Olafur Eliasson, originally uploaded by plemeljr

You can see more of my Olafur Eliasson photos on Flickr.

Last summer in a rented garage on the outskirts of Queens, NY something incredible was happening. A group of imaginative tinkerers from Trinidad were working late into the nights creating something nobody had ever seen before: enormous stereo systems jury rigged onto ordinary bmx bikes. Traveling together, each behind the handlebars of his or her own massive homemade creation, they treat the neighborhood to an outrageous impromptu music and dance party on wheels. Directed by Randall Stevens, Made In Queens is a film celebrating America’s first stereobike crew.

View the Made In Queens trailer.
There is a man which rides around in my neighborhood every weekend with a shelf stereo system strapped to his bike playing Puerto Rican music, but these kids put his system to shame.

• Shopping for Renovation Materials With Stephen Fanuka
• The “Endless Accident Events” of Los Angeles
• Art: 10 Meters of Extended US Coastline
• Assessment of the marginal cost of drivable sub-urban development – 22 times more costly than walkable urbanism
• Building Blogs [Current TV]
• South Street Seaport – Re-envisioning the Urban Edge competition Winner
• Philippe Starck is designing a line of relatively inexpensive energy-saving Democratic Ecology products

Traffic in Knightsbridge, 1960s., originally uploaded by Fray Bentos

On people’s reactions to traffic lane restrictions, The Urge to Merge:

So I started consulting professionals on my own: traffic engineers, the highway police, queuing theorists. The learning curve, it must be said, was robust. I hadn’t known queuing had theories. But of course it does, mathematicians and business-operations people have to work them out, the heart-attack patient gets in ahead of the sprained ankle and nobody has a problem with that, and anybody who has been to Europe intuitively understands what one engineer meant when in midsentence he said to me, “perfect England,” meaning culturally mandated compulsive queuing, and, “perfect Italy,” meaning culturally mandated compulsive nonqueuing. I learned about the father of modern queuing theory, an early 1900s Dane whose specific who-goes-first challenge was the new Copenhagen telephone system, which required callers, disembodied but queued nonetheless, to be moved along in a way both maximally efficient and acceptable to all.

This is particularly bad in New York City where highways can go from four to two lanes abruptly.
The key to faster traffic? Don’t get in line too early and let the sidezoomers in.

Bicycle head badges, originally uploaded by fixedgear

Tube Badges Set via Draplin.

• The demographic inversion of the American city
• A Radioactive River Runs Through It
• Jacques Herzog: ‘Only an Idiot Would Have Said No’ – exactly my sentiment
• Are Seatless Subways in Our Future? – Interesting proposal which reeks of desperation. I suspect we will see this on the L Train soon.
• Algorithmic architecture
• The, Vertical, Urban Farm
• Lyons House, Robin Boyd, Sydney
• The destruction of old Beijing (via)

Mechanical poetry, originally uploaded by Lumase

P.F.1 (Public Farm One), originally uploaded by plemeljr

I visited WORK AC’s P.F.1 (Public Farm One), winner of the Ninth Annual Young Architects Competition at P.S. 1 and I took a bunch of photos.
Generally, the work is interesting – and at least it isn’t falling down like previous year’s installations. The main criticism is that there is a definitive lack of shade and seating. And the seating which was provided where made out of black rubber. Watching from the 7 Train yesterday, volunteers scaled the installation pruning, picking and harvesting the installation.

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• Public Farm One Photos
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Expo 86 Pavilion Passport – Pages 2 and 3, originally uploaded by RedRaspus

Told you it would be a heavy Draplin day. Check out the Expo 86 Passport (Vancouver) via Draplin (why aren’t you guy’s reading him yet??).