Curbside Haiku Samples

TRAFFIC SAFETY HAIKU
With ubiquity comes invisibility. And words can be arranged with the same economy and elegance as high quality graphic design. These two precepts are the inspiration behind the DOT’s latest spate of traffic signs. By combining a little bit of poetry with well-designed visuals, the DOT hopes to call attention to hazardous intersections. According to The New York Times City Room, twelve curbside Haiku signs have been installed in over twenty locations (PDF) around Brooklyn and Manhattan with more locations slated throughout the boroughs, all of which correspond to highly trafficked intersections near major cultural institutions. Apparently, the notion of traffic sign haiku is catching on, as City Room’s readers have responded with some entertaining, seventeen-syllable poetry of their own.

DELANCEY UNDERGROUND
A couple months ago, a proposal to build an underground park at the site of the the abandoned Essex Street Trolley Terminal at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge began to circulate around the Internet. Dubbed “Delancey Underground,” the proposal excited interest, and, while its fate is still uncertain, the MTA definitely wants to open the space up to development. To that end, the MTA has released a video tour led by Peter Hine of the MTA’s real estate office (blogged earlier this week by Second Avenue Sagas). While leading the tour, Hine offers up some suggestions of what kinds of retail or commercial uses could inhabit the space, and he is particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of a nightclub: the former dispatch tower of the trolley terminal could serve as the DJ booth and revelers could enjoy views of active trains at the adjacent Delancey Street – Essex Street subway station. The video ends with an invitation to developers to get in touch with ideas about the “creative redevelopment and reuse” for this and other spaces belonging to the MTA throughout the city. For more information check out the MTA Real Estate Department’s website.

David Brooks' new installation at 46th street and 8th Avenue.

SUBURBAN DUNESCAPES IN TIMES SQUARE
A couple weeks ago, we spoke with Glen Weiss, former manager of the robust public art program at the Times Square Alliance. With the help of the Art Production Fund, Times Square has recently inaugurated a new series of installations ”that focus on raising environmental consciousness,” the first of which is a new, 5,000-square-foot sculpture by the artist David Brooks entitled Desert Rooftops. Constructed out of asphalt-shingled rooftops, the piece evokes strip malls, McMansions and other typologies we commonly associate with suburban sprawl right in the heart of New York City. Brooks’ synthetic landscape “examines issues of the natural and built landscape by comparing the monoculture that arises from unchecked suburban and urban sprawl with that of an over-cultivated landscape.” The installation is on view now through February 5, 2012 at Times Square, at The Last Lot project space on 46th Street and 8th Avenue. More information is available at the Times Square Alliance website.

DREAM CITIES
Reimagining cities has long been a favorite topic of discussion among architects and urbanists. Increasingly, the topic is capturing the attention of mainstream audiences as well. In September, The Atlantic unveiled its new online section, Atlantic Cities, which is devoted to “[exploring] the most innovative ideas and pressing issues facing today’s global cities and neighborhoods.” This week, Salon.com is widening the audience of those concerned with the future of cities even further with their new series, Dream City. The series, created to “explore the way we’re designing our cities of the future, cities in which we want to live, right now,” opened with a look at the possibilities of floating, water-borne architectures followed by a post on the removal of inner city highways. Both of these entries referenced New York City precedents: the Floating Pool and the proposed removal of the unloved Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx. We look forward to reading more.

DESIGNER SCAFFOLDING
While fun for the acrobatically-inclined child or cyclist looking for bike parking, the ubiquitous sidewalk scaffolding that protects pedestrians from falling debris at construction and demolition sites has always been an eyesore. In response to the ugliness, in 2009 the Department of Buildings invited architects and designers to submit proposals to the UrbanShed competition. The winning entry, from the team of Young-Hwan Choi, Andres Cortes and Sarrah Kahn of Agencie Group, was announced last January and their design is finally making it to the streets. For more of the coverage, check out the New York Times City Room and the Village Voice.

EVENTS and TO DOs

RAIL YARDS COMMUNITY INPUT MEETING: Now that all stakeholders have pledged to retain the final section of the High Line for recreational use, the team at Friends of the High Line are ready to move ahead with plans and designs for phase three. On December 6th, join them for a project update from representatives from the High Line design team, James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and voice your suggestions or ideas for the site. For more information about the Community Input Meeting, visit the Friends of the High Line’s website. Tuesday, December 6th, 6:30pm, at Public School 11 Auditorium, 320 West 21st Street.

Button Agreement Map, Day 5 | Stanley Greenberg

EVERY STREET IN MANHATTAN
Photographer Stanley Greenberg, who spoke with us last year about his long history of documenting infrastructural spaces and systems, has embarked on a new project, the Button Agreement. Greenberg will walk every street in Manhattan. He will go on at least one walk a week, documenting the walks with photographs and maps showing which streets he’s been on. The documentation will be made public on his blog.

A book of his previous project, Time Machines, photographs of high energy physics experiments, is now available. Join Greenberg for a discussion and book signing next week in Brooklyn. Wednesday, December 7th, 7pm at BookCourt, 163 Court Street.

AIDS MEMORIAL COMPETITION: When the AIDS epidemic hit New York City in the early 1980s, St. Vincent’s hospital was at the epicenter of the crisis. St. Vincent’s has closed and the hospital is being redeveloped as luxury condominiums, but the NYC AIDS Memorial Park Campaign has succeeded in designating the triangle adjacent to the hospital a future park and memorial space. The triangle, bounded by Greenwich Avenue, West 12th Street and 7th Avenue, which has traditionally served as the loading dock for the hospital, will now serve as a “memorial park and teaching space to honor and recognize the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who have died from AIDS.” Architizer and Architectural Record have launched a competition to design the memorial park. The competition will be juried by Michael Arad, Kurt Andersen, Barry Bergdoll, Liz Diller, Ken Smith, Robert Hammond, Bill T. Jones, Richard Meier, Dr. Marjorie Hill and Suzanne Stephens. Find more information at the competition page. Deadline: January 21, 2012.

JOIN YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY BOARD!: Community boards serve a vital role in the life of New York City. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is hosting a series of informational meetings about the roles and responsibilities of community board members, the newly increased role the borough’s community boards play and how to become a board member. The meetings will be held Tuesday, December 6th, from 6:30 – 8:00pm in the Municipal Building, 1 Centre Street, 19th Floor; Wednesday, December 14th, from 6:30 – 8:00pm, at 163 West 125th Street, Room 8C; and Thursday, January 5th, from 6:30 – 8:00pm in the Municipal Building, 1 Centre Street, 19th Floor. RSVP to conference@manhattanbp.org.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Much has already been said about how everyone is an architecture critic these days, how the Internet has sped up the criticism cycle, and how the ubiquity of imagery has made architecture magazines that much less valuable. But Alexandra Lange noted another problem with Internet criticism: Nowadays most architecture “criticism” is really just commentary on renderings. Rare is a critic’s response to experiencing an actual building. In fact, a building’s merits are so thoroughly debated while in rendering form that writing about the built work can seem almost besides the point. As a result, the experiential quality of buildings has become less of a focus for design criticism — a potentially dangerous problem for architecture.

We’re a little too nostalgic for a kind of magazine culture that may not have been as robust as assumed.Indeed, very little of the evening’s conversation even touched on buildings themselves. While the Internet has enabled commentary on projects far from our backyards, it has encouraged a kind of watered-down criticism that lacks real reporting. Mimi Zeiger defended the Internet’s merits by giving a great example of how the Internet’s speed and conversational tone can enable a fast debate about the value of a building. Recently the LA Times critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote a short blog post about a Michael Maltzan building (yes, still in renderings!) at San Francisco State University. The building, which will cost $265 million, was then criticized by blogger Javier Arbona on the grounds of its financing — though it is paid for by a public university, which is getting less and less money from the bankrupt state of California, the money will come through a complex financial arrangement with Wall Street. Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), then chimed in about the corporatization of universities. Zeiger used this example of fast-paced dialogue to show how lively the Internet criticism sphere is — it drew in a “traditional” critic, a non-traditional blogger, and an architect, plus all the archi-Internet nerds through comments and Twitter. This debate has the additional effect of shaping future reviews of this building and other public-financed projects.

But as the editor of a print publication and the person responsible for the overhaul of Domus’ online presence, Grima voiced a fair amount of nostalgia for the heyday of print architecture magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, magazines like Domus or Casabella would publish all important buildings, and yet criticize many of them. Today’s architecture criticism is stifled by the fact that most magazines do not publish stories about buildings the editors don’t like — or can’t criticize. Zeiger noted it’s too expensive to print a story on a building an editor hates.

I’d argue that there’s something else at play here. Perhaps part of the reason we are nostalgic for the mid-20th-century coverage in print magazines is that the United States was then the center of the skyscraper and urban planning boom. Now the industry has moved to Asia. But where is the commentary on Zaha’s opera house in Guangzhou or Moshe Safdie’s Marina Bay? Architectural Record will still cover it, but three months later. And certainly not with the same kind of first-person knowledge and passion that Maltzan’s SFSU building inspired. Isn’t it problematic that this blogger community is not able to respond to the work going up in Asia and the Middle East with the same kind of authority and visceral response as they might to one in California?

Eva Franch noted that this lack of “criticality” isn’t confined to print magazines. Rather than criticism, she sees the Internet encouraging more exposure of architecture and commentary on it. She noted that blogs are “reporting an obsession, not taking a position.” It’s a comment that gets right to the heart of my last On Criticism piece. A lack of editorial vision or critical position is the final element that many blogs are missing — the thing that keeps us pining for print.

Shannon Mattern helped to conclude the evening with a reminder: the unsettling aspects of Internet “microculture” pervade all art forms and are not particular to architecture criticism. We assume that most architecture blogs, which pursue niche interests without establishing broader socio-political values, fail to inspire a broader debate about architecture. But I’m beginning to think we’re a little too critical of the dialogue happening online, and a little too nostalgic for a kind of magazine culture that may not have been as robust as assumed.

In the drafty Storefront space, without adequate seating and headache-inducing microphone problems, I felt an honest desire to be back at home, in a comfortable chair, with my laptop and Twitter feed. I never thought I’d become the kind of person who occasionally prefers virtual communication to the real kind. But increasingly I think we are living in a golden age of online conversation, one that has more in common with “happenings” than the print journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Happenings had a great influence on the development of conceptual art; could the same be said one day about blogging and architecture?

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This is the eighth in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

Diana Lind is a 2011 fellow at Van Alen Institute where she helped develop the ideas competition Life at the Speed of Rail. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. Connect on Twitter @dianalindindex.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The article takes issue with the kind of criticism that is found on popular architecture blogs. We know this brand of lament well: the web is killing everything that was ever good, and, in this case, Kelly is wringing his hands that “speculative” bloggers who focus more on cultural mashups than straightforward dissections of architectural projects — in the style of, say, Paul Goldberger — have failed to produce what he blandly calls “informed, intelligent criticism.” And because the blogosphere is the new establishment, this means that we can expect that this kind of writing and the figures behind it are here to stay.

Although Kelly takes aim at a few British bloggers (Bad British Architecture, Strange Harvest, etc.), I was most interested in his attack on BLDGBLOG, which he calls “probably the most influential architecture blog in the world.” Its author is Geoff Manaugh, whom Kelly calls an “institution.” Manaugh’s response to Kelly makes two key points: first, Manaugh has never attempted to replace traditional architecture criticism, nor does he hope to cultivate an audience that is looking for that kind of stuff; and second, he would welcome an alternative to his own style of blogging that might resemble the smart, level-headed approaches of the LA Times‘ architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne or The Center for Land Use Interpretation‘s founder Matthew Coolidge. He then ends by saying:

Imagine a world, then, where critics like Peter Kelly actually step up and demonstrate how to do the things they so enjoy pointing out as lacking in others. If they could succeed at this — and find an audience, and push an agenda, and gather influence, and raise the stakes of what it means to be an architecture blogger — then we would all, as writers and readers and builders, be stronger because of it.

To my mind, the reason why there isn’t more of Peter Kelly’s kind of writing is that there aren’t enough places where one can make a living writing about architecture. There are probably fewer than a dozen people who make a living in the United States writing about architecture (and don’t get the majority of their incomes through editing, teaching or consulting). The problem, in other words, isn’t that Geoff Manaugh is a popular blogger, but that the vision of Peter Kelly’s ideal critic isn’t economically feasible these days. Until a new business model, or a better way of funding criticism through a smaller niche of avid readers, is figured out we can expect to see the number of pages (even webpages) dedicated to serious criticism dwindle: even the monthly critiques by Robert Campbell and Michael Sorkin had to be cut from Architectural Record‘s coverage in 2010.)

This economic impossibility needs to be recognized before proposing a utopian world where architecture critics have all the necessary resources to provide the informed, intelligent criticism expected of them. Otherwise it’s like saying our urban education system should rival that of private schools without recognizing that there aren’t unlimited funds to support that revolution.

A sense of responsibility for guiding public discussion about architecture is what I miss most.

So what is the appropriate response to this situation that we all find a bit disappointing? Is it to voice frustration with the new guard that is innovating? No. Instead, we should be asking: Why does the Old Establishment, which is adequately supported, suck so much? Why is Nicolai Ouroussoff still the lead critic for the Times when his writing, at its best, is greeted with a shrug? And while we all love Paul Goldberger, why hasn’t The New Yorker given someone else a chance to write the occasional piece of criticism for the magazine? If we’re going to be using new means to create a dialogue about architecture criticism, it might be interesting to do it in a way that is purposefully attempting to overthrow the PMS (pale, male, stale) guard.

Kelly presumes that BLDGBLOG is incredibly influential, and it is, in so far as it has widened the context and lens through which we see architecture. But it doesn’t shape the architecture profession (that’s not what it sets out to do) and it doesn’t serve as much of a reference about what’s happened in architecture over the past few years. Like most blogs, it’s really more of a catalog of Manaugh’s personal interests.

If the old architecture criticism establishment continues to be boring and a new establishment continues to mine the esoteric margins of architectural thought rather than the work of architects, what is at risk is a clear sense of who is debating the direction of architecture as practice or discipline. Kelly blames Manaugh et al. for lacking the right style or substance; Manaugh seems to shirk responsibility for the future of online dialogue about architecture.

Perhaps magazines like Architectural Record feel too much of a responsibility for charting what’s happening in highbrow, mainstream architecture and don’t allow for enough personal, tangential conversation. But that sense of authority and responsibility for guiding public understanding and discussion about architecture is what I miss most about the old establishment. I miss that much more than the writing style in which old media expressed itself or even the architecture that old media referenced. When Herbert Muschamp was the critic for the Times, he felt a responsibility to curate a series of alternatives to the SOM-designed replacement for the World Trade Center — is there anyone writing right now who would take on that role of architectural shaman?

What should someone with the privilege of being listened to do then? Manaugh’s call for a more vibrant criticism scene, which enriches the thinking of writers and architects, is just one example of how he can wield his power to greater effect. We all seem to agree that we need more online voices that are actively challenging architecture and architecture criticism as they are practiced. To use a Manaugh-style analogy: he’s shown us the playing field and now he’s kicking around a soccer ball waiting for a game of pick-up. Anyone else inspired to answer this call to action? At the very least, I think this debate has revived the On Criticism series on this website, so game on!

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This is the seventh in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Diana Lind is a 2011 fellow at Van Alen Institute where she helped develop the ideas competition Life at the Speed of Rail. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. Connect on Twitter @dianalindindex.

The value of conceiving criticism in this way, it seems to me, is that it allows for and acknowledges that certain buildings and projects may be perfectly elegant or beautiful solutions to perfectly trivial questions (think Meier’s tower on Grand Army Plaza) and, conversely, that there may be difficult or unsuccessful designs which nevertheless engage questions that have much greater relevance or significance to the values the critic prizes. Because criticism is perforce a statement of values; it is in that sense that criticism is at root a utopian venture and a bully pulpit. If we weren’t interested in remaking the world it wouldn’t matter much what we said about it.

In this vein, it is also important, from time to time, to write about bad buildings and failed projects, to use them as counter-exemplars and to explicate what it is in their design and realization that makes them a negative standard. This is difficult for a profession bred on the false politesse of ‘if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything’. We need to understand what makes bad buildings bad, and what the steady accretion of poorly conceived, boring, venal and badly built projects does to our cities and our souls. We need to name names. Or else, give up altogether.

There is also an element of time in all this; Henry A. Millon, one of the best critical historians of his generation, used to say that history could not be written before 50 years had passed, the implication being that the circumstances which frame a project’s gestation could not themselves be looked at historically until a certain contemporaneous reverberation had dissipated. The prerequisite of history is distance and a consequent lack of immediate familiarity; context must become strange again, or more precisely, we must become estranged from it, for the methods of historical analysis to be deployed. By this standard we are only just able to begin to analyze the projects of the 1960’s, to look seriously at Saarinen’s TWA terminal for example. And, in fact, this is exactly what is happening, the Museum of the City of New York’s revisionist Saarinen exhibition and the current reappraisals of Rudolph and Stone following by a few years the welter of texts and exhibitions that had us look afresh at the icons of the previous decade, Lever House and the Seagram Building, etc. (to look only within the limits of Manhattan for examples).

Criticism of course is but the first draft of history, not the thing itself. It is journalistic in the original Latin/Francophone sense of the word — ‘of today.’ Its historical aspirations, such as they are, can only be to serve as the raw material of some future, more dispassionate, analysis. But in exchange criticism can — must — make full claim to passion, to the convictions, enthusiasms and biases that animate discussion today, now, in full understanding that once our passions are spent they too will become the subject of more broadly contextual and quieter historical methods. Deprived of any pretense to history, criticism has nothing left but bias: without bias criticism is worthless.

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This is the sixth in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Stephen Rustow is the founding principal of SRA/Museoplan, a consulting practice working with arts institutions and design professionals on the presentation of cultural collections.  An architect and urban planner, he is also a Professor of Architecture at Cooper Union and has written criticism for Praxis, JSAH and other publications. He lives in Manhattan.

The first issue, the insecurity of the landscape/architecture professions, is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the fallout from Modernism. In his seminal essay “Whatever happened to Urbanism?” Koolhaas gave voice to an unsettling feeling that had been haunting practitioners since it became apparent that modernist architecture was not the panacea it claimed and not as important as it supposed. Forced to confront superfluity in a single generation, the critical discourse within the profession took up defensive positions to weather the storm.

The second issue is more ingrained; the mystification and resultant inaccessibility of the intellectual aspect of the landscape/architecture professions. Design pedagogy is defined according to processes of exclusivity: design methods and forms are understood as too sophisticated to be either fully comprehended, funded, or implemented by its constituents. And academic discourse is presented as too complex and profound to be undertaken or appreciated by the plebeians. For this reason, the majority of practitioners have abdicated their responsibility to contribute to the contemporary discourse within the professions. It is currently dominated by writers and theoreticians with no foundation in praxis.

As a result, the critical discourse has become a series of self-catalyzing memes and hyperbolic metaphors characterized by a forced focus on concept and cult of personality. Only projects deemed exemplary according to a conservative set of values (standards of beauty, economic viability, social popularity) are discussed and then largely in a laudatory tone. This is not healthy criticism.

The landscape does not need an apologist. The implicit meanings do not need to be spelled out and given voice, and we do not need to know if the design decisions meet the approval criteria of the author. In recent decades, a generation of design practitioners and writers have taken to conceptualizing a site, wrapping it up tightly in a metaphor (or series of them), and then narrating the argument to us. Marc Treib argues the impotence of this stance was argued persuasively in an essay titled “Must Landscapes Mean?”*

Meaning accrues over time; like respect, it is earned, not granted. While the designer yearns to establish a landscape that will acquire significance, it is not possible to use pat symbols alone as a means to transmute syntax into semantics, that is, tectonics into meanings… differences in culture, in education, in life experience, in our experience of nature will all modify our perception of the work of landscape architecture… We cannot make that place mean, but we can, I hope, instigate reactions to the place that fall within the desired confines of happiness, gloom, joy, contemplation, or delight.

After addressing these two issues, the question becomes what should contemporary criticism focus on? If the purpose of professional criticism is not to explain a project but to make the work better, then there are four areas of focus of contemporary criticism: political process, cultural context, a focus on criticism through time, and polemics.

First, the political process; instead of remaining enamored with the cult of personality, the designer’s thoughts and views should always be presented within the larger context of all of the players in a project. Without exception the significant designers of our time are experts at negotiating the political intrigues inherent in public agencies, affluent clients, vocal constituents, and marginalized communities. This dynamic will always influence a project and the criticism should acknowledge and examine this.

Second, the cultural context – historical, scientific, technological, social and popular – should be present in criticism. This can be implied or explicit but it should be present. It is this perspective that will help to frame the discussion around sustainability, changing it from a tactic that is essentially a marketing tool for designers, developers, politicians, and manufacturers, to a logical argument and thoughtful discussion. If the intellectual context surrounding the implementation of an initiative were more thorough and critical the project could be examined more honestly for effectiveness and appropriateness.

Third, criticism for a project should take place through time. How a place changes over the course of a day, through the seasons, and across a number of years should be considered. The conventional approach is largely the fault of shortsighted editors placing a focus on narrow definitions of timely and relevant in order to drum up readership for their publication. Criticism of a project should absolutely not be limited to opening day, a date set by political and economic agendas. Andrew Blum stated this sentiment in his essay “In Praise of Slowness” and Elizabeth Meyer’s essay “Slow Landscapes”* is a good example of a more thoughtful type of criticism.

Fourth, all landscape/architecture criticism should be polemical. The High Line is an exceptional project — extremely expensive, complicated, and high profile. That it has gotten a free pass from the critics, Jacky Bowring’s critique notwithstanding, is a huge disservice to the professional community. Every project, at various stages and according to metrics deemed appropriate by different editors, should be examined and questioned. As a profession, we gain nothing by constantly patting the same people (and by extension, ourselves) on the back for a job well done. Designers know that no project is perfect. Self-righteous celebration is not the job of criticism within the profession. There is a place for that, and it is with the lobbyists, apologists and at times the popular media.

Ultimately, criticism exists to make the work better, always better. If the discourse can include more voices — practitioners, writers, and academics — all questioning and examining thoughtfully and professionally, we can get at the interesting aspects, stories, intrigues, and facts. If we can get past our fixation on metaphor, concept and style, landscape/architectural criticism will function as a feedback loop with the design process to better the work of designing the built environment.

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This is the fifth in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

* “Must Landscapes Mean?” by Marc Treib Landscape Journal. 14(1):46-62 (1995)

** “Slow Landscapes: A New Erotics of Sustainability,” by Elizabeth K. Meyer, Harvard Design Magazine, Vol. 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10, p. 22-31.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

FASLANYC works as a landscape architect for an urban design firm in New York City. He also writes the landscape criticism blog faslanyc and contributes to other design journals with features focusing on urban projects in South America.

This post is part of an ongoing series that invites critical reflection on data visualization and urban cartography – past, present and future. To see all entries on this topic, click here.

National Geographic

Sarah Slobin:
So you’ve seen mapping go from pencil on paper to the digital, interactive versions we have today. Tell us about some of the watershed moments you’ve witnessed.

Kris Goodfellow:
I think that watching the transformation of newsrooms from copying map books to using digital mapping tools and adopting GIS was a watershed transformation.

At the Times, there were 8 or 10 people doing maps and a maps editor checking their accuracy. The department had a history of more than 100 years. The reference material was fabulous. But when I went to AP in 1998, there were two guys doing mapping. One was an 85-year-old, World War II vet with a bad gambling habit and even worse vision. He couldn’t see all of the details on the reference material so there were a multitude of mistakes on even the most basic US map. And these were the maps most newspapers printed for major news stories. It was inefficient and the quality was terrible. We had to change.

That was really the motivation behind creating MapShop. I wanted to be able to create a map of every corner of the world, export it in Illustrator in 30 minutes. MapShop did that for AP and other newspapers.

But where we saw the adoption of professional GIS tools – at AP to be sure, but more importantly at Time and The New York Times – it was an enormous leap step forward. The work that Bill McNulty did at the Times after 9/11 and the maps of Afghanistan during the war, should be featured in a museum exhibit. They are transformational for the industry because they are so beautiful and informative and timely. These were created on deadline. That’s something that just doesn’t happen very often.

USA Today

SS: Have you seen any evidence that our ability to visualize neighborhoods has had an influence of the shape of the neighborhoods themselves?

KG: I don’t think that it works this way. Neighborhoods have a life of their own and are constantly shifting and evolving. Capturing that spirit of a neighborhood within some lines on a map is difficult. There are two schools of thought. One is that you should have lines on a map that fit together like typical political boundaries – one stops and the other begins. The other is to have overlapping boundaries so that there is room for some gray area. The first approach appeals to my personal preference for creating a clean map. But the second really fits what I know about neighborhoods much better.

cyberhomes.com

SS: As a nation we’re fascinated with real estate. Do you think new mapping technology has contributed to that?

KG: More than anything the housing boom and bust have driven our fascination with real estate. But it is a little hard to imagine this national obsession taking hold without real estate data, maps and images online. Prior to 1990 and the advent of Realtor.com, there really was no way to find a new home without going to a realtor. And prior to Zillow, there was no way to know what your home was worth without going to the assessors office or getting an appraisal.  In 2006, it was commonplace to hear, “I can’t believe how much my house is worth, I just looked it up on cyberhomes.com.” But in 1986, that comment would have been “I got my tax bill in the mail…” and that’s just beyond dull.

So as a part of all that data going online, we had to show people the location and that has led to a lot of great mapping applications from cyberhomes and others. Google and Microsoft do a great job pinning homes on a map and showing what’s around it. But as a map geek, what I love is putting that property in the context of its neighborhood using things like median home value and change in value over time. Or looking at neighborhoods that have, say, lots of 20-somethings or lots of children. Those are markers of what type of neighborhood it is and whether you, as a potential new homeowner, would fit in. Our partnerships with companies like Urban Mapping and RMM CADD have made that contextual information come alive and have helped us move beyond “You are here!” mapping.

Still, I know that people are most fascinated with their own home. My favorite comment on cyberhomes.com was from a woman who was looking at our oblique views from Bing Maps, and she said that the photo was wrong because her garage door was open in the picture online and she was looking at it right now and it was closed. She literally thought were had a satellite checking in on her house right then! Who knows, maybe someday!

cyberhomes.com

SS: What advice would you give someone who was trying to use maps to convey an idea?

KG: I’d give the same advice that I do in all visual design. Decide what one message you are trying to convey and then make everything you are doing help support that message. I think that we often have 15 great ideas for maps in our mind but haven’t applied the intellectual rigor to their execution and the result is a confusing and muddled mess.

I personally got a refresher course in simplicity working at CBS News during the 2004 elections. We created their county level map of the US results but also a host of other demographic maps. And I’d want to add city names or even state names or boundaries and they would just keep saying, it’s on air for 10 seconds, Kris. It’s got to be simple! Really, when you think about it, so is that map in your power point slide. When you are presenting something, unless it’s a dissertation, remove anything extra and keep to the point.

The other thing that I’d say, is really spend time understanding your data and making sure it is complete and accurate. There was recently a story in the LA Times about a crime mapping application that the city of LA built that is rife with errors. I see these kinds of applications being created all the time in the GIS community. You can sort of get away with it because the client assumes that the contractor is a wizard and so it must be right. But too often when you start to use that data, especially in an emergency operation center like the one I worked in after 9/11, you realize just how much sloppy work is out there and how under the gun, it matters.

CBS News

Sarah Slobin is a visual journalist. She spent 15 years at The New York Times where she was trained to report the story from the ground up, find the visual language to translate it, then write, design, chart, edit and produce information graphics. From 2006 to 2008 she was the head of graphics at Fortune Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

R: This year, Postopolis was a five-day event, where bloggers of the built environment came back out from behind their keyboards, convening in a real, live urban environment. For me, this trip out west was a follow up to the first Postopolis that Storefront for Art+Architecture hosted in the unseasonably sweaty June of 07. I glowed my way through that, when the Masters of the Built Environment Blogs (BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Subtopia and others) descended on NYC to curate several days of talks by their favorite urban/tech thinkers-and-doers. This week, Alissa and I joined the Postopolites again, this time shivering through its second coming last week in LA, outdoors on the fifth facade – aka the roof – of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

A: It was disturbingly, unseasonably cold. I believe I coined the term Frostopolis.

R: Nice. Did you feel like this was primarily a celebration of blogging or of architecture or urbanism or something else all together?

A: I think it represented a very interesting convergence of information and urbanism. I think blogging as a phenomenon is kind of boring to talk about, but what it represents is really just a faster way of disseminating good ideas about where and how we live (and Twitter is maybe even better). Maybe the point of all this is that we’re able to affect cities more intelligently by understanding them better, and now, thanks to our ability to share this information more efficiently, we will? What do you think?

R:  I absolutely agree that the draw for me was far more the subject matter, than the format – I’m taking the ‘it’s the content, stupid’ approach, as usual. Converging on shared interests creates community, and that’s one reason I made the trip out here – to participate, instead of just reading about it. When I’ve described Postopolis to others, I’ve made a point of saying it’s about urbanism and technology: the intersection of physical place and information space, not just about blogging about cities.

That said, there’s definitely a quality to this that’s defined by the format – something appealing about seeing some of my favorite online foragers coming out from behind the screen to put faces to what and who they’ve gathered on their blogs. I mean, when I scroll through archive lists of months and years of posts, my mind boggles that there’s a real person, with bills to pay and a life to lead, behind these editorial ziggurats that the rest of us gobble up and trade with others. But more impressive than the discipline of maintaining that curatorial role is what they’ve documented: Yes, your idea that we’re able to impose ourselves on the city by understanding it better is key; how better representations of cities improve our understanding, experience and engagement with cities is of particular interest to me – I’m here for the dynamic data visualizers, the graphic storytellers, the spoken word poets, pretty much anyone who forsakes PowerPoint.

A: Right, like Eric Rodenbeck’s super-conversational whiskey-drinking delivery of his work for Stamen Design. I love how they see the city as data to be sliced and diced at will:  they made heat maps of Manhattan showing where all the upwardly mobile single ladies lived and also slurped all the information about where Oakland crimes were located into this beautiful, easy to read web-based application. It just wouldn’t have been possible to see the city that way before, and it can all be used to improve the urban experience.

R: Yup, can’t get enough of what Stamen has been up to, and the implications of others’ work like that. Coming back to Postopolis this year after the first one, it’s struck me this time how much has changed in just two years. From Bush to Obama, the economy tanked, and perhaps a shift from peak blogging to peak Tweeting. Graphics of dry data are now sexy – or at least better looking to regular people: pictures are indisputably a compelling way for fact-chasers to view and make sense of the ec-crisis. Oh, and we headed west for this one. I like that we’re in SoCal, not SFO for this one – it resituates the tech vibe of the discussion significantly. And there’s no escaping the urbanism here.

A: True, it’s obvious for anyone who knows me that the fact this event focused on LA was the single biggest draw, seeing as I’m a rabid defender of Los Angeles as the Greatest Unfinished City on Earth, and I’ll deliver a beat down to anyone who says otherwise. I was interested to see what about LA they found compelling, as (mostly) outsiders.

R: So what, to you, felt distinctly ’09 and West Coast to you about this week’s talks? And what’s noteworthy about the blog culture of this event?

A: Well, if you’re going to be discussing any issues of the built environment, LA is like one big gaping wound of a case study. We have some pretty awesome problems to deal with right now, so if you’ve got radical new ideas, our situation puts you in a good frame of mind to express them. There was a lot of talk of community, whether it’s designing a building to encourage it, or using technology to map it, or even the community that’s this connective tissue that binds all us design and architecture bloggers. I think 2009 was a sign that we’re moving from the era of posting a rendering first (First!) to becoming something much more substantial. We’re so closely networked now, we share and comment on each others’ ideas in a public forum, we can reach a lot of people who are engaged with their own communities…so what do we do with this phenomenon?

R: I reckon we keep going with the systemic thinking that networks encourage; the economic crisis demonstrates that bluntly. So I also reckon, as far as urban planning goes, we celebrate that we’re now more aware of interconnectedness and networks offline, whether that’s run-off from nascent internet culture or not: Michael Downing, the LAPD Chief Commissioner for Counterterrorism, brought this home: Communities are at least a match for vertical organizations, joined-up effort makes the efficient and personalized experiences (of all kinds) possible, especially in cities where there’s connectedness through density. From his talk, I also appreciated that interesting relationships emerge as top-down, traditional hierarchies coexist alongside – and even intersect and cooperate with – matrixed communities. So at once, he lent the event credibility – woo, here’s an important guy from law enforcement – but he also appreciated the potency of shared knowledge and collaboration in a city with no center.

A: Right, which is also where something like Twitter came into play, with little bits of ideas drifting out over the rooftop and out into the world like dandelion fluff for anyone to grab onto and act upon. I really liked that part of it. I liked reading into some of the community coverage and analysis more than some of the speakers themselves, some of whom I thought had exceptionally poor presentation skills. But as we discussed, that’s what happens when you invite someone mysterious from the dark realms of the blogosphere.

R. Which leads me to wonder…where are the girls besides Mademoiselle deBatty? There are certainly lots of women blogging, and many in the audience. Did we lose our voice or not make it into the lads pack this time? Who gets citizenship of Postopolis? What kind of community is it?

A: To tell you the truth, I was surprised. I don’t want to dwell on it, but since this is a hot topic, I went ahead and broke it down. Of the 62 speakers only 13 were female. I was actually on a panel with three other women, the most female-dominated moment of the entire event. Thursday was completely bereft of women speakers whatsoever. One can only think that this could have been avoided in the planning stage if the participating bloggers weren’t 5/6 male. But you’re right, there were tons of women who attended and plenty who blog about this stuff. Besides all that, though, what were some of the highlights for you?

R. I liked the Benjamins: Benjamin Ball, of architect duo, Ball and Nogues, presenting Frank Zappa’s axiom, “You can’t eat the recipe” and Benjamin Bratton‘s entire talk (looking forward to Cityofsound.com posting the full transcript) and his phrase the ‘Caliphate of Google’ – don’t give them any ideas! Back to format, and better representations of complex information, I loved Mike the Poet and now that I’ve washed my hands, I liked that my red pen started leaking during Gary Dauphin‘s talk on vampirism and Fort Greene.

A: There were a lot of weird moments like that. Downing talked survelliance as a helicopter circled overheard. And remember when Christian Moeller was talking about his “vibrators”—poles that sent out an electric charge when people touched them—and he kept getting shocked by his computer? Ok, highlights. I already mentioned Stamen Design. The Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Matthew Coolidge showed this crazy flyover of the Houston Ship Channel, which is basically an oil metropolis. Christopher Hawthorne talked about Dubai as an example of Bernie Madoff planning. I loved Jeffrey Inaba‘s studies for Volume and the New Museum where they discovered this new culture of giving alongside all the economic collapse. Fallen Fruit is always a treat. And I really liked the casual nature of the event, that you could move in and out of the space without disturbing the program, huddle under heat lamps with someone for a quick tete-a-tete then come back into the conversation. Did you like the format?

R: Yes, though wish I’d had a duvet and better socks with me. It’d definitely lose some character if the main bloggers weren’t moderating, and it feels like a more concentrated dose of inspiration than quickfire multi-city, often mobbed Pecha Kucha. How would a Postopolis ’11 go down in the suburbs, in the periphery, in – heaven forfend – the flyover zone?

A: Sydney has been floated around as the next location, but to be honest I’d like to see this go somewhere like Detroit. And I’d rather see mini-Postopolises spring up in cities throughout the year, with the bloggers from their own cities curating the programs and focusing on action.

R: So, PNY 07 was too hot, and PLA 09 too cold, but now we can all retreat to our respective built environments for another couple of years til the next one throws some other climatic adversity our way. Temperature fluctuations = no impediment: Just a healthy reminder that even bloggers, and their devotees, express sensitivity to physical surroundings not only through WordPress and beard-scratching architectural erudition, but also in flip flops and fleece.

A: And drinking Red Bull Belvederes doesn’t even help you stay warm, unfortunately.

The views expressed are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Joe Lertola is an information graphics artist. He worked as Associate Graphics Director for Time Magazine from 1983 until 2008. He has received several awards including a gold medal for feature information graphic at the Society of News Design’s annual Malofiej competition in 2002. He can be reached at joe [at] joelertola [dot] com

Sarah Slobin is a visual journalist. She worked on information graphics at the New York Times for 15 years, running the Business graphics team from 2003 to 2006. Between 2006 and 2008 she was the graphics director for Fortune Magazine.

This post is part of an ongoing series that invites critical reflection on data visualization and urban cartography – past, present and future. To see all entries on this topic, click here.

Sarah Slobin: Tell me about yourself, how did you get your start in maps? What drew you to cartography?

Joe Lertola: I was hired by Time in the early 1980s. Time has a set of scrap books that contain a clipping of every map and graphic ever printed in the magazine. I was impressed by the design and craftsmanship of many of the older maps from the 40s, 50s and 60s. They had a way of painting airbrushed mountain ranges that was striking. That inspired me to work on adding dimension and depth to the maps I worked on.

SS: What was it like working for Time magazine? It’s published weekly, so how much time did you have to produce your work?

JL: Working at Time could be hectic, tense and exciting. Depending on when breaking news happened we might have any where from one to four days to produce the graphics for the magazine. The bulk of the work was always done during the last two days before the close. Thursdays and Fridays were typically 12 to 15 hour work days.

SS: How do you choose the best way to visualize data?

JL: I haven’t found any formula for visualizing data. The main thing I try to do is present the graphic information as clearly as possible. Each graphic I work on is a fresh problem. I start by trying to get a clear idea of what information we are trying to present. Then I try to apply my sense of what will look good. There is a lot of playing around with ideas, sketches and discussion of various approaches.

SS: Tell me a little about each one of these maps.

Courtesy of Joe Lertola

JL: The New York City day/night population map was interesting because the data presented on the map was not available to the public before. The data was produced for the US government and it is classified. We managed to get permission to use the data as long as the actual number values were not displayed. Because of this, the key for the map is vague.

Courtesy of Joe Lertola

The US population density map was technically challenging. I actually had to do a bit of programming to convert the original data file, which was a text file with ASCII numbers, into a grayscale image. The grayscale image was then used in a 3D program to create the spiky look of the map.

Courtesy of Joe Lertola

The Arctic map was done to accompany a story about the Russian claim of an area of the Arctic Ocean that includes the North Pole. This map presents different layers of information. The most prominent is the thick read lines that define the treaty-defined boundaries of territorial waters. The shaded relief of the Arctic Ocean floor was important because the under water ridge that runs across the arctic ocean played a big role in the Russian claim.

SS: What excites you most about how maps are being used these days?

JL: Over my career I have seen a vast expansion in the quality and quantity of mapping data that is available. For example in 2000 Nasa sent up a Space Shuttle mission to collect high-resolution elevation data for most of earth. Over the next few years the data was released to the public. I have been able to use this elevation data to add unprecedented terrain detail to my maps.

The amount of a mapping data keeps ballooning. Publicly available Global Positioning System and commercial satellite imagery have greatly increased the possibilities for both mapmakers and the public in general.

SS: Do you have a dog?

JL: No but I do have two Siamese cats. They sometimes make it hard to work. One of them likes to walk on my keyboard. From time to time he manages to send unfinished emails and quit programs without saving changes.

All images courtesy of Joe Lertola.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.