Bethlehem Steel, originally uploaded by Marty (Slidewayze)

• On Nervi’s GW Bridge Station: Change and Outrage at the Bus Station That Time Forgot and George Washington Bridge Bus Station Plans Revealed; don’t forget to check out Nervi GW Bridge Station photos
• The Making of the Via dei Fori Imperiali
• United States Fixed Guideway Capital Costs Estimated
• City Buys Deno’s Wonder Wheel Kiddie Park Land for $11 million
• Redskins not worth $1B stadium
• Making Wooden Business Cards with Ponoko
• Public Picks Grand Army Plaza Design
• PBS Exposes the Joys of Transit
• The High Cost of Short Buildings

190, originally uploaded by bryanboyer

Bryan Boyer has released online his Shadows & Straws broadsheet which was completed during thesis research at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Also, he has a new blog.
(You: go read! Now!)

Bethlehem, PA

Strongsville, OH

This is sad.
Thank you McCain and Palin.

I’ve discussed the Obama campaign logo and visual identity previously and with the polls showing, if the election were held today, Obama winning well over 300 electoral votes, Brand Obama has reached national saturation. Besides his policy positions (the superiority of which I won’t discuss here) the focus has been on his campaign’s well organized and executed campaign, including the very well developed visual identity. But the madness below has to stop. Please.

This is of course in response to Senator McCain’s bizarre third person soliloquy on house rescue plans culminating in the Senator calling Senator Obama, “That one.” The That One ’08 website is fairly funny, and is set to be today’s most emailed link (and make the owner some advertisement money and T-shirt cash).
I feel a bit queasy even calling this out since I don’t believe the author is trained in design, and all of the shibboleths and nomenclature which comes with the profession. But the author’s butchering of Obama’s logo is just horrible; well intentioned, but horrible. I’ve already gotten complaints from my friends questioning why I would complain about something as “trivial” as typeface choice with others positing that they used a different font to differentiate themselves from the campaign. Frankly, I think whomever created this is well intentioned, just design illiterate. Which is fine, because not everyone cares what kerning is or that there are two typefaces used in the NYC Subway system which look very similar (Aksidez Grotesk & Helvetica).
The reason this logo even stand out is because the original is so very well designed and executed. But part of this is the result of the Obama campaign releasing 14 logo versions covering groups as diverse as the LGBT community to sportsmen to Republicans to National Delegates to Environmentalists. There are even third-party logo creators to customize to “O” logo. You don’t see McCain supporters remixing the McCain-Palin logo. Which goes to show that the visual identity which was created around Obama has moved past the simple logo to something which people identify with and appropriate to their own cause or want (myself included). I don’t believe the logo made the man; rather, the logo was created around the man and ideas, which reinforced the visual identity. I would not be surprised to see case studies and undergraduate courses revolving around the Obama visual identity in the near future.
Which brings us back to the remixers and DIY logo enthusiasts: keep on supporting Obama in your way; but please, aspire to make it better. Design a logo we can believe in!

Just something to argue about.

I’ve been super busy, so posting was light. Here are a ton of links for your viewing pleasure.

• La Guardia’s Expressway Visual (also nice is National’s River Visual Approach)
• High-Speed Rail on the Ballot in California
• The Metropolitan Life Tower
• Bicycle Bailout
• Mad Men Typography
• Sensors powered by trees
• More on City Competitiveness & The MEniverse
• Strange Maps: The Semicolonial State of San Serriffe & Tea As A North/South Litmus Test
• GeoCommons Maker! Awesome or super awesome?
• On highways being built as speculative ventures, but rail requiring existing userbase: Trains to Nowhere, and to Somewhere
• Medium Speed Rail
• MTA Installs Second Prototype of Flood-Proof Vents
• Anti-Tsunami Landscapes
• Improper Pricing of Surface Transit
• When Shipping Container Architecture Goes Bad…Apocalypse Bad

Crisis? What Crisis?, originally uploaded by miguel valle de figueiredo

Both the TED Spread and LIBOR, lending rates banks are willing to lend money to one another which illustrates measures of risk, are off the charts today. The TED Spread is at 3.81% and LIBOR is at 5.33%. AND California is seeking $7 billion in emergency loans because they can’t secure cheap short-term credit. AND new jobless report came out showing 159,000 new jobless, lucky duckies.
Right now as of 1121 EST the markets are up, probably in the hope that the House will pass the bailout bill. Right now there are two Democrats and two Republicans who have switched from “nay” to “aye,” the previous bill only needed 12 votes to pass. I would look for both sides of the aisle to flip 6 each to “aye.” If you want a play-by-play, this Daily Kos thread is useful.
If the House Republicans continue to play chicken with the economy, then Monday’s losses will be just the beginning.

Library Stacks, originally uploaded by plemeljr

If I was attending Yale this fall, or could afford to take the MEDIUM FAST TRAIN to and from New Haven to sneak into campus like some 1980’s plot device, and had my choice of first semester classes, these would be my top three seminars I would fight to attend:

• The Construction of Exactitude: Classicism and Modernism
  

  This seminar critically considers modern classicism not only as a compositional design method and as an evocation of precedents, but also as a language of clarity, reduction, and economy resistant to an unquestioned avant-gardist predilection for the “new.”

• Modernism and Environmentalism in the Twentieth Century
  

  The seminar explores connections among the social, technological, and formal proposals of architectural modernism as well as the connections between the growing concern over the destructive nature of human interaction with the natural environment.

• Opulence and Excess: The Architecture of Techno- Romanticism
  

  This seminar posits that during the past decade digitally produced architecture based on geometric, mapping, and performance-based ambitions has failed to yield the intended results.

Go forth Yale students, and earn your degree.

ch-sm-08-0084, originally uploaded by Sandro Maggi architetto

Also check out the whole Flickr set.