[Image: From Redraw, Reboot by Ryan Sullivan].Designer Ryan Sullivan recently got in touch with Redraw, Reboot, a series of new maps for the U.S. state of Massachusetts. [Image: From Redraw, Reboot by Ryan Sullivan].Sullivan's maps "explore new boundaries for municipalities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,"...
Twisty little passages
Churchyards and private farmlands throughout the German state of Bavaria are perforated from below by "more than 700 curious tunnel networks" whose "purpose remains a mystery." [Image: Photograph by Ben Behnke courtesy of Der Spiegel].As Der Spiegel reports, "The tunnel entrances are sometimes located...
Bird's Eye View
The last time we heard from photographer Gerco de Ruijter, he was photographing tree farms from above using fishing poles and kites; now he's back, having explored the biological edges of aerial photography by sending a pigeon aloft with a small video camera to perform a kind of animal surveillance...
L.A. Stunt School
[Image: From L.A. Stunt School (2007) by Catrina Stewart].In 2007, Catrina Stewart, then a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, proposed a stunt school for the city of Los Angeles, complete with ramps, explosions, and airborne students flying on ankle cables over spun webs of emergency netting....
Death and Marriage, Weather and Birds
[Image: Artist Jae Rhim Lee models her "mushroom death suit"; photo by James Duncan Davidson/TED].Some quick links for a Wednesday evening:—Artist Jae Rhim Lee has designed a "mushroom death suit," a posthumous garment impregnated with mushroom spores that will consume the corpse eventually wearing...
The house of mechanical animals
The new film Convento documents work by Christiaan Zwanikken, an artist who preserves and literally reanimates dead animals using recycled motor parts and pumps rescued from scrapyards. He then "breeds these new species in a 400-year old monastery in Portugal," which his family has been restoring for...
The Weather Bank
A slideshow over at National Geographic features this image by photographer Ian Wood, showing, in the magazine's own words, "what might be called extreme Inca landscaping."[Image: The weather bowl at Moray, Peru; photo by Ian Wood/Alamy, courtesy of National Geographic]."Three enormous pits, each with...
Geopolitical Redesign, or: A Bridge Between Europe and Africa
[Image: A cable car connects Europe and Africa, by Fabio Tozzoli and Eliana Salazar, Bologna (Italy); via Domus].Back in May, the revitalized Domus magazine asked to see "your ideas for a connection between Africa and Europe across the Strait of Gibraltar," suggesting in the process that the best results...
Insurrectionary Memory
[Image: From a press pack released last month by Factory Fifteen].This is just a quick note that I've updated an older post, embedding a short film called Robots of Brixton by Kibwe X-Kalibre Tavares of Factory Fifteen, whose work that post describes. Check it out if you get a chance....
Ruin Index
Welsh soldiers are currently documenting abandoned neighborhoods in the divided city of Nicosia, Cyprus, photographing a region that "stretches across the entire breadth of the island, covering 134 square miles." Their ultimate goal is "to catalog everything in the area of the city that is part of a...
Those of you in the UK on 19 July can take a "smell walk of Sheffield’s University Quarter followed by a presentation on the role of smell in urban design." You'll learn about "the unique qualities offered by smell to placemaking; contemporary experiences of odors in town and cities; [and] design issues...
Interpretation-Based Spatiality
[Image: A collage of various buildings by Robert Scarano, from photos by Gabrielle Plucknette for the New York Times].After reading today that a New York appeals court has upheld a ban on architect Robert Scarano, preventing him from practicing in the city, I found this fascinating anecdote published...
Gotham Sans
[Image: The Dark Knight Rises, courtesy of Warner Brothers].Paul Owen of the Guardian today attempts a thorough critique of director Christopher Nolan's most recent films, by way of nothing more than the new poster for The Dark Knight Rises, due out in summer 2012. The poster presents us with "an empty...
Situationist Drawing Device
[Image: The "Situationist Drawing Device" by Ji Soo Han and Paul Ornsby].The "Situationist Drawing Device" is a backpack-sized mechanism for recording the experience of landscape. Designed by Ji Soo Han and Paul Ornsby, and operating by way of mirrors, the Device "records a journey taken in an altered...
