FREE-WAY

I got a new camera for christmas, just a new point and shoot Casio, but it's nice to be able to take pictures anytime again. Yesterday, on a drive up I-5, I just started snapping away and couldn't stop. The freeway is a strange place, and I think these pictures are even stranger. The cars here are suspended in motion, driven by unknowing subjects, creating oddly voyeuristic and often intimate shots. The sidewise view renders a busy freeway as open, and captures an anonymity of place common here. As much as I can't stand the landscape of a freeway bound culture, I am fascinated by its imagery and its obsession with control against all odds.

Golden

LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote an interesting piece on the expanding transit network in Los Angeles.  Citing the pessimistic view of most towards Southern California's hopes and objections to building a cohesive transit network, he looks at the pending opening of the Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension (Sunday!) and the transformative nature of projects like it:

The real significance of the stations' debut on Sunday flows from the fact that with every substantial extension of the rail and subway network, another piece of the future Los Angeles comes startlingly into focus. More transit means more pedestrians, more people who pay attention to the shape and design of the city up close. That, in turn, means a growing constituency for shared space in Los Angeles and new interest in our long-neglected streetscapes and public sphere.

To put it another way: Transit and the life of the street are inextricably intertwined, and a boost to one is almost always a boost to the other.
 

California From Above

1. Sidewise view of greater LA/OC showing Palos Verdes in the foreground with (from left) Mt. San Antonio and Mt. Harwood, Anderson Peak, San Gorgonio Mountain, San Jacinto Peak, Modjeska and Santiago Peaks (aka Saddleback mountain).

2. View after takeoff showing the bay and SFO to Pacifica and PCH (lower left).

3. The bay, creeping fog and the Crystal Springs Reservoirs.

4. View over San Luis Obispo to the Sierras.

5. Landing approach showing the Pacific coast from Bolsa Chica to Long Beach.

6. Former Pacific Electric right of way cutting through the sprawl.

7. Saddleback and the Tustin MCAS airship hangars. Landing.

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Urban Edit

Urban Edit Installment




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Ross Racine

Dave first described the work of Ross Racine to me when he saw it at Like the Spice Gallery in Williamsburg. Naturally, descriptions of aerial images of dream suburbs piqued my interest, but the lack of a name and the closing of the show kept me from seeing them. Then one day, browsing the internet (I hate the term browsing for some reason, and I think it may have been on Ben's blog), I found Ross's work!

THIS IS (amazing) CAKETOWN!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

An amazing remix of "this is caketown" inspired by the life affirming 300 trailer pg version. Caketown has since become a term widely used in über hip architecture circles to describe the current state of pop architecture, epitomized by buildings of faux/foam detail freakishness smeared with stucco icing that are often featured on New York Shitty and Curbed, among others.

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Urban Edit

Urban edit is art in the tradition of art. It is a continuing project.

Landscape painters traditionally paint landscapes in their idealized form. Following that lead, the modern landscape is painted (in this case photographed pre painting) and edited into an idealized version of itself. Through the simple act of covering (often through a color mask of the CMYK range), the new landscape reveals impact and relief, man and nature and often the patterns of both. It is a diagrammatic abstraction fused with the long tradition of fine art, resulting in something unexpected, and often rather nice.

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AR(c)TIC in OC?

Design aside, this is one exciting building. HOK's above image for a new regional transit hub in "downtown" Anaheim represents a major step forward for Southern California. Intended to be built by 2013, the building will connect Metrolink, Amtrak, Disney monorail, local transit and high speed rail underneath a vaulted roof inspired by the rail stations of days past. Can this building really be designed for Orange County? (Check out the map below)


View Larger Map

The pedestrian neighborhood this hub will serve is as speculative as pedestrians in Orange County. But who says a parking lot sandwiched between a freeway and a dry drainage ditch today, across the freeway from Angel Stadium and next door to Honda center, can't be the planner's pedestrian paradise of tomorrow? Maybe it's name says it all: ARTIC (Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center). Don't kid yourself, there's no ice in the OC.

BUT, there will be ice in the OC!!

As a not so side note: This hub and it's immediate neighborhood will tie into Anaheim's Platinum Triangle (I know cheesy right?), a partially built, partially under construction, partially stalled by economics project that's attempting to bring some dense, mixed use, walkable urbanism to the area between the 5 and 57 freeways that is Angel Stadium, Honda Center, Convention center and Disneyland adjacent.

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urban edit

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