The Bibliobarn’s Bibliobargains!
I love this idea. In the small village in Lower Austria where I like to spend the summer, there is a small disused bus shelter made of wood. I have been wondering if it could be turned into something like that – a reading shelter for the village kids, a stop for book crossing. But then it only makes sense if people use it. And that would mean more people passing through, but I like that it is so quiet here. And who would make sure it is not vandalized? Hmmm.
Exterior view of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, designed by Paula Scher, Pentagram, New York.
(Image credit: jonathan_moreau).
(Image credit: wcb0028).
I have found this on CrookedBrains:
The residents of Kansas City were asked to nominate influential books that represented their town, and huge forms of the winning selections were then used as the exterior of the library’s parking garage.”
Cardiff Public Library has done something similar:
(Image credit: keithpatterson).
Walking stairwords by Geof Huth
Geof Huth painted some visual poems on the staircase of his house, made from the private family language and kidspeak. It has several stanzas, the third one on the ceiling over the staircase.
I just love this idea, and I wished we were back in our house in London, where I hated having to climb up and down several sets of stairs all day long. I could have made a simple poem with four stanzas! I would prefer a poem, which is rhythmical, and can be memorized. This reminds me of my childhood, when we used to stay at my grandparents’ house. My grandfather would take me and my brother to bed upstairs, and every night walking up the stairs he would say the same counting, rhyming nonsense poem. I used to love that part, it made climbing up the stairs and having to go to sleep fun.
A staircase poem allows to connect the movement of the body through time and space with the rhythm and music of the words.
by Lisa Rienermann. All images show shots of the sky as seen in backyards. Apparently it all started when she discovered the Q in Barcelona. She decided to go hunting for other letters, and spent many weeks – looking skywards. Great idea.
“where the people are dying to come in”
Steve is in New Orleans right now, and he has joined Flickr!
(Fellow Austrian) Ludwig Wittgenstein described language as a large town, grown from an ancient city into a large town including what today would be modern suburbs:
Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations
(a metaphor which Clifford Geertz expanded to “culture” in his essay “Common Sense as a Cultural System.“) The metaphor can also be reversed, and cities may be read as text:
This video could be seen as a reversal of the project Delete! (I blogged about it here).
In “Kapitaal” (Capital) not the signs but the city is eliminated, and all but the signs remain. The video was created by Studio Smack (via ‘Cross the Breeze). I do agree with the comment of a viewer, that the animation would be better viewed on a big screen, or may be for the small low res YouTube version it could be a bit shorter.
This video “The Child” created by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet is a brilliant animation, showing an entire short story set in an urban (New York) landscape, created only with words and typography. Cult video for fonts lovers and graphic designers says the YouTube description. One of the best typo motion /animations I found on Youtube. Worth watching indeed.
I was looking for a particular website with great samples of old Viennese shop signs, but it seems to have been taken down. On Flickr I found plenty of images instead, notably two groups with retro shops worth having a look at here lukertl and plasticbag.
Delete! was a street art project two years ago, or public installation, where all shop signs, advertisments and logos were covered with yellow foil in one of Viennas busiest shopping streets. It was organized by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf, who had quite a job convincing all the shopkeepers. I remember looking for a particular shop and getting lost. Read more on various sites such as here and here and here and see more pictures on Flickr. It is related to Matt Siber’s The Untitled Project, where he digitally stripped photographs of urban settings of all traces of textual information.
Neubaugasse in Vienna
Digitally enhanced New York
This is a picture my father took of the old gate to Kaiser Mahal, the Garden of Dreams, in Kathmandu, which has been his most recent conservation project. Th wrought and cast iron gate spells out the word G A R D E N on one side and D R E A M S on the other. It is a very unusal garden, essentially an Edwardian garden with a slight Nepali touch right in the heart of Kathmandu.
Quotables
word and image 