From White Walls:
“Faces in the Mirror” by Blek le Rat opens at White Walls on May 1, 2010.
Faces in the Mirror is a collection of Blek’s iconic imagery of beggars, sheep, rats, and Michelangelo’s David with an AK-47, combined with never before seen images such as Mona Lisa. These forms open conversation about consciousness, social relation, mass media, and commodity fetishism.
Via @issue, by Delphine Hirasuna:
Graphic, minimalist and understandable in any language, this set of posters for the 2012 Olympics in London was designed by University of College Falmouth graduate, Alan Clarke. The design proposals were actually meant to brand the Transport of London, with text on each poster identifying which underground station links to each Olympics event. “My thinking behind these posters was to convey the movement and energy of the games in a simple abstract way,” Clarke explains. Clarke’s images are evocative of the visuals created by the legendary German designer Otl Aicher for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Clarke, who now works as a designer at Gendall in Falmouth, was a D&AD Best New Blood Winner for 2009.
From the BBC:
Five men accused of conspiring to extort £4.25m ($6.5m) for the safe return of a Leonardo da Vinci painting have been cleared.
The case was found not proven against Marshall Ronald, Robert Graham and John Doyle, all from Lancashire. Glasgow solicitors Calum Jones and David Boyce were found not guilty. The men were accused of seeking the funds for bringing back the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, which was stolen from a castle, near Dumfries, in 2003.
At the High Court in Edinburgh, all five men had denied the charges. The offences were alleged to have taken place between July and October 2007. The men were charged with plotting to extort the money for the return of the artwork, which had been taken from the Duke of Buccleuch’s Drumlanrig Estate, north of Dumfries, four years earlier.
They were not accused of carrying out that raid. A jury took eight hours to deliver its verdict after a trial lasting more than seven weeks. During the trial the court heard details of an undercover police operation to recover the artwork.
Prosecutors praised their efforts, claiming the officers involved had “turned the tables” on the accused. They said a video the men had produced showing the valuable painting alongside a copy of a newspaper was a “hallmark of kidnapping and extortion”. Those claims were dismissed by lawyers representing the accused.
They described the assertion that their clients were involved in a conspiracy as a “colourful tale” and a “mad idea” which was “wholly incredible”.
From National Geographic, Image courtesy ESO.:
Condensing dust and gas light up newborn stars in a picture of Messier 8, aka the Lagoon Nebula, released on April 19 by the European Southern Observatory.
About a hundred light-years across, the stellar nursery is among the few such nebulae visible to the naked eye. It boasts a number of huge, hot stars that are sculpting the clouds with their strong radiation.
Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
The star-forming region known as IC 1795 lights up the bottom right corner of a picture from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope released on April 16.
The region, part of the Perseus arm of our Milky Way galaxy, appears mostly dark in visible light. But the gases and dust light up in infrared. The colors in this picture represent different infrared wavelengths coming from the dust cloud and the hot, young stars inside.
Via ArchDaily, by Nico Saieh:
Architects: Anderson Anderson Architecture
Location: Granite Falls, Washington, USA
Project Area: 2,800 sq ft
Project Year: 2006
Photographs: Anderson Anderson Architecture
This prototype is built near Granite Falls, Washington, in the Cascade Mountains about 50 miles north east of Seattle. A second prototype is in the planning stages for an urban site in San Diego. This house is part of a series of projects that explore the opportunities for using prefabrication techniques and new building construction methods and materials to build low cost, high quality, site-adaptable and program-adaptable manufactured buildings.
Although the building site for this prototype has quite unrestrictive zoning constraints, the challenging topography and geotechnical conditions play a strong role in defining the overall design strategy for this project and as a prototype for difficult hillside sites. The small ground floor building footprint/foundation reduces the cost of this expensive area of the house, and allows the points of attachment to adapt to varying slope and soil conditions with minimal disruption of the natural topography.
The building system is a marriage of two common, standardized, mass-produced building elements – a prefabricated steel structural frame (of the type commonly manufactured for light-weight commercial structures), and a structural insulated panel system (SIPS) that provides all non-glazed building envelope areas. Significant economies are achieved by using the same low-labor structural panels for walls, floors and roof. The system is designed around a small number of interchangeable, rearrangeable assemblies for efficiencies of time and cost, and to minimize the environmental impacts of on-site construction.
Although the materials and methods of construction are chosen for efficiency and affordability, the underlying design principles guiding the development of the system have the larger goals of producing affordable, high quality buildings that offer variety, adaptability, convertibility, strength, simplicity, spatial richness, and optimized access to views and light.
Read the rest, here.
From The Economist print edition, Apr 15th 2010:
The new model: Is Oregon’s metropolis a leader among American cities or just strange?
THE city most comparable to Portland might be Vancouver in Canada, reckons Sam Adams, Portland’s mayor, although “we look to Amsterdam, Helsinki and Stockholm” for ideas. Ethan Seltzer, a professor of urban planning in Portland, thinks little Freiburg, in Germany, is the best comparison, with its similar obsessions about recycling, sustainability, public transit and bicycling. Others pick Zurich, which, like Portland, has a view of snow-capped mountains, orderly (bordering on staid) streets with trams, even the same peculiar fondness for direct democracy and tolerance of assisted suicide.
This might seem odd for a city on the American West Coast that once was the terminus of the Oregon Trail and has a cowboys-and-rodeos heritage. The locals, in fact, enjoy feeling odd: “Keep Portland weird”, say bumper stickers on the city’s cars, which all seem to be hybrid-electric vehicles. “Keep Portland sanctimonious,” mumble a few contrarians, while others savour the irony that Portland had to steal the slogan from Austin, Texas. But on the whole, Portlanders not only love their city but believe that it is, and ought to be, a model for the rest of America.
Mr Adams has personally contributed by becoming the first (though no longer the only) openly gay mayor of a big American city, and even surviving a recall attempt after a sex scandal (he is now confronting another). Mr Adams has a vision of progressive urbanism: a city where most people cycle or ride the streetcar, recycle what they consume, exist in harmony with nature and live in communities rather than the suburban sprawl of cities like Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix or Atlanta.
Nature, in fact, is the main draw for the mostly young and single newcomers to this city, almost the fastest-growing on the West Coast, says Joe Cortright, a Portland economist: the ocean to the west; the Cascade mountains to the east; and the high desert beyond them. The vineyards of pinot noir and chardonnay along the Willamette Valley are all within a manageable drive. In Portland, “business casual” means wearing a fleece. The area’s main industrial cluster is “activewear”, led by Nike and Columbia Sportswear and including thousands of smaller companies.
The environment is also the main theme of public policy. The biggest force in local politics is not a party (Democrats in effect rule without opposition) but cyclists. The bike lanes are impressive and getting even better now as streets get “bioswales”, patches of turf and shrub that capture and filter storm water and simultaneously calm traffic and separate pedestrians and cyclists from the Priuses. Those who can’t bike are encouraged to use public transport, which is free downtown.
Mr Adams says Portland’s success is “totally replicable”. But much of it seems to be an unintended consequence of land-use policies dating back to 1973. Back then, Oregon adopted “urban-growth boundaries” (UGBs) to preserve the farmlands that were then the mainstay of Oregon’s economy. Over time the rationale for UGBs changed to “don’t Californicate Oregon”—ie, don’t become Los Angeles, a freeway sprawl with no centre. The result has been unusually compact living, which is in turn easily served by public transport.
But cities with sprawling, California-style layouts will find it harder to make people use public transport. Phoenix, for example, has an excellent light-rail system, but it is often empty. And it may be even harder for such cities to get their residents to live more closely together.
Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles-based demographer and author, thinks that places like Portland, San Francisco and Boston have become “elite cities”, attractive to the young and single, especially those with trust funds, but beyond the reach of middle-class families who want a house with a lawn. Indeed Portland, for all its history of Western grit, is remarkably white, young and childless. Most Americans will therefore continue to migrate to the more affordable “cities of aspiration” such as Houston, Atlanta or Phoenix, thinks Mr Kotkin. As they do so, they may turn decentralised sprawl into quilts of energetic suburbs with a community feeling.
That is not to belittle Portland’s vision. It is a sophisticated and forward-looking place. Which other city can boast that its main attraction is a bustling independent book store (Powell’s) and that medical students can go from one part of their campus to another by gondola, taking their bikes with them? Other cities will see much to emulate. Minneapolis, for example, this month displaced Portland as Bicycling magazine’s most bike-friendly city (“they got extra points for biking in the snow,” grumble Mr Adams’s staff). Adam Davis of Davis, Hibbitts & Midghall, a Portland polling firm, says that Oregonians like to consider themselves leaders but also exceptions. They are likely to remain both.
NEEDLE & GLOBE 
