Jullia Fullerton-Batten’s series Teenage Stories juxtaposes typical scenes and individuals with strange locations and incredible scales.

• Jullia Fullerton-Batten
• Urban Street Art Images in Macroscale: The Giants in the Streets
• Bizarre Photography: the Awkwardness of Adolescence

Shipping Container house Wellington New Zealand, originally uploaded by petraalsbach

• Shipping Container house Wellington New Zealand (above)
• Video: ArchRecord Interview: William Mitchell
• Ecovillages could very well be the new Garden Cities, paternalism and segregation included
• M House, contemporary house or office, on wheels or afloat
• If there is life in Flint…
• Lessig’s review of Supercapitalism
• Crime prevention through environmental design
• Vintage Wallpaper (below)

Venezia – Arsenale – 1999, originally uploaded by Sam Rohn – Location Scout

The danger for a city as a theatre or theme-park is that it becomes a stage set, a backdrop. This inevitably treats citizens as actors, there for others amusement. This leads to a simulated city as Baudrillard would have it, a city of the hyperreal as Umberto Eco might tell us. What happens when the audience is not there? Visit Venice on a windswept January and you’d probably find a virtual ghost-town – in fact many people have commented that Venice at night is eerily quiet, as almost no-one lives there, and relatively few tourists stay on the main island.

The city destroyed by its own beauty

Introducing a new, semi-regular, feature of smogr: Logo Smackdown!

Logo Smackdown will feature one logo against the other in a cage match where our reader will critique the two logos and smogr will (more or less randomly) name a winner.

First up is the Amtrak, which is the many-headed hydra frankenstein of a national railroad:

For passenger train lovers, May 1, 1971 was a day of reckoning, as Amtrak began its first day of operation, and many privately operated long-distance trains made their final arrivals. The first day saw 184 Amtrak trains running on a 23,000-mile network that served 314 communities.
Sadly, this was half the amount of some 440 passenger trains that had run the day before. Even factoring in the 34 additional trains still privately run by freight railroads after May 1, the loss of service was staggering, and many large cities and small towns suddenly had no passenger service at all.

I still love the original logo – the “new” one’s color is boring (sea foam green?), smashed text and whimsical logo mark is just off the mark.

Assemble Your Own SFAI 2/2, originally uploaded by bryanboyer

Flexibility in buildings is a question of patience. All buildings adjust or die, the question is how quickly and how gracefully they adapt. To a large degree, flexibility within buildings has been solved by technical flooring and the dropped ceiling.
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I would like to make the case for Paffard Keating-Clay’s San Francisco Art Institute as a key example of the synthesis possible between a strong figure and enduring adaptability.
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By acknowledging and accepting the fundamental impatience of the building’s occupants, these columns unify the abstract logic of the building, its actual structure, and the implications of the building’s future into one material thing.

Flexibility in buildings is a question of patience, analysis by Bryan Boyer, Adriel Mesznik, and Chris Parlato of Paffard Keating Clay’s SFAI for a GSD studio by Wes Jones.

The Orange County Register – Santiago fire

Michael Simonian’s 2001 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Plutonium Memorial competition winning entry, 24110:

Simonian won the contest by envisioning a concrete and steel tub sunk into the ground on the Washington Mall that would hold a 500-ton stash of plutonium casks. It could be easily policed there, while silently reproaching lawmakers for their shortsighted nuclear policies. Beneath a circle of peeled-up lawn and playing fields, the concrete lip of 24110 would be embossed with portraits of politicians and scientists as well as logos of nuclear-industry corporations.
A capillary layer of gravel and volcanic tuff atop the casks would theoretically expose pedestrians to just .01 REM annually. (According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the average person receives about 360 millirem of radiation per year.) Raying out from the walkway would be 241 “clock totems,” a series of flared steel tabs, one of which would be bolted to the ground every century to mark the passing of a little plutonium half-life.

The one takeaway point from Fast Food Nation, which has stuck with me, is that American culture has become obsessed with hiding processes, people and technology who are either an inconvenience, the “other” or who operate as sharp relief to Middle Class American life. Meatpacking is done in far off worlds, by a mostly immigrant workforce; energy is produced somewhere else, where the environmental impact burdens others. Americans have successfully created a sphere of ignorance to live, work and play in – which possibly is the only way we can go about our lives.
This is why Michael Simonian’s entry, 24110, to the 2001 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Plutonium Memorial competition is so compelling. Rather then hiding the waste in a facility, far away and over a fault line (Yucca Mountain), Simonian’s entry forces the polis to come face to face with the effects of our policy choices.

• Michael Simonian
• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Plutonium Memorial competition entry 24110
• ID Magazine profile and Q&A with Michael Simonian

tiny town, originally uploaded by f.trainer

My block in Brooklyn plays a good Hudson Street—at least at first glance. Each morning, the cigar-store owner throws open his gate, the barber puts out his chairs, the baker begins her muffins, and the old man a few doors down takes up his surveillance from the second-floor window. When I make my own first entrance a little after seven, with the dog, the newspaperman calls me “boss.” It may all look like Jane Jacobs’s glorious sidewalk ballet, but this is no longer Jane Jacobs’s city.
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“I think we’re not too far off from recognizing that it’s a moral imperative to add density to any place with a transit stop,” believes Christopher Leinberger, a fellow at the Brookings Institution—displaying plenty of the modernist brio and contempt for the souls of cities that Jacobs fought. But I’m tending to agree. We are wedging ourselves between a rock and a hard place: between the pleasures of medium-density living (Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Toronto’s Annex) and the ecological necessity of even more density.

Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change

GSW Tower, originally uploaded by gyzem

• Berlin Chases UNESCO Status for 1920s Social Housing
• Toronto: A messy, inspiring urbanism
• Gothic Medieval Cathedrals: A Survey
• Elkus Manfredi Neiman Marcus Store
• The Unofficial Green Prefab Guide