The ultra-modern Talmadge Memorial Bridge carries people across the Savannah River, while historic sternwheeler paddleboats carry people up and down the river.
City Scene: Going Underground
London’s famous Underground signs now have an electric treatment, helping them stand out in the night.
Categories: London, United Kingdom
Leave a comment
Seeing Stars in Los Angeles
Astronomers Monument - Los Angeles, California
Long before people who make their living pretending to be other people were called “stars” there were people in the Hollywood hills who made their living looking at real stars.
They are the scientists at the Griffith Observatory, built in 1933 high above the city in an area that was thought to be safe from the coastal basin’s famous smog. We think of smog as a modern phenomenon, but it actually pre-dates European settlement of the area. Early explorers reported smog and haze hanging over the area from the fires of local indians.
Back to the point — outside of Griffith Observatory is a monument to some of the world’s great astronomers: Hipparchus, Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and William Herschel. It was commissioned by the United States government and designed by Archibald Garner.
Skyline of the Week: Frankfurt
Frankfurt skyline
While other German cities push their architectural envelope into unusual small shapes, Frankfurt is the nation’s recognized leader in skyscrapers, with dozens over 30 stories residing in harmony with the city’s historic spires.
Frankfurt skyline
Categories: Frankfurt, Germany, Skyline of the Week
Leave a comment
Tracking Cell Phones as Urban Art
About a year ago, a security researcher noticed that it is possible to read a file on someone’s home computer and create a map showing the cell towers that their iPhone has accessed. It was an interesting hack, and not that big a deal until the “journalists” of the blogosphere got wind of it.
Suddenly, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth across the internet that ZOMG!!! U R Iphone iz Traxxing U!!!11!! as people with below average intelligences put one and one together and got eleven. Somehow it never occurred to them that a device that connects to cell towers and wifi hotspots might want to remember where those connections are so it can make better, faster connections in the future. If the feature was left out, it would have been ridiculed as “LOLz Apple FAIL!” But since it was included, it became “OMG! Security hazard!!!”
Out of curiosity, I tried to make a map from my data, but couldn’t because I have my computer set to encrypt my iPhone backups. I disabled the encryption and waited a couple of weeks, then made some maps, and the results turned out to be… pretty.
Cell phone tracks across downtown Chicago
Above is a map showing my travels around Chicago. As you can see, I kept pretty much to the downtown area during the time period in question. But the grid patten generated from my travels makes for a great piece of art.
Cell phone tracks around the Pacific Northwest
Looking at my travels around the Seattle/Vancouver/Victoria area from afar is much messier. Lots of overlapping blobs, but you can clearly see certain routes that I traveled repeatedly. More interesting, is all the cell towers that light up on the islands. I only visited a couple of those islands. The dots are from when I went past those islands on ferries.
Cell phone tracks in the Seattle area
A close-up view of the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond/Issaquah area reveals the same grid that showed up on the Chicago map.
Cell phone tracks in Victoria, British Columbia
The same thing can be seen when zooming in on Victoria, British Columbia.
Phantom cell phone tracks in Las Vegas
And then there’s this. This is a record of my phone in northwest Las Vegas. I’m not sure how this happened. I’ve never been to Las Vegas, or anywhere else in Nevada, but apparently my iPhone thinks I have. Nevada is one of the four remaining states I haven’t been to yet (Alaska, Hawaii, and Utah are the others). So, I think it’s safe to conclude that this so-called “tracking” that all the dumb people got their knickers in a twist about isn’t exactly 100 percent accurate. But it is at least very pretty.
Categories: Uncategorized
Leave a comment
City Scene: The World’s Best Warehouse Gates
Just because a building is an industrial warehouse doesn’t mean it has to be ugly. For example, these gates on a food distribution warehouse in the Smithfields section of London. Not only are they beautifully ornate, they’re painted in a festival of colors.
You can see more great London architecture on our sister web site, London Architecture.
Categories: London, United Kingdom
Leave a comment
City Scene: Potatoes Under the Tracks
Pretty much everyone eats potatoes now and again. And those tubers have to come from somewhere. People who live in the Southwark area of London can thank this potato-monger for their spuds. The olde-tymie shoppe is located underneath London Bridge in Borough Market.
You can see other London bridges on our sister web site: London Architecture.
Diamonds in the Rough: The Ravenel Bridge
Traditionally, the city of Charleston, South Carolina is associated with historic architecture, stately plantations, and generally old things. But the biggest thing in Charleston Harbor (aside from the cargo ships loading up on freshly minted BMW cars), is a new piece of architecture: The Arthur Ravenel, Junior Bridge.
The bridge’s span is held over the Cooper River by a set of concrete diamonds and fans of cables. According to Wikipedia, this is the second-longest cable-stayed bridge in the Western Hemisphere, after the Audubon Bridge in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana.
Glass Cones Mark What’s Down
Festhall/Mitte subways station in Frankfurt
A pair of tall glass cones form an atrium over a the Festhall/Messe subway station in Frankfurt. We’ve seen similar glass cones used in other places. For example, the entrance to the Japanese Nursing Association building in Tokyo.
Categories: architecture, Frankfurt, Germany
Leave a comment
City Scene: Buckingham Palace in the Morning
You have to get up pretty early to beat the tourists to Buckingham Palace in London. But it’s worth it.
Just you, a couple of Beefeaters and bobbies, and the sun casting long shadows across the perfect forecourt. If you have the opportunity to go inside, do. It’s really a great tour, and you can do it at your own pace. Allow at least two hours. Four is better.
And since we’re talking about London, don’t forget Towrs has a sister web site that specializes in London architecture. Amazingly, it’s called London Architecture.
City Scene: The Dimming of Harrods
Tourists who visit the famous Harrods Department Store in London are continually wowed by the sparkly baubles available inside. Those who visit after dark, however, get to witness the majestic building edged in lights, an entirely different delight.
Unfortunately, right now one side of the historic building is being renovated, so the view isn’t everything it should be.
And while you have London on your mind, visit our sister web site, London Architecture Info.
City Scene: Rainy Day Cyclists
People in Berlin don’t let a little thing like rain stop them from cycling. When this photo was taken, it had been raining all day, but still there were hundreds of people riding their bikes around the city.
Categories: Berlin, City Scenes, Germany
Leave a comment
City Scene: The Monument
You have to be a pretty confident, important, and historic city to have a monument that is simply called “The Monument,” and London is just that type of city.
This is The Monument, a monument marking the historic Great Fire of London in 1666, which left an estimated 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 residents homeless. If you lay The Monument down, its tip will touch the bakery where the fire started. If you’re athletically inclined, you can climb up the stairs inside to a viewing platform for a couple of pounds.
Westend Tower: A Famous Frankfurter
Westend Tower, Frankfurt
The skyscraper known as Westend Tower may not be Frankfurt’s tallest, but it is one of the city’s best known. It was among the first to use a decorative crown to set itself apart from others in a skyline, and has become a key to identifying Frankfurt for people around the world.
City Scene: Dom’s Domes
The domes of the Berlin Cathedral rise into a misty 6am sky. The grassy area it faces is a favorite hangout for latter-day punks, goths, larpers, and wannabe vampires late at night.
Making a Big Deal of Small Things
We spotted this in the window of the Jourdan & Müller architecture firm. It looks like its making a scale model of the entire city of Frankfurt. Very handy for skyscraper fans!
Categories: Frankfurt, Germany, Jourdan & Müller
Leave a comment
City Scene: Morning in Berlin
A misty morning makes Berlin’s landmarks stand out against the sky.
SOM’s Master Plan For Bahrain Bay
Perpetual skyscraper foundry, SOM, added its master planed district for Manama, Bahrain to its project pages. Bahrain Bay is one component of the North Manama Master Plan, but it’s a whopper.
Bahrain Bay. Image courtesy of SOM.
Like many flagship Middle Eastern mega-projects, this one rises from the Persian Gulf on a 4.6 million square foot artificial island, linked by freeways to the mainland.
Completion is scheduled for 2017.
Massive Project Gets Underway in DC
A rendering of the CityCenter DC project. Courtesy of Hines.
These days, few developers are developing. And those that are, are doing so with the help of governments. That’s what’s happening in Washington, DC where Hines and Archstone have broken ground on CityCetner DC. Here’s the press release:
The Blog is Back
I no longer believe in the technological fairyland that is known as “The Cloud.”
The Cloud is the latest technology buzzword that dot-com companies are banking on to keep the industry afloat for a little longer. You’ve probably seen TV commercials that mention “the cloud.” Or if you read a lot of business magazines, the suit-and-tie version of it is “SaaS” (Software as a Service).
The cloud is a great idea. And I truly believe that some day it will revolutionize information access.
Today is not that day.
Today is the day I bid farewell to Google’s Blogspot service. This cloud blogging app (it would have been called a “virtual publisher” in the 90′s dot-com boom) is what I have run two commercial and one personal blog on for the last four years. Before that I used a homegrown CMS.
But, as you may have read earlier, Google lost the blogs. All of them. Hundreds of articles, photos, and reader comments vaporized into “the cloud.”
I’m not running blogging software on my own server. It’s more time, more money, and more work than just using a cloud app like Big G’s Blogspot/Blogger. But then again, Google’s offering was free. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in business, it’s that very often you get what you paid for.
I paid nothing to use Google’s blogging service. And now that’s what Google has left me with: Nothing.
Thanks to some help from the people across the street at Microsoft’s Bing headquarters, I’m managing to slowly recover many of the articles that were formerly on this blog. Sadly, all of the comments our loyal readers have left are gone forever.
Still, this is an opportunity to look forward, not back. Time to rejuvenate this blog and increase the level of regular posting.
It’ll take a couple of days for me to get as many of the old articles back as I can. After that, we’ll plow ahead with new content. Set phasers on stun, and your RSS reader to http://feed.chicagoarchitecture.info.
Thanks for being a reader.
Editor
Categories: Announcements
Leave a comment