STUDIO 630
A New Subway Map Lets You Know The Time Your Trip Will Take
Evenly spaced stations might look good on a map, but they’re a total lie. A new design for the Boston subway map incorporates the length of your potential trip.
Via FastCoExist
Do you have an idea on how transportation could change America’s urban landscape?
What impact does urban mass transit have on the mobility of our cities in which we live, work and play?
What does the future hold for transportation investments in urban mass transit?
What forms will these new investments take and what is the result to our built environment?
Transform Kansas City, a collaboration between the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance and the Kansas City Chapter of the American Institute of Architects Young Architects Forum, would like to apply these questions and solutions to the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. Transform Kansas City has launched an International Call for Ideas and is asking for submissions that illustrate transportation related or affected ideas or solutions. Transform Kansas City invites you, no matter your background or experience, to submit your ideas on transportation, urban design and architecture.
Kansas City is a mid-sized Midwestern American city with a population of just over 2 million people concentrated in both Missouri and Kansas. Until the 1950’s, Kansas City was a vibrant urban center with bustling activity strengthened by streetcar and passenger rail synergies. The widespread introduction of the automobile decimated the public transportation system in Kansas City. Since the end of the streetcar era the urban core of Kansas City has slowly declined to an almost halt. Infrastructure deteriorated, populations fled for the suburbs and new investments were ineffective and stagnant….until now…
The future of Kansas City’s urban core and the metropolitan area in general is starting to brighten. Thanks to several large scale transit investment strategies, the region has the opportunity to see urban Kansas City return to its bustling days of transit glory. A robust return to the streetcar system, high technology light and regional rail systems, and a smart grid strengthened by Google Fiber all add to endless possibilities to the Kansas City environment.
Here is where you come in. We would like for you to identify and elaborate on the initiatives taking shape in Kansas City. Better yet, create your own. No idea is too large or novel. Introduce us to transformative transit projects in other parts of the world. Display original designs relevant to the Kansas City region. Inspire us!
Submissions are due June 30, 2013 and selected entries will be featured on the TransformKC.org website and included in an exhibition at Union Station. Please visit the website for submission criteria and medium. The TransformKC exhibition will be located in the East Hall of Union Station during the month of October 2013. The exhibit provides a great opportunity to bring your ideas, knowledge and expertise to a local, grassroots level and showcase you as a leader in the world’s built environment.
For more information please visit the TransformKC.org website.
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Every single triangle of the above grid blinks 3 times per second. If we used this grid to count world population, corresponding one blink of each triangle to a different person, it would take 39 days to finish.via iomikron:
(via fyprocessing)
Malcolm Gladwell: Human Potential
Pop sociologist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell has honed in on a profound new question: what separates extraordinary and average people? Discussing findings from his much-anticipated book “Outliers,” Gladwell details how we’re squandering human potential everywhere from the football field to the classroom – and what we can do to change it.
The Creator’s Project
You know what is fun? Making things. Turning a spark of creative insight into a thing that you can show people — a thing that people can use and from which they can derive some iota of pleasure or utility. Start with a simple website. Basic HTML and CSS. No product is too small. In fact, the opposite is true. If you don’t know how to build the first version of your product in a weekend — a usable working version, don’t try to build it. Programming is a means to an end, not an end in itself. You should be trying to do as little of it as possible to make the thing that you want.The fastest way to make something is to simply start. Don’t get caught in the never ending process of learning, researching, and over-thinking your idea.
via jonathanmoore:
“A Brief History of Suburbia’s Rise and Fall
Eric Jaffe. March 14, 2013
The suburb has a claim to being one of the most successful and least loved inventions of the modern era. Many intellectuals, being city people at heart, find the suburb a hard place to love.
So writes city historian Graeme Davison of Monash University, in Australia, in a recent issueof the Journal of Urban History. Davison goes on to chronicle a brief though rather complete rise and fall of the suburban lifestyle. Concentrating on England, but drawing support from the United States and Australia, Davison tracks suburbia from its ideological roots in the Victorian era to its harsh detractors in the present.
“Like a hardy hybrid, the suburban idea has flourished even in environments remote from its origins, and outlived most of the criticisms hurled against it,” he writes.”
Photo: Shutterstock
(via urbanresolve)
Joel Kotkin, a paid shill for the right-wing ‘philanthropist’ Howard Ahmanson, recently suggested that Richard Florida had abandoned his ‘discredited’ creative class theory about the richness of cities. Not only did Florida respond, and dismantle the weak arguments that Kotkin arrayed, he went on to call for a new urban social compact, to extend the benefits of dynamic cities to all of their denizens.
via stoweboyd:
Zhengzhou Tower II by Christian Kerez, 2013
via elcontexto:
The Future Isn’t A Book, It’s A Video Game
In Present Shock, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues that technology has delivered us to the future, and so it’s now time to use that technology to allow us focus on the present, instead of forcing us to constantly try to catch up.via fastcompany:
Mirror of Symmetry
Using mirrors and long exposures, Shinichi Higashi captures the movement, bright colors and architecture of Tokyo at night. View the entire Mirror of Symmetry set on Flickr.
Related - Tokyo Sky Drive “Take a journey through the city of Tokyo at night with this video filmed in HD on the Tokyo Monorail and horizontally mirrored.”
via jonathanmoore:
Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy
What’s the key to using alternative energy, like solar and wind? Storage — so we can have power on tap even when the sun’s not out and the wind’s not blowing. In this accessible, inspiring talk, Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that store renewable energy.
Project New York
“Audi Urban Future: Project New York” envisions a new city based on the award-winning concepts from the inaugural Audi Urban Future Award – hosted at the 2010 Venice Biennale – including the winning entry byJ. MAYER H. Architects from Berlin. To bring to life these concepts in New York City, five practices (LEONG LEONG, Matter Practice, Abruzzo Bodziak Architects, labDORAand THEVERYMANY) have applied these concepts to a 3D interactive map of Manhattan.
via futurepredictor:
TEDx: How to Build a Better Block / Jason Roberts
In this TEDx Talk, Jason Roberts – known as the “The Bike Guy” in his Oak Cliff community outside of Dallas, Texas – gives his audience a how-to guide in improving a community one block at a time as part of a project called “The Better Block“. The project did not start off as an organization with vast goals and strong following; instead it started off with Roberts’ interest and desire to develop his community into one that had a legacy apart from the highways and overpasses that dominate the landscape. Inspired by the rich history and existing street life of European cities with their historic buildings and monuments, plazas, and vistas; Roberts started small and eventually built a foundation and organization that is now nationally recognized and used as a tool to develop cities across the country.
