Manhattan Flood Zones Under 4-Foot Sea Level Rise | LDEO & Civil Engineering, Columbia University | via transportationnation.org

FLOODED SUBWAYS
When Hurricane Irene was headed towards New York City, the MTA made the bold choice to shut down the entire subway system, anticipating widespread flooding of the tunnels which could cause significant damage to transit infrastructure. Though our subways escaped harm this time, the flood threat looks to be a harbinger of a future norm — unless we make some changes now. Last week, Columbia, CUNY and Cornell released Responding to Climate Change in New York State, a report commissioned by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The document is the result of three years of study into the potential local impact of sea level rise, temperature fluctuation and precipitation increases on infrastructure, economy and public health. The report offers adaptation and preparation recommendations for policymakers, managers and researchers. (Read more in The New York Times.)

Meanwhile, Andrea Bernstein at Transportation Nation points us to Flooded Bus Barns and Buckled Rails, an August 2011 Federal Transit Administration (FTA) report addressing climate change adaptation needs specifically in the realm of public transportation. Bernstein talks with Columbia professor and transit and climate change expert Klaus Jacob, who has worked with the MTA to model some worrisome future scenarios, and MTA Climate Adaption Specialist Projjal Dutta, who is working to implement preventative strategies. Of course, the MTA’s financial woes are well known, and these are costly measures — but Irene’s threat demonstrated that the possible impacts of climate change are closer at hand than we like to believe, and if you think mitigation strategies are expensive, imagine what would happen if we do nothing. According to Jacob, recovering from a full flooding of the subway system could take as long as 29 days, a timespan that would affect economic activity in the city to the tune of $4 billion a day.

photo via civiccenter.cc

BEFORE I DIE I WANT TO…
Candy Chang, public installation artist, designer, planner, TED Fellow, Omnibus contributor and part of the team that designed urbanomnibus.net and our 50 Ideas for the New City posters, has taken her project Before I Die to cities around the world. The project presents a huge chalkboard, painted on a neglected or underutilized wall, repeatedly stenciled with the sentence “Before I die I want to _____”, entreating passersby to fill in the blanks. Chang’s intention is to help people remember what is important to them and, in some small way, to acquaint people with their too-anonymous neighbors. Over the past few weeks, the corner of Adams St. and Fulton Street Mall in Downtown Brooklyn has joined the ranks of New Orleans, Amsterdam, Querétaro, Lisbon, San Diego, Almaty, Ponta Delgada, Portsmouth as temporary home to Before I Die. From the looks of these photos from the Civic Center website (the design firm Chang started with James A. Reeves), Downtown Brooklynites aren’t short on hopes and dreams. Go check it out for yourself while you can and add your own aspirations to the jam-packed wall — the installation, on the construction boards of the future Brooklyn Shake Shack, will only be up through next Tuesday, November 29th.

© Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos | via todayspictures.slate.com

BUILDING THE VERRAZANO-NARROWS
For the past couple months, Slate has been presenting an incredible series of photographs from the collection of Magnum Photos. This week, we were treated to a series of the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, a vital piece of transit infrastructure whose lasting impact on Staten Island, New York City and the metropolitan region we explored in the third of our City of Systems videos. These shots document the human side of that story, with poignant portraits of construction workers assembling the “142,000 miles of twisted wire… and 8,000,000 bolts and rivets” that made this engineering marvel possible.

IS ROBERT MOSES FINALLY DEAD?
The Verrazzano pictures don’t just chronicle workers toiling on a massive public works project, but testify to an era when infrastructure investment was a political priority. The bridge was one of the final achievements of Robert Moses, whose legacy has been picked over and argued since his less than ceremonious expulsion from power in 1968. Beyond his reputation as power greedy and insensitive to the needs of neighborhoods, no one disputes that he embodied an era of consistent investment in infrastructure on the part of American governments at all scales. The end of that era, argues Matt Chaban in the Observer, begs serious questions about our current political climate’s failure to produce civic works responsive to contemporary needs. He takes Governors Christie and Cuomo to task for what he perceives as short-sightedness, and he calls out other leaders across the country who have done what Moses once thought impossible: they have pulled up stakes on active projects, prioritizing short-term political gain over jobs creation, regional planning and national competitiveness.

EVENTS and TO DOs

SEED AWARDS: The Social, Economic, Environmental Design (SEED) Network, a group of individuals and organizations dedicated to building and supporting a culture of civic responsibility and engagement in the built environment and the public realm, has announced the second annual SEED Awards for Excellence in Public Interest Design. The awards aim to showcase and promote projects that help create socially, economically and environmentally healthy communities, judged according to SEED metrics. Submit a project for consideration before January 16, 2012. Six winners will receive a $1,000 cash prize and an all-expenses-paid trip to present at the Structures for Inclusion conference in March, an annual event dedicated to highlighting the social and economic impacts of design, and will be included in a documentary series by The UpTake. Deadline: January 16, 2012. Find more info here.

WHERE IS NEW YORK?: Last week, Senator Chuck Schumer and NY State Senator Daniel Squadron announced that $14 million had been secured for the redevelopment of Pier 42 into a public park. On Monday, Columbia University’s Urban Planning Program is hosting a panel discussion addressing questions of the future of Pier 42, the role of community plans in urban development and how to activate civic participation. The panel includes three of the authors of the 2009 community plan A People’s Plan for the East River Waterfront, Jason Cheng (CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities), Anne Frederick (Hester Street Collaborative) and Damaris Reyes (GOLES), moderated by Kaja Kuehl (GSAPP). Monday, November 28, 6:30pm. Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall, Columbia University GSAPP. Free and open to the public. Find more info here.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1969 | via nydailynews.com

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
The Omnibus is signing off until Monday. Have a wonderful holiday weekend!

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

View from Red Hook, Brooklyn, 1978 | Photo by Camilo Jose Vergara

Last Wednesday evening, Paul Goldberger, author of Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York, spoke with Camilo José Vergara at the Museum of the City of New York, in conjunction with the MCNY exhibition of Vergara’s photographs of the Twin Tower, The Twin Towers and the City: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara, currently on display. Vergara is known for his photographs of some of America’s poorest neighborhoods, returning year after year to shoot the same building or site over time. His method involves an extraordinary amount of patience, commitment and prescience: he began photographing cities in the process of disinvestment and resulting decay in the 1960s and ’70s and has been following them ever since. Traveling again and again to cities throughout the United States — including Detroit, Chicago and Gary, Indiana — his photographs tell the story of a country in flux and the deterioration of the American city in the latter half of the 20th century.

The Twin Towers and the City makes apparent the changes to Vergara’s interest in the towers throughout their life span. When Vergara came to New York City in 1965, the poverty that had insinuated itself into many aspects of urban life had risen to the surface, ready to be photographed. When construction began on the Twin Towers in 1968, Vergara was fascinated by the way they symbolized what he sees as the misplaced priorities of American culture: the desire to build giant, shimmering monuments to capitalism in the face of an ailing city. One photograph in the show, “View of the World Trade Center Under Construction from Duane Street, Manhattan, 1970,” is an especially poignant juxtaposition: in the foreground, a man lies asleep on the sidewalk next to a trash can, surrounded by detritus, while in the background the gleaming, modern towers are busily being constructed, cranes visible at the upper reaches. As the years progressed, Vergara became more focused on documenting the state of degraded living conditions and the dilapidation of the built environment throughout New York City, and he became less concerned with the towers as a symbol. They became part of the scene, visible from every point in the city. That ubiquity recurs throughout the show: the towers are in the background of photographs from every part of the city, as well as New Jersey; as one approached Manhattan from the north, south, east or west. They became a geographical anchor for Vergara’s photographs in much the same way as they did for the city itself.

View of Lower Manhattan from the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn, October, 1979 | Photo by Camilo José Vergara

View of Lower Manhattan from the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn, November, 1979 | Photo by Camilo José Vergara

When a visitor first enters the gallery, the first six photographs she sees are the only in the exhibition with the Twin Towers as the primary focal point. The title of each clinically describes the view, the photographer’s location, and the date shot, beginning with “View of Lower Manhattan from the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn, October 1979” and followed by the same composition photographed in November 1979; on September 11, 2001; in September 2001; on September 10, 2010 (showing the Tribute in Light); and in May 2011. The photographs serve as an introduction to the show, documenting the changes to the landscape from the towers’ opening through their destruction, but they are the anomalous sequence in the exhibition; the rest of the exhibition functions as a single portrait of the city’s experience with the towers, rather than multiple portraits of those specific buildings. When the Twin Towers were first built, they were criticized for their hugeness, for their a-contextuality, and for their erasure of the existent fabric. Gradually that hatred became acceptance of their inescapable presence on the horizon. Finally, in the face of destruction, they became symbols of loss and, for a time, sacred. During the moment of mourning, Goldberger referred to them as Modernist “martyrs.” It took their destruction for the city, as well as the rest of the country, to love them. The exhibition, ultimately, documents the gradual change in the city’s attitude toward the Twin Towers from hatred in the face of new construction through “martyrdom” with their destruction.

The conversation also tracked decades of shifting attitudes, referencing Vergara’s and Goldberger’s changing relationships to the towers throughout their careers. Vergara opened the evening with the memory that Goldberger had reviewed his first show at Parsons favorably, and this praise had opened the door to more opportunities and exhibitions. In this way, Vergara placed the beginning of two speakers’ careers in time, specifically beginning when the towers were first introduced to the city.

View of Lower Manhattan from the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn, September 11, 2001 | Photo by Camilo José Vergara

View of Lower Manhattan from the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn, September, 2001 | Photo by Camilo José Vergara

Vergara spoke generally about his own work and process, about the necessity of returning to a space, an address, a building or a neighborhood, multiple times over the course of years of capturing or understanding that space. He touched upon what he saw as the power of sequencing images, how they begin to take on meaning through that sequencing. Goldberger stipulated that the true subject of Vergara’s work was time. Vergara agreed: he had set out to capture images of a ruin, of monuments falling apart, but was totally surprised that New York City ”didn’t go the way of Detroit.”

The loss of the towers was felt not only in the context of New York City, but throughout the rest of the country as well. Goldberger pointed out that, outside of New York, the towers were depicted as entities in and of themselves, often alone, without the surrounding city. They were monuments to the event, with the towers as the symbols of the loss. In contrast, remembrances in the New York metropolitan region often focus on specific people that were lost. While rebuilding on the site itself has been fraught with logistical, political and emotional difficulties, the rest of the city has continued to function; for the rest of the country, the towers remained the symbol, unchanging over time. That differentiation is made explicit by Vergara’s series of photographs depicting murals from around the country slightly separated from the photographs of murals from around New York City.

World Trade Center seen from St. Paul's Churchyard, Manhattan, 1970 | Photo by Camilo José Vergara

Discussing the towers as physical entities, Goldberger pointed out their beauty as “minimalist sculptures.” That the facades consisted of more metal than glass allowed for a play of light, shimmering differently throughout the day. Vergara maintained that there was something wonderful in their simplicity, that they became almost a three-figure composition, with the space between bearing as much visual weight as the two towers themselves. He lamented the loss of the slivers of space between the buildings in Lower Manhattan as the neighborhood has been built out and that space has been eaten up over the years. Goldberger pointed out the irony of all the ways that they were criticized at ground level, as being anti-urban, contextless, as a podium disrupting the streets, that they became so much a part of the city at the larger scale, from everywhere but directly below them. Now, ten years later, the biggest change, to Goldberger, is how much we’ve accepted their loss: now the strange pictures are those with the towers in them. The question and answer session at the end of the evening gave the speakers a platform to express fears that the new buildings would not be great, and lament the lost opportunity that rebuilding offered to utilize the lessons learned from the last forty years about how cities work.

What’s most remarkable about Vergara’s work is that he tells the story of the American city in the wake of Modernism not by photographing the big interventions, the large scale monuments to efficiency that completely reshaped cities, but by documenting the untouched neighborhoods. He shows the viewer those neighborhoods that were allowed to devolve without intervention, and therefore tell a story of civic disinvestment, suburbanization, population shifts, economic downturns and urban poverty. If Vergara’s real subject is time, as Golberger suggests, it is through returning to the same site throughout decades that reveals the process by which the built environment adapts or decays. Thus, his most powerful photographs approach an understanding of a large and incomprehensible whole — a city — through the documentation of one aspect, a building or a block, as it ages.

All images courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

Jessica Cronstein is a designer and writer interested in the point at which the social, cultural and physical growth of a city intersect. She has just completed her M.Arch at Rice University and lives in New York City.

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.

Man and the Machine | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

Stephen Mallon is a photographer invested in capturing extraordinary moments in the industrial landscape and the surreal beauty of the machines and sites that populate it. But the projects Mallon documents aren’t your everyday construction sites. “Next Stop Atlantic” follows an MTA recycling program that uses retired subway cars, stripped and cleaned, to rebuild underwater reefs along the eastern seabed. “Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549″ documents the recovery of the US Airways airbus, piloted by Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, that landed in the Hudson River in 2009 after a collision with a flock of geese resulted in engine failure. In “A Bridge Delivered,” one of his time-lapse projects, Mallon shows us the delivery and installation of the new Willis Avenue Bridge, crossing the Harlem River to connect Manhattan and the Bronx. Most recently, Mallon completed “Volare,” a series of images following the construction of a new roller coaster on Coney Island. We recently had an opportunity to talk to Mallon about his work, the underappreciated beauty of engineering and how photography can provoke contemplation of industry and our natural environment — and their unexpected convergences.

An exhibition of Mallon’s series “Next Stop Atlantic” will be presented at the Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville in June 2011, and will also be on display at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey later this summer. In spring 2012, “Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549” will be exhibited at Webster University in St. Louis. “A Bridge Delivered” has been selected for inclusion in this summer’s Rooftop Films Summer Series here in New York City.

Volare, Coney Island | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

How do you conceive of or identify your projects? What does it mean to you to be an “industrial photographer,” as you’ve described yourself in the past?

I am attracted to a lot of different subjects in the industrial world. I just finished a project documenting the construction of a new roller coaster for the Wall Street Journal. It’s the first new coaster in Coney Island in over 50 years. A few months ago, I was in Brazil on a commission to photograph on an offshore drilling platform for a series titled “Petrobras.”

I am hoping to be in a number of recycling plants over the coming months. I move from commission to commission, along with continuing my long term project “American Reclamation,” which is a series of images about material and space reuse in the 50 states.

But I am actually getting away from identifying myself as “an industrial photographer.” I realized, after framing my work that way, that people saw me as someone who was shooting only the box on a conveyor belt.

It seems that you have a particular interest in recycling and salvage. How did that interest develop?

I have been shooting industrial landscape work for almost all of my life. I got away from it during university, but in the late ’90s I started finding the antenna and the oil container really appealing again. After a meeting with a book agent to publish a collection of my work, I realized I needed a project to focus on. Recycling was a natural fit!

Next Stop Atlantic | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

Tell us about “Next Stop Atlantic.” This series documents an MTA program that recycles retired subway cars by using them to create artificial reefs — “moments of violent recycling,” as you’ve described it. How did you find out about the project?

I was out scouting a location for a portrait in New Jersey when I recognized a barge loaded with subway cars sitting in a shipyard in Bayonne. The yard was owned by maritime contractor Weeks Marine. I sent them information about my recycling project, and the MTA and Weeks let me follow the subway cars out into the Atlantic Ocean. I spent just shy of three years going out on multiple trips.

The moment the car hits the water there’s this Titanic-esque moment when the water overtakes the car as it sinks. It’s incredibly fast — from the moment it’s picked up and thrown overboard for the fishes. The change from seeing steel lying on a barge out in the Atlantic to watching water rush in as it hits the ocean is quite dramatic.

Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549 | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

In a lot of your work, bodies of water play an important role. In your series “Flight 1549,” you document the recovery of the US Airways airbus that famously landed in the Hudson River in 2009 after a collision with a flock of geese caused its engines to fail. Are you particularly attracted to maritime industrial subject matter?

It just keeps calling my name. Similar to shooting objects placed on a white background or against the sky, water isolates the machine.

How did you get interested in creating “A Bridge Delivered,” your time-lapse video of the delivery and installation of the new Willis Avenue Bridge? Did you know immediately that you wanted to document it?

Weeks Marine has a construction division and they gave me a call last summer to see if I would want to come out to shoot it. I knew immediately that I wanted to document it!

A Bridge Delivered from stephen mallon on Vimeo.

Over 30,000 images comprise “A Bridge Delivered,” but in your still photographs the individual moments you capture are very precise. Did you think about these two projects very differently, or did your photographs suggest how best to portray the idea?

Yes, the process of telling a story in motion has been a change for me. I used to look for one or a few images to encapsulate the event. Now I am looking for clips, longer moments in time to keep the viewer engaged and the story running.

Practically speaking, how do you negotiate such immediate access to your subjects? How do you get as close as you do?

Having the existing body of work has made clients and locations much more comfortable. They see that other people have trusted and commissioned me in the past, which boosts their confidence.

American Reclamation | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

How would like your photography to affect or inform the way your viewing public sees or considers the city and its infrastructure?

Some people are horrified about the artificial reef program, but I think it’s because they don’t know the details about how it is designed to help the environment. I am fortunate that I have been able to photograph these historical projects that are all tied to New York — my interest is in making unique images of historical moments. The response to these projects has been amazing and I am truly grateful.

What types of projects are you working on now?

I’m designing a remote camera that will let me shoot hi-res time-lapse footage from any location for an extended period of time — I’ll have more details soon! I am also conceptualizing my own proposal for an artificial reef. But that is going to take some time!

Man and the Machine | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

All photos courtesy of and copyright Stephen Mallon

Most people look at work sites and machinery and see nothing more than concrete and steel. Stephen Mallon looks at them and sees both a surreal beauty and the wonder of their engineering. His work has been exhibited widely and featured on numerous websites, in print and on TV and radio, including National Public Radio, Flavorwire, The Atlantic, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, GQ, Wired, New York Magazine, NBC, Vanity Fair and CBS News. Stephen has traveled everywhere from Africa to Brazil, searching out artificial landscapes and industrial footprints. He has also been commissioned by a wide range of clients, including the Sunday London Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Publicis, Sudler & Hennessey, and MAYTAG. Mallon’s photos have been honored by Communication Arts 2008 and 2009, the New York Photo Festival 2009 and the Lucie Awards 2009. Since 2002, he has been a board member of the New York chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers and served as president from 2006 to 2009. He lives in New York with his wife and their young daughter.

Photo by Kramer O'Neill | Courtesy of the Design Trust for Public Space

The Design Trust for Public Space has released a Call for Submissions for their 2011 Photo Urbanism Fellowship.

“Photography plays an integral role in the examination, discussion, and re-imagining of New York City’s public spaces,” the RFP states. “The Photo Urbanism program supports this role by offering fellowships to New York City-based photographers to produce new bodies of work exploring the city’s complex public realm in conjunction with active Design Trust projects.” This year, the theme of the fellowship is urban agriculture in New York City, to coincide with Five Borough Farm, an ongoing initiative to develop a citywide plan for urban agriculture (which you can learn more about in our recent interview with the project’s Policy Fellow Nevin Cohen). The Design Trust will provide access to urban agriculture practitioners and locations citywide, and in turn the photographs will help inform the ongoing initiative. The fellowship includes a stipend, a public presentation and a publication dedicated to the final work. Submission deadline: April 25, 2011.

For submission guidelines and more information, or to download a PDF of the Call for Submissions, visit the Design Trust’s site.

For more on urban agriculture here on the Omnibus, look back at Urban Agriculture: East New York, a five-part documentary video on the evolution of an urban agriculture movement in one neighborhood; Food and the Shape of Cities, an interview with the founders of the Foodprint Project about the impact of food systems on the physical city; and the aforementioned interview with food policy expert Nevin Cohen about the process of developing a citywide plan for urban agriculture and its promise as both social justice movement and model for community development.

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On December 3rd, I was two weeks into a new job on the Upper East Side. I have rarely spent time on the Upper East Side over my 17 years in New York. It is not a neighborhood that has ever felt welcoming to me, especially in the dark days of mid-winter, when the streets are pitch black at 5pm. So, I was looking for a reason to like this neighborhood where I suddenly found myself five days a week — and that’s when I discovered my love of neon.

The Upper East Side has quite a few excellent neon signs: Goldberger’s Pharmacy, Cork & Bottle Liquors, and the original location of Papaya King, just to name a few. I was charmed. So, when I saw that December 3rd marked the one-hundredth anniversary of neon signage (more on that history in a moment), I decided to take my camera and follow the glow.

And so, I set out to document the neon of New York — working signs only and, for the most part, avoiding chain-store signs that can be found all over the city. I have been told that New York’s neon is unexceptional in comparison to Chicago’s or Portland’s. I wanted to prove otherwise. I also wanted to demonstrate (mostly to myself) that the quirky, independent New York is still here — it’s not all chain stores, standard-issue vinyl awnings and luxury condos. I too often hear about all the great things that are gone, going or about to go. I needed, in the dark depths of winter, to find good stuff that’s still here.

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The history of commercial neon signs really begin in 1902, when French inventor Georges Claude perfected a technique for liquefying and slowly reheating air, which allowed him to separate out the component gases and thus cheaply extract the trace amounts of the noble gas neon from air. Although the trick of making certain gases glow with electric voltage had already been discovered, suddenly neon was plentiful. Claude demonstrated a long, glowing tube of neon at the Paris Motor Show on December 3, 1910, one hundred years ago. But if you missed this anniversary, don’t worry — there are other neon landmarks to celebrate, including November 8, 1911 when Claude filed for a patent for a “system of illuminating by luminescent tubes,” or January 19, 1915 when the patent was granted. There’s also 1923, when the first neon sign appeared in the US, for a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles. (You can read more about neon’s early history at the American Sign Museum’s website.)

Neon signs, I have learned, don’t always contain neon gas. Different colors are obtained by using neon, argon, helium, krypton, and xenon (all noble gases) singly or in combination, with each other or with mercury, though neon and argon are the most common. The interior of the tube is often coated with phosphors to increase the glow.

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I love neon signs that have a sense of place, that mark a place, that feel unique and evidence their hand-made origins. The glow, the colors, the hum when you get close, the flicker when they need repair. They are lively and engaging. They are landmarks or even icons. A familiar sign can seem like a helpful friend in the dark of the city at night. If I have forgotten which street Old Town is on (as I often do), I know I can just walk up from Union Square and the glow of the sign will catch my eye.

Smaller neon signs often gather in the neighborhood of a great one. Every glimmer seemed to lead me to the next. Are the smaller signs inspired by the glow of the larger? Or do neon sign sellers concentrate their efforts on key locations? Do certain neighborhoods have the right characteristics to encourage the population of neon to grow? I haven’t figured it out yet, though I suspect a combination of all three. Of course, certain business types are more likely than others to feature neon. Liquor stores, bars and strip clubs are all classic spots for neon — but so are parking garages, drug stores, Chinese take-out places and shoe-repair shops. All places you might be in a hurry to find, at night, possibly in an unfamiliar neighborhood — hence the neon.

Not that neon is confined to the metropolis — some of the best neon signs on earth are lighting up old motels off the beaten path or in small towns at the local movie palace. But the neon sign is, for the most part, a cosmopolitan creature.

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I have spent hours darting all over the city in the last two months, visiting neighborhoods I’ve never been to, discovering new signs I’d never seen, stumbling upon half-forgotten landmarks, revisiting old favorites, and encountering for the first time great signs I’d only seen in pictures or during the day time.

So what are New York’s best neon signs? We all have our own aesthetics, of course, and I have to admit I sometimes find it difficult to separate my love for a sign from my love of the place it advertises, but there are more than a few stand-out signs worth a visit. The images in this post’s slideshow are some of my favorites.

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Project Neon has only just begun. I’m continuing to explore and document the neon of New York, and I plan to visit one neon-signed establishment each week (both places I have already photographed and new locations) to have a drink, get my shoes repaired, or eat some BBQ. I want to photograph Sunny’s in Red Hook — one of my favorite signs in the entire city — and, of course, the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island, which is also a gem. I’ll write about each visit on my Project Neon blog and you can track my progress on this Google Map (blue markers are places I haven’t yet photographed, green markers I have already documented and the red markers indicate my favorites so far). I’m also assembling a field guide to New York City neon, which I hope to expand to other neon-filled cities in the future, and exploring the possibility of making this into an iPhone app.

Some have said that neon’s days are numbered. LED technology has been steadily improving, but the quality of LED light is not even in the same league as that of neon. LEDs are appropriate for many uses, but neon is worth preserving because nothing — not fluorescents, not incandescents, and not LEDs — can replicate its glow. And so I’m going to continue working on Project Neon, documenting the great signs of New York, mapping them, and visiting the businesses that support them. I hope Project Neon will inspire more New Yorkers to appreciate our metropolis’ treasure trove of neon, encourage shop owners to maintain fading or damaged signs, and persuade citizens to support the businesses that light up our city. New York would be a much poorer city without neon.

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What is your favorite New York neon sign? What other cities do you think have good neon? Would you be interested in a field guide to neon for New York or any other city? Speak up in the comments below!

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All photos by Kirsten Hively. Hively received her MArch in 2007 from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. When not architecting she can often be found photographing or writing about New York City, where she lives and works.

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.

Ezra Stoller | TWA Terminal at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport, Eero Saarinen, New York, NY, 1962 | Gelatin Silver Print © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York. Click image to launch slideshow.

Ezra Stoller | Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, NY, 1959 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Ezra Stoller | Manufacturers Trust Company, Fifth Avenue, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, New York, NY, 1954 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Ezra Stoller | Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, New York, NY, 1958 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Ezra Stoller | House in MoMA Garden, Marcel Breuer, New York, NY, 1949 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Walking into an exhibition of Ezra Stoller photographs induces a specific kind of vertigo. Tightly grouped zones of square, white frames regiment the wall planes of the white-cubic gallery space; within the frames, monuments of 20th century modernism continue to reflect their mysterious light, vanguards of the era now as embedded in the collective mindframe as the temples of antiquity. Stoller’s articulation of the various species of heroic modernism — whether gridded (Seagram Building), biomorphic (TWA Terminal at Idlewild), or volumetrically motley (Fallingwater) — classifies and idealizes them in ways architecture itself would have been unable to achieve without the great architectural photographers of the era.

The 50 images now on view at Chelsea’s Yossi Milo Gallery do something that is still surprising: they liberate the architectural photograph from its original client/media context, allowing its technical precision to generate an aura of high artistry. This move is still relatively recent for the genre, which has hovered between its two constituent industries — architecture and photography — and their wildly divergent, yet inextricable, practices. Whether in the service of the architect, the developer, or the press, the priorities of the architectural photograph have almost always been to record in order to promote. Therefore, this mode of photography has had to shed its original context before it could be understood on its own merits. Like a lot of commercial work, the distance of time has seemed to deepen its perceived aesthetic value.

But unlike the photographers of shoes and perfume bottles during the rise of the product advertisement and the retail catalog, the architectural photographer of modernism had to convey a new supercategory of product quite unlike anything that had come before. Their toolkit included the inherent geometries of the buildings themselves, and the choices of perspective, depth, detail, staging, and lighting that would conspire to make these images as unforgettable as possible.

Stoller was canny at integrating the kinds of elements that in less careful hands are distracting (which is why architectural photography orthodoxy advises to avoid them or clean them up in post-production). Cars, foreground expanses of tarmac (complete with oil stains), roof guardrails, airplane wings: all of these demonstrated the kind of philosophical assimilation of the everyday that made modernism accessible to laypeople. And it was that very element — people — that Stoller was particularly unafraid to include in these machinelike environments, contrary to the bizarre fallacy that only the most recent generation of imagers such as Iwan Baan introduced the human figure into the architectural frame. Stoller deployed people to activate spaces and convey scale, demystifying spaces (as with spectators at the Guggenheim, or the deadpan businessman contemplating the street-visible vault of the Manufacturers Trust Company building). But he also used figures differently for other kinds of projects, for the opposite effect of conveying quotidian reality. One classic view of the Seagram Building, taken from a height at twilight, reveals a solitary figure at the edge of the otherwise empty front plaza, creating an ambiguity that alludes to the new sublime atmosphere of midcentury urbanity.

Stoller and other giants of his generation fixed a methodology and aesthetic approach that made sense for its era; or is that a truism that we can no longer really see past, due to the pervasive success of their work? It’s commonplace to think that seminal photographers have taught us to see their subjects. Currently, Stoller’s example is progressively being dismantled by photographers who started working in the wake of postmodernism and for whom the full digital arsenal of data-intensive image capturing and processing tools are the norm. For them, there are no more iconic views to create, because the built environment is now as volatile as the digital image. Stoller’s work had to contend with new monuments; today’s photographers have to contemplate a defaulting Dubai, non-place and junkspace. Their rejection of classical norms is gradually training us to unsee Stoller.

Today the architectural image seems to proliferate boundlessly. For this we confront Stoller with a predictable measure of nostalgia, but also as a marker for visual and design practices that were at their own crucial turning points. In the skeptical unseeing of the modernist legacy, today’s architectural photography primes our visual palate for a future where both architecture and photography are destabilized further. For now, when we resort to beholding the previous era, we can do so much like the solitary figure in the plaza of the Seagram Building: with a kind of awe, because awe is still permitted.

Ezra Stoller | Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, New York, NY, 1958 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Ezra Stoller is on view at Yossi Milo Gallery at 525 West 25th Street until February 12th, 2011

Alan Rapp is the managing editor of the New City Reader, a temporary newspaper which recently completed its residency at New York’s New Museum. A graduate of School of Visual Arts’ Design Criticism MFA program, he edits, writes, and creates visual books 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.

Click the image above to launch a slideshow of selections from The Night Shadow by Michael Neff.

I am interested in looking more closely at the spaces and objects that surround us in our daily lives. It is easy not to be present, especially in New York, and I try to keep myself open to the out of place, surprising juxtaposition, or formal beauty that can be found by walking out the door. This point of view has led to projects ranging from investigations of grocery store price stickers to photographs of the spaces around big box stores. Ultimately, my work stems from an instinct to point at something and say, “Look!”

The Night Shadow project began in March of 2006. I was living and working in the West Village. I often worked late and on my walks home I began to take notice of the shadows along my route — primarily ones cast by exterior lights on buildings and street lights, but sometimes by interior light shining through a window. I did some drawing experiments in 2002 where I sat in a café and repeatedly traced sun-cast shadows of window lettering on my table. The sun moves quickly in relation to something so small so I would start at one end of the type and work my way to the other. By the time I was done the whole shadow had moved and I would start again. The end result was very much like Heidi Neilson’s Long Island City Sundial project; it almost felt like animation.

I chose chalk for this project because it seemed right. Much like shadows, chalk is impermanent. I also recognized that many shadows fall on buildings and my intention was to share something beautiful and surprising, not anger home or business owners. By choosing chalk over paint or ink, I left the outcome up to those who chose to engage. If someone didn’t like the work, they could wash it away or wait for it to rain.

I draw and photograph all of these works at night. Night in New York City is surprisingly bright. During the day, shadows change quickly, which inevitably results in distorted tracings. Shadows cast by electric lights gave me the opportunity to spend time on each piece and make very intricate drawings. I once spent 3 1/2 hours making a drawing on Hudson Street that was probably 150 feet long and 8 or 10 feet wide.

The photograph is an important part of the process, acting as documentation and a vehicle to share the work, so the fact that the drawing is fugitive doesn’t bother me. But I enjoy hearing that people have run across the drawings in person. There haven’t been that many and they don’t last very long, so there’s something special about encountering the work out in the city itself.

For more information about Neff’s work, check out his website and his Flickr page. All photographs copyright Michael Neff, all rights reserved.

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Michael Neff was born in Seattle, Washington. He earned a BFA in photography wih a minor in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. He lives in Brooklyn and dreams of driving on the West Coast.

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.

Images from left to right: Hudson River Park, image courtesy of Mathews Nielsen; West Harlem Piers Park, image courtesy of Alison Cartwright | via archleague.org

PARK TOUR AND BIKE RIDE
This Saturday, Architectural League group Design in 5 is hosting a park tour and bike ride of Hudson River Park and the West Harlem Piers, two of the many waterfront revitalization efforts springing up all over New York City. Design in 5 events are typically open to designers roughly five years or fewer out of school, but the group invites all young Omnibus readers as well. Participants will travel by bike to two different Hudson River parks and meet Len Greco from the New York City Economic Development Corporation and designers Barbara Wilks, of W Architecture, and Signe Nielsen, of Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. Join them to talk about waterfront development, design processes, and coordination efforts involved in projects of this scale, all while enjoying a beautiful day out in the sun. Email designin5@archleague.org to sign up.
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A HUNDRED MILLION CALLS TO 311

311 Calls for New York | Pitch Interactive via wired.com

WIRED reports on What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York, including how 311 calls “represent a huge pool of data to be collected, parsed, and transformed into usable intelligence,” evident in crowdsourced detective work like the Maple Syrup Mystery. Eye-grabbing infographics provide a quick glance at New York’s most vocal zip codes and common gripes, but also reveal more nuanced geographic and temporal complaint patterns. The article points to various efforts, by the City and private companies, to improve the efficiency of problem solving, but suggests that these programs can only go so far in improving the urban fabric. As a resource though, the uses of 311 call data continue to unfold. The call center is a voice of accountability that may encourage more New Yorkers to speak up, and 311 data is a tool to analyze the City’s problems, spurring timely and targeted response.
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DESIGN MATTERS
A recent survey following Election Day, which tested polling issues ranging from voter privacy to equipment functionality, found that over a third of the survey participants thought that the newly-designed ballot was difficult to read and used font that is too small. Design matters! Maybe its time for New York’s Board of Elections to go back to the drawing board with AIGA’s Design for Democracy, which “applies design tools and thinking to increase civic participation by making interactions between the US government and its citizens more understandable, efficient and trustworthy.”
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TRACING TRASH
Trash can over flowing? Not to worry, take your waste to Union Square tomorrow from 11am- 1pm for Culture Push’s Tracing Trash symposium. The “curated trash experiment” gathers information about waste disposal practices in the city. Orange-jumpsuited liaisons will answer questions about where garbage comes from and where it goes, and offer ideas for alternative disposal. Just remember to RSVP, to cp@culturepush.org, for your date with the dumpster.
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SWIMMING CITIES
Last weekend, the newest addition to Swimming Cities, which we discussed with artist Swoon earlier this fall, was launched in the Gowanus — or at least the radial foundation for it was. The Ocean of Blood, as the fleet of small boats is called, and its crew of artists will begin a journey up the Ganges River in India in March. The small rivercrafts can be connected for common space or separated in order to navigate narrow waterways. On-board motorcycles serve dual purposes, as propellers for the individual boats and vehicles for the crew when they need to get supplies on land. The final destination for The Ocean of Blood is Varanasi, the oldest living city in the world, where the crew will collaborate with local artists to create visual and musical performances using their journey as inspiration.
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KRANTHOUT

KrantHout | via worldchanging.com

File this under new materials wrought from extreme recycling: Worldchanging tells us about newspaper wood, aka KrantHout, designed by Mieke Meijer and available through the Dutch design firm, Vij5. The product is made from layers of recycled newspapers, which can be milled and sanded like any other type of wood. Meijer says KrantHout is “a reversing of a traditional production process; not from wood to paper, but the other way around.” The material has been in development since 2003 and Vij5 is working on a line of products to be added to their collection.
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EYEBALLING BRIDGES AND TUNNELS
Last week’s interview with photographer Stanley Greenberg reminded BLDGBLOG of this 2004 “carto-photographic look” at New York’s bridges and tunnels, an impressive gallery of images from the Library of Congress, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and Historic American Engingeering Record (HAER). “Eyeballing New York City’s Bridges and Tunnels” spotlights the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck, George Washington, Queensboro, Verrazano-Narrows, Triborough and Hells Gate Bridges along with the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, in all their infrastructural beauty.
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TEDxBROOKLYN

This Saturday, TEDxBrooklyn — one of many local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a “TED-like experience” — is hosting a stage event at Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn Campus. The one day program will focus on “the making of a movement,” bringing together local artists, entrepreneurs, activists, innovators and other Brooklynites to talk about and demonstrate their work and ideas. Meanwhile, you can nominate a “transformational individual” you know to be considered for TEDxBrooklyn’s “ONE Brooklynite,” to be featured on the program website.
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