Polar Inertia, a somewhat addictive photo catalog/journalism site about (mostly) the American West and Pacific Rim.

Seam Carving, soon to appear on a website near you (and probably a tool in Photoshop CS4). Free tool to play with here.

PhotoSynth and Seadragon, two spectacular technologies that Microsoft has locked in a vault (video is a 6-month-old TED presentation, but it’s new to me so I’m passing it on).

Well, it looks like my quarterly spurt of activity has ended at last, given that I am now going weeks at a time without a decent post. I’m going to respond by capitulating to my slothfulness; I am holding myself to one good and one lame post a week now. To begin:

Katy has been listening to a fantastic multimedia photo-history podcast from an uncommonly devoted community college professor. One of the last mentioned what was and probably will remain the largest conventional negative camera ever made, used by George Lawrence to make a 4 1/2 x 8 foot glass plate negative of a locomotive for the upcoming Paris Exposition (Lawrence is most famous for using kites to lift cameras to 2000 feet for arial panoramas, such as those of San Francisco immediately following the Great Fire). Here it is in all of its 1400 lb glory, with about half of the team necessary to operate the beast:

and

Further research revealed the existence of the Moby C at 2nd and Bleeker in NYC, the largest polaroid camera in existence, capable of 40″ by 106″ prints. It was originally used to make life-size reproductions of paintings, but the scale is also, incidentally, ideal for life-size polaroids of humans as well. There is something about capturing 1:1 images that makes photographs break the bond of representation and recapture some of Walter Benjamin’s destroyed “aura”. It turns the camera into some kind of frozen mirror, a human-capturing device.

But no discussion of gargantuan cameras would be complete without a mention of the (very recent) Legacy Photo Project, which captured a 25′ x 100′ cloth negative using an abandoned aircraft hangar as a gigantic camera obscura:

So here you have it, the world’s first Borges Mapping Engine. Or perhaps a new weapon, the landscape soul thievery device! Able to steal the special aura surrounding any vista, hillock or monument you can think of, for transport and re-display at will. Ancient town centers and natural wonders beware! Your charms are no longer safe!

When I was in school the only real lessons we got in color theory were “there are no bad color combinations,” and then a big “have at it!”

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the ways that colors interact. Ever wonder why there is a light purple but no dark yellow? Ever wonder what the real difference between whiteness and brightness is? Well trip on down to LivelyGrey, play some games, and learn some lessons. You’ll be glad you did.

This is what archibase calls the Stockholm Metro. I would have to agree:

“The Stockholm Metro, or Stockholms tunnelbana, is the metro system in Stockholm, Sweden. The system has three main lines and one hundred stations, 47 of which are subterranean and 53 are aboveground (surface and elevated) stations.”

“Stockholm’s metro is well known for its decoration of the stations; it has been called the longest art exhibit in the world. Several of the stations (especially on the Blue line) are left with the bedrock exposed, crude and unfinished, or as part of the decorations.”

Tremendous, indeed. I have never, in my years of mass transit, seen anything approximating this. Say what you will about the scale of D.C.’s tunnels and the baroque chandeliers of Moscow. I’ll take the caves of Stockholm, thank you very much. Why on earth have the Swedes not let everyone know about this? Those cheeky Swedes.

(Thanks to things magazine for the heads up)

Mr. Manaugh of BLDGBLOG posted a few days ago on a joint performance by Michael McDonough and Michelle Kaufmann at this weekend’s Dwell on Design conference. The “big idea” of this presentation was apparently that “conductive” materials, such as metal, should be avoided in new housing in favor of “insulative” materials. I might be slightly biased in all of this, but this seems like a crazily reductive and somewhat specious argument to be making in front of thousands of paying customers. Not only is McDonaugh simplifying the idea of sustainability to a single variable (energy performance), but he seems to be ignoring holistic strategies and even the existence of more than one climate on this earth! In addition, heat conductance is a relative value, and roof, wall, and floor construction is almost always, by necessity, an assembly, so where do you draw the line, and with which material?

My other beef seems to be that Ms. Kaufmann is supporting this argument to differentiate her (wood framed) modular construction from similar (steel framed) modular construction, on the basis of sustainability. Never mind that the first Leed Platinum home in the country is entirely steel framed.

I think that Mr. McDonaugh and Ms Kaufmann are both very intelligent, gifted architects that have contributed greatly to the idea of a sustainable, well designed environment. And I’m definitely not going to claim that recycled steel is a perfect building technology. But this presentation seems to me to be a warning shot– the first in a series of “sustainability wars” where hype and proprietary technologies overcome the need for shared information and measured individual solutions. If we’ve learned anything from previous modern mistakes, it’s that a single and homogeneous treatment of any problem is going to be seriously lacking in resilience and vitality. So I am making an open request to Michele and Michael– next time you use your considerable clout to fight for sustainability, please try to acknowledge the need for a comprehensive, heterogeneous, multivalent solution to the problem. Simply saying “metal is bad” does no one any good.

The new Key Magazine in the NYT has this article of interest, a combination anthropological study of SoCal condo life and general expose on the marketing of “lifestyle” urban living centers. The jury’s still out on whether the findings are reassuring or frightening. The (somewhat geriatric) gist is that the young folks don’t want to leave their college dorms, which reminds me of this BLDGBLOG post that posits that our wish for pedestrian urbanism is, for most, really a nostalgia for campus life.

One problem I do have with the article is that it casts contemporary social networking as a kind of mass solipsism– all of the examples cited are chiefly recreational groups. No mention is really made of groups that produce– other than a sideways mention of Burning Man, which is somewhat equated in the article with flash mobs. Actually, come to think of it, the while article is sprinkled with condescension of this type, which seems to spring from the unspoken assumption that a mortgage and family is the de facto “normal” way of life in our country. So maybe I don’t like this article after all. But I like the slide show. Look at that.

I promise I’ll start posting more regularly, but for the time being here’s some filler. Slate.com has this lovely, detailed article on the true state of international nuclear relations. The gist is that the cold war has not ended, it’s just on hiatus. But there are also some great bits on an impervious quartz mountain-cave bunker headquarters.

If the above words make your heart accelerate, you might want to check out the recent NYT article on Bob Cassilly, and his two past and one future creations: The City Museum, MonstroCity, and CementLand. All are junkyard conglomerations built upon former industrial sites for the purpose of, in Cassilly’s words, providing a place “where people can come and do things they’re not supposed to.” I have harped on this again, again, and again. Post-industrial lots are the beginnings of great public spaces. I heard just yesterday a person from Friends of the LA River talk about the reclamation of 20 acres of former rail yard next to the river into a combination of wetlands and community soccer fields. In order to do this they had to first sue the county and city to keep it from being zoned for further industrial use. These things do not happen on their own. What is your local Highline?

Once again I have been lazy. I have no excuse.

There is a good article by Beth Daily at the Boston Globe about how there is an enormous market for secondhand industrial and transportation technologies in second- and third-world countries. When a city replaces its bus fleet, or a factory goes out of business and its power plant is dismantled, the detrious is recycled in a very literal way– it is shipped and reassembled in Guatamala, or Kenya, or Sri Lanka. It is a large scale version of what Bruce Sterling calls “the new composting the old,” with “outdated” technologies not disappearing but merely retreating out of the view of those of us who remain slavishly up-to-date, becoming cheaper and more receptive to hacking or modifying.

The article takes the slant of sustainability, and does a good job of conveying the complexity of the issue– reuse is good, but often repurposed items (such as diesel buses) are replaced because they are polluting or inefficient– the idea being that, when that coal power plant next door shuts down, it actually will spew carbon for another 50 years or so, only in South America.

I’m tempted to step aside all of this calculation and simply be satisfied that things are being used to their fullest extent; that the world is becoming more complex and interconnected, at a very basic and ground up level, every day. I can only wait for the day when we start using secondhand robots from Nicaragua, or retitled Balinese spacecraft. The world of the secondhand is mostly immune from the world of branding and global identitiy — what is getting sold is the possibility for energy, or conveyance, or communication. And an intangible alien quality that never quite diminishes with age.

“…infrastructure should be defined not by what it looks like, and not by who designs it or who pays for it, and not by who builds it or actually uses it. It should be defined by whom it is meant to serve. For all its seemingly disparate parts, infrastructure comprises those elements in a metropolitan region’s physical landscape that are meant to serve the public–or rather, the sometimes competing, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes wholly discontinuous publics that populate today’s American metropolitan areas and are critical to the growth of our country.”

Yes, yes and yes. This New Republic Article (subscription required to get beyond the first page) makes most of the talking points for the post-Minneapolis “rotting infrastructure” harangue, but with enough erudition and restrained anger to be convincing, even inspiring. Good job, Sarah Williams Goldhagen. Even the comments afterwards (mostly) continue the argument in a sane and rational manner. I’m going to start my own harangue here, but Goldhagen is obliquely making the same point I’ve been trying to drive home– that infrastructure in now the primary mode of public space and spending, and that it’s resources as an urban collector are poorly exploited (if at all). What this article points out is that we have underbuilt and undermaintained consistently over the last few decades, while veritably pouring money into private-public developments like arenas and “town centers,” developments that would probably have come to bear with our without government support.

Who will speak for the aqueducts, for the aqueducts have no lips? Um, me.