As February gives way to March, Brand Avenue begins its third year online! A few highlights and/or personal favorites from the last year:
- Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio's use of storyboards to plan and explain the Phantom House, the energy-efficient home of the near future. The narrative integrates the vagaries of a normal day with the home's technologies and design cues, revealing the "how" and the "why" of the project in doing so. This reinforces the primacy of design for everyday living.
Follow along as "J" and "M" go about their day:
As M's car comes within five miles of the house, the Home on the Go unit triggers the DomestiSleep and RapidCool systems to awaken the house and begin to cool it down. M walks inside, throws off his jacket, and prepares a martini. Realizing he has forgotten to pick up the chilies and the turmeric, M leaves J a message and rushes out, overriding the DomestiSleep system.
Long story short: fiction writers and architects ought to team up more often (like this! wow!). All would benefit.
- Those who would brand hotel chains (through the selection of everything from sheets to showerheads) are faced with a fascinating challenge, as explored in August:
Since 2005, some 31 (hotel) brands have been announced, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than at anytime since 1988-89, when 27 were introduced. And with this increased competition, identifying market segments and customer preferences has become essential to creating customer loyalty -- which is where the showerhead, among other details, becomes crucial....Competition...has taken the art and science of hotel branding to a new level. Enormous resources are being poured into researching and designing hotel rooms, lobbies, amenities and services -- all intended to inspire brand loyalty by creating what hoteliers hope will be a distinctive experience for guests.
The hotel's design touches work in concert to respond to broader trends in shelter, thus framing a unique experience that a traditional hotel cannot. Guests can live among the trappings of loft living, if only for a night or two. (Below, the guest "lofts" of the Nylo chain. More here.)
- I reviewed a few good books this past fall, and there will definitely be more in the coming months. For the time being though, I'm looking forward to digging into this and this soon.
- What does a city really feel like? Explore through the highly personal lenses of timelapse photography. How does music impact the image of place? What does your town sound like? (Below, Vancouver, rather beautifully.)
I would expect as many of us know firsthand the sensation of walking around town with headphones in, we realize we have some ideas about how these things can go together. Am I right?
- Several posts in this last year gravitated toward the frontier between retail strategy and urbanism, from one concerning the outdoor apparel store Nau to a few exploring the configuration of main streets and public spaces, in terms of traffic, retail offerings, and form. We looked at the design of a new plaza in San Francisco, with event programming and retail outlets chosen to compliment each other; and a new boulevard in suburban Madrid, with ingenious "air trees" growing in its middle.
For fun, here's a few more things to consider, that I just haven't gotten the chance to mention:
- Speaking of boulevards, Boston's Big Dig, the complex, decade-long transformation of a 3.5-mile swath through the downtown of one of America's most storied cities, is now officially finished. Where an interstate highway once stood is now the Rose Kennedy Greenway. So now what? (Photos via Flickr.)
- The brilliant City of Sound posted a fascinating piece recently about technology in the street of the near future, what's visible and what isn't. Perhaps the Phantom House will be built nearby:
Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture. Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?...
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.
- And finally, at the intersection of landscape architecture, humor, cultural identity, iconography, and massive infrastructural undertaking, there is the semi-serious proposal for a new island off the coast of Holland, just one of so many enormous building schemes being dreamt up worldwide nowadays. It's hard to believe that a 50 km-long, tulip-shaped landform is what's necessary to solve a nation's problems, but that's exactly the premise.
Again, many thanks for reading! Feel free to get in touch.
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