Proposed by John S. Wright in 1849, the system was envisioned twenty years later when the State Legislature established the South, West, and Lincoln Park Commissions. Also referred as the “Emerald Necklace” since the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, it is composed by a series of streets and parks, some of them designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and William Le Baron Jenney. After the mid-twentieth century, the lack of proper funding, the split of management of the system as a whole (parks would be managed separately from the streets) and the migration of residents to the suburbs were some of the circumstances that accelerated the deterioration of the system. While portions of it, such as the Logan Square Boulevards District (an official city landmark district since 2005) still maintain the original character, other parts have just become underutilized areas and oversized streets that act as barriers within neighborhoods.
That is where we are now and this competition asks you to envision where we can be in the near future. These are some of the questions that we are asking ourselves and we want you to think about in your proposal: What if the system becomes a new transportation corridor in the city? What type of transportation would that be? What if the open space becomes an active layer and not just a passive one? What if this system provides activities that the city as a whole is lacking? What if the system becomes a tool for social cohesion? What if the system has a strong visual identity? What if it becomes an economic catalyst for the neighborhoods? What if the system is all of this and more?
Participants are asked to look at the urban scale and propose a framework for the entire boulevard system as well as provide answers and visualize the interventions at a smaller scale that can directly impact its potential users. Through images, diagrams and drawings we want to know what are those soft or hard, big or small, temporary or permanent interventions that can reactivate and reset the Boulevard System of Chicago.
Submission deadline is Monday, February 21, 2011.
Hopefully by predicting that we'll be seeing entries proposing the ubiquitous urban farm and alternative energy generating field, we won't actually be seeing too many of those.
Unrivaled by even the demographic upheavals seen during the Great Migrations of earlier eras, almost overnight the Muslim community of Chicago grew from a tiny minority to 99.9% of the city's population.
Here's two more to add to yesterday's blog list. First is the Institute for Augmented Ecology. What exactly is “augmented ecology?” Well that's what the Amsterdam-based group will try to find out.
Basically it's an exploration of the field before it gets to be defined and/or narrowed down by convention. For now it looks like a one year research-period starting Jan 2011 investigating the possibilities which the field of AR offers for connecting people to their direct environment, trying to propose tangents to explore and perhaps prototype new practices or technologies.
Organs Everywhere refers to the post-human condition of the disembodied human being, a cybernetic assemblage that challenges traditional notions of time and space. The aim of each issue is to imagine and explore ways for the technologically enhanced men and women of the future to socialize, play, design, domesticate and inhabit. The blog is a live platform where ideas from the zines are allowed to grow and evolve in conversation with academics, activists, film makers, technologists, economists, artists, futurists and designers.
Since it's been awhile, here's an extended list of blogs and sorta-kinda-maybe-like-blog blogs we've added to our links page in recent months, the first group being this month's additions.
Now for a different sort of swing, something less ominous than the Congressional variety and more likely to induce squee: Büro Wehberg's giant swings.
There's three of them, and they've been installed every summer at Autostadt, which is a kind of theme park devoted to cars located next to a Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany. Surely streets everywhere could use one of these. Instead of swinging (that is, if you can call swaying mere inches back and forth swinging) in cramped bus stops and subway trains, you fly between skyscrapers, above bumper to bumper traffic, and perhaps plunge into a lake or river right at the end. And it should be a permanent fixture, not a temporary hack. Have a cooling ride during the scorching heat of summer, and a few months later, an even more invigorating ride after the blizzard of the century has emptied out the streets.
We ended last year with one of our favorite photos of the decade: an extraterrestrial sunset photographed in 2005 by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. We thought we'd end this year with another Martian sunset. This one was captured last month by Spirit's twin, Opportunity, in a series of photographs, which the rover science team combined and enhanced to create a seamless simulated descent. A bonus footage included in the embedded video above shows the moon Phobos passing in front of the sun.
A quick quote from a PBS two-part documentary first broadcast in 2008 and based on the “definitive” book on cold, Tom Shachtman's Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold. The scientist quoted is Seth Lloyd, of MIT:
Getting to absolute zero is tough. Nobody's actually been there at absolute 0.000000, with an infinite number of zeros. That last little tiny bit of heat becomes harder and harder to get out. And, in particular, the timescales for getting it out get longer and longer and longer, the smaller and smaller the amounts of energy involved. So eventually, if you're talking about extracting an amount of energy that's sufficiently small, it would indeed take the age of the universe to do it. Also you, actually you'd need an apparatus the size of the universe to do it, but that's another story.
