Connected States of America | Image via MIT SENSEable City Lab

CONNECTED USA

A NEW BRAND OF BUSES
Transportation think tank EMBARQ has released “a creative guide to making public transport the way to go,” calling for a re-branding for public transit services in efforts to attract new users, retain existing riders and encourage government support. In a competitive marketplace in which the auto industry spends $21 billion on card ads annually, EMBARQ says creative marketing must be seen as an investment, not a luxury. The report highlights efforts of global public transportation administrations that have developed branded identities and boosted user-friendliness by increasing accessibility, streamlining design and using non-traditional language. Read more coverage on The Dirt or download the full guide here.

FOODPRINT L.A.
For our Los Angeles readers: Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich have just launched an experiment in crowdsourcing data collection to find out more about the food Angelenos eat and where it comes from. Every two weeks, volunteers will be asked to document their food purchases using Kullect‘s new app. The data collected will be used to create infographics, maps and charts to foster a better understanding of Los Angeles’ foodscape. The project is in anticipation of the next installment of the Foodprint Project, coming to L.A. this fall.

TreeHouse on Governors Island | Image via Inhabitat

GOVERNORS ISLAND TREEHOUSE
Artist Benjamin Jones has officially opened the Governors Island TreeHouse, built from all-sustainable materials that were sourced from non-profit reclaimed material warehouse Build-It-Green! NYC. The installation features a few interactive add-ons: games like an FSC See-Saw, a cell phone charging station, a Scratch N’ Sniff stand, and a greywater peddling fountain to teach visitors about sustainable energy sources. This weekend, Jones has invited the public to help paint the structure and enjoy a picnic party, on Saturday, July 9th. Read more about the TreeHouse on Inhabitat.

EVENTS AND TO DOs:

Fast-Tracked With CUP: Two years and two billion dollars from now, New York will get its first new subway stop in 22 years. Join CUP’s teaching artists Alexandra Woolsey-Puffer and Jeff Maki on July 12th at The Lot under the High Line at 30th Street for the debut presentation of Fast-Tracked, an investigation into how subways are developed, with particular attention paid to the hidden history of the 7 line extension and the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project. The program is free and open to the public. Find out more on the CUP Facebook page or RSVP to info@welcometocup.org.

Sarah Nelson Wright’s Oculus at Bring to Light Festival 2010 | Image via Sarah Nelson Wright and Nathaniel Lieb

Light Bright: Bring to Light has released a request for proposals for their second annual event. The festival fosters a new kind of engagement between temporary art installations and public space, “creating an immersive spectacle for thousands of visitors. … Whether boldly monumental or quietly engrossing, Bring to Light fosters contemplative, multi-sensory and participatory experiences in the public sphere with lasting impact.” The RFP invites artists at all stages of their careers to propose site-specific installations of light, sound, performance and projection to transform the streets, parks and industrial waterfront of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The RFP is open until July 25th.

Vertical Urban Factory Closing Reception: Next week is your last chance to see Vertical Urban Factory at the Skyscraper Museum, closing on July 17th. On July 13, from 6—8pm, architectural historian and exhibition curator Nina Rappaport will lead a gallery tour and discussion about the exhibit, followed by a closing party. Find out more at skyscraper.org.

Fixing the Great Mistake: Why have we let cars take over our streets? Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, noted entrepreneur and advocate for livable streets, will look at the history of transportation in New York City at the Center for Architecture next week. He will focus on unpacking some of the myths that are often cited to defend car-centric planning, providing evidence against them and offering a vision of livable streetlife in New York City.

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

The locations, heights and age of the mobile phone antenna installations filed with the Department of Buildings since 2005. The variable density of base stations is a reflection of the extremes of architectural topography and the obstruction environment, as well as the volume of user demand.

The relationship between mobile infrastructure and a city like New York is complex, and subject to many different forms of negotiation. It is also subject to a remarkable degree of change, reflecting the evolving form of the city itself and the novel ways that people engage it. The variables that concern how mobile infrastructure operates, how it is deployed and located within the city, and how its tactics change over time are certainly all spatial in nature. And taken as a whole, the negotiation between the infrastructure and the city describes a fundamentally new form of space – the signal space of the city – where the city and its electromagnetic transmission environment meet.

Mobile networks are at once invisible, and are also the systems most associated with the soft dimensions of infrastructure and its potential to act as an engine for large-scale social, economic and technological change. At a recent conference on mobile communications technology, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission noted that “no sector of the communications industry holds greater potential to enhance America’s economic competitiveness, spur job creation and improve the quality of our lives.” And just as the operational and physical dimensions of conventional infrastructure, from transportation to utilities, manifest themselves and influence the growth of the city in important ways, signal space can be understood as a new and important public space, located at a nexus of public, corporate, governmental and technological concerns.

While much of the speculation about the future of the city in relation to mobile networks has been focused on applications and potential uses of the technology, less attention has been devoted to the way that the technology itself is developing and the impact that it may have on the city. Our research into mobile infrastructure centers around identifying some of the developments in mobile technology that have the greatest potential to affect the future development of the city, and speculating on where they may have particular relevance for design. Our aim has been to theorize and document signal space, to increase its visibility, and to make its protocols and characteristics available for action.

Cellular network organization

SECTORIZING THE CITY
At the most fundamental level, a mobile phone is a two-way radio. The phone contains an antenna that communicates with a mobile base station nearby. A base station generally includes a series or array of antennas that receive and transmit signals, and a computer that coordinates the communication and interfaces with the cabled phone system. The structure of mobile networks is generally comprised of sectors or cells, defined as the overlapping region of three base stations. At its simplest, a cellular network can be imagined as a continuously tiled set of hexagonal cells, with base stations located at every other vertex. An individual user making or receiving a call communicates with a nearby base station. As that user moves out of range, the signal is shared between other base stations within range until the most optimum base station is identified and the call is handed over.

The broadcast spectrum is a finite resource, so the region of the broadcast spectrum available for any given technology is rigorously policed and legislated. Mobile networks have access to a limited range of frequencies, so cellular communication is based on the reuse of frequency channels within the network. Any of the frequencies associated with a given cell are being reused at another cell, usually nearby but far enough away to avoid co-channel interference.

Frequency Allocations of the Radio Spectrum from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) | Right-click and open in a new window to see details.

The capacity of the system is limited by interference from the environment and by the depletion of available channels due to an increasing number of users. Each base station can only accommodate a certain number of simultaneous users, for instance, so one of the primary methods for increasing the capacity of mobile network technologies relies on subdivision — sectorizing the city into smaller and smaller individual frequency zones.

The surest measure of signal quality is the unobstructed line of sight from antenna to receiver. In dense environments, like cities, signals tend to be reflected off of obstructions and arrive out of phase at the receiving antenna. Coverage is dependent not only on the availability of a signal at a given location, but on the network’s ability to maintain a signal over time, throughout an individual cell, and as a user moves from cell to cell. Mobile base stations are strategically located to optimize the “fit” between the available signal and the specific physical environment. The complexity of this relationship is such that most base stations are located as a result of experimental testing and local calibration because no sufficiently powerful analytical methods or modeling are available to determine the behavior of signals.

Base stations and antennae | L-R: Jane Street at Hudson; E. 4th St. between Ave. A and Ave. B; E. 2nd St. and Ave D; Sullivan and W. 3rd St.

The FCC, in recent years, has authorized a three-fold increase in the commercial spectrum, which includes the recent auction of 700MHz frequencies previously in use by analog television. However, given that a 35-fold increase in wireless traffic is expected over the next five years, mobile providers constantly add antennas to their networks. While a single base station might have a range measured in miles in an unobstructed environment, in an urban setting installations are often separated by only a few hundred feet.

Rapidly increasing demand will mean that base stations, which today are almost exclusively located semi-stealthily on mid-rise building rooftops, will not only become denser, but will likely migrate into interiors, streets and other public spaces. The radical densification of sectoring into ever-smaller cells affords finer degrees of control over the transmission. It also calls for a miniaturization of the antenna equipment to allow for easier integration with other structures and camouflage. Already, hundreds of thousands of femtocells (small-scale base stations for boosting wireless signals indoors that are the size of a Wi-Fi router) are currently installed throughout the United States.

Base Station Density | L: The service volume, or exposure, for each base station was determined by calculating the total interior square footage of buildings within the broadcast radius of each antenna point. The size and color of each base station is proportional to its positive or negative deviation from the mean exposure. Not surprisingly, in Midtown Manhattan a high number of base stations service a large amount of building volume, or user volume. Fairly large differences are evident, though between the Upper West and Upper East Sides. | R: Base Station density by New York City Community District. The average density of antennas in Manhattan is one for every 218 square meters. Evaluated by community district, the density ranges from 380 square meters at the low end to 160 square meters on the high end. A number of other administrative boundaries show wide variation in the density of base stations. For instance, Landmark Districts as a whole have considerably fewer installations and on average have an antenna density just over half of that of the rest of Manhattan.

PROLIFERATION OF THE MOBILE NETWORK
One of the most significant factors in the development of the infrastructure and its proliferation will be any proposed change to the registration and reporting requirements currently in existence. No comprehensive documentation on the mobile infrastructure in New York is available, largely because the infrastructure itself is entirely owned by corporate entities and installations on specific buildings are often negotiated in private. Since 1998, New York City’s building code requires that new rooftop installations be approved under an alteration permit, though no data concerning the operation of a base station or its conformance to FCC radiation regulations are maintained by the City. And since 2005, the Department of Buildings has maintained a cellular antenna information database with information on mobile antenna permits. This data, coupled with registration from the FCC and FAA (above 200 feet, antennas must be registered as potential flight hazards), constitutes a substantial record of the infrastructure. To start to get a picture of the built infrastructure of mobile networks in New York, we developed a series of maps (seen throughout this piece) by cross-referencing permit and registration data with the NYC Planning Department’s PLUTO and LION datasets, as well as individual building information from the New York City Data Mine.

Not only are base stations proliferating, they are also developing sophisticated spatial senses and intelligence. Base stations employ spatial algorithms, probabilistic modeling and other soft computing methods to anticipate and coordinate the effects of signals that are lost, delayed, or arriving out of phase with the primary transmission. In effect, they reconstruct signals from the interference generated by the physical environment and are able to anticipate the transmissibility of a signal given a specific environment and user.

SIMULACRUM OF THE CITY
“Smart” antenna installations are designed to customize a radiation pattern for each individual user as a means to better negotiate obstruction-rich environments and to greatly increase the capacity of a given base station’s limited set of frequencies. The sensitivities of each component of the network are precisely tuned to users and to the physical environment alike. In aggregate, they add up to what is unquestionably one of the most comprehensive representations of the city in existence, capable of accounting for the physical obstruction environment of the city (its physical form) and the activities, communications, data transmissions and locations of the network’s users. As the network becomes denser, and cells finer, the resolution of the signal spaces increases dramatically.

Visually confirming the data set along the Bleecker Street and East 3rd Street from the Hudson River to the East River. While base stations are most frequently absorbed into the visual noise of rooftops, a number of camouflaging techniques related to color and matching brick textures are apparent. This limited sampling also reveals the broad range of scales associated with equipment. It is common in the far East Village, for instance, to see installations covering entire rooftops.

As recent reports have widely publicized, mobile phones and base station computers store significant personal data. That information, coupled with the emerging spatial and user sensitivities of the infrastructure itself, could be understood as a unique form of spatial memory. Proposals to embed sensors into mobile phones for sniffing out bioterrorism agents or nuclear radiation are indications of the network’s potential to support crowd-sourced passive surveillance, but also to retain memory of the activities of the city at particular locations and in relation to particular spatial environments.

In his work Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard recounts a fable by Jorge Luis Borges where a great empire creates a map of its territory so exact that it approaches the size of the territory itself. In many ways, the memory built into signal space reflects Baudrillard’s observation that in contemporary societies, the simulacrum supersedes the actual territory itself. In 2003, New York City’s Department of Information, Technology and Telecommunications collected information about signal quality by inviting New Yorkers to report areas with poor cell phone reception, so that they could be reported to mobile carriers. More recently, in a 2011 paper, researchers at AT&T Labs have proposed that cell phone user data has the potential to dramatically change the future of urban planning, noting that “cellular networks must know the approximate locations of all active cellular phones in order to provide them with communication services. Given the ubiquity of these phones and their almost constant proximity to their owners, cellular networks can be used to opportunistically sense the locations of large populations of people. They thus provide a means to monitor city dynamics frequently, cheaply and at an unprecedented scale.”

.

All images, except the FCC Frequency Allocations graphic, by Michael Chen and Justin Snider.

Michael Chen is principal of Normal Projects, a New York-based architecture and design firm, and teaches design studios and seminars at Pratt Institute School of Architecture (www.crisisfronts.org). His design work and writings have been published widely. “Signal Space: New York’s Soft Frequency Terrains,” an article exploring the relationship between broadcast technologies and urban form with maps and visualizations by Chen and Justin Snider will appear in Bracket issue #2, Bracket [goes soft], published by Actar later this year.

Justin Snider is a designer and researcher based in New York.  He is currently a Project Manager for Hume Coover Studio and Teacher’s Assistant for the Pratt Institute Berlin Program.  His project REBOOT was winner of the ARCHIVE Seed Award.  Images and videos of his recent work are available at http://a-object.com/.

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.

Proposed Applied Science and Research Campus |

THE NEXT TECH CAPITAL: NYC
This past March, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) solicited a request for expressions of interest (RFEI) to global research institutions for ideas to establish a future “applied science and engineering research campus” somewhere in New York City. NYCEDC received 18 proposals from top schools that included designs on four recommended 40-acre sites, including the Navy Hospital Campus at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Goldwater Hospital Campus on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, areas on Governors Island, Farm Colony on Staten Island and some privately owned sites. Stanford University unveiled a particularly interesting plan for an institute on Roosevelt Island, which, if constructed, could open in 2015. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser wrote on the topic for The New York Times, reflecting on whether or not an applied science center in New York City even makes sense. Read Glaeser’s piece here and see the full coverage of the Stanford proposal in The Architect’s Newspaper, here.

Proposed Fourth Avenue Zoning Area | Image via Department of City Planning

DCP PROPOSES ‘ENLIVENED’ FOURTH AVE
The New York Times’ City Room blog covered the Department of City Planning’s latest proposal to rezone the commercial strip of Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, between Atlantic Avenue and 24th Street (from Park Slope to Sunset Park), in a effort to ban new developments from constructing parking lots, apartments or any block-long stretches of unfriendly walls on the ground floor. The proposal eliminates streetside parking and residential use, requires “a minimum of 50 percent street wall transparency” on Fourth Avenue, from two feet above the sidewalk up to 12 feet, and calls for all owners to devote at least half the space for retail. After 1993, when it was partially rezoned for residential use, Fourth Avenue began a “visible and dramatic transformation from an auto-oriented, heavy commercial and industrial avenue, to one with a significant residential presence.” The proposal is currently in public review, and will be assessed by affected Community Boards for the next 60 days.

Gotham Greens Greenpoint Greenhouse | Image via Gotham Greens

GOTHAM GREENS: BK GREENHOUSE
Gotham Greens, Brooklyn’s first commercial greenhouse farm facility, will begin their first Greenpoint harvest this month! The hydroponic greenhouse will provide year-round production of vegetables and herbs soon to be sold at a select list of restaurants and retailers in NYC. This hyperlocal commercial facility is another in a string of urban farm businesses including Brooklyn Grange and Eagle Street Farm. Check out Gotham Greens’ site for updates on where you can buy their locally produced veggies in the near future.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: “THE BIKES HAVE WON!”
The Wall Street Journal published an optimistic piece on the city’s ongoing “war” over the value of bike lanes, bike culture and the future of biking in New York City. Author Jason Gay adeptly claims that biking is far from the cultural fringe of our city, asking readers: “Email your friends. Ask how many of them own bikes. Then ask how many of them own cars. If more of them say they own cars, look out the window. You live in Connecticut.” Gay believes the so-called bike war is actually an enormous mischaracterization by the media, and draws salient points about the outcome of the momentum built by bike advocates like Transportation Alternatives and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik Khan. “The bikes have won and it’s not a terrible thing.”

Amtrak Acela Train | Image via Amtrak

THE END OF AMTRAK?
Last week, Chairman of the House of Transportation and Infrastructure Committee John Mica proposed legislation to privatize Amtrak, denouncing the system’s forty-year track record as a “costly and wasteful Soviet-style operation.” The proposed Competition for Intercity Passenger Rail in America Act hopes to “end the Amtrak monopoly,” involving a competitive high-speed rail network between New York City, Washington, DC and Boston. First the act would transfer ownership of the railroad to the US Department of Transportation, after which the Transportation Secretary would seek bids from private companies “to design, build, operate and maintain intercity passenger rail service, including high-speed rail” in the Northeast Corridor. Check out Infrastructurist’s ongoing coverage of the issue, and see the Chairman’s press release on the proposed legislation here.

CITIES vs. SUBURBS
This week’s issue of The New Yorker includes “Get Out of Town,” a piece by Nicholas Lemann discussing the age-old city vs. suburbs debate that draws on several books to assess the factors behind a successful city. “In the United States right now, after a long run of ‘urban crisis’ (punctuated by periodic hopeful reports of revitalization), cities are viewed positively again,” he writes. Through Richard Florida’s The Great Reset, Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, John D. Kasarda/Greg Lindsay’s Aerotropolis, Doug Saunders’ Arrival City, James S. Russell’s The Agile City and more, Lemann looks at the prevalence of celebrations of urban dynamics in current society and touches on questions still unanswered as we move into an increasingly urban world. Read an abstract of the article here, or pick up this week’s New Yorker on newsstands to read the complete piece.

Rendering of Interboro’s “Holding Pattern” | Image via PS1

TO DO: INTERBORO’S HOLDING PATTERN
This year’s PS1 summer courtyard installation is now open! “Holding Pattern” by the Brooklyn-based Interboro Partners will be on view through September 26 in Long Island City and will act as the environment for PS1′s Warm Up music/performance/sound/dance series every Saturday from July 2nd to September 3rd. As part of the installation, Interboro conducted a survey asking local businesses and organizations what objects they would like to have or most need that they don’t already have access to. Based on the results, the team constructed a set of simple but elegant objects, including foosball tables, lifeguard chairs and a rock climbing wall, all of which will be donated to the neighborhood organizations after the installation is taken down. The hope is that this process will strengthen the connection between PS1 and its surrounding community, a goal that inspired the physical form of Holding Pattern. The undulating plains of rope, taut from wall to wall, create a dialogue between the courtyard and the surrounding environment by integrating without obstructing. Find out more about “Holding Pattern” and the MoMA Ps1 Young Architects Program at ps1.org.

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

HIGH LINE PHASE TWO NOW OPEN
Section 2 of the High Line is open to the public after a surprise soft launch on June 7th, between 20th to 30th Street along 10th Ave. The latest phase has doubled the length of the park to one mile. Some of the best new features to check out: the 4,900 square foot 23rd Street Lawn; an elongated, wooden radial bench (between West 28th and 29th Streets); and the 26th Street Viewing Spur, a glass framed lookout over West 26th Street with cascading teak sitting steps. See the official High Line site for more information on Section 2.

BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN REVIEWED
Norman Oder, resident expert on Atlantic Yards and author of the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report, recently reviewed Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley’s documentary on the seven-year development controversy, Battle for Brooklyn. Oder finds the film to be “most valuable in the camera’s witness to the palpable insincerity and cold-blooded indifference of the developer-government alliance” and wonders if Ratner’s deputy Bruce Bender asked the right questions. Read Oder’s full film review over on Dissent and his comment on Forest City Ratner’s response to the film.

BAD HABITS = DANGEROUS STREETS
SVA Masters student Ron Gabriel has created a compelling video campaign called “3 Way Street” drawing on the dangerous behavioral tendencies bikers, people and cars play out on NYC streets. Gabriel’s project exposes how “pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists running red lights and motorists plowing through crosswalks” make our streets unsafe. Catch the cleverly annotated video here.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR SOUTH STREET SEAPORT
Gotham Gazette covers the latest land use controversy over plans for South Street Seaport, following a 40-year string of unsuccessful development strategies. The Howard Hughes Corporation has been in preliminary discussion with SHoP Architects to redevelop the neighborhood, which, although it has some of the oldest architecture in Manhattan, has been home to many struggling businesses over past few decades. A 2008 plan sought to tear down the Pier 17 mall and construct a huge condominium, which was heavily critiqued by Community Board 1. Competing area demands like public retail needs and newer businesses like the New Amsterdam Market make for a complex design challenge. Stay tuned for updates and see the full story here.

Graphic via Architecture Magazine

IS LEED TOO POWERFUL?
On ArchitectureBoston, Michael Liu outlines the debate surrounding the legitimacy of LEED certification. Starting in 2010, Henry Gifford filed a class-action lawsuit against the non-profit US Green Building Council (USGBC) on a number of accounts, claiming USGBC’s claims to improved energy performance of LEED-certified buildings were unsubstantiated and contributed to a defrauding of the public en masse over the actual benefits of LEED-certified buildings. LEED-certification currently charges significant sums for construction and professional credits, turning LEED into what Gifford calls “a fee-generating monopoly.” Gifford provides a relevant contribution by opening up discourse around who makes what rules and unpacking the added complexity of charging money for institutionalized standards. Nevertheless, LEED certification also represents the need to formalize and codify design standards to move toward a sustainable future. Gifford points out that we need to be wary of how these standards are met; he critiques the “process of certifying buildings and the creation of a fee-generating bureaucratic structure” rather than green design standards themselves. Read Michael Liu’s full op-ed here.

HIGH-TECH TOURISM
CultureNOW, an organization formed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 specifically to illustrate the cultural and historical richness of Lower Manhattan, has mapped out the history, art and architecture of New York’s public realm to create a “museum without walls” iPhone app. CultureNOW President Abby Suckle calls the app, which won an honorable mention in the New York City’s 2011 BigApps 2.0 contest, a “treasure hunt, almost like urban archaeology.” Users can explore with maps, photos, tour routes and renderings of former buildings, all while listening to timely podcasts from experts like Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, Pratt Professor Bill Menking and architect Hugh Hardy. Download the app here.

Poe Park Visitor Center | Image via NYC PARKS/Malcolm Pinckney

EDGAR ALLEN POE AND DESIGN EXCELLENCE IN THE BRONX
The new Poe Park Visitor Center, located in the Bronx between the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road, sits on a 2.3 acre park that was home to the last residence of famed author Edgar Allen Poe. The visitor center is the first parks project to be completed from the Bloomberg Administration’s Design and Construction Excellence Initiative. Designed by architect Toshiko Mori, the new center is a 5,400-square-foot visitor center that includes a gathering space for community use and a display area showcasing the Poe farmhouse vista. A modest structure, Mori did not want to overwhelm Poe’s tiny farmhouse. See Archinect’s full coverage on the center.

EVENTS + TO DOs

BY THE CITY / FOR THE CITY CALL FOR DESIGNS
Last month, we told you about Institute for Urban Design’s call for ideas for its By the City/ For the City project, which asked New Yorkers to share their ideas for how to improve NYC. IfUD has now opened up the second phase of the program to designers who want to visualize these ideas. The ideas and designs will eventually be published in a public atlas. The Call for Designs will be open through July 14th. Submit your designs and visit the competition’s site here.

CITY AS STAGE: CONVERSATION ON ‘FORECLOSED’
On Saturday, June 11th, the Whitney will host a free, public platform lecture on Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, at 3pm at The Kitchen, 512 W 19th Street. As part of the exhibition Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, the discussion will explore urban space as a site of contestation and possibility. It will begin with a screening of Yto Barrada’s video Beau Geste (2009), followed by a conversation between Tania Bruguera (Artist), Peter Marcuse (Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University), Damon Rich (Urban Designer, City of Newark) and Radhika Subramaniam (Curator, Parsons The New School for Design). See full details here.

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

I feel compelled to respond to a recent article and photo essay (PDF) published by a group of communications scholars led by Keith Hampton. Hampton is best known for his doctoral research under Barry Wellman, in which he studied the impacts of broadband on a wired suburb of Toronto. His conclusion was that while broadband didn’t increase strong social ties, the use of email amongst neighbors did expand the circle of weak social ties for residents. Overall, the impacts of broadband on social cohesion were deemed modest but positive. In the decade since that study, we’ve seen a similar dynamic play out on online social networks like Facebook, which have greatly expanded our weak social ties.

So it was with great interest that I approached Hampton’s newest study of social behavior of users of wireless public spaces. In fact, I played a major role in lighting up two of the spaces examined in the study, Bryant Park and Union Square in New York City, and have been studying them myself for nearly a decade. The researchers collected an enormous amount of data, observing some 1,400 people using mobile wireless devices in these parks as well as three others in Philadelphia and Toronto. Their mixed conclusion: “We explored how wireless Internet access brings new uses and new life to public spaces‚ and how it pushes out existing public life. Some wireless users are cut off from their surroundings, but for most, interactions between on- and off-line experiences increase exposure to social diversity.” Not exactly an indictment, but not a ringing endorsement either. Given the attention that this study is likely to get, and the potential it may have to dampen interest in public wireless by civic leaders and park advocates, I wanted to point out a couple areas where this study failed to capture “the complex relationships between Internet use in urban public spaces” it sought to understand.

The first point to make is that Hampton isn’t the first to discover the risks of social isolation for and around wireless users in public space. Literally from the very first day in June 2002, when my colleagues at NYCwireless first fired up the free public wireless network in Bryant Park, we were on the lookout for negative impacts on the park’s public life. This is because we were working closely with the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, a sort of neighborhood level quasi-governmental body that was the brainchild of William “Holly” Whyte and the organizational mechanism for the park’s revitalization in the 1990s. During the project planning, we had discussed many times that the wireless network was a pilot project, and it was made clear in no uncertain terms that if nerds with laptops took over the park, they’d pull the plug. Of course, that didn’t happen — wireless use became a small niche within the rich ecosystem of uses of the park. Furthermore, NYCwireless actively sought to create mechanisms to “undo” social isolation and reconnect Internet users back to the park — a portal with park information had to be passed before gaining access to the Internet, and we created games and chatrooms that could only be accessed on the local area network. That is to say, we created web-based services that were only accessible if you came to the park.

The troubling part of the study is where it implies that by attracting non-sociable users to public space — in particular, workers seeking an “escape” from their office — wireless connectivity is reducing the vitality of those spaces. To me, having spent a decade working in wireless public spaces around the world, this is an incredibly archaic view of what public space is for, and it is one that conflicts with the long legacy of working in public space throughout urban history. Granted, as the study documents, today, many of those working in wireless public spaces are solitary. They found that  ”Internet users rarely travel in packs: most come alone and stay alone (79 percent).” They describe the way in which Bryant Park, at certain times of the day, “functions primarily as a workers’ park” for wireless Internet users, who “typically seek empty tables and desks.”

Yet, why would we not expect Bryant Park to be primarily used for work? It is, after all, situated smack dab in the largest cluster of office buildings in the world. To think of it as some kind of bucolic retreat from the real Manhattan world of commerce is deluded at best, and destructive of the social fabric of the city, much of which is structured around work. More importantly, by making public space available for private work, we also create the opportunity for collaborative work. Laura Forlano has extensively documented the way that new forms of collaborative work are emerging in wireless public spaces such as cafes. My favorite anecdote tells of the graphic designer who leaves samples of work in progress out on display, in the hopes of soliciting casual comments from passersby. While intensely focused on his computer-based design software, he’s left a trigger for others to approach him. Other freelancers use stickers and buttons displayed on their computers to provide hooks for conversations. (Mine just says “I am making the future.”)

Thus, while Hampton’s study either misses or doesn’t address this phenomenon, it’s becoming clear that public wireless is allowing groups to work in public space in novel ways. And so, two years ago, working on one of five projects commissioned by the Architectural League of New York for its Toward the Sentient City exhibition, Forlano and I organized a series of experimental collaborative work sessions in wireless public spaces. Using a dedicated social app developed by NYCwireless’ Dana Speigel, and a backpack full of office supplies and work-facilitating doodads like a tabletop whiteboard assembled by Antonina Simeti of workplace design consultancy DEGW, we appropriated the parks and plazas of Manhattan for our work. Dubbed “Breakout: Escape from the Office,” this weeklong effort demonstrated that public space provides an ideal platform for the kind of creative, collaborative, cross-organizational work that so many companies now do. And it showed that the door is opening for us to bring work back to the streets for the first time in a century, since the office building, as architectural solution to bureaucracy — managing lots of people and paper in close proximity — sucked them away.

Finally, the study fails to address two rapidly emerging trends in mobile devices and information services that are changing the way wireless users interact with public space, and are likely to render many of the conclusions irrelevant in the near future. First, the most critical element of how online and face-to-face worlds now interact, is the widespread and diversifying use of social media and electronic communications to coordinate face-to-face meetings. “The more devices present, the less in-person interaction: the majority of public Internet users are online communicating with people they know, but who aren’t physically present.” That’s fine, but what are the consequences of those communications? Invariably, they are about planning activities that will take place in or around the park in the near future. Bryant Park receives hundreds of check-ins daily on the mobile social network Foursquare. Surely these people are creating opportunities for sociability even as they are momentarily distracted from their surroundings while leaving a digital breadcrumb. Second, the study places far too much emphasis on personal devices, especially the laptop. But laptops are already on their way out, as we enter what urban informatician Adam Greenfield first called the “post-PC era.” As tablets, game consoles and gestural and spoken interfaces to computers become more widespread, we’ll see wireless public spaces become laboratories for a kind of civic computing that lets groups large and small experience new kinds of collective computed activities.

In conclusion, while Hampton’s study of wireless public space takes great effort to be neutral and objective, its conclusions are already outdated. And I fear the nuances of its mixed conclusions will be lost on the practitioners who manage our public spaces, or, even worse, interpreted as a warning. But this great experiment with mobile connectivity in civic spaces is just getting started. We shouldn’t be so hasty to draw conclusions about its larger social impact. From an urban design standpoint, the opportunity to bring work back out of office buildings far exceeds the risks. That’s exactly why Bryant Park put the lectern desks in the park: to encourage that new and highly desirable use for a park in a business district.

And yes, I wrote this in Bryant Park, while still managing to chitchat here and there, and flirt with a girl or two. I like to think that wherever he is, Holly Whyte is looking down and smiling.

All photos of Bryant Park visitors enjoying wireless by Ed Yourdon.

Anthony Townsend is the Director of Technology and Development of the Institute for the Future, and focuses his research on the impact of new technology on cities and public institutions. His interests span several inter-related topics: mobility and urbanization, innovation systems and innovation strategy, science and technology parks and economic development, and sustainability and telework.

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.

Image by Ryan Heshka | via wsj.com

GETTING TRANSPORTATION POLICY RIGHT
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes calls for an overhaul to the way our country spends its transportation dollars. Moving away from the transportation infrastructure improvements that have built enough new highway lane miles since 2000 to circle the world four times, Puentes instead advocates for a necessary alignment between transportation and the new economy with private and public sectors joining forces to cut carbon emissions and increase connectivity. Puentes spells out a series of national goals, concerning export corridors, commuter connectivity, greener infrastructure and better technology, ”and how transportation policy can — no, must — be rethought to achieve them.” Read the full article here.
.

PLANYC’S MISSING PIECE
Last month, the City unveiled its latest update of PlaNYC, addressing what various City agencies, community groups, businesses and others can do to further the administration’s sustainability goals, calling for a multi-stakeholder approach to implementation. In an article for Gotham Gazette, Pratt Center fellows Eve Baron and Alyssa Katz see things differently. For them, participatory planning is “The Sustainability Plan’s Missing Piece.” Calling the plan “top-down” and pointing to the remarkable fact that New York is the only major metropolis without a comprehensive plan, Baron and Katz also outline some mechanisms to improve the administration’s track record. Many of the city’s progressive planning voices (Hunter’s Tom Agnotti, the Pratt Center/NYIRN’s Adam Friedman, NYU’s Furman Center, et. al.) have published complimentary pieces raising flags over PlaNYC’s process, in a series of working papers and articles called Sustainability Watch.
.

MAKING NYC ACTIVE
Last month, ASLA’s blog The Dirt interviewed Joyce Lee, Director of the Active Design Program at the NYC Department of Design and Construction, about the City’s Active Design Guidelines. The guidelines explore ways to take on the obesity and fitness crisis through interdisciplinary design of both indoor and outdoor environments. Lee goes into the framework behind the plan and points to ways that New Yorkers, despite their use of public transit, suffer from the car-related physical fitness problems that the rest of the country is dealing with. Lee describes the guidelines’ multifaceted approach, from covering sustainable construction and design to changing walking and movement habits. By connecting the design guidelines to the LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) rating system, the guidelines offer credit to developers for including things like bike storage areas and tree-lined streets. The design guidelines are being applied now to cities across the country and, although voluntary, are part of public discourse which will trickle its way into legislation. For more information about the Active Design Guidelines, look back at Samir Shah’s recap of the program’s launch last year or dive into the full Active Design Guidelines Plan at nyc.gov.
.

EVENTS AND TO-DOs:

VERTICAL URBAN FACTORY | If Nina Rappaport’s recent Omnibus feature Vertical Urban Factory caught your eye, check out two related upcoming events. On Wednesday, June 1st, the New York Design Center is hosting a panel discussion on the future of manufacturing at Trespa, 62 Greene Street. Then, on June 2nd, a tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard as an American model for sustainable urban manufacturing will meet at the York Street F subway stop at 5:15pm to board a shuttle bus. Suggested contribution is $35, to be paid online at verticalurbanfactory.org (under the “contribute” tab), or bring a check made to New York Foundation for the Arts to the event. The tour will end at Re-Bar in Dumbo for a drink. Rain or shine. RSVP by May 31 to: jamie.chan@gmail.com

Rainbow City at Art Basel Miami Beach | via friendswithyou.com

POP UP PLAZA PARKING LOT: FOOD AND INFLATABLES | The New York Times announced the latest development planned near the High Line’s 30th Street and 10th Avenue entrance. Currently a parking lot, the “Lot at 30th Street” will soon to be transformed into a multi-dimensional art and food mecca planned by Friends of the High Line. The space will feature public art installations, a 350-seat bar called Lot on Tap, managed by chef Tom Colicchio’s restaurant Colicchio & Sons. Collichio will also curate a rotating roster of five high-quality, lower-cost food trucks to compliment the bar. In its 20,000-square-foot eastern section, the Lot will also house a public art exhibition, “Rainbow City,” a collection of huge, brightly colored inflatables from Miami-based artists Friends With You.

BOB the Pavilion | via bobthepavilion.com

BOB the PAVILION | In line with the recent trend in inflatable art, Columbia is unveiling a “floating pavilion” named BOB. This “cloud” will float above a public pavilion and bathroom site, conceived by Columbia’s GSAPP and SoA students. Open June 1 – 25, the pavilion includes composting public restrooms, a projection screen, 12 student-designed seats and a bar. The pneumatic roof is re-pressurized by the toilets’ exhaust. Derived from the idea that “a society that does not provide public restrooms, does not deserve public art,” BOB pushes the link between the necessity for public space and provision of basic amenities. To learn more about BOB, click here.

Stillspotting NYC | via guggenheim.org

STILLSPOTTING NYC: SANITORIUM | The Guggenheim has launched its latest series of off-site, public installations called stillspotting nyc, in response to the idea that “ever-present cacophony of traffic, construction, and commerce; the struggle for mental and physical space; and the anxious need for constant communication in person or via technology are relentless assaults on the senses.” This two-year project will identify “stillspots” across the five boroughs and, every three to five months, will transform these areas with public tours, events or installations by artists, designers, composers and philosophers. The first installation of the series debuts in Brooklyn, from Mexican artist Pedro Reyes. Sanatorium, a temporary therapeutic clinic offering visitors 16 distinct “urban therapies,” will be located at the storefront level of 1 Metrotech Center (entrance at 345 Jay Street) in Downtown Brooklyn. Thursdays, June 2 and 9, 2–10pm; Fridays, June 3 and 10, 2–10pm; Saturdays, June 4 and 11, 10am–10pm; and Sundays, June 5 and 12, 10am–10pm; advance tickets only.

ARCHITECTING THE FUTURE CONFERENCE | The Buckminster Fuller Institute is hosting a three-day series of events and lectures around the announcement of the 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge finalists. The annual competition asks participants to design workable solutions to significant world challenges. Architecting the Future kicks off with a lecture from John Thackara on June 8th at 6pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; followed by “Urban Solution Sets —Visionary Strategies for the Future of Cities” at the Center for Architecture on Thursday, June 9th, from 2-4pm; and the announcement of winners and presentation of the selected solution at the CUNY Graduate Center on June 10th, from 6-8pm. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to bfi.org.

CALLS FOR ENTRIES | Now through July 4th, BOFFO is inviting architects to submit design proposals for the second annual Building Fashion, which pairs fashion designers with architects for a series of temporary installations in Tribeca that explore the interesection of architecture and fashion. See more details at Architizer. Meanwhile, at the intersection of architecture and urban agriculture, suckerPUNCH is hosting an international ideas competition for a Center for Urban Farming, to be imagined for a site adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Registration deadline is August 15.

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

There’s a large section on public input gathered from various ‘digital environments’ via Quora.com, Meetups, By the City, online surveys at nyc.gov and more. The top identified needs gathered from such surveys are public wi-fi, internet access in more locations (even in the subway) and real-time public information.

Much of the report talks about all the great stuff the city is already doing — but here’s some of what we can expect from the city’s growing digital infrastructure in the years to come:

• Better Access to the Internet: public computer centers with senior learning, underground subway wi-fi and cell service in six stations, improve computer access with hardware and internet to 72 of the highest-need middle schools in the city
• Open Government: API-enabled Public Data and NYC Platform, an open government framework featuring Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for City data, a hub for feedback from the developer community and an NYC App store
• Engagement: Partnerships with social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr) to engage residents, digital 311, and a better nyc.gov

Read the full Roadmap for yourself here.
.

HOUSING TRENDS
With New York City’s housing climate hitting new lows — last week’s tragic fire in Bushwick resulted in the deaths of two men living in an illegally-converted boarding house — the need to reevaluate legislation and enforcement around illegal subdivisions was made clear. Bolstered by surprising 2010 Census numbers which discounted predictions on Queens’ new residents (reporting that only 1,343 new people moved to Queens in a decade), illegal conversions housing new immigrants are being taken seriously by housing advocates and even City Hall. A recent analysis by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) found that “illegal housing types, subdivisions and sharing are so extensive in the city that it has become impossible to truly understand the population living behind our closed doors.” The Architectural League is working with CHPC on a multi-phase design study that will provoke innovative design thinking to promote a greater diversity of housing typologies in the city, given the mismatch between contemporary demographic reality and the kinds of dwellings that conform to New York’s complex housing code. Stay tuned for more on this collaboration in the weeks to come.

The issue was also addressed in the most recent version of PlaNYC, and re-evaluation of the topic is at the forefront of political conversation. NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy released its quarterly report on the city’s state of housing — and trends look dreary for foreclosure and sales. Housing prices have dipped in all boroughs except Queens, and 40% of the city’s foreclosure notices are in Brooklyn, but have declined in every borough since 2010. See the full Furman Report and more on housing reform here.
.

New and Old Parks Department Logo | Images courtesy Pentagram

PENTAGRAM AND PARKS DEPARTMENT TEAM UP
Paula Scher, of the design firm Pentagram, has teamed up with the NYC Parks Department to retool their iconic logo and identity, first introduced in 1934. The redesign will touch signage, wayfinding and environmental graphics for 1,700+ parks, playgrounds and other facilities. The design effort, spearheaded by Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, seeks to coordinate the visual identity of the Department of Parks and Recreation with high-profile projects like the High Line and Madison Square Park and to increase consistency across agency materials.

Although consistent with the original design of a leaf in a circle, the new logo has a modernized leaf, a thinner circle line, a brighter, lighter green and is set in the typeface Akkurat. Park signage has the most radical revamp, with modular pieces for future expansion and double sided signs. To read the full story, see Pentagram’s coverage.

New Parks Signage | Images courtesy Pentagram
.

END OF SUBWAY CAR REEFS
If you caught last week’s UO feature on Stephen Mallon’s photography, including his series capturing the process of using retired New York City subway cars as man-made reefs, check out this New York Times slideshow from last week announcing the end of the decade-long program. Over 2,500 retired subway cars (toxic and valuable material removed) had met their fate in the Atlantic, off the coasts of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, as permanent underwater homes for sea creatures. The program was discontinued this year, when the introduction of newer subway cars with more plastic parts and more complex stripping methods, rendered them unsuitable for oceanic disposal.
.

EVENTS & TO-DOs…

NYPL ALL LIT UP
Paul LeClerc, the president of New York Public Library sought Parisian inspiration to light the renovated Fifth Avenue landmark library. François Jousse, Paris’ civic expert on building lighting and engineering, impressed the library with his practice of putting lights atop streetlights surrounding Paris’ most beautiful buildings, casting a magnificent glow onto the most ornate of facades. The library chose Claude R. Engle, a lighting consultant who has illuminated the World Trade Center, the Louvre and the Pompidou, to redo lighting on the beloved library. Marking its 100th birthday on May 23rd, the building will be drenched in glowing, white light to highlight the massive three-year restoration project.

WILLIAMSBURG SMÖRGÅSBORD
Starting this weekend, there’s a new addition to the growingly popular flea market culture with foodies in mind. Smorgasburg, the new Brooklyn Flea Food Market, is a popular add-on to Williamsburg’s waterfront with 100+ food vendors, food organizations (SlowFood, Just Food, NYC Food Coalition) and NYS Greenmarket farmers to offer a retail market with fresh and prepared food, kitchenware and al fresco dining. Yum! Every Saturday. See the official site here.

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

Animation still from a sectional study of stairwell in a SoHo loft building (Greene + Prince Sts.) | Image: Lead Pencil Studio

Urban Omnibus: Tell us about Lead Pencil Studio and the motivations behind your practice.
Annie Han: Our primary interest is in the unusual conditions found in the city and in ordinary conditions that become unusual when isolated. We are drawn to evocative spatial experiences and while our work may resemble architectural research, our primary output is the creation of spatial conditions in the physical world. Since much of what we do operates in the context of the “art world,” we are free to explore questions not ordinarily permissible in the client services model of traditional architectural practice.

Daniel Mihalyo: In other words: we get to bend the rules if it suits a project’s trajectory. Of course the art context has its own rules, but since they aren’t the same as architecture’s they have the feeling of being less constricting. Broadly speaking, our interest is in all facets of architecture and art as they relate to the built environment, both rural and urban.

Portion of Cortlandt Alley south of Canal Street with buildings extracted | Image: Lead Pencil Studio

Can you describe the intentions and process behind your Looking at Nothing project?
AH: Looking at Nothing began with a simple observation that led to the question, basically, how do we quantify our spatial experience?

It seemed to us that the shape and proportion of certain spaces have an invisible influence on our experience of — or attraction to — those spaces. We wanted to try to isolate that phenomenon and explore the 3D figure ground urban conditions of a wide variety of public places. We decided that it would be useful to choose case studies in cities prominent in the popular imagination, such as Rome and New York City. To capture the shape of some spaces in these cities, we were going to have to figure out a way of modeling the shapes in enough detail to capture their complexity.

At about the same time, maybe 2005, we started to look into high density laser scanning (a.k.a. LIDAR) and decided that this would be the perfect tool for our independent research. The only problem was that the tool had only recently been invented and the price to own or even rent one was prohibitively expensive.

In 2007, we received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, whose institutional support led us to a generous sponsorship by Leica Italy (Leica Geosystems produces the best machine and software in the industry). In 2010, we had an opportunity to work on the second phase of our work and scan Manhattan for three solid months, thanks this time to Leica US and New York Prize Fellowship at the Van Alen Institute.

Han and Mihalyo on Broadway with the Leica Scanstation II. This scanner can work at distances of 600-700 feet, enough to reach a 50 story building from street level.

How does LIDAR work?
DM: In a nutshell, we use a laser scanner that sends out low-power laser pulses that send back an infrared signal when they hit solid objects, providing highly accurate distance measurements. Location choice is methodical and strategic in order to capture sufficient overlapping data. Later, it’s possible to merge these individual scans to create a measurable digital model of reality composed of millions upon millions of points that are collectively known as a point cloud.

How does LIDAR allow you to see and understand the city differently than, say, photographic documentation would?
DM: As the scan density increases, the resulting image can start to approach the level of detail we’re accustomed to seeing in a photo. Software advances have begun to make high density scanning the ultimate data gathering tool for architecture, archaeology and crime scene forensics.

With this process, nearly any physical component of the world can be generated since the image is a nearly flawless cast of life, warts and all. For example, it is now possible to know what the view or shadow impacts will be from the 23rd floor of a proposed building or the precise slope of a street grade down to millimeter accuracy.

In many ways, this kind of 3D modeling through laser scanning is essentially the evolution of image capture. This isn’t to say that the photographic camera will be made obsolete anytime soon, however. There are parallel efforts underway that attempt to generate three-dimensional models out of multiple overlapping photographs.

How do you personally see the city differently after spending so many hours observing it in this particular way?
AH: The effect of spending so much time with the scanner and compositing scans actually did change our perception of the things we were observing. The ability to walk into a place and in under an hour walk away with a digital model in staggering detail is absolutely amazing. It makes what previously seemed infinitely complex into something more quantifiable. To us, this represents a big advance in the ability to capture spatial conditions accurately.

DM:  The city no longer reads like a collection of individual objects, each with its own specific identity. Before LIDAR, we were accustomed to seeing the city as a collection of buildings, and buildings as a collection of materials, and materials as a set of properties. In other words, we were reading the city as a hierarchy of symbols. Looking at LIDAR data helps us to see the city as though it were a single paper-thin surface with varying embossed patterns.

Fragment of Cortlandt Alley rendered as a single sheet polygon mesh | Image: Lead Pencil Studio

Another simple but important discovery relates to how little we know about what we can’t see. From where I’m standing, I can’t tell you if that brick wall across the street is twelve inches thick or a mile. Before I started working with LIDAR, I was under the impression that I more or less understood the block I live on, my route to work and hundreds of interconnected places throughout the city. After seeing what the scanner sees, we realized that if we operate only in reference to what the eye tells us, our perception of the world is surprisingly limited to surfaces. We assume a brick wall is made of bricks, but we don’t really know what’s behind the first millimeter. For the most part, we have no concrete knowledge of 99.999% of the city.

And everyone’s perception is different: your sensory experience of the city, based on your own first-hand knowledge, may have pushed deeper into some places than mine. Prior to the scanning project, I though we were all in the same place, witnessing it identically. But the differences between the city you perceive and the one I perceive can be significant.

Desiccated polygon mesh abstraction of midtown buildings floors 1-10 | Image: Lead Pencil Studio

How did you prepare yourselves to examine the invisible, both the interstitial spaces and the ephemeral made visible — traces of movement, the rhythms of the city’s inhabitants?
AH: There isn’t much of an established road map for artists and designers whose primary interest in the built environment concerns its ineffable qualities. Maybe it’s a little odd that we’ve been using a technology whose function is to provide finite quantitative information as a method for exploring the invisible.

Beyond our general interest with negative space, stemming from art history examples like the rock-cut tombs in India, Nolli and Nauman, we have read what we can on the subjects of emptiness, zero and nothing, mostly from poets, Buddhist philosophers and science writers. On the whole, we seem to be following a recurring interest and trying to expand on it from multiple perspectives.

What did Looking at Nothing reveal to you about the shape of public space in Manhattan? What interplays or incongruities did you notice between the intentional built environment (such as buildings, streets, infrastructure) and the temporary or undesigned (like street vendors, curbside garbage, security blockades)?
DM:  Spaces that win popularity contests in cities turn out to be defined by some incredibly ordinary structures but have some rather unusual shapes. That was a surprise for us. Also, at least at the urban scale, vendor carts and fences aren’t impacting our spatial perception to the degree that tree canopies and masses of signage do. One surprise in particular came from an analysis we generated in several parts of the city to look at the percentage of “architecture” within an average cone of vision looking down the street. In Manhattan at least, only about 33% of what we see is actually “architecture.” The rest is made up of varying proportions of pavement, vehicles, signs, equipment and sky. This discovery suggests that these elements are contributing to our experience of public space at twice the rate of buildings.

Cone of vision study selection on East Broadway near the Manhattan Bridge showing the portions of architecture and, in green, material that is not | Image: Lead Pencil Studio

What do you think the potential applications are of this technology for architects, designers and planners? For creative fields more broadly? For the general populace of the city? For mapping and surveying?
DM:  The potential seems limitless. It is conceivable that within a few years cell phones will have crude short-distance versions of scanners onboard — similar to Xbox Kinect technology. On the other hand, highly accurate long distance scanners are not likely to get cheap enough for laypersons to gain access to for years to come. For the design community, this technology is fast becoming an essential tool and will begin to eclipse most manually gathered site measurement methods. Professionals who work on adaptive re-use or historic preservation are not yet embracing this technology as fast as they could and therefore risk losing their as-built services to the surveying profession. As the software for point cloud processing gets better and the learning curve gets shorter, laser scans will likely become an ordinary part of daily workflow. Some large civic projects now incorporate on-site LIDAR scans to monitor real time construction conditions.

Most surveying companies are transitioning as we speak to laser scanning. But there are still enough occasions that call for measuring a few simple points at long distances, so traditional optic instruments will probably survive another generation. Aerial LIDAR has been in use for almost a decade already and it has become an essential tool for municipal GIS databases.

More and more, new media and CGI students are miles ahead of the design and building professions on understanding the scope of applications for this technology and for point cloud processing.

How do you hope this project will affect or inform the way the public sees or considers the city?
DM: We still have some months of work to complete before we feel like we can publish the portion of the study that spatially compares different public spaces around Manhattan. When this is complete, we expect that it will be of interest primarily to urban planners professionals and maybe architects. That kind of data will be the most practical but it may not end up being the most interesting.

AH: Other art-based projects that come from this scanning work will come into the world through our exhibition channels and they will probably have their own life without any intent to affect or inform anything in particular — which, in an ideal world, is the best use of all for this kind of data.

Lead Pencil Studio probes the interdisciplinary overlap of architecture and site specific art. The studio’s creative output is informed by dedication to independent research in structural typologies and the visual arts. In 2006, the firm was named one of the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices. Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo studied architecture at the University of Oregon and are based in Seattle, Washington.