via bldgblog

urban grammar VIA BRITTA

time adjusted walking perspectives (street view like)

Koolhaas meeting minds with an ecology conference; rationally engineered attitudes towards future building projects (averting the eschatological)

"Urban informatics and the mobile Web are interesting, but I no longer think they can have a tremendous impact on everyday life."

BosWash extends from extreme southern Maine and New Hampshire – Boston's suburbs – south to Northern Virginia, Washington D.C.'s suburbs. It has a population of 55 million, or 18 percent of the population of the United States (living on only 2% of the nation's land) and about 0.8 percent of the world population.

cities and animals seem to grow more efficient by the same coefficient (.75)

good examples of inverted space (via straup)

PRE-STREETS: "The inhabitants lived in mud-brick houses which were crammed together in an agglutinative manner. No footpaths or streets were used between the dwellings, which were clustered in a honeycomb-like maze. Most were accessed by holes in the ceiling, which were reached by interior and exterior ladders and stairs. Thus, their rooftops were their streets."

typology of outdoor store speakers in Little Haiti (Miami): "This is why a snapshot of a milk crate at the moment in its life-cycle when it transitions from one use to another—when it is stolen from the supermarket and used as the leg of a display table for pirated DVDs—can be a better model for urban reconfiguration than a Herzog & de Meuron building caught in a sweeping shot from a helicopter or in a vertiginous 3D zoom. This snapshot neatly captures the fact that a city's morphology is as prone to alteration by small and repetitive gestures as it is by megaprojects."

nastiness in the place

passive versions of agressive media / google street view becomes this on the internet / and a japanese NHK tv show that is just narrated walks around

drawing of Google Maps downtown Manhattan if Robert Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway had been given the go

geography of the meltdown

whether or not quaint small-town places are apt environmental metaphors