Pruned has anentireseries of under spaces, reconfigured, re-imagined, repurposed spaces under viaducts of which this example from Milwaukee is just the latest.
New York City has a lot of these dead spaces that are too often used as parking, (and often not even that) that slice through formerly connected neighborhoods.
(I’m thinking specifically of areas under the BQE or the elevated trains in Queens or the Metro North line through Harlem.)
The examples at Pruned offer how these spaces might be returned to the community as gathering and linking spots instead of just blight.
I noticed the print ads for in amNewYork yesterday for The Pump, a new healthy NYC mini-chain restaurant. Here they’ve stretched their advertising dollars by creating what amounts to ad, but releasing it as a YouTube video. Smart.
Students in SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program took a stab at design challenges within the system. Several of the projects I felt created problems where there weren’t any in order to come up with something clever.
However the ReDirect project by student Russ Maschmeyer found an obviously problematic information design question and created a very elegant solution.
Of his project he comments:
“Service changes are bad. Very, very bad. They often involve doubling, sometimes tripling the time it takes you to get where you’re going. To add insult to injury, the accompanying service change signage is such a riddle of dates, times, and re-directions that it often requires multiple readings to glean even a basic understanding of the change. For any transit system experiencing redirects, there are four key messages that need to be conveyed: alert the riders to a change, provide a quick overview of that change, course correct any wayward travelers, and finally, guide riders through the hallways to the proper platforms. If done right, no one should have to stop to study a sign, but study them we do. Currently, the MTA employs a single, densely packed sheet of 8.5x11” paper to convey an entire set of messaging. This is a problem worth solving.
Amen to all that. Simple, clear, and fixed something badly in need of fixing.
But he doesn’t romanticize the roadway; in the notes, he calls it “a dark, spotty, viral, cancerous, bronchial, pneumatic, and convoluted mass of gray matter, at best.” What fired his imagination was not love, but horror. To him, the highway represents the nadir of American transportation culture and the melancholy triumph of the dark lord Robert Moses.
The post looks great, and Joey added sweet pics of the interior of Bloomberg LP. (My DMD location.) Many, many thanks to Joey and her blog for posting my review.
