(1) Disneyland Paris reimagines its events offer (Exhibition World)
(2) This post has some amazing personal significance! #serendipity
Today marks 50 years since the first flight of #Concorde. See some striking stamp designs to commemorate the occasion -> https://t.co/UR4N3p0us3
— The Postal Museum (@thepostalmuseum) March 2, 2019
…or see it in real-life @BrooklandsMuseu for their special day of celebration! pic.twitter.com/ExbKE4SrYY
(1) ‘Non-Stop’ by Jack El-Hai: How a small local carrier grew into the most debonair of airlines before declining into “Northworst.” (WSJ)
(2) 20 Odd Questions for Designer Marcel Wanders (WSJ)
“With design, the most common mistake is: to think it’s about functionality. If something is functional, you no longer think about it. I care about how meaningful things are.”
(3) ‘The Power of Glamour’ by Virginia Postrel: What is glamour? A dream of flight to a perfect world, of being transformed into who you want to be. (WSJ – Registration Required)
“In the end, when history, art and advertising have been combed for evidence, we are left with the idea of a dream of flight to a perfect world and a process of transformation that will (presumably) turn the aspirant into the person he or she wants to be—a concept necessarily rendered bittersweet by the knowledge that, save in exceptional circumstances, the dream is unlikely to get off the ground. To the fascinated observer, its allure lies in the existence of an abstraction, tantalizingly elusive to begin with, whose manifestations can end up light years away from its source.”
(4) A House Rooted in Nature (WSJ)
(5) ‘Ecstatic Nation’ by Brenda Wineapple (WSJ)
“But her descriptions of public events are beautiful. ‘On a sunny, warm Wednesday, May 23, [1865] Washington decked itself out for a two-day victory parade’ by the armies of Meade and Sherman. Abraham Lincoln, assassinated just five weeks before, ‘should have been in the reviewing stand,’ all agreed. ‘Clover Hooper said, ‘It was a strange feeling to be so intensely happy and triumphant, and yet to feel like crying.'”
(1) The 10 Best folding bikes: The popularity of folding bikes means there is now a huge range, whether you want one for commuting or rugged off-road riding (The Independent)
(1a) Old locomotive flanked by diminutive wheels (Flickr)
(2) A Look at Kinn: the US-Made Midtail (Lovely Bicycle!)
(2a) Cargo Bikes: The New Station Wagon (WSJ)
“Then there’s the expansion of cycling’s popularity in the U.S., with most cities reporting double- or even triple-digit gains from 2005 to 2011, according to the League of American Bicyclists.”
(3) A quote from Earthbound (The Bakerloo Line) by Paul Morley
“I remember once as a nineteen-year-old emerging into the fast, tireless light of what must have been Euston Underground Station, having been met off the Manchester InterCity train by a born-and-bred London friend. The Tube station was sunk under the low-slung, newly shaped and burnished main station, built with stern modernist zeal by Zurich-born architect Richard Seifert, who also designed the unloved, unmissable Centre Point skyscraper, a barely decorated vertical concrete block brutally stamped into submissive central London. Something about the discreetly glamorous setting, the severe, history-erasing glass, metal and stone of a Euston Station built where once there was hardcore but, by the early 1960s, embarrassing Victorian grandeur (boasting a famous classical arch), seemed fairly continental, although I had no way of knowing, having never been abroad.”
(4) The scan is from “Waterloo Station, War, A Centenary of Uninterrupted Service During War and Peace, 1848 – 1948” by Helen McKie
(4a) From the Limestone Archives: Bicycles dwarfed by place and a flock of nuns.
The first is a scan from Round-About Bermuda. The cyclists are descending either St. Anne’s or Lighthouse Road whilst Gibbs Hill Lighthouse in Southampton provides the backdrop. The second is a photo from a day-trip to to the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome.
(5) July 4th Photo (Free Spirit from Sears and Roebuck)
(6) Truly Novel Bookstores: Print lives and thrives at these trip-worthy shops (WSJ)
(7) Three interesting titles from Laurence King Publishing: (a) Battle of the Bikes: A Trump Card Game, (b) Airline: Style at 30,000 Feet, and A Logo for London.
(8) Two from the MoMA: (a) Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes and (b) Cut ‘n’ Paste: From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City
(1) Mickey Mouse, A-L-O-N-E (WSJ)
(2) Airlines Go Back to Boarding School to Move Fliers Onto Planes Faster (WSJ)
(3) I saw El Pulpo last night at a Bridgeport Bluefish game. He pitched one scoreless inning.
The danger is in the graft…and don’t share this article with Thomas Friedman.
Spain Ghost Airports: Symbols of Boom Turned Bust
But signs abound that Spain has not fully learned the lessons of its profligate spending. Spain recently announced a high-speed rail link to the sparsely populated northwest region of Galicia, a plan many economists see as an extravagance. Bridge and highway projects are plowing forward in the face of criticism that Spain just can’t afford them.
Indeed, it’s an unhealthy mix of politics and business that critics blame for white elephants such as the airport in Ciudad Real, a city of 74,000 people. Spain has a history of pouring public money into dodgy projects to fuel the careers of ambitious politicians and local entrepreneurs.
“We have substituted our obsession with bricks and house building with an obsession for highways, high speed trains and airports, but it’s the same rubbish,” said Fernando Fernandez, a macroeconomics Professor at IE Business School in Madrid.
“It’s like a drug addict trying detox,” he said. “The economy has been growing through construction for the last 10 years and that creates all sorts of bad habits.”
(1) Magnetic Color Cubes® by The Orb Factory
(2) Festival of colors (Design You Trust)
(3) Birth by Sleep (KH 358/2)
(3a) Disney Epic Mickey Digicomics
(4) Television: Pan Am Promo Trailer
(4a) Community without propinquity: Communities without a sense of place formed by professional, familial, and recreation ties, bound by avocation instead of location.
(4b) Kasarda’s Law of Connectivity: Every technology meant to circumvent distances electronically, starting with the telegraph—the original “nervous system of commerce”—will only stoke our desire to transverse it ourselves. For every message we send—whether by phone or e-mail or some handheld fusion of the two—there’s a chance it will lead us to meet face-to-face. Facebook friends drop in to and become real ones; stray tweets on Twitter breed followers, contacts, and business trips. Ergo. trillions of connections yield billions aloft. The more wired we are, the more we fly. Not less. At the current rate, the Internet will render business travel obsolete at about the same time it replaces paper.
(5) Tribute to Bob Gurr & Cars 2
(6) Spatial Fix: The shape of cities is determined by how they’re used and how we move around in them (a function of the state of the art in transportation at the time). Cities are fixed in time and place and each fix creates a landscape suited to its era.
“But if flight represents freedom, reinvention, and self-renewal—and barring all of that escape—then the terminal itself has evolved into something resembling a destination…They’re amnesiac places with no future and no past, only a continual present offering the same choices—flights, duty-free, and fast food—day after day after day.
The reason we mourn that vanished era so is that the Jet Age was the all-too-brief flowering of our romance with speed. Later, we fell for seamlessness instead, spurning the freedom to go anywhere for the ability to be nowhere all the time. We traded the clouds for the cloud, and we’re living in an instant age.” — John D. Kasarda / Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next
Related
(1a) Hubs by Douglas Coupland
(2a) Airlines Promise: It Will Get Better (WSJ)
(3a) As You Light It: Jet Lag – Ideas of time, place, and travel within the modern cityscape.
Unrelated
(4) Take A Walk Through Square Enix’s Japan Office
(1) Found – The Comics Of Chris Ware: Drawing Is A Way Of Thinking
I just finished Makeshift Metropolis by Witold Rybczynski so the timing of this “find” is serendipitous. I was also able to track down a copy of This American Life: Lost Buildings Book/DVD this weekend in the NPR Shop.
(1a) Photo-Op: Wheels of Dreams (WSJ)
(2) Frank Gehry: A sit-down with the artist of architecture (WSJ)
(2a) Architecture and Design by Frank Gehry
It seemed like a cool dream, but the dream of utopia is a great first sentence that disintegrates when you get into the paragraph.
— Bob Gurr
(3) Dear Urban Cyclists: Go Play in Traffic (WSJ)
“The reason it took mankind 5,000 years to get the idea for the bicycle is that it was a bad idea. The bicycle is the only method of conveyance worse than feet. You can walk up three flights of stairs carrying one end of a sofa. Try that on a bicycle.”
(3a) The Rise of the Designer Bike (WSJ)
(4) “The thing you push against is the thing that lifts you up.” (Delta Airlines Advertisement)
(4a) New York needs runways, but ‘ghost airport’ stays quiet
(1) “Japanese Prodigies Take on the World” – The video hasn’t been posted online yet but you can see it on the small screen on NYCLF (22).
(2) All Nippon Airways “Inspiration of Japan” (USN Report 01-30-10)
