Brand Avenue

No Small Plans

The Chicago 2016 Summer Olympics organizing committee has unveiled a new logo. The previous design, beloved by graphic designers (and here, I'll add) for its elegant depiction of the city's skyline as a stylized Olympic torch--its buildings the flame, and the waters of Lake Michigan the torch; the city and the lake reflecting onto each other--was actually illegal per the International Olympic Committee's graphic standards for candidate cities:

The city's bid to host the 2016 Olympics took on a new look Wednesday with the unveiling of a revised logo that features the six-pointed Chicago star that adorns the city's flag. Gone is the Olympic-style torch (left, below), a design no-no for applicant cities under strict Olympics rules.

Noting that stars serve as guiding lights and as symbols of athletic greatness, Mayor Richard Daley told an auditorium full of schoolchildren, "This logo will become a great symbol of hope for our city and our nation, as we work together to seek the privilege of hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games."

The white star is set against bands of color, the staggered yellow top meant to represent the city's skyline and architecture, the red center symbolizing passion for sport, the emerald green below that evoking the city's parks and the blue at the bottom symbolizing the lake. The points are meant to represent hope, respect, harmony, friendship, excellence and celebration.

Below: logos old and new.

   

Compare with London's 2012 approach, here.

Chicago schoolchildren explain some of the more unwieldy aspects of the logo--the parts about "excellence" and "harmony"--in a video:

Nevertheless, it's cool that the logo is fundamentally architectural. It evokes a place-specific relationship between urban form and water, where the extreme vertical meets the extreme horizontal--at the lakefront, the city's defining geographic feature. The other threshold described in the logo is that between buildings and sky, which is absolutely fitting in the birthplace of the skyscraper. Even the organizing committee's slogan quotes Daniel Burnham.

Below, Chicago's Olympic Stadium, as currently envisioned for Washington Park.

Cities Elapsed

Perusing an now-ancient post about a day in the life of Winnipeg, Manitoba as depicted through atmospheric, often captivating time-lapse photography has led me on an ongoing search for other similarly evocative time-lapse city shorts. I admit to not knowing that much about the spread of time-lapse photography as a technique, but I do know that it registers experiential variation through time very well. Also, that I like it.

While many feature ubiquitous scenes of automobile traffic and other signifers of urban bustle, there are elements of architecture, urban design and geography in each that impart an elusive sense of place: quality of light, commonly used materials, shared spaces, representations of climate. Here are just a few:

Cities in motion, from top to bottom: Vancouver; Tokyo; London; Los Angeles (mostly); Chicago; Toronto (also here); Montreal; Buenos Aires; Vienna; The Hague; Seattle. If you know others (and there are many more), send 'em my way.

You'll notice I've only chosen videos that are paired with music, mainly because it's interesting to consider what accompaniment a place ought to have. The results of these pairings are debatable, which you probably also noticed.

(Insert obligatory Koyaanisqatsi reference here. Also, earlier.)

Drivetime

Predawn commutes are increasingly common. You might know someone that sounds like Dawn Davis:

For an hour, padding about in a fraying robe, sipping coffee from a bucket-sized mug, she forces herself awake. Then, in thick country darkness, she climbs into her miniature red Ford and heads south, racing 70 miles to her job in downtown Minneapolis. By the time she returns home in the evening, she has about an hour of leisure before she hits the sack. An hour? "That," winces the 58-year-old, "is what my friends say."

Why do people do this? For small-town life, a feeling of escape, a sense of security:

"It really tells us something about the American character: that we will trade almost everything to get what we want," said Curtis Johnson, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Council who now leads, from Edina, a national consulting firm devoted to metropolitan issues.

"Long drives before sunrise, the cost, the inconvenience, the loss of family time," he said. "If we want something bad enough -- the bigger home, the feeling of safety, whatever it might be -- we'll trade almost anything to get it."

Is it as David Brooks points out in his book On Paradise Drive--that Americans are eternally restless? That the grass really is always greener on the other side? That the perfection everyone is striving for is really, truly within reach--if only we drive further and get up earlier? If only the kids grow up in the small towns we never knew? If we can each establish and maintain a retreat for ourselves, out there in the semi-exurban semi-wilderness, where life is "simpler" and "more real"?

Can we be perpetually mobile as well as deeply rooted?

Some people say it's purely for the lower home prices (nevermind the outrageous amounts of time and money spent for the car's sake, and the health problems such a lifestyle can produce). Polling reveals that residents of metropolitan areas like Minneapolis would gladly trade proximity for lifestyle if money were no object:

Anne Karl drives to her job at the St. Paul Heart Clinic from her home in Arlington, in Sibley County. The single mom wanted a smaller -- and to her mind, safer -- high school for her kids than they'd find in Richfield, but she couldn't afford closer cities such as Lakeville.  "I chose Arlington," she said, "for the fact that I actually grew up there. It was a great town to grow up in." There are lots of folks who think the same way.

Although the Metropolitan Council strives to concentrate as much growth as possible in the older, built-up areas of the Twin Cities, its own surveys consistently prove that even metro Minnesotans have a profound hankering for rural and small-town life. If folks could live where they'd ideally chose to, council analysts conceded in their most recent report, "the result would be a large exodus from the suburbs, a smaller shift out of the central cities, and a doubling of the region's rural population."

Interestingly, as this NPR piece points out, the migration of jobs to the "donut" of suburbs surrounding a city is a large part of what draws smaller outlying jobs into the commuter belt of a city, making the drive seem reasonable. The average American now spends 25 minutes enroute to work.

These "extreme commuters" have what Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam would call a huge "triangle," where the amount of disillusionment, illness, and inconvenience exists in their lives in direct proportion to the increasing length of said triangle's sides:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

Putnam’s favorite city is Bologna, in Italy, which has a population of three hundred and fifty thousand; it’s just small enough to retain village-like characteristics. “It would be interesting to swap the citizens of Bologna with the population of New Jersey,” Putnam said. “Do the Bolognese become disconnected and grouchy? Is there a sudden explosion of malls in Bologna? How much of the way we live is forced on us? How much is our choice?”

The growth of extreme commuting (a term first coined by the US Census Bureau in 2003, to describe the 8% of Americans who now commute more than an hour to work in both directions) affects former farm towns of the Upper Midwest just as much as less expensive corners of Europe, pulling previously remote locales into a jarringly new sense of nearness. The proliferation of discount airlines makes working in London while calling Barcelona home an actual possibility:

When you think of the commuter belt around London you don't immediately think of Barcelona, Marrakech and Tallinn....

By 2016, there will be 1.5 million people working in the United Kingdom but living overseas, using Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted as commuter terminals - predicts a report from the Future Forum, set up by travel firm Thomson. So instead of grinding into work on packed commuter trains, people will be looking for a better quality of life in accessible, more affordable overseas cities, working in jobs where they don't have to be in the office each morning.

Carrie Frais earns her living as a television news presenter in London, but finds it better value to live in Barcelona, using budget airlines for her international commuting. "I couldn't afford this quality of life in London - or else I'd have to be working every hour of every day. In Barcelona, you don't need as much to live on - everything from rent, food and clothes is cheaper."

Frais doesn't trek back and forth every day, unlike Davis in Minnesota; she stays with friends or family during the week. That leads to another question: where does "home" exist in a state of extreme mobility?  How and when does the road or the airport security checkpoint begin to accrue "homelike" characteristics? What happens to "region"? What makes someone a native? A stranger?

(Earlier: Enroute; and life in the Aerotropolis. And of course, Walter Kirn's prescient Up in the Air.)

Country Fried City

If what landscape urbanists say about the sprawling city of the present is true--that urbanization is really a landscape condition, a thinly populated layer of inhabitation intertwined with nature (i.e., places like Atlanta)--it logically follows that city and country, rural and urban, continue their convergence.

Surely, this hybrid condition has its roots in the development of "garden cities," the 19th century urban park movement, and the like--the idea that fresh air, open spaces, and proximity to nature (whatever its form) help maintain personal health, keep societal dysfunction in check, and preserve a connection to the Earth that is severed by the bustle of city life. This shows up in various ways in urban form and is a constant in modern architectural design--from LEED requirements, to the design of both 60's ranch houses as well as modern prefab housing.

Add to the list of ways people rectify this interrelationship in their personal lives, toward both aesthetically pleasing, sustainable, and productive ends, two more things: urban chicken farming, and master-planned vineyard communities. These join urban agricultural efforts like Los Angeles-based Edible Estates, and many others.

Those who raise poultry in the city do so for various reasons:

Willow Rosenthal, 35, who runs City Slicker Farms in West Oakland, Calif., and helps low-income families raise chickens as a source of sustainable, healthy food, sees them as a route to better nutrition. On the other hand, Ms. Forys sees owning chickens as a way to reconnect with where her meals come from. “Over the past two generations we’ve become completely separated from our food,” she said. “There’s something really wrong with that.”

It's not just sustainability or health-consciousness that drives urban chicken farmers; people say home-raised chickens and their eggs taste better. Naturally there's a lifestyle component too:

But there’s a simpler reason to keep chickens than for their taste, their sustainability or for caring about how they have been treated. “I could go to the grocery store and buy eggs from happy chickens,” said Reilly O’Neal, 32, whose San Francisco flock consists of two Golden Sex-link pullets and a Barred Rock named Zorah. “But this is so much more fun.”

I hasten to add that there are some obvious design issues to consider, from coop design to the proper proportion of yard to open space, the disposal or use of waste, noise control, and zoning.

(Below: an urban chicken--specifically, "Bella" the Rhode Island Red--via Flickr.)

Meanwhile, a new type of resort community takes shape, where production of a particular luxury good becomes a new form of leisure:

The novelty of the golf course community may have begun to fade in recent years, but now vineyard living is emerging as an alternative. The American fascination with wine has never been more intense — wine consumption increased by 25 percent or 142 million gallons between 2001 and 2006, according to the San Francisco-based Wine Institute — and new housing developments are appearing alongside or right in the middle of vineyards across the country, even in areas not well known for their wine production.

In the last three years, at least 10 of these developments have opened or broken ground in California, Washington, Idaho, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, New York and Rhode Island, and several more are in advanced planning stages. Some are built on or around existing vineyards, by vintners out to supplement their wine-business incomes and lower their property taxes (“we’re not doing this for poetry,” said Patricia Kluge, the chairwoman of Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard in Charlottesville, Va., who is giving over a quarter of her 2,000-acre estate to 24 private residences); some, like Ruby Hill, are created from scratch by developers, who see the vineyards mainly as residential amenities and who leave the cultivation to residents or outside professionals. At some developments, the vines are within view but out of reach of the residents; at others, residents are encouraged to set up their own vineyards and develop private-label wines....

Although cultivating wine grapes, or watching others do it, may seem an improbable form of recreation, it is only part of the total wine experience offered by these developments, which surround their wine-enthusiast residents with like-minded neighbors, and which typically feature activities like wine classes, dinner lectures and harvest parties.

Vineyard communities also exploit the cachet — and the snob appeal — of wine. Like a golf course, “a vineyard is a very high-prestige, social-capital amenity,” said Adam Ducker, a senior principal at Robert Charles Lesser & Co., a real-estate consulting firm that has been involved in the development and marketing of several vineyard communities. (Unlike a golf course, he added, it’s an amenity “that effectively pays for itself.”)

These are Edible Estates of a different kind, perhaps--where leisure, consumption, and "nature" come together in a very different way. This is taste--social segments, affinity groups--actively shaping urban form, to facilitate the construction of a lifestyle, and the establishment of a narrative. I'm not saying these things are good or bad; just pointing out that these kinds of continually evolving permutations are shaping our cities, and impacting architecture (apparently "Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired" forms marry well with winemaking).