Thoughts on Transportation

Highways, historically, have a strange effect.  The more you build, the more cars there will be to fill them up.  NYC--and especially Manhattan--resists automobiles like no other city.  Not its residents, so much, but just the practicalities: parking is a nightmare or ridiculously expensive or so far from where you're going it's hardly worth it, traffic can be so bad you could get to your destination faster by walking, the huge number of pedestrians themselves (who have absolute right-of-way, always) cause traffic blockage.  But Robert Moses' highways and bridges did what they do, despite all that.

So why doesn't the same thing happen with mass transit systems?  So many cities build them and they end up being all but a complete failure.  Obviously a city like Los Angeles resists public transportation.  But that kind of resistance made no difference to car owners commuting to NYC.  "They don't go where the commuters need them to go" isn't exactly a valid reason, either, because in the early days of rail travel, whole towns grew up around where the rails were laid, not the other way around.  

Maybe that's the problem, though.  The trains may take you from where you live to where you work, but then you're stuck, in a city like LA (and plenty of others).  Work out at the gym before going to the office?  You have to drive there.  Need a carton of milk on the way home?  You have to drive there.  No PTS could realistically go to all those places.

It's kind of a Catch 22, in fact.  Businesses would have no reason to expect a PTS to be successful and provide a steady source of customers, so they don't group themselves around transit hubs.  Because there aren't conveniences grouped around transit hubs, the PTS remains useless to commuters.  I can't help thinking that cycle could be made to spin the other direction, though.  If all sorts of little businesses (gyms, dry cleaners, small groceries, newsstands, coffee shops and cafes, banks, cellphone dealers) were given tax breaks or whatever else to grow in those kind of areas, it could potentially work, I believe.

Ryan Witte

Tiny Cork Chairs

This is so cute!

Design Within Reach held a contest to see what kind of a chair people could make using nothing but the foil, wire, and cork from two champagne bottles.

A friend of mine and I always laugh and ask "Within Reach of whom?" because their stuff really isn't all that cheap.  They do have a great line, though, and this is a really awesome contest.  I wish they'd shown more of the entries on their website, but I guess we'll just have to go to see them in person.  I might haul myself all the way over to Brooklyn tonight except that it's like -20° out there at this point.  And it would appear to be tonight only that they're on display.

It's hard also to get a feeling of scale, but they must be incredibly tiny if they're carved out of a champagne cork, etc...but the entries look SO precise.  I just don't know how they did it.

Ryan Witte

Another Paul Rudolph Masterpiece

During the late House & Garden Magazine's "Design Happening," I went to see this townhouse by Paul Rudolph, completed in 1994.  If this series of lectures and events is any indication, it's no wonder the publication went out of business; the whole thing was run extremely poorly.  The woman organizing this particular one was just beyond rude.

One of the speakers was an historian, Donald Albrecht, who knew quite a lot about Rudolph, the other was Rudolph's lighting designer, Ernst Wagner, who also still lives in the house.  My friend and I had arrived a bit early, and were the first ones there. Wagner let us in and was really very, very sweet and hospitable.

The house is on East 58th Street, if I remember correctly.  Rudolph evidently had another house on Beekman Place where he spent most of his time, but he used this address to play around and test out different ideas.

Click on the pictures for larger views.

It was revealed later that the front facade actually reads as the interior of the house in section: the arrangement of all the floors and circulation routes and everything else, all the way to the back.

Living/ Music Room/ Library:

Kitchen:

If you look closely, the white horizontal sort of shelves in front of the glassware are actually stairs leading up to the second floor:

TV Room/ Dining/ Back Terrace:

All images ©2007, Heidi Gelover and Ryan Witte