Month: December 2009

[Image: Vendor Power! by Candy Chang].

This is the second of two posts about design projects by Candy Chang; here’s the first. This one features a detailed poster and booklet about street vendor’s rights in New York City.

In Chang’s own words, “The guide also serves as an educational/advocacy tool and includes a poster full of fun facts on the history and challenges of NYC street vending, personal vendor stories, and policy reform recommendations.”

[Images: Two views of Vendor Power! by Candy Chang].

Called Vendor Power! A Guide to Street Vending in New York City, the impressively multi-lingual poster is intended to help street vendors know their legal and commercial rights in the city:

As part of Making Policy Public, Candy collaborated with The Street Vendor Project and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) to research, compile, and design this guide to street vending in New York City. Many vendors are being fined $1000 for little things like parking their cart too far away from the curb, not “conspicuously” wearing their vending license, and other rules buried in the City’s regulation book full of intimidating jargon that would make even the most patient person cry. This guide helps clarify the rules through diagrams and minimal text in English, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish, so NYC’s diverse vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living.

Again, I just think this is great; using design skills to assemble legible, economically accessible, and legally useful guides to the urban environment is so much more exciting to me than making new boutique objects for the modern home.

Plus, this poster and its accompanying guidebook fall somewhere between grass-roots vendor-empowerment and straight-ahead small business advocacy; the fact that this applies specifically to mobile street businesses gives it an allure of the poetic, but it would be just as socially important if it outlined the legal dos and don’ts for family shops in the San Fernando Valley.

[Image: From Vendor Power!].

In fact, realizing that these sorts of posters could be made—similar to Chang’s flashcard deck, as mentioned in the previous post—for other legal situations is like downing a quadruple espresso; how awesome would it be to design posters like this for urban agriculture, roof gardens, community parks, and more? Even suburban lemonade stands, for that matter.

[Images: Vendors reading Vendor Power!].

In any case, taken together, Chang’s Vendor Power! and Tenant Flash Cards projects offer two fantastic examples of how graphic design can be put to use in clarifying everyday, seemingly uninteresting legal situations—and I would love to see similar such endeavors occur elsewhere. The rights of the homeless in Los Angeles! Flashcards for international border crossers; your legal rights in quarantine; how to use the city in an electrical blackout. Or, for that matter, your rural hunting rights. Or the Geneva Convention! The rights of walkers in the British countryside. The possibilities are bewilderingly wide-ranging.

The New York Times covered the project back in April, meanwhile, if you want to read their take.

[Image: Tenants’ rights flashcards by Candy Chang].

This will be the first of two posts about recent projects by designer Candy Chang; each presents an awesome example of what a user’s guide to New York City might look like.

[Images: Tenants’ rights flashcards by Candy Chang].

The images shown here document Chang’s tenants’ right flashcards, a deck of cards with legal advice for apartment renters in New York City.

As the project description itself reads: “The flash cards translate New York’s official Tenants’ Rights Guide into a fun and friendly format that covers everything from security deposits and subletting to paint and privacy so residents can enjoy good times while becoming empowered residents.”

[Image: Tenants’ rights flashcards by Candy Chang].

“What’s my landlord required to repair?” Chang asked herself at the beginning of the project, realizing that there was very little about New York City’s legal renters’ rights that the general public really knew. “How does rent stabilization work? When can my landlord enter my apartment?”

But now you can just bust out this flashcard deck and remind yourself.

[Images: Tenants’ rights flashcards by Candy Chang].

It’s such a great idea, and the design possibilities for other legal situations are almost literally endless. From photographers’ rights in the UK to a pamphlet my college housemate once made about your rights as a driver on the U.S. highway system (vis-a-vis police searches and “probable cause”), there seem to be hundreds of highly useful card decks just waiting to happen. London zoning code, translated into a card deck. Municipal water rights in California—or standards of water safety and cleanliness.

What makes this particular card deck even better, I think, is Chang’s use of graphic design in the legal service of a specific community in a specific city—and it’s an approach that she used again in another project that I will be posting about here soon.

Check out the flashcards, meanwhile (including how to order a deck for only $10), here.

Nicola Twilley has pointed out this awesomely over-the-top post about home quarantine measures taken in the face of swine flu.

From sealing off your home ventilation system to turning the basement into a functioning medical ward—stashing “Pandemic Go-Kits” in the trunk of your car and wearing a full biohazard suit along the way—this is certainly one, albeit rather extreme, way to keep yourself safe from catching the flu. To the author’s credit, however, he does mention that one of his children is quite sick.

But the architectural transformations implied here—a suburban house in Utah becomes a post-apocalyptic medical ward with just a quick trip to Home Depot in between—is remarkable. In fact, a fantastic article could be written about the vernacular architecture of American survivalism, with an emphasis on the incidental equipment necessary for living in home quarantine.

In any case, the setting:

I live in a 2 story house, the basement is designed as a separate apartment; there is a kitchen, laundry room and 3 bedrooms down there, with a separate outside entrance. I live in the country on 50 acres and there are very few people around us. I have 8 children, 7 of whom live at home.

And here, specifically, is “the quarantine plan,” if you’ll excuse my quoting at great length:

The entire basement will immediately become the sick ward. The air vents, doorways and the upstairs entrance to the basement will be sealed off with 6 mil plastic to deter air flow. The window to the sick room will be open to allow fresh air circulation. I plan to get a UV Air filtration system to use in the basement as well. The sick person will be confined to a bedroom while in the house and will be allowed to play outside in a designated area that the other children will not be allowed to go to. The bathroom will become a decon room to dress and undress for entry into the sick rooms. The basement laundry room will be the only place the sick person and caretakers laundry will be done. All dishes used by the sick person will be washed in the sink downstairs. The sick person will be required to wear an N95 mask anytime someone is in the room with them, anyone going into the room will need full protective gear on (more on that in a minute). The sick rooms will be sanitized twice a day including changing and washing all linens on the bed. All paper trash (kleenexes, etc) that is able will be burned in our fire pit daily. All other trash will be collected into a garbage bags and disposed of twice daily.

To get this stage, “several specific preps” are required; these include purchasing the right breathing masks. The author points out, for instance, that “the filters I have for my respirator are 95% (like N95) filters—meaning they miss 5%. I’m planning on getting N100 filters to replace them. I’ll be doing that in the next week or two.”

On a side note, there is such a thing as too much filtration. Last week, for instance, a Miami hotel accidentally gave some of its guests Legionnaire’s Disease by installing filters so powerful that they prevented even bacteria-killing chlorine from entering the drinking water; this led to a bloom of the often-fatal Legionella bacteria. As Miami county’s “top epidemiologist” points out in the article, “What’s ironic is the hotel installed a special filtration system to enhance the quality of their drinking water.”

Home preparation doesn’t end with filters, however; there is psychological preparation, as well. Feelings of cabin fever and claustrophobia inspired by the spatial condition of quarantine can be partially relieved, we read, through playing “classic games like Clue, Pictionary, and Scrabble“… while the rest of your family is locked behind an air-seal in the basement.

A commenter on the original post writes: “It’s good to be prepared, but, stop a minute and think about it. Tyvek® hazmat suits? Full-face respirators? You’re likely to scare your kid to death with the Moon Suit!” But the blog has its sights set on more important things; its tagline is nothing less than “Ready for anything.”

[Image: By Jack van Wijk, Eindhoven University of Technology].

My brother pointed out this series of maps over at New Scientist. Combining a Buckminster Fuller-like interest in the most efficient way to map a sphere in two dimensions with a deployment of new algorithms, the maps show alternative ways of representing the earth’s surface.

[Images: By Jack van Wijk, Eindhoven University of Technology].

“Making truly accurate maps of the world is difficult,” New Scientist points out, “because it is mathematically impossible to flatten a sphere’s surface without distorting or cracking it. The new technique developed by computer scientist Jack van Wijk at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands uses algorithms to ‘unfold’ and cut into the Earth’s surface in a way that minimises distortion, and keeps the distracting effect of cutting into the map to a minimum.”

[Image: The world as a near-continuous coastline around one global ocean. By Jack van Wijk, Eindhoven University of Technology].

In van Wijk’s own abstract, published by The Cartographic Journal, we read that these “myriahedral projections,” as they’re called, “are a new class of methods for mapping the earth”:

The globe is projected on a myriahedron, a polyhedron with a very large number of faces. Next, this polyhedron is cut open and unfolded. The resulting maps have a large number of interrupts, but are (almost) conformal and conserve areas. A general approach is presented to decide where to cut the globe, followed by three different types of solution. These follow from the use of meshes based on the standard graticule, the use of recursively subdivided polyhedra and meshes derived from the geography of the earth.

It would be amazing to see what effect this technique might have on a much smaller scale—if, for instance, you could run one of these cuts through a populated area like London, say, and watch as parts of the city fractal off to opposite sides of the planet, the city’s roads opened up into algorithmic fissures.

(Thanks, Kevin!)

For those of you who have enjoyed the posts here about music, sound, noise, urban acoustics, glacial reverberatories, and their like, I will be on the radio tonight speaking about those very things, in conversation with DJ /rupture on his show Mudd Up!.

[Image: And they ascend the antenna… Photographer unknown; photo from a 1969 issue of Broadcaster magazine].

You can stream it live internationally, if you’re so inclined; it will run from 7-8pm EST tonight, Monday, December 14. Expect some archaeology, some radio cave-mapping, some sonic warfare, and even a few of my own favorite rekkids.

Over on Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley takes a look at the under-appreciated art of geophagy: eating soil. There is apparently a whole subculture around the practice, Twilley writes, in one case coming complete with “tasting notes for soil, which draw heavily on the vocabulary of wine appreciation.”

At one such earthen event, participants are actually served “two or three wine glasses, each filled with soil from a different organic farm”—and these samplings of different geographies do matter. “In other words, if the earth on which your farm sits has ‘grassy,’ ‘olive,’ or ‘smoky’ notes, those flavours will recur in the organic spinach or goat’s milk cheese you produce. Smelling the soil first simply helps you become aware of the continuity.”

I don’t see myself sprinkling farm-fresh soil on my salads any time soon, I’m afraid, but check out the rest of the post over at Edible Geography.

As many—if not all—of you will know, last week saw Swiss voters ban the construction of new minarets in their country.

Fear, on one side, of watching Europe turn into “Eurabia“—even if the demographics don’t justify such worries—and, on the other, of seeing centuries’ worth of social liberalization—including women’s suffrage and gay rights—fall apart in the face of religious conservatism, has led to the illegalization of an architectural form.

When your culture is under threat, ban a building.

Writing in the L.A. Times, Christopher Hawthorne calls it “Islamophobia lightly veiled“—whereas Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in a rambling article for the Christian Science Monitor, views it as “a rejection of political Islam, not a rejection of Muslims.” The minaret, she continues, “is a symbol of Islamist supremacy”; its ban is thus a much-needed wall against what she calls “Muslim immigrant newcomers who feel that they are entitled, not only to practice their religion, but also to replace the local political order with that of their own.”

So what would happen if we temporarily—if only for the sake of argument—treated this whole thing as a design problem? What if architects could redesign minarets—what would that do to the efficacy of Switzerland’s ban?

Archinect has stepped into the midst of this fight over religious expression, architectural form, visual traditions, national identity, future migration, international borders, the scenographic purity of the Alpine landscape, and more with a public design competition: Switzerland, We Have A Problem.

From the competition brief:

To address this impasse between the rightful expression of the Muslim religion and the value of Switzerland’s overwhelmingly scenic environment, we challenge you to design a solution that allows the best of both worlds. Can you design a minaret as event rather than object?
Your task is to design a deployable minaret that can attain full presence, visible from a distance, during each of the five daily calls to prayer.
You may use any technology you like, choose any site in Switzerland, and your minaret may reach any height so long as it’s at least twice as high as the building it sprouts from.

There are more specific requirements over at Archinect.

In the end, then, how might certain building types respond creatively to a legal ban? What private chapels might result if megachurches were universally denied planning permission—and what effect might this architectural gesture have on Christianity itself?

Might Switzerland, ironically, become a site of intense design virtuosity and formal mutation in the historical typology of the mosque?

Things like this will never look the same after reading our long interview with Sara Redstone, plant quarantine officer from Kew Gardens, London, but they’re still very cool.

This is how to make a “seed grenade,” “seed bomb,” or, more prosaically, seed ball.

Seed balls, simply put, are a method for distributing seeds by encasing them in a mixture of clay and compost. This protects the seeds by preventing them from drying out in the sun, getting eaten by birds, or from blowing away.

And they’re not new. The blog post I’m quoting from is more than two years old—but “the seed ball method” itself, we read,”has been working for centuries.”

I’ve read that some North American First Nations’ tribes used seed balls. More recently natural farming pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka has experimented with them. And, in New York City, seed bombs were used in 1973’s revitalization of the Bowery neighbourhood and the development of the city’s first community garden.

Landscapes at a distance. BLDGBLOG has already covered the idea of using military equipment in large-scale reforesting efforts, as well as the possibility of dropping “soil bombs” on Iceland.

But this wonderfully down-to-earth how-to guide for making everyday seed grenades saves you the hassle of purchasing decommissioned warplanes…

[Image: “This is what happens just a few day’s after dropping a seedbomb. The rain melted the clay and the compost, feeding the soil surrounding the bomb allowing for other plant growth.” Image and text from Guerilla Gardener’s Blog].

Just pack your seeds in a matrix of red clay, hurl your balls over a fence somewhere, and watch new worlds on the other side grow.

[Image: The DoChoDo Zoological Island by Julien De Smedt Architects, from Agenda].

Another book launch I am looking forward to is for Agenda, which documents the work of Julien De Smedt Architects. Here are some page-spreads.

[Images: From Agenda by Julien De Smedt Architects].

If you’re in NYC this week, come by the book’s official North American launch party, hosted by Storefront for Art and Architecture; it’s on Thursday evening, December 10, starting at 7pm.

[Images: From Agenda by Julien De Smedt Architects].

The book includes a huge range of projects, including the DoChoDo Zoological Island proposal, pictured at the head of the post, and “Experiencing the Void,” De Smedt’s proposal for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in which a massive, climbable web would be hung down through the central rotunda.

[Image: From Agenda by Julien De Smedt Architects].

I’m also excited to say that I have a short story published in the book, about the cross-species appeal of roof gardens as witnessed by a junior executive at Albert Heijn…

So stop by if you’re around, and consider picking up a copy of the book.

[Image: “Landscapes of Quarantine” meets at Storefront for Art and Architecture, October 2009].

As many readers will already know, for the past two months BLDGBLOG has been teaming up with Edible Geography to lead an independent design studio called “Landscapes of Quarantine” in New York City. We’ve been meeting every Tuesday—and the odd Saturday—since October, using various spaces around Manhattan but, for the most part, based at Storefront for Art and Architecture (we’ve also met at Front Studio/Harvest and at Studio-X).

It’s all coming to an end this week, however, after which we’ll start getting ready for the “Landscapes of Quarantine” exhibition, which opens in March 2010 at Storefront for Art and Architecture. I thought, therefore, following Edible Geography‘s lead, that I should post some photographs from the previous eight weeks. These are less project documentation shots, however, than they are simply social photographs of our weekly meetings; for the projects themselves, expect more images coming up in the spring.

[Image: “Landscapes of Quarantine” meets at Storefront for Art and Architecture, December 2009].

Of course, I realize that these photos will not be of immediate interest to everyone—but what I nonetheless like about them, and why they are appearing here, is that they show how a design studio without any official institutional affiliation can manage to set itself up, using equipment as simple as cheap wine, PDFs, and Post-It notes, inside already existing spaces around the city.

[Images: Scenes and friendly faces, including guest speaker Jake Barton, from “Landscapes of Quarantine,” autumn 2009].

You don’t need a campus, in other words, or even a dedicated building (or room); you need a schedule, some colored markers, a stack of plastic cups, maybe a Google Groups account, and a willingness to participate in a structured conversation.

[Images: After hours on a Tuesday night at Storefront for Art and Architecture, autumn 2009].

In fact, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography and I have been joking that we wanted to start a kind of counterfeit university—that is, a form of continuing education that models itself on, and masquerades as, the very academic studio system it is meant to supplement (but not replace).

Whether or not any of that is told by the following photographs—let alone whether or not Nicola and I were actually successful—is something else altogether. But I’ll put these photos up here simply as an act of willful nostalgia and archival documentation. It’s been a great eight weeks. I regret no part of it—even living in a surreal, semi-abandoned building in New York City without a lease while everything we own remains boxed up in a storage unit in west Los Angeles.

[Images: Paola Antonelli from the Museum of Modern Art addresses the “Landscapes of Quarantine” group at Storefront for Art and Architecture, November 2009].

The group has had some fantastic guest critics & speakers, as well. Architect Bjarke Ingels came by in October to see some initial project proposals; Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, gave us all an inspiring introduction to her own past work (and offered exhibition advice for the future); designer Jake Barton blew everyone away with some of the most interesting exhibition-design ideas out there today; architect and educator Laura Kurgan supplied much-needed feedback on our designs and conceptual approach; graphic designer Glen Cummings came by with countless examples of his books, pamphlets, posters, shows, and websites; and Joseph Grima, director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, gave us an eye-opening history of the space we all then sat in. We even got to meet the immensely talented (and intimidatingly young) landscape architects from paisajes emergentes, in town from Medellín, who stopped by one night to say hello.

[Images: Guest speakers Laura Kurgan and Glen Cummings address “Landscapes of Quarantine,” November 2009].

That’s in addition to the amazing group of people we had along for the ride. The breadth of our participants’ projects is extraordinary, and it’s worth taking a long look at how far they’ve been pushing the idea of quarantine. I’ll here paraphrase—or outright quote from—Edible Geography‘s own round-up of the studio.

At its most basic, quarantine is the creation of a hygienic boundary between two or more things, meant to protect one from exposure to the other. It is a spatial strategy of separation and containment, often invoked in response to suspicion, threat, and uncertainty.

Typically, quarantine is thought of in the context of disease control, where it used, somewhat mundanely, to isolate people who have been exposed to a contagious virus or bacteria (and who, as a result, might be carrying the infection themselves). According to historian David Barnes, quarantine was simply “an unpleasant fact of life” in most port cities for the duration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and, in some cases, earlier: in 1377, Dubrovnik became the first city-state to hold ships for a thirty day quarantine, on an island outside its harbor).

By the twentieth-century, this kind of routine application of quarantine was becoming less and less common. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s own “History of Quarantine“:

In the 1970s, infectious diseases were thought to be a thing of the past. At that time, CDC reduced the number of quarantine stations from 55 to 8. However, two major events—the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the SARS outbreak in 2003—caused concerns about bioterrorism and the worldwide spread of disease. As a result, during 2004–2007, CDC increased the number of U.S. Quarantine Stations from 8 to 20.

This year’s swine flu pandemic has prompted an even greater awareness and enforcement of quarantine—although opinions are divided as to whether or not it has actually been effective in slowing the spread of disease.

[Images: Guest critic Bjarke Ingels surveys the scene as the “Landscapes of Quarantine” group presents their preliminary design ideas at Studio-X, October 2009].

The use of quarantine to restrict individual liberties in the name of public health raises a host of legal and ethical questions that proved a fruitful ground for discussions this autumn about the “dark math” of triage and “acceptable losses.”

Game designer Kevin Slavin, for instance, and comic book artist Joe Alterio are both now producing projects that investigate the challenge of shared responsibility and individual decision-making in the face of a deadly disease.

[Images: Add Post-It notes, and every wall becomes a university… Post-It notes at Storefront for Art and Architecture, autumn 2009].

Other studio participants have identified an undercurrent of absurdity inherent to the practice of quarantine, and they have been gravitating toward almost Dada-like real-life images of tourists forcibly confined inside Chinese hotel rooms, receiving takeout food from biohazard-suited attendants, and the returning astronauts of the Apollo program who were denied their public ticker-tape parade and simply waved at by President Nixon through the window of a modified airstream trailer (which was itself later found, mysteriously, on a fish farm in Alabama).

Set designer Mimi Lien and graphic designer Amanda Spielman (in collaboration with her brother, Jordan) are both creating projects that play on the most surreal aspects of quarantined space, with (respectively) evocative, depopulated dioramas of unexpected quarantine locations, and a tongue-in-cheek public health campaign filled with helpful tips. These touch on making the most of your time in quarantine, for example, as well as on relationship-maintenance for married couples divided by quarantine.

Of course, quarantine does not only apply to people and animals. Its boundaries can be set up anywhere and for as long as necessary, creating spatial separation between the clean and the dirty, the safe and the dangerous, the healthy and the sick, the foreign and the native—no matter how those terms might be currently applied. Many of our readings and discussions thus focused on the technical challenges involved in using design to prevent the forward contamination of Mars or the spread of plant pests in an era of global climate change.

Artists Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth of Smudge Studio are focusing their attention on what they term the “limit-case” of quarantine: plans for the one-million-year containment of nuclear waste in subterranean geological repositories around the world. Is there such a thing as infinite quarantine, Smudge has asked, and how might that be represented on a comprehensible human timescale?

[Images: Smudge Studio‘s graphical analysis of how long-term nuclear waste repositories can be designed].

Of course, as a project of spatial control, the implications of quarantine ripple outward to affect the layouts of buildings, the shapes of cities, the borders of nations, and even the clothes we wear. Our weekly discussions have ranged from the fictional potential of quarantine (currently under investigation by writer Scott Geiger) to the infrastructural requirements of quarantine as it applies both to rare orchids and to the President of the United States (architect Thomas Pollman of the NYC Office of Emergency Management).

Architects Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita of Front Studio are addressing the implications of inserting quarantine spaces directly into the fabric of the city, while architect Brian Slocum has been examining the way quarantine spaces blur the border between inside and outside, resident and visitor, homeland and foreign origin.

Some evenings, our conversations have revolved around the dystopian overlap between border controls and health screening, as well as what quarantine might look like from the point of view of the bacteria or virus that that quarantine has been set up to control (a twist that stems from architect and filmmaker Ed Keller‘s thoughts on networks, information virology, and what he calls political science fiction).

Scott Geiger, Kevin Slavin, and artist Katie Holten were brave enough to rise early on a cold October morning in order to catch the Staten Island ferry with us and witness the ceremonial re-interment of the quarantined dead during a bagpipe-accompanied church service. Later in the studio, Katie went back out onto the waters of the New York archipelago to visit North Brother Island, the final home of Typhoid Mary, where she stepped through ruined buildings half-buried in autumn leaves, while photographer Richard Mosse—previously interviewed here on BLDGBLOG—flew all the way to Malaysia as part of his fascinating exploration of vampirology, family history, and remote villages destroyed by the Nipah virus.

[Images: Benjamen Walker of WNYC records the final Tuesday evening of “Landscapes of Quarantine,” December 2009].

As some people might have noticed, on the other hand, we lost Lebbeus Woods (one of our studio’s original participants who, unfortunately, had to drop out of the proceedings), and we’ve been meeting with Jeffrey Inaba off-site in order to discuss his work (with C-LAB) for the exhibition.

You can read more about the studio here or here—and I want very much to point out to other people elsewhere that you don’t need to be connected to academia in order to put together a group of interesting and committed people for the purpose of pursuing an organized research project. You could work at Jamba Juice and still assemble a makeshift university. In fact, I’ve always thought it worth remembering that Thomas Bulfinch wrote his classic text Bulfinch’s Mythology while working day shifts as a bank teller in Boston.

But you need nothing more than a structure, a common topic, a place to meet up, a backpack full of the most basic office supplies, perhaps a bottle opener, and the will-power to see it through; with any luck, in other words, more “counterfeit universities” will be popping up here and there, their research published independently on blogs, their meetings hosted in apartments, offices, restaurants, bars, and other spaces in their after-hours, bringing more and more people into productive conversation.