First up is from a great couple of people who design subway maps for unlikely places. Take for example this map of a hypothetical subway system on the “Bar Harbor/Acadia Metro Area.” They offer a number of cool poster size maps on their website of various unlikely locations for subways. You can find them over at Transit Authority Figures.
Next up is an interesting slideshow from the New York Times about Michael Najjar, a photographer that uses mountain peak lines to express the rise and fall of the stock market. After finding a mountain in Argentina that already looked like a stock chart, he proceeded to go home and recreate new mountains that expressed real stock data. Here is the link.
While looking through some pictures of the old Terminal Station of Atlanta, (which is now a parking lot) I found a post over at infrastructurist ranking the top ten demolished train stations. It’s too bad these epic structures are gone, especially in light of the new push for high speed rail in the US. We can only imagine what it would be like to arrive at one of these stations in a modern train. Unfortunately I imagine there will never again be the desire or incentive to build such monuments to transportation. Number 1 on the list is naturally the original Penn Station, a true marvel of New York City:
This might be a tangential Riken’s Links but that doesn’t really matter. I’ve found a few interesting things I’ve wanted to show people so I guess this is the best place to do it.
First up was a really great video of the Trans Siberian Railway that has been matched with Google maps to its location as it travels across the length of the Russian nation. What is pretty great about the Google hosted page linked here, is that you can listen while traveling to the sound of the train, or if you want to put yourself in the position of the traveler, the books on tape of Tolstoy and Gogol. You can start in Moscow and either jump ahead to interesting sections, or travel the length of Siberia until you finally make it in Vladivostok. Also, the videos hosted on Youtube go to an amazingly clear 1080p HD. (Thanks to my brother James)
Next up I have a selection of info-graphics created by some very clever people. Susanna Hertrich has done some great work, but my favorite is one depicting the perception of risk and actual hazards:
Last up is another awesome visualization of the undersea cables that line the ocean’s floor sending the first international telegraphs and hosting current international interweb traffic.
This tilt-shifted time-lapse video, titled The Sandpit was created by Sam O’Hare is interesting and unique in its breadth if not use of the format. From landscapes to intersections, this is New York.
I’ve tended to show a fascination with parking garages in some of my past work, and to most people it was a weird thing to show interest in. The thing is, I can’t help it, and so I’ve decided to extend it into a sort of ongoing project. Mostly shot at night or on weekends when there are few cars around to ruin the awful architecture that typically defines parking garages and lots, these photos will show my attempts to examine the life and times of the places we store our cars when we are doing other things. Highways and roads are interesting to me too but they are more in our face because we are there with our car when we see them.
When we park out car however, we aren’t there to share the experience – we leave it there to do something else. Many people show affection to their cars and even give them a name but they still leave their automobile in a cluster with relative strangers and hope things will be alright. Setting aside the way Hollywood movies present parking garages as a place for crime or spy meetings, I will try to show how these neglected venues for car socialization can give us insight into how we ourselves think about social interaction and urban planning.
I used to think that these buildings would be skeletons of a wasteful era, when gasoline fueled a blindness to aesthetic taste and practical use of space. If energy scarcity ends the life of the car, I’ve wondered what will happen with these buildings. Electric or hydrogen fueled cars might change this, but nevertheless even if we do turn to electricity to drive us for years to come, it will only enhance the role of the parking garage as a charging station.
Here are some photos from the last few weeks.
A garage in Atlanta next to the State Courthouse – taken two weeks ago.
This one is a night shot from the top of a nearby parking garage. Across the way is another.Another night shot, this time from within a local municipality parking garage.
This might be a tangential Riken’s Links but that doesn’t really matter. I’ve found a few interesting things I’ve wanted to show people so I guess this is the best place to do it.
