These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place (like Tjentište, Kozara and Kadinjača), or where concentration camps stood (like Jasenovac and Niš). They were designed by different sculptors (Dušan Džamonja, Vojin Bakić, Miodrag Živković, Jordan and Iskra Grabul, to name a few) and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković...), conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their "patriotic education." After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.

From 2006 to 2009, Kempenaers toured around the ex-Yugoslavia region (now Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.) with the help of a 1975 map of memorials, bringing before our eyes a series of melancholy yet striking images.

"Professor Alan Penn of the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture reveals the loads of resonance between physical shop floorplan design and UI design for ecommerce, plus he explains exactly how Ikea employ Dark Patterns."

The word charrette may refer to any collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem. While the structure of a charrette varies, depending on the design problem and the individuals in the group, charrettes often take place in multiple sessions in which the group divides into sub-groups.

If I would have won the Mega Millions yesterday my first purchase would be this house. Reported by Paste Magazine, the home from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is up for sale. Built in 1953, The Ben Rose House — located in Highland Park, Illinois — was designed by architects A. James Speyer and David Haid. The home is listed for $1.65 million, lets all pitch in and get it then drive a Ferrari off the back.

More info and a great picture gallery over at the Sotheby’s listing page

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Post tags: Architecture, ferris bueller's day off, highland park, house, modern

Kevin Lynch's work, especially his theory of city form and studies relating to human perceptions of the city and how they should affect city design, was highly influential.

The tourist attraction National Tourist Routes comprises 18 selected stretches from north to south. Mountains, fjords and coastline form the core of the travel experience. Bold architecture placed in magnificent natural scenery gives the attraction its special character.

“Tektonomastics” is a word that we made up by combining “tekto-” (Greek for “building) with “onomastics” (the study of the history and origin of proper names. More established branches of onomatology include toponomastics (the study of place names) and anthroponomastics (the study of personal names). We are creating a new branch - tektonomastics - or, the study of building names.

The Tokyo Apartment building by Sou Fujimoto consists of five dwelling units. Each one of them has two or three independent rooms in a prototypical “house” shape. I’m not sure that I would like to climb a ladder each time I want to go to the other room. But I would definitely like to visit this building.
Photos by Iwan Baan.

"The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."

Van Alen Institute's Resident Fellowships support the production of projects in public architecture. Projects can range across media, temporalities, dimensions, geographies and scales. Projects must be publicly accessible, and they can take the form of demonstrations, installations, performances, symposia, workshops, or other experimental formats.

Protocol Architecture was pitched as a team that "investigates potentials for future design through the creation and analysis of hyper-fictional documents. These document sets create evidence for future scenarios that string together a specific history of political, social, and technological developments."

"As more and more digital fabrication machines have been created their overall cost has gone down dramatically. This is affecting our ability as designers to build more robots. "

For Growing A Hidden Architecture, Christian Kerrigan proposed an awe-inspiring series of contraptions—collars, tourniquets, hinges, corsets, and belts—that could be attached to still-growing trees, thus bending and shaping their growth into a functioning, sea-ready ship.

"For those of you unfamiliar with the Myst series of video games, the basic designs of much of the architecture and machinery within the worlds explored are very much in the mould of Steampunk. And I figure it'd be really cool to be able to design a modern house with that stylistic idea in mind."

If we look at the functions of architecture with respect to games, however, some are meaningful and some are not. Weather, the primary reason for constructing most of the buildings in the world, is irrelevant. If it exists in games at all, it's usually cosmetic. Privacy, too, is normally immaterial -- most games don't let you take your clothes off anyway.

"I decided to take a ride out to visit the Candela Structures on Flushing Bay.

The Candelas are two fiberglass prefab shells that sit at the World’s Fair Marina, just north of the Mets’ new stadium. These relics of the 1964/5 World’s Fair were designed by architect and industrial designer Peter Schladermundt."

A story about an unusual building and the places it may take you.

Malcolm McCullough is the author of Abstracting Craft (1996), Digital Ground (2004), and Ambient Commons (someday...). He has lectured widely on urban computing and place-based interaction design. He teaches architecture and information design at the University of Michigan.

Research arm of school of Architecture at University of Westminster

The Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track of their original intentions.

In a nutshell the project is about exploring visual relationships in Regents Park and this application is exploratory work for an intervention to amplify vistas across the main pond.

In the previous entry I wrote about an unsuccessful submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale Australian pavilion. As I noted, it grew out of an earlier internal ideas competition at Arup Sydney, in which I produced a set of 14 super-short stories, each pertaining to describe a particular Australian city of the future.

Why not be able to search a place for its stories, its poetry, and its metaphors and why not be able to select what you desire as well as be able to create such things specifically for this place itself?

Levitt Goodman Architects have designed the Euclid Avenue house in Toronto, Canada.

From the architects:

Compact, ecologically smart, affordable and successfully integrated within a diverse streetscape, the Euclid Avenue House is a useful prototype for new urban housing. The project’s design restraint, responsive plan and its unity of architecture and nature establish an array of alternatives to the shortcomings of Toronto’s housing typologies.

Simplicity of means has resulted in a strategically planned and relaxed living space that accommodates the life of a full family and invites the varying temperature, light and colour of Toronto’s fluctuating seasons into the house, imbuing it with a rural sensibility that is an astonishing compliment to its urban setting.

Photos by Ben Rahn of A-Frame Architectural Photography and Levitt Goodman Architects

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Zecc Architects have completed a villa in the woods of Soest, The Netherlands.

Full description after the photos….

Photography by Cornbreadworks

Villa in the Woods by Zecc Architects
constructing period    2007-2009

On a wide constructing site in the woods of Soest (The Netherlands) a new villa has been built. An important theme while designing the house is the spatial connection between the three floors. From basement to the second floor a void has been planned. Standing at the front entrance a view over the void, directly into the garden, is provided. Functions as the toilet, wardrobe and closets are connected to this void. The parapet around the void continues smoothly into these functional spaces and make sure a sculptural link between the three floors is created.

Visit the website of Zecc Architects – here.

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For those who couldn’t be there, and for those who were there and seek to savor the memories, here is An Event Apart Chicago, all wrapped up in a pretty bow:

AEA Chicago – official photo set
By John Morrison, subism studios llc. See also (and contribute to) An Event Apart Chicago 2009 Pool, a user group on Flickr.
A Feed Apart Chicago
Live tweeting from the show, captured forever and still being updated. Includes complete blow-by-blow from Whitney Hess.
Luke W’s Notes on the Show
Smart note-taking by Luke Wroblewski, design lead for Yahoo!, frequent AEA speaker, and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008):

Jeffrey Zeldman: A Site Redesign
Jason Santa Maria: Thinking Small
Kristina Halvorson: Content First
Dan Brown: Concept Models -A Tool for Planning Websites
Whitney Hess: DIY UX -Give Your Users an Upgrade
Andy Clarke: Walls Come Tumbling Down
Eric Meyer: JavaScript Will Save Us All (not captured)
Aaron Gustafson: Using CSS3 Today with eCSStender (not captured)
Simon Willison: Building Things Fast
Luke Wroblewski: Web Form Design in Action (download slides)
Dan Rubin: Designing Virtual Realism
Dan Cederholm: Progressive Enrichment With CSS3 (not captured)
Three years of An Event Apart Presentations

Note: Comment posting here is a bit wonky at the moment. We are investigating the cause. Normal commenting has been restored. Thank you, Noel Jackson.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2695

Photo by Delcio G.P.Filho.

The big apple.

Many say it’s the greatest city in the world. Whether or not you agree, there’s no denying it’s an incredibly dense place with an overwhelming amount of people and things to do. Not only are there over 40 million tourists annually, jostling to see the sights and get a taste of the cultural capital but there are also over 8 million people living here − struggling to manage the tasks of daily living amongst all the tourists. That’s a lot of people with very different goals. How do they all figure it out?

(For those of you not in New York, you might want to consider pressing play for some mood music.)

The usability of cities

I’ve been on the road for the past few weeks and am struck by how some cities are easier to use than others. Since I’m in the business of interfaces I’ve been thinking about it in those terms. Just like software, smaller cities with few features are generally (but not always) fairly easy to use. Once you have a large, complex city with many features − like NYC − it gets much more challenging to maintain that ease of use.

New York City is an incredibly powerful interface with multiple entry points and endless features. One might say it has feature bloat. It overloads the senses and it’s not always easy to navigate and understand, yet people learn to use it effectively and often grow to love it.

In that way it’s like Adobe Photoshop - optimized for expert users, perfect for their needs once they have taken the time to learn how it works, but very intimidating to novice users. Over 40 million of tourists enter the city each year and have to navigate the New York City ‘interface.’ How do they figure it out?
Navigating New York

From a physical standpoint New York is pretty easy to navigate. The basic grid structure is consistent, except for the villages, and numbered streets helps one stay oriented.

There are many ways to get around: the metro, cabs, buses, bicycles and your own two feet. For the most part these are all pretty easy to use, but there are a few codes that can be confusing to figure out at first - for example you can’t just hail any old cab. Well you can, but only a select few will stop. The trick is to know what the various lighting configurations of the taxi sign mean: no light mean the taxi already has a fare; just the middle light means it’s available; if both the side lights are on too, then the cab driver is off duty.

The system doesn’t break if you’re unaware of this code but it can go more smoothly if you know which cabs to wave at and it’s not so frustrating when you know why four cabs speed past you before one stops. This lighting code may be documented somewhere, but who ever reads the user manual anyway? Like many of my favorite product features, the only reason I know about it is because someone told me. That’s how I discovered my most frequently used Web browser shortcuts - F5 to refresh the page, and F6 to place the cursor in the address bar. Similarly, they’re not critical to basic usage but they make me more efficient and improve my experience.

Getting around NYC is not too difficult, even for first timers. There are lots of wayfinding cues and breadcrumbs to keep you on track and indicate where you are.


It’ll be easy to get there, once you figure out where to go. And that is where the NYC interface can get complicated - especially for power users.

New York for newbies

An interface optimized for novice users is very different from one designed to meet the needs of power users. The interesting thing about NYC is has to offer both, overlaid with one another. The goals of first time visitors are typically very different from residents’ goals. They don’t need to work out the logistics of daily life like shopping for groceries in a city where it’s not practical to own a car. Tourists are typically more interested in seeing the major sights and enjoying some quintessentially New York experiences - like eating a hot dog from a street car, catching a show on Broadway or maybe passing by the David Letterman studio (especially in light of the current scandal.)

Since these are popular features typically used by novices, they have been made accessible with ‘big friendly buttons’ − your hotel maps or a quick “what to do in NYC” search on Google will provide details on where and how to do these things. Even the iPhone map of NYC highlights the Letterman studio as a tourist attraction.


The various aspects of the NYC interface work well together -highlighting features that new users care about and making them easy to find and use. The only problem then is to deal with all the other newbies trying to do the same things, resulting in long wait times and unavailability of certain features.

The New York power users: Daily tasks and discernment
Interfaces that optimize for power users are often very complicated; with so many features and capabilities that almost none of them are readily discoverable or intuitive, but once you learn to use them it’s a smooth and efficient experience.

Expert users in the city tend to know their way around pretty well, but since NYC is so big, they specialize in a particular area. Not unlike the way users of an incredibly complex program may specialize in a particular area. They have a working knowledge of the other areas, but stick to using the one they know best. For example, my friends who live in TriBeCa are a fountain of knowledge about anything below 14th street but once I go above that they can’t help me.

Residents' goals and tasks are very different from tourists. They avoid highly populated tourist areas, favoring things that are off the beaten path. They value the hidden features, wanting to discover something new and special -just like the super geeks looking for the tricks that developers hid away somewhere: a secret way to do something cool and special. And it’s most satisfying if they’re among the first to find it.

If you need something to eat you don’t have to go far in NYC. You can’t walk half a block without stumbling on at least two restaurants and one hotdog cart. The challenge comes when you want to be more discerning about it. In order to filter through the obvious options and get to something good you have to do some work. There are tools to help you along, for example the New York Times, Time Out, NYCgo, Yelp and many more - all serving as guides to help people discover which restaurant has the best food, or atmosphere, or prices. The problem is,once something starts to get a lot of positive reviews, the crowds aren’t far behind, and accessibility and quality often decline. What people really need is access to an expert to help them.

One common pattern I’ve noticed doing design research is that a common way for people to learn a complex interface is to work closely with someone who already knows it. This is very true for New York. The quintessential New York conversation tends to revolve around where to find the best “insert food item or service here.” Everyone is trying to learn the best tricks to make the interface work for them. It’s kind of like listening to gaming geeks talk about how they navigated a level of the latest “it” game.

Gaming NYC

The NYC interface really is most like a gaming interface which makes sense, since life is not just about achieving goals and performing tasks, it’s about having frivolous fun, being surprised and following ridiculous dreams. That is where the NYC interface performs best. It’s full of challenges, surprises and delights as you navigate through it as you attend to the day-to-day.

One I came upon recently is the High line park.


About a year ago I posted “designing time to think” encouraging us to consider how we can create pauses and moments for refection in our interfaces and this is a perfect example. It’s an old freight rail line converted into a raised natural park. The design was led by James Corner Field Operations, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro. In a city that is so dense that people are cars are now vertically stacked it makes sense to vertically layer natural spaces and pauses into this interface.

Where I’m left in my ponderings is that as an interface NYC is multi-layered, and like most games you have to start at the first level. Once you’ve seen the major sites and gotten a sense for the basic layout, then you progress to the next level - searching for attractions that are off the beaten path, although you may not get very far unless you plug into the community and enlist people’s help to find the cool features. As for becoming a true expert, it will take years of experience. It’s this challenge that attracts that special breed of people to make it their home and become true New Yorkers.

Daniel Burnham’s monumental Plan of Chicago (1909) was unprecedented in its size and scope. Given the date of production, one shouldn’t be surprised that a number of celebratory exhibitions have run course during the year. Among them, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Plan of Chicago brings to public eye the illustrations Burnham commissioned to give his plan visual pull. These images realize Burnham’s ideas, and in their time worked as a major selling point.

The museum’s exhibition runs until December 15, 2009, but full exploration of the plan, its drawings, and more are available via an online exhibition titled “Without Bounds or Limits.”

© 2009 Curated for Titel Media. Author: nschonberger |
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Photography by Joe Gavin

Anymails is a visualization of my received emails.
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