em's blog

Monday (Spencer Avenue)
His toddler bangs out notes on the child cage. A symphony of flailing fists accompanied by Hebrew reprimands. The anti-theft cages protect each window of each identical apartment building. Also their personal in-house nanny. Jon and Kate Plus Eight on every block, in every building, every home. Three more join in the music lesson playing makeshift instruments. Clack, ring, reverberation. Shouts and screams. Children ride bicycles on the sidewalk but gawk at mine. Enjoy it while you can. After you outgrow your 24" wheels, they will not buy you another set. Toys are not transportation.

Tuesday (Kent Avenue)
Vibrations. DOT's allocation collapsed with Bear Sterns and you've been waiting for the pavement roller for two years. The sound of its exhaust pipe will spout rejoice into your bedroom window one morning. Until then, what's another day? Your headset quivers, groans at the abuse. A uniformed man is the kuma hula and the cars follow his lead. Out of sync, you leap through oncoming traffic, he ponders the impact on his life if your timing had been just a half a second off. Unemployment is only funemployment for trust fund hipsters and recent college graduates.

Wednesday (Ryerson Street)
Forget the flu, I'm suffering from "The Fear." The recipe: a pinch of sleep, a cup of liquor, and a dash of anxiety. Let sit until morning. The pavement stumbles beneath me and my front wheel pitches from side to side. Your favorite bartender bought all the rounds as well as my cab ride home. Sweet syrup of whiskey and ginger ale poured past bar time. Speech travels, choosing its own path uncontrollable, unpredictable. Liquid courage. You danced on the bar and became one of those girls. Later, you fucked the bartender behind the counter. Even later, you deny it. My roommate woke up this morning face down on his floor surrounded by White Castle containers. At least I made it to my bed. Double yellow line provides a straight path. Follow.

Thursday (N Elliott Place)
"We used to launch ships, now we launch businesses." Rumor: The borough president promised a developer. The juxtaposition of industrial relics and over priced water views would have been a bourgeois dream. Fact: Decrepit row houses leak glass and asbestos just the same. Their ghosts fade into the jungled greenery as the vines inch closer to the sun. Admirals abandoned long ago. Bricks slide off the barrier wall forming sidewalk jetties. Climb over. Don't get caught, the skeletons beckon. Gliding, pedaling, spinning, she wishes for the details. Murderous filigrees suspended from caved in ceilings--she saw it in a photo once.

Friday (Gold Street)
Shit. I missed my bridge exit. Flushing turns into Nassau and Navy plays hide and seek.

IHow does your street scape achieve a "sense of place"?
Well, it doesn't look like the rest of New York and is site specific to Washington Place so it has that going for it. It's kind of park-like, with benches and bollards you can sit on, but it is clearly not an extension of Washington Square Park. I hoped that by using street furniture, I could not only identify NYU as a place, but also encourage much lacking street life. I was super into that video on public spaces and how people use them, so I put in a lot of seating and trees (not that Washington Place needs more shade).

What are those lego looking things?
Bollards to keep cars out of the bike lane. Cars in the bike lane are the worst, and I've removed all the curbside parking. I really hate cars, car culture, driving, and street parking makes it more convenient to drive so I have eliminated it. But I don't want drivers double parking in the bike lane either!

What's up with the planter boxes in the street?
The planter boxes are actually "chicanes," which are curb extensions that force cars to drive in a zig zag, slowing them down. It makes the street less attractive to speeding motorists, but still allows necessary traffic to come through.

What's up with the colorful bike lane?
Jan Gehl. Copenhagenize the planet!

Actually, why is there color everywhere?
From an aesthetic standpoint, I think urban designers take themselves too seriously. Modernist metal and sterile white street furniture does not appeal to me. But I'm not into tedious filagrees either, I like clean lines. So I used color to make the landscape more interesting. I'm in love with the street lamps in Flushing Meadows from the 1964 World's Fair, and used them as inspiration for a new streetscape. The bright colored boxes lend something whimsical, playful and postmodern to a block with intimidating buildings. The brutish Meyer Hall building, which certainly doesn't invite foot traffic off of Broadway and onto Washington Place, needs to be quelled with a counterpoint on the street.

For years I wanted to sew for a living, and I think that my obsession with colors and textures is influenced by my love for fabric.

Yeah, but you made the streetscape look like a playground/a salvia trip/Damien Hirst's dot paintings.
Thank you.

Did you really render that mini cooper?
No. I didn't render the mini cooper, the plants, the trash cans, the bicycle, or the people. I borrowed them from the 3D warehouse, which is one of the most awesome parts about sketchup. I wish I could model plants! But I did render the building facades, which I will never do again, along with everything else. I used the project as a learning experience to get better at Sketchup, which I think was successful, and I learned what I do and do not like about the program. It's really intuitive, which is great, but isn't very technical, which makes doing detailed drawings difficult.

What was the most traumatic part of this final?
You can't open newer sketchup files in older versions of the program. NYU computers only have old versions of the program, while my computer has the new one. This was problematic. In order to get the most current version of sketchup downloaded on an NYU computer so I could finish this project on a computer that could render it properly, I had to cry to the computer lab manager because they don't "do" individual updates on computer software.

Moral of the story: crying gets you through bureaucratic red tape? I should try it with the financial aid office.

What was your dream about last night?
I can't quite remember, but I do know that everything in it was Sketchup-able, so I was able to change the scale of objects and move them without effort. Also, everything turned bright blue when you touched it and you could create dotted gridlines to connect objects. It was either really cool or really anxiety inducing.

When starting the final, I thought a lot about whether or not NYU has a sense of place distinct from the city around it. With each year at NYU, my workload and my time spent on campus increase proportionately, and I've lately found myself wishing I could just sleep in the Gallatin lounge. I'm becoming almost too familiar with the place, yet I can't quite place an identity to it. NYU, as a "place," is conflicted. It doesn't know whether it should be integrated into the urban fabric or should separate itself off, and has done neither successfully. On the one hand, NYU is integrated into the fabric of lower Manhattan: there are no clear boundaries or edges between it and the rest of the city. Unlike other universities in the city, like Columbia, with a distinct campus feeling created through architecture, gates, and closed off streets, NYU's buildings, sprinkled throughout lower Manhattan, are not necessarily distinguishable from the surrounding cityscape. Some buildings are so far from the Campus Core, like Third North, that they can hardly be considered a part of whatever "campus" we do claim. On the other hand, NYU does not "feel" the same as the rest of the Village. It is seriously lacking in ground floor retail and attractions and, because of a love affair with Philip Johnson in the 1960s, has a disproportionate number of "brutish" architectural buildings. During the time between classes, the streets are packed, but lay almost empty during each hour and fifteen minute period (not mixed use!). Students flock to the park (benches!), which has been identified with NYU, but certainly isn't "our" space. For me, a sense of "community" is spatially related; running into people you know unexpectedly makes the city feel smaller and makes me feel more connected and grounded in New York and NYU. On the whole, however, NYU does not do a very good job of providing spaces to facilitate spontaneous interactions. The public spaces the university provides are usually quieter study spaces--the library, the lounges most academic buildings, computer labs... With these issues in mind, I set about redesigning Washington Place between Broadway and Mercer. Ideally, I'd knock open the ground floor of the Meyer Hall and give the space a nice little sidewalk cafe and other ground floor retail to reintegrate the land use of the campus back into the City, but I gave myself the parameters of working with the existing architecture and land use. (In my opinion, not only would this create a better street scape, commercial uses would also provide a reason for the non-NYU public to use the streets around NYU buildings.) My redesign visually separates out the street from the rest of the city. If not as a "gateway" into the campus, I'd envision it as an identifying feature and as a place that facilitates spontaneous interactions. My placement was definitely influenced by Gallatin's efforts to create these types of spaces in the building redesign (which I think have been fairly successful), so I am just taking what Gallatin has already done and dragging it out onto the street. More screen shots are up on my flickr, with larger sizes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7230238@N02/ (I am trying to figure out how to make a video jobbie of the sketchup file, and I will post it on youtube and here if I can figure it out. 3D is awesome!)

She was a blue Raleigh 10-speed. I spotted and fell in love with her the day I moved to New York. I could watch her from outside my dorm window, where she was locked on the street and never moved. I dreamed of liberating her, replacing her tires and tubes, and riding her around the neighborhood.

Like bags stuck in trees, bicycles abandoned to street furniture are ubiquitous in New York City. Though they don’t flutter or shred, the bicycles shed parts as crackheads, looking to make enough for their next fix, strip anything not permanently secured. Wheels are usually the first to go; saddles and seatposts are removed next. Finally, handlebars and stems, brakes and derailleurs, pedals and cranks, bottom brackets and headsets disappear, until the frame slumps onto the sidewalk. Bags twist in the wind—-bicycle frames twist under the weight of drivers who accidentally jump the curb.

Like plastic shopping bags, they come in all sorts of colors and brands: Huffy mountain bikes, Raleigh road bikes, Schwinn cruisers, Swobo track bikes. Original paint jobs fade with the weather and steel parts sprout parasitic brown spots until the rust patches eat clear through the tubing.

Cyclists lock their bicycles to other abandoned bicycles, and then abandon those bikes. Whole piles of abandoned bicycle ooze out onto sidewalks from parking signs. Litter gravitates to abandoned bicycles, hiding underneath spokes and rims, and a trash heap of tangled tubes, McDonalds cups and Vitamin Water bottles emerges.

Along park fences, they form bicycle graveyards. The bicycle skeletons rest against the fencing like lines of Sicilian mummies. One can determine how long ago they deceased by their physical conditions. The older they are, the more distorted and unrecognizable their features.

Abandoned bicycles and stray shopping bags are both ignored by City departments. Frazier’s battle against shopping bags led him to invent the Bag Snagger, while my own crusade against abandoned bicycles led me to pilot an abandoned bicycle-recycling program, a partnership between NYU and the local environmental non-profit Time’s Up!’s Bicycle Co-op.

During the summer of 2007, armed with a small amount of funding through NYU's Green Grants, the Co-op’s head mechanic and I reclaimed, refurbished, and redistributed all the abandoned bicycles on NYU property. We tagged the bicycles with fliers, alerting owners that if the papers were not removed in two weeks, their bicycle would be considered abandoned. Using angle grinders, bolt cutters and a pretty memo from the Sustainability Coordinator, we sawed through locks and brought the bicycles back to our space. We scrubbed off rust and dirt, and replaced missing and worn parts in the evenings after our 9-5 grind. In September, we gave the bicycles a new lease on life, returning them to a group of NYU freshmen.

Photos from http://jschumacher.typepad.com/photos/abandoned_bikes/index.html

Dolores ParkThe pace and energy of New York embeds itself in our daily lives. When Daniel Quinn is following Stillman Sr. he had trouble keeping pace with the old man: “He was used to walking briskly, and all this starting and stopping and shuffling began to be a strain, as though the rhythm of his body was being disrupted. He was the hare in pursuit of the tortoise, and again and again he had to remind himself to hold back” (71). Though Quinn is quite familiar with both the City itself and wandering its streets and avenues aimlessly, the pace throws off his sense of place and he is suddenly unaccustomed to the task at hand. “The feel of a place is registered in one’s muscles and bones. A sailor has a recognizable style of walking because his posture is adapted to the plunging deck of a boat in high sea” (Tuan 184). Like the sailor, Quinn’s sense of New York is fast-paced; the physical movements of his body reflect this sense of place.

Quinn’s physical reaction to pace implies an innate sense of place that he denies (whether consciously or not) in the opening paragraphs of the novel. “New York was in inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well… On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere” (4). It seems that, even in a trance-like state, the City’s energy influences the way that Quinn behaves; otherwise, it would not be such a challenge for Quinn to adapt to Stillman Sr.’s pace.

My own routines and habits in this City reflect the energy that New York represents for me; but, like Quinn, I am more attune to these changes when I am removed from my comfortable environment and my behavior is out of synch with another situation or place.

I find myself riding my bicycle faster and more aggressively than necessary when in San Francisco, for example. I’m accustomed to vehicular traffic barreling down the avenues. Without bike lanes (and sometimes even with them—6th Avenue comes to mind), my only hope to avoid the dreaded door zone is to take a lane and try to keep up with traffic. In SF, however, my riding style is unnecessary—rude even—and I struggle to adjust to the new place.

In other aspects, however, the Californian in me cannot adjust to New York’s frenetic lifestyle. Like Quinn, when he finally stops following Stillman Sr. and realizes that he can no longer sustain his previous pace, whenever I return from the west coast, I’m always shocked that I can manage to live here. Transitioning from entire days spent eating burritos, reading books and drinking beer in Dolores Park to a city where lazy days are seen as “unproductive” or, worse, “boring,” forces me to change my habits in accord with the location I’m in. When in Rome…

CM Ad on the Williamsburg BridgeOur chants of “more bikes, less cars!” echo down the canyon of Madison Avenue; tourists stop to gawk, cheer and take photos as we ride by. I ring the little blue bell on my bars, and strike up a conversation with the stranger riding next to me. It is August and the warm weather has brought out an unusual number of people—enough to easily span the width of Madison. I’m near the head of the pack and behind me I see a flood of cyclists and, in the distance, a handful of vehicles that haven’t bothered switching to another uptown street.

Every last Friday of the month, bicyclists around the world take to the streets and exercise their right to the road. “We’re not blocking traffic, we ARE traffic” is their key assertion. Often called an “organized coincidence,” Critical Mass has no leadership and no planned route—just a starting time and place. The ride itself moves through out the city based on the decisions of whoever happens to be in the front of the pack.

This particular night, we’ve managed to outwit the NYPD scooter brigade gathered at Union Square by splitting up into groups and reconvening in the middle of Madison Square Park half an hour later. (It is the only NYC Critical Mass I’ve ever participated in that escaped police presence.) The pack stays together only when we all pay attention to our speed—the faster we go, the more distance we must put between us and the person in front of us—and our ability to travel without car interference depends on being a compact group. The short distances between each bicycle feels crowded and, at times, makes me nervous that the person in front of me might hit the brakes, or the person next to me might swerve to avoid a pothole; the low speed, however, guarantees that any collisions would leave both me and my bicycle unscathed.

Tuan writes, “Young Americans… seem to like crowds. Protest marches against social injustice and war arise out of true indignation; yet the young marches surely also enjoy the camaraderie, the sense of group solidarity in a righteous cause, and the sheet pleasure of swimming in a sea of their own kind” (Tuan 63). My experiences of being ticketed (lights, bells and reflectors, oh my!), barely escaping arrest, and witnessing the police literally tackle my friends is not unique; the group rides because of and in spite of unfair bicycling conditions and cyclists at CM possess a shared experience that brings the group together.

Though, because of NYPD presence I have since given up riding CM in New York—really, pedaling as fast as you can away from scooter cops is more tiring than fun—I’ll always appreciate the one time we got away.

Flatpak: In Aspen, ColoradoVinyl siding, once nearly synonymous with cheap and prefabricated architecture, is one material these designers won't touch with a ten-foot-pole. Over the past ten years, architects like Michelle Kaufmann (Breezehouse), Charles Lazor (Flatpak), and Kieran Timberlake (Loblolly) have been busy revolutionizing the field.

The new prefab architecture movement plays off the contradictions that J.B. Jackson explores at the end of "The Movable Dwelling." "Now that environmentalism has become an established philosophy," he writes, "the values we stress are stability and permanence... Still, we cannot help being reminded... that we have a second architectural tradition, a tradition of mobility and short-term occupancy" (223). Though Flatpak and Loblolly are movable homes, they're actually built stronger than traditional homes in America because they must withstand being shipped on the back of a truck. In that sense, they're designed to last longer and be more permanent than balloon-frame constructions. However, Flatpak and Loblolly are both designed modularly and can be disassembled and moved to another site, making them as mobile as the medieval peasant's homes Jackson describes. These prefab houses are designed to be flexible, catering to both long-term and short-term occupants.

Lakewood, CaD J Waldie is unique in suburban Los Angeles County; he is a part of the 3.2 percent of Los Angelenos who walk to work. Approximately 80 percent of Los Angelenos use a car, van or truck to get to work. Of these, 85 percent drive alone. He writes in the afterward, “I cannot drive. I have a boring collection of vision problems that prevent me from getting a license or owning a car. I live about a mile from my office at City Hall… It takes me about half an hour to walk to City Hall in the morning” (181). Waldie’s careful observations of Lakewood are shaped by the difference in transportation modes between him and his neighbors. Walking through his suburban housing tract, Waldie interacts with the landscape more intimately than his neighbors. Ironically, because of his poor eyesight, he is afforded the luxury of actually “seeing” the landscape, noticing subtleties that are lost on other residents. For example, Waldie remarks on the trees in front of people’s houses. He comments on the species that the city plants (Jacarandas, Eucalyptus, no California natives) and the methodology of particular neighbors in killing said tree (nails, axes, girdles). The time space compression of car travel means he is probably one of the only people to take notice of these minute details, making his book a unique account of the suburbs. Furthermore, there are other subtle differences between Lakewood and “typical” suburban America. Waldie’s neighborhood, while constructed as a single-use housing tract, seems to have evolved toward a mixed-use neighborhood. Choosing a random address in Lakewood – 2750 Dashwood Street Lakewood CA and entering it into walkscore.com, I discovered that it is surprisingly walkable compared to what we think of Los Angeles, earning a “somewhat walkable” score. Within half a mile of that address is a Starbucks coffee, a park, a school, a drug store, a bookstore, a hardware store, a bar… One of the general givens of being a “suburbanite” is automobile travel. Walking, as a mode of transportation, is a generally urban phenomenon because in the suburbs (and maybe even more so, in the technoburbs), the distance between two places is too great to carry out on a bicycle, let alone on foot. Waldie’s ability to live in Lakewood as a pedestrian implies that his "suburbia" is perhaps less suburban than originally thought.