June 2003
The fabulous ruins of Detroit
The fabulous ruins of Detroit.
Awesome, extensive photo gallery of the ruins of downtown Detroit.
It is shocking that this is what a major American city looks like. It looks like Yugoslavia during the war.
There are some hopeful notes detailing Detroit's slow rise from the ashes, but the pictures speak for themselves.
This is what happens when you don't have good public transit - esp. because the people that Own The City want you to drive everywhere.
(Brought to this blog's attention via Attaboy.
Architectural Catfight!
Rem Koolhaas to Daniel Libeskind: Oh, Snap!
"Instead of the two towers - the sublime - the city will live with five towers, wounded by a single scything movement of the architect, surrounding two black holes. New York will be marked by a massive representation of hurt that projects only the overbearing self-pity of the powerful. Instead of the confident beginning of the next chapter, it captures the stumped fundamentalism of the superpower. Call it closure."
-from Rem Koolhaas' great article in the new Wired, "I _ NY"
the $12,000 font change
Design consultants charge $12,000 to change city's font from Univers to Rotis.
Can I have that job?
So our new civic logo font is Rotis, beloved of pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies as an alternate for the old Neutrogena-y standard, Herman Zapf's Optima.)
This font was actually designed by Otl Aicher, the German graphic designer most famous for his Olympic pictograms used at the 1976 games...which have come to be very 'Montreal' symbols in my memory.But Rotis is just...wrong.
The city should have used a typeface from a Montreal designer - a trendy distressed typeface from 2Rebels that more accurately resembles our fractured civic politics, the state of our "roads," and the general unkemptness of the city since the mega-merger.
(via Montreal City Weblog)
