A milli A milli A milli
- Death of the dream job: "We get it drilled into our heads at an early age: “Follow your dream. Follow your dream!” But no one ever told us to be willing to make drastic and necessary changes to that dream as technology and people and the world changed around us. So follow your dream. But whatever you do, don’t you dare waste another minute looking for your dream job." What a call to arms. Damn.
- Chicago's West Loop will be getting a new Green Line El station. I'd like to think this diagram I blogged in 2004 helped make it happen.
- "...Obama is the first president since Kennedy who’s psychically, if not ancestrally, urban. He has an intuitive feel for cities. The résumé item that rolled so disparagingly off the tongues of Republicans during their convention—“He’s a community organizer”—wasn’t just a knock on his experience but his big-city life. It’s hard to think of another president in recent memory who could play a ferocious game of pickup basketball. Or would reach for a smoke in times of stress. And one could certainly never imagine Barack Obama retiring on a ranch."
- On Michael Wolf's "Transparent City" photographic exhibition (running now at MoCP):
"In Chicago, the buildings are spread out, they’re more loosely structured, and ten- or twelve-story parking garages are interspersed between them. From the garages, you can look into buildings. I would go up onto the twelfth floor of a parking structure and get a nice view into the neighboring building... one evening I was looking at a photograph I had shot and I saw in it a man giving me the middle finger. In the exact moment he made that gesture I pressed the shutter, even though I had probably been standing there for twenty minutes.
It set off a chain reaction in me, and I began to look through every file at 200 percent magnification to see what else was going on in those windows. I saw hands on computer mice and family photographs on the desks of CEOs; I saw people watching flat-screen TVs in the evening. It was a bit lonely, particularly when I was photographing corporate office towers during the first banking crisis in November–December 2007—I could see through my telephoto lens the tension and stress those bankers were feeling. By zooming in on details, I manage to introduce a certain vernacular visual language as well as balance the faraway with the up close."
- MVRDV consistently create the most exciting and visionary architectural concepts I've seen. I feel like I'm looking at sci-fi movie concept art-- but no-- this stuff is getting built. Holy crap.
1/08/2009
