Municipal Pier 11 – 1932 (via PhillyHistory.org)

With the opening of the new Race Street Pier last month, Philadelphia took an essential step forward in riverfront revitalization.

Jutting into the Delaware River just below the towering Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the former Municipal Pier 11 was built in 1896. From late 20th Century on, it sat empty and unused, another segment on a strip populated by big box chain stores and the occasional hotel, segregated from the street grid by Interstate 95.

Several visions were put forth in recent decades for an overhaul of Philadelphia’s waterfront , but none ever seemed to bear fruit (thanks to a combination of bureaucracy, grandiosity and a suffering economy). Then, in 2009 – at the urging of Mayor Michael Nutter – the newly formed Delaware River Waterfront Corporation began to implement the Action Plan for the Central Delaware, developed by UPenn think-tank Penn Praxis.

Looking northeast from the start of the Race Street Pier

Instead of expensive, overarching renovation, the new agenda called for small, incremental steps, with goals of reconnecting the street grid to the water, adding green space and making it easier for people to experience the riverside on foot and via bicycle.

It looks like the piecemeal strategy is working. For example, a paved bike trail now meanders along the southern banks of the river, starting at a small rain garden, which blossoms with greenery behind the Walmart at the intersection of Washington and Columbus Blvd.

A diagonal path connects the upper and lower levels of the Pier

Funding for the pier redevelopment was secured from the William Penn Foundation and others, and New York-based Field Operations won the bid to create a public park atop the 500-foot metal wharf. Led by Philadelphian James Corner, Field Operations is the firm behind the transformation of an old elevated rail line into NYC’s immensely successful High Line Park. Their track record remains stellar with this Philadelphia endeavor, where they’ve created a winning public space.

A place to find tranquility in the city

The bi-level jetty features several dozen white oak trees and a myriad of grasses and flowers along its length, culminating in a tiered seating area at the eastern tip, which doubles as stairs connecting the split upper and lower walkways. At high tide, the water is just 4½ feet below the pier’s edge, providing a feeling of being out in the river achievable nowhere else in Philly.

An uncommon view of the majestic Ben Franklin Bridge impresses, both during the day and at night, when it’s complemented by an array of 200 LED solar light blocks embedded into the paving.

The pier is understated but attractive, welcoming and accessible, clean and friendly, with unique views and perspectives. Here’s hoping what happened on Race can be repeated throughout the riverfront.

Official summer hours are 7 AM–11 PM (and it’s the perfect spot to catch tonight’s Independence Day fireworks).

This November, the National Museum of American Jewish History will open their brand new building on the Independence Mall in historic Philadelphia.

Since breaking ground in 2007, the impressive, 100,000-square-foot structure has been steadily rising, on time and under budget, just across from the Liberty Bell and the National Constitution Center.

The new location is a stone’s throw from the museum’s former home in a building shared with congregation Mikveh Israel. The old facility offered less than 2,500 sq ft of exhibit space.

Almost complete, the five-story outer facade glints in the afternoon sun, awaiting installation of an 8-foot LED light sculpture that embodies the qualities of a flame.

James S. Polsheck, founder of Polshek Partnerships (now Ennead Architects), whose past works include the Rose Center for Earth & Space in New York City, designed the outer glass structure to symbolize the translucency afforded Jews who have found sanctuary in America, and the fragility of this freedom.

Each floor of the museum opens onto a terrace encased in this artfully glazed glass, offering fantastic views and a space to clear your mind as you traverse the capacious exhibits.

Inside the glass, a terra cotta cube defines the inner volume. This hearty structure represents the solidity of the liberties that protect all Americans.

Warm anigre wood and cool glass create an exciting interior, focused around an 85-foot high atrium lit from above by skylight.

The top floor is event space, and already has several weddings, bar mitzvahs and other gatherings on the books.

Throughout the rest of the $150 million building, the extensive collection of Jewish Americana (the largest in the world, with over 25,000 artifacts) will be supplemented by a series of truly innovative displays.

Exhbit design firm Gallagher & Associates provides interest by showcasing some stories in large, open areas and others in smaller, more intimate settings.

A chronological timeline leads you through floors 2, 3, and 4, from the first Jews who settled in New Amsterdam in colonial times, to the explosion of Jewish immigrants in the late 1800s, up through the World Wars and late 20th century life.

Several of the presentations are interactive. There are life-size models children can clamber on and play with. A video projection of letters and photos will add new images as they are donated. A theater outfitted with reclaimed wooden seats shows three movies on Jews in the film industry post World War II.

A storytelling booth encourages visitors to take two minutes to record their own story. These user submissions will be edited and worked into gallery presentations.

And on the ground floor is an unique media exhibit called the Only in America^® Gallery / Hall of Fame [Ed – You can tell it's unique because it's got a registered trademark symbol], which tells all about the contributions of 18 well-known Jewish Americans. The subjects will change over the years, but the inaugural group includes the likes of Stephen Spielberg, Albert Einstein, Esteé Lauder and Irving Berlin.

Add the fully equipped Dell Theater, a suite of offices for museum staff, a kosher cafe and a store, and you’ve got a new thoughtfully designed, world-class destination that calls Philadelphia home.

[Photos | Danya Henninger]

The recently opened Dostoevsky Station in the Moscow subway has all of that, and more.

One of a series of metro stations named after Russian literary heroes, Dostoevskaya features murals that depict scenes from his famous novels such as Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot and Crime and Punishment, as well as a stern portrait of Fyodor himself.

The wall art is austere, featuring black and white silhouettes of the books’ characters in action: a man is raising a gun to his head. Another holds an ax above his, waiting to bring it down on a women nearby.

These are the stories told in Dostoevsky’s novels, which explore heavy themes of sanity within society.

This is not out of the ordinary for Russian literature; from Tolstoy to Pushkin to Lermontov, Russian writers have gained fame exploring suffering, emotional paralysis and loss.

Dostoevskaya’s opening this spring was delayed at least a month, possibly in part because of an uproar in the Russian blogosphere over whether station’s design was too depressing. Some psychologists claimed it would become a magnet for suicides, which are apparently quite common in the Moscow metro.

There is no doubt that art and architecture can affect mood. From the view out your window to the height of your ceilings to the color of your walls, design will factor into your internal temperament.

Can public art be too sombre? Does it need to be uplifting to be worthwhile?

Certainly a great majority of the myriad outdoor murals that dot Philadelphia are full of positive inspiration, with imagery of colorful flora, fanciful dancers and symbols of pride and learning. And most of the other Moscow metro stations are decorated brightly, be they named for an embittered author or not.

In contrast, we have  Antony Gormley’s recent Event Horizon, which featured lifelike statues posed on rooftops over Madison Square Park and frightened passersby into calling the NYPD to report suicide jumpers. In 2006 a statue of haggard horse riders commemorating Polish suffering that had graced Boston Commons for a quarter-century was abruptly moved; some claim because it was too depressing.

In fairness, there has been a heightened sense of danger on the Moscow metro since two suicide bombings killed close to 40 people this past March. The reported mastermind of these attacks was recently killed in a shoot-out with Russian security forces.

But the art does compliment the minimalist palette and clean, large lines of the station’s architecture.

As the artist, Ivan Nikolayev, said, “What did you want? Scenes of dancing? Dostoevsky does not have them.”

And as Dostoevsky wrote in The Possessed: “We are all happy, if we but knew it.”

[via NPR]

Paul Pounds took his grandfather’s 1925 Elgin pocketwatch and converted it into a fully functional digital timepiece.

The time is not displayed as cyphers, however.

The face is a beautifully designed set of LEDs that mimic analog clock hands with concentric circles of light.

Gorgeous not only in looks, but also in user interface, the watch boasts an audible “tick” for each second, easy time-setting via the stem, and a custom alarm.

After 15 seconds, the watch goes into standby mode to save batteries.

When you open the face, it lights up again.

At each minute interval, it sets off a swirl of LED color!

Some additional deets: Paul wrote the program in C (and fit it in a 2KB code-size limit), used 133 surface mount LEDs, and engraved a tiger eye under the micro-chip.

Beautiful.

[h/t @bre]

The 20th century in the US saw a burgeoning industrial design atmosphere. From automated dishwashers and automobiles to rockets and computers, our society was fundamentally changed by these lasting engineering designs.

But quite a few others were suggested that didn’t make the cut. Looking back now, they seem silly, even absurd. But they were much more in keeping with their time.

What will our future counterparts laugh at? Segways? “Smokeless” cigarettes? Swiffers? Will they seem as foolish as some of these?

Some of my favorites from the Life Magazine piece follow.

Pack of cigarettes holder. Bet that gives a nice rush.

Curved barrel shotgun, for shooting around corners. As Life puts it, perfect for the man who “shoots first, looks where he’s shooting later.”

Artificial breasts with a built-in heartbeat. From Japan. A “sleeping aid” for children? Ahem.

While certainly only one of many of L. Ron Hubbard’s ridiculous inventions, this electrometer is being used to determine if vegetables feel pain. What was the conclusion? Tomatoes “scream when sliced.” Of course they do. Perhaps this was the same device that led Hubbard to discover that Xenu brought humans to earth 75 million years ago in DC-8 airliner spacecraft.

The shower hood. If you want to keep your hair dry and play Star Wars in the shower at the same time.

There are more. And I guess there always will be.

[via @phi162 & Cakehead Loves Evil]

Founded in 2000 — or 02000, as they like to write, the project published their first edition Rosetta Disk in 2008.

The disk holds 1500 languages from around the world.

Made of double-sided micro-etched nickel, the disk is a visual archive, not a digital one. Not format-dependent; all one needs to read the disk is magnification. Like microfiche, but with much more density.

One side of the disk is a guide to the main archive on the reverse. It is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in 8 major languages:

Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.

The message is printed in concentric spirals, both maximizing the number of people who will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the disk, as well as implying how to use it – magnify to see more.

Five actual disks have been produced, which come in a spherical stainless steel/glass container intended to protect and showcase the disk for millenia to come.

Now, the disk’s contents are available to the general public on a $15 DVD, or, thanks to Kurt Bollacker, in an interactive viewer on the web.

Contents range from descriptions of linguistic to vocabulary lists to transcribed texts or oral narratives.

At the very least, the Rosetta Disk provides an informative overview of human linguistic diversity in the 21st century. However, it may do much more.

[h/t @bre]

Humans are very visually oriented.

Organizing information into a well-designed schematic allows us to digest huge amounts of information, and can reveal otherwise unseen connections or structures.

This is a relatively new but exploding field. The New York Times has a great team who regularly create fantastic visualizations to accompany and elucidate articles, and even has a visualization lab, where users can access ready-made data sets and design and submit their own.

Here, Fry has created an interactive visualization of the changes between Charles Darwin’s six editions of On the Origin of the Species, his famous manifesto on the theory of evolution.

Starting from the first edition, changes are animated into existence, differentiated by color. By the end of the final edition, the resulting image looks almost like abstract art, in the vein of Mondrian.

But this is information design, and rolling over any part of the illegible multi-colored columns will highlight and enlarge the text, allowing the user to read through it, and view the actual changes.

The data is sourced from the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, an impressive body of his publications, all digitized by Dr. John van Wyhe & team.

It’s an exciting time in data modeling, and in thought design.

[h/t @mkgold @clioweb @jcmeloni]

Last December the Philadelphia Streets Dept. ripped up the sidewalk corners in much of the Wash West/Society Hill area, one block at a time.

New signal boxes were erected and cast into the concrete, in anticipation of an (ongoing?) $12 million project to deploy digitized traffic signals throughout the city.

Because of a Federal DHS mandate to include future surveillance equipment along with the lighting equipment, the new signal boxes are huge, probably 3-4 times the size of the previous, pole-mounted ones.

As the Inquirer’s Inga Saffron points out with her usual acumen, these empty boxes look like huge brown refrigerators, and are an urban design nightmare in our neighborhoods of rowhouses.

On her blog she highlighted a few of the more egregiously placed metal monoliths, and noted that the flat sides were an empty slate almost begging for graffiti.

A prime example was this one, smack up against the historic house owned by Marjorie Amrom.

It appears that Amrom’s gone and had an artist paint a very attractive and colorful trompe l’oeil, or mini mural, all over the offending box.

Can we get the Mural Arts Program to commission a project to paint the rest?

UPDATE: Inga Saffron wrote another follow-up post, highlighting this box. She mentions that it might be “going a little too far” to paint all of the signal boxes like this. And a commenter points out that getting neighborhoods to agree on a design might “take as long as fixing the city budget.”

I still think it’s worth a try.

Don’t think I ever read the historical sign that is currently posted in the Avenue, though. These signs, erected by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission since 1946, are studies in idea condensation.

Way before Twitter, the designers for these signs did a pretty great job compressing history, philosophy, biography and more into signs that measure approximately 1ft x 2ft and hold less than 250 characters.

This one holds a gem of a sentence. One that deserves more publicity than it’s small alleyway allows.

Artists found that social interaction enhanced the creation and appreciation of art.

Still does. Still does. Still going strong.