Fulcrum by Richard Serra, London, England
NY Times Arts Dwell ARTstor Blog
TED’s A Greener Future? page includes 53 videos of lectures delivered by leading scholars, designers and activists engaged in the debate over the environment and climate change. Al Gore, Cameron Sinclair, Norman Foster, and others discuss a wide range of topics including global mass extinctions, sustainable food culture and urban design.
TED conferences and its subsidiary the TEDTalks video website “has a love affair with buildings.” Featuring over 21 conference videos on its Architectural Inspiration page, TED has assembled thematic discussions from Moshe Safdie, Nathaniel Kahn, Daniel Libeskind and more focusing on sustainability, historicism, food culture, and uniqueness as it relates to the built environment and design inspiration.
Harvard University Libraries have created VIA (Visual Information Access), a growing online catalog uniting collections from various Harvard libraries and archives including the GSD, Fine Arts Library, Harvard Film Archive, Arnold Arboretum and Horticulture Library, and more. Documenting material culture, and social history, VIA is an excellent research tool, containing descriptive records and images representing paintings, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, architecture, decorative arts, trade cards, rubbings, theater designs, maps and plans. New material is added daily.
Places is an interdisciplinary journal focusing on contemporary architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and its impact on the public realm as physical place and social ideal. On October 5th, Places will assume a fully web-based, open-access format. Places online will publish peer-reviewed scholarship as well as topical commentary, observations, reviews, and visual portfolios that focus on “public spaces in the service of shared and egalitarian ideals of society” and explore “the highest standards of public responsibility and design.”
The California State University IMAGE Project has assembled almost 75,000 images for into its WorldImages database (formerly known as WorldArt). Organized into portfolios, the database includes a wide range of content from around the globe including images of cities and building technology, religious and cultural art and artifacts, architecture, material culture, and more. In addition WorldImages hosts a few special collections including faculty contributions, special exhibits and the Sourisseau Academy Clark B. Waterhouse Collection.
Detail of Greenwich Emotion Map
Christian Nold, an artist and activists, is developing new “models for communal representation.” For his Bio Mapping project, over 1,500 volunteers documented their physiological responses to the urban landscape. Armed with GPS devices that also measure galvanic skin response (GSR, a measure of emotional activity), individuals wandered through San Francisco, Paris and London. The integration of geographic with psychological data allowed Nold to map high and low arousal and pinpoint the places where people feel on edge or relaxed.
4th St between Layfatte and Mercer from NYC Grid
The blog NYC Grid documents the city of New York, block by block. Each post focuses on the everyday and ephemeral aspects of a single corner or small segment of a street. The author, Paul Sahner, initially began NYC Grid as a means to explore the city, but now primarily documents the present moment. Not an elegy for a vanishing urban past, the blog “is simply a snapshot: New York as we live in it now.”
Also check out a previous Deep Focus post highlighting a selection from the NYPL Digital Gallery. Conceptual artist Dylan Stone took 26,000 snapshots of Manhattan south of Canal Street for a project entitled Drugstore Photographs or a Trip Along the Yangtzee River from the New York Public Library.
Case Study house #22, 1960
Pierre Koenig, architect
Julius Schulman, photographer
USC Professor of History and Political Science Philip Ethington has developed two websites confronting the issues that plague urban historical investigations of Los Angeles. Los Angeles: The Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge, completed 2000-2001, examines the city through images and essays, both historical and historiographical, to treat the subject comprehensively. Though somewhat technologically outmoded, the content is viable and includes images ranging from photographs, plans, models, maps, photomontages, and “reflexive index sets,” historic images grafted onto a photograph of the here and now to demonstrate the scope of site history.
The second site of interest, Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1954-2000, uses two forms of narrative to discuss the city’s history in terms of cultural, economic and political landscapes. Yet unfinished, the site presently includes three short essays focusing on the history of Hollywood, aeronautics and the oil industry in Los Angeles complemented by a photographic narrative featuring Klansmen and tire workers alongside those of Hollywood fame and photos of the city’s Case Study houses by Julius Schulman.
Race, space, and politics will be the dominant themes at the University of Pennsylvania’s 2009 Unspoken Borders:The Ecologies of Inequality student design conference. The conference will highlight socio-economic and environmental concerns, focusing on key issues of infrastructure and design process. Registration is currently open for the conference to be held April 3rd and 4th.
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