Archivo de la etiqueta: the Times

A BIG Heart for Times Square

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BIG?NYC by BIG

It’s that time of year again. The candy and flowers will be purchased in unthinkable amounts, reservations for over-priced/hyped restaurants have long been booked (hopefully), and architects have their hand at the daft populist messages that make the cold mid-February air that much more oppressive. Sponsored by the Times Square Alliance, the annual “heart sculpture” project asks architects to re-envision the ubiquitous heart graphic as a interactive urban emoticon. This year it’s BIG, and the gooey statement for 2012, you ask? “More people = more love.”

BIG?NYC distills the blurry and flashy business of experiencing Times Square down to its constituent elements–namely, “movement, lights, the masses”–and reconfigures them in a tidy, monolithic package. The project is comprised of acrylic tubes arranged in a 10′-by-10′-10′ cubic volume and illuminated by a series of LEDs embedded in the base. At night,when the lights are activated, a deep red heart-shape glow will emanate from the dense grove of tubes. Sensors surrounding the installation collect energy from the footsteps of gathering visitors which is immediately converted into light, providing the project’s big payoff: “the huddled crowd makes the heart burn brighter. . . . A heart created from a collective cluster of individual constituents.”

BIG?NYC is the fourth in the Times Square Alliance-sponsored series of Valentine’s Day public art installations. Past winners include Gage/Clemenceau’s overwrought, Maya-inflected confection, Moorhead & Moorhead’s winking “Ice Heart” and Freecell’s curious ‘de-constructed’ take. BIG’s installation opens tonight and will run through the end of the month.

The Weekender: M.T.A.’s Graphic Design Solution

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If you live in New York, or even if you’re visiting the city, it’s likely that your experience with the subway includes unexpectedly rerouted trains, confusing, text-heavy signs, taped off stations, and other reasons to roll your eyes or let out an expletive. And with so much planned work on the weekends, you might as well stay at home to keep blood pressure low on your days off.

Well, it’s about time we all exclaimed “I’m mad as hell and I can’t take it anymore!” The New York Times Magazine recently enlightened us about the new Weekender website, an elegantly designed digital solution to some of New York’s public transportation woes. Better yet, the story behind the Weekender is a wonderful segment of graphic design history. Click to learn more!


The Weekender view of Brooklyn

The Weekender site boasts an interactive map that can be clicked, zoomed, panned and expanded to see live updates on weekend service interruption. Blinking dots and shaded lines grab your attention and graphically indicate planned work.

To produce the refined and coherent graphic, M.T.A. sought out Massimo Vignelli, the designer of the 1972 New York subway map. The Times explained how this iconic map has lived on in design exhibitions more so than in local New York history.  At the time, Vignelli’s new representation of the subway system was revolutionary, replacing the previous chart of meandering, geographically accurate train routes with a simplified graphic made of bold bands of color with angled, beveled edges.


Vignelli’s 1972 subway map. Image via the New York Times Magazine.

Vignelli’s abstract representation skewed geographic details to create a more functional product. Of the more notable adjustments, the reduction of Central Park from a rectangle into a square and the shrinking of Midtown West, an area with fewer subway stops, did not bode well with the New Yorkers of the 70s. Vignelli argued that above ground geographies did not need to be accurate, as they may obscure our grasp of our below ground experience. Apparently too far ahead of its time, the map was replaced in 1979 with one that retained more geographic accuracy.


A detail of the M.T.A. subway map currently in use: New Yorkers have grown accustomed to seeing tangled, serpentine lines.

Today, Vignelli’s design ideas seem incredibly relevant, especially on a digital platform. For the revised map on the Weekender Website, Vignelli and his team removed even more geographic details, using basic white shapes on pale gray to describe the boroughs, and notably leaving out parks. One could almost forget that a river separates Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens. And as an inter-borough commuter, that is actually something I do forget as soon as I push through the station turnstile. What do I remember? To stay off the E train this week, too much planned work.


The Weekender view of Manhattan and Queens

“The Architecture of Negotiation:” Michael Arad and the WTC Memorial

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Michael Arad — partner at Handel Architects and originator of the WTC Memorial design — is the story embedded within one of the biggest news stories of the year. The New York Times has a fascinating account of his role in the process of building the memorial that depicts the transformation of Arad from a young architect aggressively (and perhaps ineffectually) promoting his scheme to a calm, politically-deft actor in a city-wide drama.

Handel Architects have released a new series of images from the memorial, which opened to great fanfare yesterday morning. Read on.

An early study model and sketch of the scheme.

Arad, who once served in the Israeli army, was only 34 when his scheme for the Memorial was selected. That’s young to lead a major construction project in lower Manhattan, and even younger to lead the most contested public memorial project in the history of the United States. Yet according to the Times, the tribulations of the project (aggressors in the form of Daniel Libeskind, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and even Santiago Calatrava) have provoked considerable political and professional grace from Arad, who found himself with few friends and fewer supporters in the early years of the project.

Arad commented on his politicking, saying, “When I started this project, I was a young architect… I was very apprehensive about any changes to the design. Whether I wanted to or not, I learned that you can accept some changes to its form without compromising its intent. But it’s a leap of faith that I didn’t want to make initially — to put it mildly.” Yet, over time, he made friends with city officials, building “a series of supporters that had my back,” making inroads with the city government and pursuing support “sometimes openly, and sometimes through back channels.”

If the story sounds familiar, that’s because it’s an archetypical one; a die cast perhaps most famously in “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” in which Lincoln transforms one-time enemies into his most trusted allies. Arad’s story is proof that architects can still affect the public realm with political savvy, rather than confining themselves to inter-academic squabbles.

Check out Handel Architect’s images here and here.

All images (c) Handel Architects.

Meet New People through mmmm… and the Times Square Alliance

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Courtesy of mmmm…

Ever think you could find a moment of peace and quiet to have an intimate conversation with a friend in the middle of Times Square?  The designers that go by mmmm… must have considered the same thing.  Starting August 16th, people visiting Times Square can enjoy a private moment with up to eight people in one of mmmm…’s Meeting Bowls supported by the Times Square Alliance. The 5-foot tall, 7-foot wide pieces of street furniture will be available as a visiting exhibition until September 16th between 8am and midnight.

In this effort to humanize the otherwise frenetic city of New York, the designers at mmmm… hope to inspire intimate dialogue and interaction in the commercial center.  These semi-spherical forms are more than benches; they seat people across from one another, obscuring all the other events outside of the space.  They even rock gently as people enter and leave the bowls.


A Grand Central Kiosk, Made From 1,800 Copies of the NYT

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Those of you anti-iPad luddites who complain about the loss of the smudgy, visceral pleasure of reading will love the newest project from Brooklyn-based studio Tacklebox. They just completed construction on a sales kiosk for up-market cosmetics brand Aesop (for whom they’re currently building a store presence in Nolita) made from 1,800 copies of the New York Times.

The Grand Central Station-located kiosk is meant to harken back to the era of the New York Times-reading suburban commuter, who would stop at a newspaper kiosk to pick up a copy of the Grey Lady (the modern consumer, meanwhile, must be content with picking up a tube of $45 dollar Australian moisturizer, which we assume is meant to keep their NYT digital edition-swiping fingers looking good). Click through for more images of the lovely project.

While you could argue this is a huge affront to the Times, who’ve fought the dwindling newspaper business tooth and nail, I’d argue it’s a win for them: their brand is now being applied to other brands as a value-added veneer.

Tacklebox employee Ravi Raj (and, full disclosure, friend) explained, “I think the most interesting thing about it is that there are 1,800 copies of the NY Times used, with four weeks of hand tearing – quite a production in such a short time.” 1,800 copies of the newspaper were pressed between pieces of powder-coated steel by Tacklebox’s Brooklyn fabricators. Raj continued, “For me, it was really fun to see how involved our fabricators were into the project – their whole shop was literally covered in the New York Times and the ink was constantly all over their hands.”

Here’s Tacklebox‘s official statement:

“The kiosk was built out of 1,000+ old recycled NY Times newspapers and power coated aluminum which provides the surface on which the products sit. The kiosk is meant to serve as Aesop’s handshake to NY and NY commuters as it is the first retail endeavor on the continent. The handshake is a symbol of both the an introduction to the brand as well as the use Aesop makes of hand demonstrations which are used to introduce Aesop to new customers. The kiosk was intended as a place for information, as well as a place of familiarity, hence the use of the NY Times which is part of the commuters’ daily routine.”

Check out more fabrication photos on Tacklebox’s blog, here.