A User's Guide to New York City pt. 1: Tenants' Rights Flashcards

[Image: Tenants' rights flashcards by Candy Chang].

This will be the first of two posts about recent projects by designer Candy Chang; each presents an awesome example of what a user's guide to New York City might look like.

[Images: Tenants' rights flashcards by Candy Chang].

The images shown here document Chang's tenants' right flashcards, a deck of cards with legal advice for apartment renters in New York City.

As the project description itself reads: "The flash cards translate New York's official Tenants' Rights Guide into a fun and friendly format that covers everything from security deposits and subletting to paint and privacy so residents can enjoy good times while becoming empowered residents."

[Image: Tenants' rights flashcards by Candy Chang].

"What's my landlord required to repair?" Chang asked herself at the beginning of the project, realizing that there was very little about New York City's legal renters' rights that the general public really knew. "How does rent stabilization work? When can my landlord enter my apartment?"

But now you can just bust out this flashcard deck and remind yourself.

[Images: Tenants' rights flashcards by Candy Chang].

It's such a great idea, and the design possibilities for other legal situations are almost literally endless. From photographers' rights in the UK to a pamphlet my college housemate once made about your rights as a driver on the U.S. highway system (vis-a-vis police searches and "probable cause"), there seem to be hundreds of highly useful card decks just waiting to happen. London zoning code, translated into a card deck. Municipal water rights in California—or standards of water safety and cleanliness.

What makes this particular card deck even better, I think, is Chang's use of graphic design in the legal service of a specific community in a specific city—and it's an approach that she used again in another project that I will be posting about here soon.

Check out the flashcards, meanwhile (including how to order a deck for only $10), here.

Best New Blogs of 2009

How exciting to see that Edible Geography, BLDGBLOG's partner-site launched earlier this year by Nicola Twilley, has been named one of the Best Blogs of 2009 by Kevin Nguyen and The Bygone Bureau. Nguyen elaborates on his decision, writing that Edible Geography "talks about how global warming affects the quality of Czech pilsners, the EU's legal standards of beauty for produce, and the Subway sandwich shop being built atop a crane at the Freedom Tower construction site. She digs up the obscure and fascinating." Congratulations, Nicola!

Will Wiles's Spillway also gets a nicely deserved shout-out; as does Hilobrow, a consistently awesome and very wide-ranging collaborative effort by Matthew Battles and Josh Glenn. "13 Ways of Looking at Apollo" is a particular favorite post of mine.

Congrats, everybody! Read about the rest over at Bygone Bureau.

It would be wrong in every way, however, not to include mammoth on a list of the best blogs launched in 2009, and Diffusive Architectures by Carl Douglas is another 2009-born blog worthy of more attention. Veg.itecture also sprouted earlier this year.

Love in the Time of Home Quarantine

Nicola Twilley has pointed out this awesomely over-the-top post about home quarantine measures taken in the face of swine flu.

From sealing off your home ventilation system to turning the basement into a functioning medical ward—stashing "Pandemic Go-Kits" in the trunk of your car and wearing a full biohazard suit along the way—this is certainly one, albeit rather extreme, way to keep yourself safe from catching the flu. To the author's credit, however, he does mention that one of his children is quite sick.

But the architectural transformations implied here—a suburban house in Utah becomes a post-apocalyptic medical ward with just a quick trip to Home Depot in between—is remarkable. In fact, a fantastic article could be written about the vernacular architecture of American survivalism, with an emphasis on the incidental equipment necessary for living in home quarantine.

In any case, the setting:

I live in a 2 story house, the basement is designed as a separate apartment; there is a kitchen, laundry room and 3 bedrooms down there, with a separate outside entrance. I live in the country on 50 acres and there are very few people around us. I have 8 children, 7 of whom live at home.

And here, specifically, is "the quarantine plan," if you'll excuse my quoting at great length:

The entire basement will immediately become the sick ward. The air vents, doorways and the upstairs entrance to the basement will be sealed off with 6 mil plastic to deter air flow. The window to the sick room will be open to allow fresh air circulation. I plan to get a UV Air filtration system to use in the basement as well. The sick person will be confined to a bedroom while in the house and will be allowed to play outside in a designated area that the other children will not be allowed to go to. The bathroom will become a decon room to dress and undress for entry into the sick rooms. The basement laundry room will be the only place the sick person and caretakers laundry will be done. All dishes used by the sick person will be washed in the sink downstairs. The sick person will be required to wear an N95 mask anytime someone is in the room with them, anyone going into the room will need full protective gear on (more on that in a minute). The sick rooms will be sanitized twice a day including changing and washing all linens on the bed. All paper trash (kleenexes, etc) that is able will be burned in our fire pit daily. All other trash will be collected into a garbage bags and disposed of twice daily.

To get this stage, "several specific preps" are required; these include purchasing the right breathing masks. The author points out, for instance, that "the filters I have for my respirator are 95% (like N95) filters—meaning they miss 5%. I’m planning on getting N100 filters to replace them. I’ll be doing that in the next week or two."

On a side note, there is such a thing as too much filtration. Last week, for instance, a Miami hotel accidentally gave some of its guests Legionnaire's Disease by installing filters so powerful that they prevented even bacteria-killing chlorine from entering the drinking water; this led to a bloom of the often-fatal Legionella bacteria. As Miami county's "top epidemiologist" points out in the article, "What's ironic is the hotel installed a special filtration system to enhance the quality of their drinking water."

Home preparation doesn't end with filters, however; there is psychological preparation, as well. Feelings of cabin fever and claustrophobia inspired by the spatial condition of quarantine can be partially relieved, we read, through playing "classic games like Clue, Pictionary, and Scrabble"... while the rest of your family is locked behind an air-seal in the basement.

A commenter on the original post writes: "It's good to be prepared, but, stop a minute and think about it. Tyvek® hazmat suits? Full-face respirators? You're likely to scare your kid to death with the Moon Suit!" But the blog has its sights set on more important things; its tagline is nothing less than "Ready for anything."

Cracking the Planet

[Image: By Jack van Wijk, Eindhoven University of Technology].

My brother pointed out this series of maps over at New Scientist. Combining a Buckminster Fuller-like interest in the most efficient way to map a sphere in two dimensions with a deployment of new algorithms, the maps show alternative ways of representing the earth's surface.

[Images: By Jack van Wijk, Eindhoven University of Technology].

"Making truly accurate maps of the world is difficult," New Scientist points out, "because it is mathematically impossible to flatten a sphere's surface without distorting or cracking it. The new technique developed by computer scientist Jack van Wijk at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands uses algorithms to 'unfold' and cut into the Earth's surface in a way that minimises distortion, and keeps the distracting effect of cutting into the map to a minimum."

[Image: The world as a near-continuous coastline around one global ocean. By Jack van Wijk, Eindhoven University of Technology].

In van Wijk's own abstract, published by The Cartographic Journal, we read that these "myriahedral projections," as they're called, "are a new class of methods for mapping the earth":

The globe is projected on a myriahedron, a polyhedron with a very large number of faces. Next, this polyhedron is cut open and unfolded. The resulting maps have a large number of interrupts, but are (almost) conformal and conserve areas. A general approach is presented to decide where to cut the globe, followed by three different types of solution. These follow from the use of meshes based on the standard graticule, the use of recursively subdivided polyhedra and meshes derived from the geography of the earth.

It would be amazing to see what effect this technique might have on a much smaller scale—if, for instance, you could run one of these cuts through a populated area like London, say, and watch as parts of the city fractal off to opposite sides of the planet, the city's roads opened up into algorithmic fissures.

(Thanks, Kevin!)

Pirate Radio Speleology

For those of you who have enjoyed the posts here about music, sound, noise, urban acoustics, glacial reverberatories, and their like, I will be on the radio tonight speaking about those very things, in conversation with DJ /rupture on his show Mudd Up!.

[Image: And they ascend the antenna... Photographer unknown; photo from a 1969 issue of Broadcaster magazine].

You can stream it live internationally, if you're so inclined; it will run from 7-8pm EST tonight, Monday, December 14. Expect some archaeology, some radio cave-mapping, some sonic warfare, and even a few of my own favorite rekkids.

Eat the Earth

Over on Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley takes a look at the under-appreciated art of geophagy: eating soil. There is apparently a whole subculture around the practice, Twilley writes, in one case coming complete with "tasting notes for soil, which draw heavily on the vocabulary of wine appreciation."

At one such earthen event, participants are actually served "two or three wine glasses, each filled with soil from a different organic farm"—and these samplings of different geographies do matter. "In other words, if the earth on which your farm sits has 'grassy,' 'olive,' or 'smoky' notes, those flavours will recur in the organic spinach or goat’s milk cheese you produce. Smelling the soil first simply helps you become aware of the continuity."

I don't see myself sprinkling farm-fresh soil on my salads any time soon, I'm afraid, but check out the rest of the post over at Edible Geography.

Blackout

[Image: From The Night the Lights Went Out by the staff of the New York Times].

I'm excited to say that I will be leading a research seminar at the Pratt Institute's School of Architecture in the spring of 2010. I've decided to post the general course description here, simply because I find it interesting; I'm very much looking forward to exploring this more in the spring.

BLACKOUT: Failures of Power and The City
In this guided research seminar we will look at blackouts—the total loss of electrical power and its impact on the built environment. From the blackouts of NYC in 1965 and 1977 to the complete blackout of the northeast in August 2003; from the “rolling blackouts” of Enron-era California to the flickering electrical supplies of developing economies; from terrorist attacks on physical infrastructure to aerial bombing campaigns in Iraq and beyond; loss of power affects millions of people, urban and rural, worldwide.

[Image: From The Night the Lights Went Out by the staff of the New York Times].

But how do blackouts also affect the form, function, social experience, and even ecology of the city? What do blackouts do to infrastructure—from hospitals to police and traffic systems—as well as to the cultural lives of a city’s residents? While blackouts can lead to a surge in crime and looting, they can also catalyze informal concerts, sleep-outs, and neighborhood festivities. Further, how do such things as “dark sky” regulations transform what we know as nighttime in the city—and how does the temporary disappearance of electrical light change the city for species other than humans? This raises a final point: before electricity, cities at night presented a fundamentally different spatio-cultural experience. That is, the pre-industrial night was always blacked-out (something to consider when we read that, according to the International Energy Agency, nearly 25% of the global human population currently lacks access to electricity).

We will look at multiple examples of blackouts—internationally and throughout history—exploring what caused them, what impacts they had, and what spatial opportunities exist for architects in a blacked-out city. On the one hand, we might ask: how do we make the city more resilient against future failures of electrical power? But, on the other: how might we take advantage of blackouts for a temporary re-programming of the city?

(The seminar is only open to students at Pratt, unfortunately, but I hope that some of the research will find its way onto BLDGBLOG. Stay tuned—and let me know if you have any of your own suggestions for readings/viewings).