Londonist has some details of a novel map by Stephen Walter: an intense look at the secrets that lie buried, physically and historically, under the streets.
Art
Checking In
Work has kept me away from Legal Towns for the last month, but I thought I’d post this link to a funny article by the artist David Kramer about the perils and pluses of smoking. I wonder how much of the fall of Western civilization will ultimately be attributed to the anti-smoking movement. I quit about seven years ago, myself. I haven’t missed nicotine in years, but sometimes, in an anxious moment, I still miss the physical habit. I’ve also never been able to recover the prolific writing ability that I had as a smoker (when I could sit down and write–creatively, productively–for four or five hours). Sadly, iced coffee is my daily vice now.
Art Imitates Land Use
Hill and Ploughed Field Near Dresden. Caspar David Friedrich. 1824.
Cityscapes
Sometimes, the mindset of planning can cause us to lose track of something that makes the field so compelling: the social fabric that neighborhoods express. Here’s a story that brings the American cityscape back to earth. It’s about an amateur photographer– a young policeman– whose work over the last decade captured the grit and beauty of ordinary time in some of New York City’s least glamorous precincts. To some extent, a few of his images remind me of my own memories of doing Census field work in Jersey City, when I was 19.
An Online Look at Gismondi’s Rome
Here’s a large photo set posted on Flickr, by a user called MrJennings, showing Italo Gismondi’s Model of Imperial Rome, at the Museo della Civiltà Romana. The 1:250 scale model depicts the city in the time of Constantine. Snapshots of the model turn up frequently in the context of articles about the imperial city, but this is a rare look at the work itself in its entirety. Meanwhile, here’s a more interactive look (zoom, pan, etc.) that also includes a bit of a description.
Art Imitates Land Use: Miniatur Wunderland
From Hamburg, Germany, an amazing project that began as a model railroad. More videos here.
Art Imitates Land Use: Edward Hopper
The City: Edward Hopper, 1927.
The ‘Champs-Élysées of the Bronx’
A Deco doorway on the Concourse. Source: NYC Landmarks Comm.
Let’s hear it for the Grand Concourse, one of America’s greatest concentrations of Art Deco and Late Victorian apartment buildings. Truly, some of New York City’s most amazing apartments are located there. The Concourse, itself, also has the potential to become a great public space. (At present, it has largely been paved over and is very underutilized.) A large swath of the southern Concourse (between East 153rd and 167th Streets) has just been designated as a new historic district by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
And, yes, it’s true: There’s been a lot of the Bronx on this page.
A Subway Map of French Wines
c. Dr. David Gissen
A clever idea. I think that the use of maps to depict the spatial relationships by which we organize complex, non-spatial concepts is still vastly under-explored. This is especially true in light of the tedious nature of linear narratives that seek to explain complex relationships among multiple subjects. A lot of legal concepts, for example, could probably be better explained with maps than by treatises, but the tyranny of the printing press goes on.
This map, showing French wine regions and their signature grape varietals as stops along a series of fictitious subway routes, bridges an attempt to map what are primarily nominal relationships with the more traditional subject matter of cartography. Typically, the sample JPEG from the publisher is very reduced: You would have to purchase the full-sized print to enjoy most of its details.
The White City of Tel Aviv
Bauhaus architecture, Tel Aviv.
The world’s largest collection of Bauhaus architecture makes up the White City of Tel Aviv. Planning students will remember that Sir Patrick Geddes, the eccentric godfather of 20th century regional planning, was retained by a forerunner to the Jewish Agency to plan the new city’s physical layout during its first period of rapid growth, in the mid-1920s. Between that time and Israeli independence in 1948, Bauhaus became the architectural style that filled out much of Geddes’s plan. Recently, I came across an Israeli website, Artlog, that catalogs some of the city’s most significant structures with photographs, architectural drawings, and descriptions. There really is a striking aesthetic to the clean geometry and smooth curves of these buildings, set against the bright skies and sun-starched land of the Middle East. Artlog seems to be a work in progress, but its work on Tel Aviv is already quite thorough, and worth a look.
Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean. The ancient seaport of Jaffa is on the horizon.
I found versions of both these photos on multiple websites, without apparent attributions or copyrights. But if they’re really yours, just let me know, and I’ll either provide appropriate credit, or take them down.
Meanwhile, here’s a schematic map, reproduced in Dwelling on the Dunes: Tel Aviv, by the architect Nitza Metzger-Szmuk (2004), from the cover of Geddes’s 1925 report; and a Google satellite pinpoint map, for comparison:
