New York Harbor

Following on from the Red Hook Pier photos from Halloween, I am posting a few other images of New York harbor. All images are from 2019 - the first six are from late May and the last two are from early June. The air is visibly much cleaner in the first photos; the views towards... Continue Reading →

NYC Neighborhood Mapping

Last week's post on the NYC lampshade showed not-quite-finished work, but work that had been refined and recreated in a long process of sketching and tracing while exploring typography and legibility. I wanted to share the process tracings, to show the different aesthetic directions driven by handwriting choices. It felt freeing to draw and explore... Continue Reading →

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

Thomas J Campanella's tome is a skip stop tour of Brooklyn's history, focusing on the built environment but full of rich sketches of the outsized personalities inhabiting and shaping the borough. A blurb from the publisher: Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never... Continue Reading →

Box Shelves, Past and Present

Over the past few years I have been creating wooden boxes that can be stacked together to form shelves, with the intent that any object stored on this shelf could be transported by the disassembled boxes. Initially I used finished grade 1x8 and 1x2 poplar wood and countersunk screws to create boxes approximately 15"Lx15"Wx23"H. I... Continue Reading →

53. Mies Flees

Why Mies really left Germany From The Guardian, "Mies and the Nazis" by Tom Dyckhoff: "It was hard for someone to ignore politics in 1930s Germany, but Mies did his best... Starved of work, Mies tried to ingratiate himself with this new, powerful and rich state patron, signing a motion of support for Hitler in... Continue Reading →

52. Big Brother

Where the CCTV cameras are The CCTV Map project is an attempt to map out the location of all the security cameras in London (though it seemed to start and end in 2012). In 2013 Fast.Co wrote an article about a proposed app SURV which would show users their location vis-a-vis nearby security cameras (spoiler... Continue Reading →

38. Color Wheel

The color wheel Light uses color in an additive process to combine red, blue and green to make white. Pigment uses subtractive color to combine cyan, magenta and yellow to make black. I've had a few teachers and colleagues make a point to view images on a computer screen using CMYK, rather than RBG, because... Continue Reading →

37. Elementary Ergonomics

Elementary ergonomics The blog/podcast (now magazine) Funambulist focuses on the 'politics of space and bodies' and has looked often oat the interface of the human body and the built environment. The article "Patterns of Life" by Gregoire Chamayou surveyed many examples of mapping the movement of people (or just their limbs). The image above shows... Continue Reading →

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