Emily has been a consultant to creative professionals for over 20 years providing confidential, best-practice insights and advice on staff, client, and process-management strategies, conducting client surveys and writing winning proposals, creative briefs, and contracts. Her CreativeMornings talk was insightful and filled with hands-on tips. Please enjoy Emily Cohen’s talk:
Grace Court Alley is Adorable
Also see Verandah Place, Sidney Plaza, Hunts Lane etc. The city did a good job of keeping old world charm and the rich people did a good job of making these adorable little streets available for only the ultra wealthy.
For a full recap of all the adorable streets in NYC check out
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/Alleys/BROOKLYN%20ALLEYS/brklyn.html
For a full recap of all the adorable streets in NYC check out
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/Alleys/BROOKLYN%20ALLEYS/brklyn.html
Door Hardware Maven
"It’s an amazing field — it incorporates design, history, material sciences. It’s a technical thing and a decorative thing at the same time"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/
http://www.erbutler.com/
Poetry in a Maximum Security Prison
Kal Wagenheim, a Columbia Professor speaks to Brian Lehrer about teaching writing in a maximum security prison. Really Cool.
How the city is sneaking cool buildings into unexpected places
Rescue Company 3 in the Bronx
NY Mag article about the DDC program and how the city subsidizes cool building once in a with
For the full article:
http://nymag.com/arts/http://www.nyc.gov/html/ddc/html/home/home.shtml
Olmstead & Parks in NYC
I love Fort Green Park
30 acres
1867
It was Olmsteads first park
“Olmsted didn’t think a park should reveal itself in totality from any given place,” Mr. Twombly said. “He thought the park should unfold itself constantly as you walk through it. So there’s always a surprise, there’s always something new.”
Thanks NYT
http://fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/author-sheds-light-on-fort-greene-park-designer/
Sports Parks!!!
sport parks are great - promotes social well being and fitness and heath and can occupy spaces that leisure parks or housing may nit be suitable for. McCarren Park is hugely sucessful. oppotunities for sports parks near infrastructure ie BQE try that open lot near vanderbilt in Clinton Hill would be a great place to start
Stair Treatments
Circulation spaces are fleeting spaces. These stair treatment are inspired by motion. Stairwell and entrances are temporary occupied spaces. Occupation of the transit spaces is not a permanent. These fleeting temporary spaces have the opportunity for a more daring design. Landings serve as opportunities for modern design.. Sample designs (above) for landings include full wall graphics printed on 3M Control-Tac Vinyl, about $10/SF to a lighting installation using fluorescent tube lights, colored sleeves and baffles.
What if NYC had Piazzas?
What if New York City had piazzas? The funny part is we already have a network of beautiful old Italianate Churches that can make Rome jealous. And for some reason we put high traffic roads in front of their doorsteps. Whoops. We are ignoring our treasured spaces. The hard part is already built. why don't we have public space in front of them? The hierarchy of roads, open spaces and Church facades in America favors personal mobility at the cost of cultural spaces. Brooklyn we should do better.
Examples of Piazzas:
Placa Virreina, Barcelona with cafes. Trees and small low-traffic roads run at opposite sides of the piazza as Church maximizes open space in front of the beautiful old church.
Brooklyn flea as an example of the Brooklyn Piazza.
Beautiful old church in Fort Greene with road directly in front of entrance.
Examples of Piazzas:
Placa Virreina, Barcelona with cafes. Trees and small low-traffic roads run at opposite sides of the piazza as Church maximizes open space in front of the beautiful old church.
Santa Croche, Florence - Famous Piazza with street vendors and cafes
Beautiful old church in Fort Greene with road directly in front of entrance.
Three underlying design princples
Three underlying design principles:
1 - Shape
2 - Size / Scale
3 - Color
Who knew design could be so easy?
1 - Shape
2 - Size / Scale
3 - Color
Who knew design could be so easy?
Quintesential Question of Architecture
I always find myself thinking about Brownsville. Years ago our studio at Columbia that used brownsville to address a quintessential question about architecture. It asked to plan 2 residential blocks in New York City -which already has the perfect fundamental brownstone building block template. An almost impossible model to improve on. Not to mention the architectural detail is gorgeous.
Brownstone Building Block Template / Perimeter Block Layout
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Generations of Architects, including Courbusier tried to solve the dilemma of how to layout out residential buildings.
The Atlantic Commons project in Fort Greene has modernizes an already existing solution to the dilemma. It does three things well-
1 - Scale - Relates to neighborhood
2 - Establish the Perimeters - leave the correct amount of public space
3 - Brickwork & Good Masonry - Adds to already established character in the neighborhood
Atlantic Commons in Fort Greene
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The 'I Love Gradients Series'
Exercise 1:
Gradients represent texture depth spectrum richness and wealth (T or F )
Exercise 2:
gradient of __________. (fill in the blank)
a- locations
b- people
c- stories
e - all gradients
e - narrative
Exercise 3:
All gradients are spectrums and thus can be narrative in nature (T or F )
Exercise 4:
Exercise 4:
Name three naturally occurring gradients
[ placeholder upside down answers here]
McDonald's vs The World
McDonald's is is a modern empire. They bring cheeseburgers but also economic infrastructures to their colonies. Tracking their movement through international borders while charting beef processing, oil, the price of a big mac and international conflict.
Caffeine To Go
I love Caffeine. I wish I could add it to my OJ instead of being a slave to coffee. Have they invented this yet? Why is this not readily available? Where can I buy it?
Clinton Hill Building
Found this one in Clinton Hill one day when I was riding my bike. Would love to know who funded this. Very interesting. I haven't seen this one on curbed yet.
322 Hicks Street by Smith-Miller and Hawkinson Architects
Kohler Bowl
Given the hyper-competitive naming and sponsor of the college bowls games in the recent years. I think this might be an excellent and hilarious sponsorship for the college bowl season.
MOVE THE BIKE LANE
BEFORE
AFTER
I really wish they moved the bike lane. Mayor Bloomberg has done and excellent job embracing bike culture in NYC and especially in Brooklyn . Bicycle infrastructure is amazing yet they are missing one important detail. Get the bike lane out of the street. Move the bike lane between the sidewalk and parked cars. I think if we used parked cars to buffer the bike lane we there would be less bike fatalities and less bicycle accidents. I applaud transportation alternatives and Mike Bloomberg on the bike friendly initially the city has seen in recent years but this simple repositioning will save lives. And from the drivers point of view it is a lot easier to parallel park without driving backward through the bike lane.
Hip Hip Hooray for Bow Wow
Amid our current economic situation there is an opportunity to specifically crafted. I believe it become utterly important to understand and appreciate smaller scale developments as a response to economic instability.
Atelier Bow Wow epitomizes this. Their projects deal predominantly with the complexities of dense urban environments. Conversations on twelve different urban and architectural issues relevant to their practice are threaded throughout this book which comes exhaustively illustrated with photographs, models, plans, sketches and elevations. If the American recovery can take a lesson from the recovery of post bubble Japan the silver lining will be a renaissance for small scale residential projects This new scale of operation is exemplified the current generation of Japanese architects, Kengo Kuma, Atelier Bow Wow. Images from their portfolio website.
Hoxton Square by Zaha
Shoerack
Sixx Design: Interior Design Supercouple
Do you hate couples? Your in for a treat! Sixx Design, a interior design supercouple are improving interiors all over NYC one at a time. Sixx Design is Cortney and Robert Novogratz. Here's thier NYT slideshow.
Superbowl 43 Logo Contest
What makes two things that are great even better? Combining them! The New York Times mixed football and Graphic Design and ran a Superbowl Logo contest. Here are some of my designs - I think the contest might of be rigged given my unlucky outcome and that they finally posted the winning deisgns 3+ weeks after they said they would.
Art Curators has Sweet Apartment
Yahoo vs. Google
http://www.y.com/
to compete with google
David Adjaye
If you want to see more Pitch Black pics here is a flickr photostream or check it out for yourself at 208 Vanderbilt St between Dekalb and Willoughby.
MAN vs RAT
Why Architecture school is useful and design is useless
Thinksolving / conceptual problem solving
Unpacking the conflict between design and construction
Average people are more concerned with catching their flight and don’t pay attention to the overall design, nevermind how the glass is engaged with the steel. The only people who notice the design are people who actively try to notice it. Yet for some reason as asociety we romanticize the notion of architecture.
I had a drawing professor claim the most beautiful piece of paper is the blank paper. Before the pencil touches the paper the paper has limitless possibility. The finsihed drawing or in our airport example, the built airport destroys the dream that was once the unbuilt airport. The physical building was compromised. The possibility that the building truely embraces the spirit of change was compromised and the original intent is forgotten. The notion that a building can propagate social change is a falsehood. In fact architecture, built architecture as a means to reform is ridiculous. Renaming design as "rethinking" is total bullshit. However, there is something good we can extract from this lesson.
In all honesty, creativity is probably a more common skill than we care to admit. When we were five everyone used crayolas, we all drew when we were in grade school. Humans are born creative creatures and the romanticizing the creative arts is human. Perhaps, at a moment in time, we all participate in a personal romantic dream to design through a creative outlet such as fashion, music, cooking, or remodeling our kitchen. In the television show Seinfeld, George Constanzas claims a false identity as an architect, and goes as far to claim he designed "the new addition to the Guggenheim." George, thinks, as many of us do, that the architect leads a superior life. Buildings are fun and easy to design, architects enjoy a high overall quality of life and architects possess superpowers, such that with the wave of the hand they can create life improving buildings for the masses / ordinary people. But in reality, the unspoken truth of architecture is that these dreams fall short of these aspirations and Georges alter ego perpetuate a false vision of the dream that is architecture. George, as have many of us, is caught romanticizing architecture as a powerful instrument of social change.
The utopian vision of architecture is possible, but not in the harsh reality of the real world, but in a insular dream land called architecture school. Nothing is built. Everything is a dream everything is an exercise in conceptual problem solving.
According to Wikipedia, “architecture is the activity of constructing and designing buildings and other physical structures”
Architecture is composed of 2 major themes, 'designing and constructing'. An academic training is also broken down corespondingly. The first is the physical construction of building and the second is a ‘creative design’ involved in designing extruded rectangles. Construction embraces convention and practicality, the design pushes innovation and creativity. Examining how these two themes play out at both the professional and academic level reveal a added value of academic architecture. While architecture firms (real world) usually tend toward practical constuction and realised project - academic architecture programs are almost entirely creative think tanks. Below is a short list of firms and university’s broken down by type (construction 1st vs. creative 1st) (hmmdoes this make sense?)
FIRMS
Construction / technical 1st - the Practical architect 98%
Heintges
Kendall Heating
Creative 1st the creative firm ( the dream of architecture) 2%
OMA
IDEO
Universities
Construction / technical 1st - the technical schools 2%
NJIT
NY Tech
anything with a tech at the end
creative theoretical 1st Designthinking 98%
Columbia
Harvard
Yale
think newsweek graphics red black and grey
Unpacking the conflict between design and construction though the lens of professional vs. academic institutions (bring to light something interesting The cushioned and pampered lifestyle that the academic architecture institution can offer a student is suddenly invaluable because it was a serves as an haven for ideas, creative thinking and collaboration. Architecture schools embed a strong fundamental comprehension of how to create solutions and use innovative thinking create . It is essentially multidisciplinary.
The goal of both fields is to introduce you to a new way of thinking about data, and help you to gain an understanding of how to use, communicate, and interpret information and convey a new concept model way of thought. This happens in school, where there are 6 semester long research projects, in which at the end I gave a presentations about ideas. Another such example occured through my work with Volume Magazine. Volume Magazine is an experimental think tank venture. They are devoted to the process of cultural reflexivity. Cultural reflexivity is the circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional; with both the cause and the effect affecting each another in a situation that renders both functions causes and effects. The objective was to supersede architecture and reach out toward an understanding of broader social structures and global organizations. The project mandates an expansion of thought, culture and design.
If we return to our proverb about the blank paper an architecture can posit limitless possibilities on what the airport may be. Contemporary practice in a university promotes numerous drawings and diagrams of how a building is dreamed to work.
Typical design requires thinking and drawing dimensionally but the progressive schools emphasize filtering preconceived notions and processing data to discharge a powerful unseen creative vision. And while the crestfallen architect goes back to his drawing board to value engineer his design that can’t get built the way it is the architecture student gets straight A’s. In academic architecture there are no buildings but conclusions to research. A scientist would a arrive at a hypothesis after an experiment about the system he is studying and at the end of a semester the architecture student arrives at a conclusion about social. unbuilt airport holds/contains the promise of
This is where we arrive at the term thinksolving.
Development in Brooklyn is Ridicoulous - Brooklyn2012 Video
Conversation in a taxi from circumnavigated the Atlantic yards.
Ben: What do you think of all these buildings
Driver: They puttin up all these tall buildings here.
B: I don't believe it.
D: All of these buildings and ain't got nobody to live in em. can't they be creative. same thing over and over. they got so much money the don't know what to do with em. they are probably smoking cigarettes and lighting them with money.
B: Build a school
D: Who drew that plan? ..... moe-ron !
B: what do you think of the stadium
D: That would be great. i would love to see Lebron play in this hood.
B: It's too big but a little part of me wants to see 'em play here.
D: It's good too cuz it brings in tourists
Carless City
Awesome New York Times slideshow about Vauban, Germany a city where there are no cars.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/05/12/science/20090512-SUBURB_index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/05/12/science/20090512-SUBURB_index.html
Bus Stops: The "If it ain't broke don't fix it" Dept.
Girl: They're nice, they put a couple of them in Staten Island
B: But are they really necessary
G: No not really, like kids in Staten Island like to shoot them with bb guns just for fun
B: So they become targets for crime and vandalism?
G: Yes definately
Mr. Bloomberg was this the best way to improve our city? Why can't we have more places to lock our bikes?
Why can't we have more hybrid buses?
The new New York City bus shelter was designed by Grimshaw Architects and is run by the Spanish advertising company Cemusa.
All Along the Pacific Ave
What is an Isthmus? A diagram of Madison Wisconsin
An isthmus is strip of land nestled between bodies of water. The name of the lakes Mendota and Monona translate into sunset and sunrise and the basketball team is pretty good too.
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