April 11, 2013
Olugbenro Ogunsemore via Esquire
When you hear the term “transportation commissioner,” you probably picture someone whose job it is to make sure a city’s planes, trains, cars, trucks, and subways get where they need to go. But for Janette Sadik-Khan, who oversees New York City’s staggeringly complex transportation system, vehicles are only a part of the whole: She’s working to give the streets back to pedestrians.
On Monday, April 8, Sadik-Khan announced the city’s new bike share program, which will launch in May (after long delays, largely due to damage caused by Hurricane Sandy) and will ultimately feature 600 docking stations and 10,000 shared bikes. “In just the last five years,” she wrote in the commission’s report, “New York City has made huge strides in creating modern, safer streets,” noting that in keeping with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC sustainability agenda, the city has “established more than 300 miles of bike lanes, 30 plazas and made expansive street safety redesigns to accommodate all street users citywide.” Read more!
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February 15, 2013
To understand a city’s character, look no further than its parklets (which, as you know by now, are those mini–urban parks that replace parking spots with public amenities). San Francisco will never say no to a potential hack—witness Rebar’s awesome but ill-fated parklet made from a sliced Citroën cycling van—and Los Angeles will turn just about anything into a workout. With the opening last week of two new parklets on Spring Street in downtown LA, passersby who regret downing that entire venti mochaccino can hop on one of the parklets’ two exercise bikes and people-watch while squeezing in a few minutes of cardio. Their bored companions can try a hand at the foosball table or just text from one of the nifty swing-style seats. Sure beats idling in a car! Read more.
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December 28, 2012
The freedom of off-the-grid living can be so tantalizing: no power bill, no lawn to mow, no homeowners’ association. It’s the aesthetics of the whole enterprise that often disappoint. (Let’s just say that proverbial van down by the river is not getting any cuter with each passing day.) Meanwhile, those sleek micro-units and tiny houses can get expensive, and claustrophobic, awfully fast. So if you’re cool with living in something the size of a food cart, why not put it on a bike?
For China’s Get It Louder biennial in Beijing, People’s Architecture Office (PAO) and People’s Industrial Design Office (PIDO) designed an accordion-like polypropylene mobile house on the back of a tricycle—garden sidecar optional! Read more.
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August 22, 2012
Photo: Dino Perrucci
Everyone knows bicycling is David Byrne’s favorite mode of transport in any enviroment. And everyone knows David Byrne’s preferred environment to navigate is the city, which is to say New York. The musician-artist-cyclist has involved himself with the city’s bike politics in the past, championing the DOT’s bike lane expansion proposal–as Gothamist reminds us–plus designing a whimsical coterie of car bike racks in 2008 that were sprinkled throughout Manhattan (and Brooklyn), from a massive dollar sign in Wall Street to a ironically suggestive outline of a night-worker at “Old Times Square”. Now, Byrne has reprised the project for a temporary installation outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM),
For the installation, Byrne drew up two new bespoke bike racks, each of which were positioned to flank BAM’s main entrance. The blue stations spell out “Micro Lip” and “Pink Crown”–messages without any encoded meaning but whose form indicates towards the easy modularity of the content at hand, in this case, letters and phrases (just like I Zimbra!) As Byrne explains, “When designing these bike racks, I wondered how I could make something that was modular, yet variable—a design that wouldn’t always look the same and could vary depending on season and placement.” The letters can be rearranged to form other letters–though not all letters, just those contained within the “David Byrne Bike Rack alphabet”–and different words, like “BAM”. According to the project organizers, the work is part of an “ever evolving installation”, which will grow with the help and input of the local community and BAM’s social media audience. And yes, the bike rack is functional.
Photo: Dino Perrucci
Byrne in 2008, with one of his lively bike racks designed for the DOT; Photo: G.R. Christmas
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May 22, 2012
All images: NL Architects
Where the rooftop race track connoted a Futurist sensibility of speed and motion, cast in modernist clothes of reinforced concrete, Holland-based NL Architects‘ conceptual bike pavilion for southern China, with its cyclist-bearing pagoda roof, looks towards the rise and dissemination of Dutch bike culture. Designed as part of a large resort in Hainan province, the bike club consists of a intriguing formal mashup: a velodrome perched atop a glass cafe/pavilion. The idea came to the architects after they had introduced the wide-brim pagoda roof to the design, the product of much research into vernacular typologies meant to accommodate and withstand the vagaries of the region’s tropical climate.
Apart from the elegant and friendly curves of its “optimistic” profile, the roof proved “surprisingly functional” as a velodrome. Supported on a field of columns which frame the curtain-wall structure below, the roof, though a diminutive version of a typical regulation-size velodrome, is capable of holding party to a score of cyclists at once. This top house protrudes over the edge of the glass wall, casting shade over the ground floor bike rental outlet and cafe, with sunlight falling through the central voids framing the twin staircases that provide access to the bowl above.
Construction on the bike club is expected to conclude late this year.
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April 18, 2012
If Robert Howsare‘s turntable-cum-drawing-apparatus is any indication, analog machines that are seemingly destined for the yard sale can make for impressive artistic instruments. In the same vein, artist Joseph L. Griffiths breathed life into an old stationary bike by dismantling the dated exercise machine and threading its parts together into a makeshift drawing apparatus of its own. When pedaled by a user, the front wheel of the apparatus spins to power a series of attached colored markers, which whiz about to make circular patterns on the canvas before it. The handlebars too trigger a set of markers that hover suspended like a marionette, swinging upon command to make unpredictable marks. The cyclist thus appears to draw his or her own illusory vortex, which in reality captures the elegant, human-powered motion of the velocipede.
[All images courtesy the artist]
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January 5, 2012
Before we began pouring our identities into online profiles, eagerly baring our likes and dislikes for the world to see, there existed a simpler material means for such a ritual within the everyday home: the bookshelf. Privacy settings were a little higher of course—only those who were permitted to enter your home could look, pry and judge—but the bookshelf was and is the primitive mantel for the you-are-what-you-like portrait of the self. Whether you like it or not, spines of books and other media align to form a self-conscious representation of the inner mind. Monographs interspersed with curated tchotchkes might accentuate a person’s artistic flair. Music buffs can line their walls with discs and vinyl. Meanwhile, self-help books, if not hastily destroyed after reading, are likely tucked away out of sight.
Well, it’s about time the revealing shelving unit had a space for your bike, and the designers at Italian design firm BYografia have created a freestanding bookshelf for those who subscribe to the you-are-what-you-ride philosophy. The Bookbike combines a vertical compartment to hang a bicycle with a series of stacked storage spaces for books and other shelf-worthy belongings in a versatile, minimalist design. As cities around the world accommodate a growing population of cyclists, the Bookbike emerges as a prototype for the urban home, a way to not only save space but to also uphold the bicycle, a timeless emblem of the symbiosis between body and machine, as an object worthy of self-expressive display.
[Images courtesy BYografia]
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November 30, 2011
It’s great to see that the employees at New York City’s Department of Transportation haven’t lost their sense of humor, despite the constant hate being thrown at them from all sides over the last few months years. These haiku street signs, unveiled on Gothamist, are the latest irreverent contribution from DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s team, who worked with artist/poet John Morse on the project.
It’s important to note that these aren’t “street” signs meant to be read by drivers operating vehicles. The signs that will be affixed to walls and entranceways at transportation hubs, along with education and cultural centers. Nonetheless, they’re likely to criticism, since most safety education efforts by the DOT — be it though haiku signs or free bike lights — are met with sarcastic cries of “I guess this means all the pot holes are fixed!” But to those who spend a lot of time on New York’s streets, education is a vital (if not immediately noticeable) part of the DOT’s activities. Sadik-Khan is a polarizing figure in the city, whose many successes since being named have included the installation of hundreds of miles of new bike lanes, and the introduction of a bike-share program, to begin next spring.
Click through to see them all.
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November 9, 2011
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times.
Occupy Wall Street. Libraries. Bikes. Is there no civic stone Michael Kimmelman will leave unturned in his first month as The New York Times’ architecture critic? Kimmelman’s been refreshing, given the heaps of starchitect-praise Kimmelman’s predecessor was fond of publishing. Let’s get to the real problems, amiright?
Kimmelman’s latest piece details his 7-mile bike ride alongside Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. His thesis? Experiencing the city by bike is distinct from the experience of New York from, say, a cab window. Kimmelman invokes Venturi and Scott Brown’s notion of speed as the primary informant of our perception of space, saying “Las Vegas was their example, and they wrote about driving versus walking (skipping over the bicycle). But the point stands. On a bike time bends. Space expands and contracts.”
Sadik-Khan has been repeatedly skewered by right-leaning news outlets in the last year, with the New York Post leading the way with pieces like “Bike Lane Bloodbath” (September 21, 2011) and “Bicycles Built for Boors” (April 26, 2011). Even the Times hasn’t been very welcoming of Sadik-Khan’s attempts to create safe biking infrastructure for New Yorkers.
The chilly reception of bike lanes indicates a problem not only on the part of drivers, but also on the part of those bad apple cyclists who ride headless of red lights or pedestrians. Popular bike blogger BikeSnobNYC addressed “problem cyclists” last week, after seeing a man riding repeatedly through red lights at crowded crosswalks: “I probably watched him ride against the light through three or four crosswalks. Furthermore, at each of these crosswalks, I’d estimate that at least five pedestrians looked at him like they wished he’d get run over by a truck… [giving him] the power to turn five New Yorkers against cyclists every single block.” Yet for every “problem” cyclist, there are 10 riding politely behind them, and unfortunately, cab drivers, trucks, and car doors don’t discriminate.
Some have criticized Kimmelman for taking on an issue that isn’t “architecture” with a capital A, but Sadik-Khan herself says that the DoT is attempting to develop an “architecture of safety.” We’d contend that Kimmelman’s piece indicates the shift of the architect’s domain away from singular design and towards policy-making issues in the public realm.
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August 24, 2011
Rio de Janeiro – Airport Bicycle Shuttle from Copenhagenize on Vimeo.
When Copehagenize founder Mikael Colville-Andersen recently visited Brazil, he had a couple of friends in Rio pick him up from the airport on bikes, luggage in tow. Upon returning from his trip, Colville-Andersen, whose site is devoted to Copenhagen’s bike culture and spreading its gospel around the world, produced the above video in which he documents his 16+ kilometre ride, claiming that ”there are few cities in the world where you can get picked up at the airport by friends – on bicycles – and ride all the way into the city on safe, separated bicycle infrastructure.” It’s definitely cheaper than a cab.
More after the jump!
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