Category: General

Drains of Canada

beneath-the-worldbeneath-the-world, originally uploaded by bldgblog

Check out BldgBlog’s article Drains of Canada: An Interview with Michael Cook:

Michael Cook is a writer, photographer, and urban explorer based in Toronto, where he also runs a website called Vanishing Point.
Despite its subject matter, however, Vanishing Point is more than just another website about urban exploration. Cook’s accounts of his journeys into the subterranean civic infrastructure of Canada and northern New York State – and into those regions’ warehouses, factories, and crumbling hospitals – often include plans, elevations, and the odd historical photograph showing the sites under construction.
For instance, his fascinating, inside-out look at the Ontario Generating Station comes with far more than just cool pictures of an abandoned hydroelectric complex behind the water at Niagara Falls, and the detailed narratives he’s produced about the drains of Hamilton and Toronto are well worth reading in full.

Best of the web – check out the interview and the complete photo set.

London Underground Map formatted for iPhone

20070827-iphoto-tube.jpg
Using Khoi Vinh’s prior art, A Subway System in Your Pocket, for creating a iPhone subway system map I’ve gone and created a London Underground system map for iPhone. While Transport for London has a nice GIF System Map, there is something very nice about Khoi’s image hack which takes advantage of the iPhones photo limitations. Since I travel to London a bit, this seemed like a perfect companion to my travels.

In the spirit of sharing, please Download the iPhone Underground Map. It is a zip file comprised of 6 individual jpg’s for you to zoom in on each quadrant.
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=plemeljr-20&o=1&p=12&l=ur1&category=blackfriday&banner=1P1GW80DE247G1YW95R2&f=ifr
Just like Khoi’s map, download the zip file, and import the archive contents into iPhoto.Create a new album called something you can remember, such as “Underground” and drag the files into the folder, set your iPhone to synch with that album via iTunes.
And there you go.

Please see additional articles:

In Italy, Creating Worlds Takes Precision, Yes, and Politics

Vladimiro Valerio, an expert in the history of cartography on the architecture faculty at the University of Venice, called mapmaking a blend of science and art. “Maps aren’t faithful portraits of reality but subjective constructions,” he said. “Maps reflect the design for which they are to be used. They reflect who commissioned it.”
In sum, he said, “cartographers don’t lie, but they take a position.”