julie kim's hammock coffee table in the city

Local furniture-maker and space designer Julie Kim put her newly-designed hammock coffee table at a bus stop on the corner of 6th + Vermont in K-Town, just to see what would happen.

Okay, not a whole lot happens, but the concept is a really good one: let's make bus stops, I don't know...nicer? So more people will actually want to ride the bus, and all that good critical mass stuff? I would love to see more experiments of urban guerrilla beautification like this!

Las Vegas Strip (II)

Another view of the Vegas Strip, including Treasure Island, the Palazzo, the Wynn & Encore, and the Stratosphere off in the distance, with the street squeezed down to just one lane. See it narrowed!

friday favorites: asheville, north carolina

A discussion about skewed intersections on Streetsblog's Google Group led to alternate intersection designs, which led me to this very postiive FAQ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety about roundabouts: those momentary shifts from cartesian to polar (and back) that people seem to be so afraid of, but actually are safer for everyone—and all at a drastically reduced maintenance cost, too! My favorite is this before-and-after conversion in Asheville. I took a Segway tour that crossed this lovely part of downtown. See it rotarized!

friday favorites: washington street, norwalk, connecticut

Finally, finally getting around to sharing this great post by Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist with some nicely articulated thoughts (as well as resource links) about the value of narrow streets. He even squeezed down the street above to illustrate his point, drawing inspiration from Nieuwendijk in Amsterdam and...me!

Be sure to check out the lively debate that ensues in the comments (are cities just shopping malls?) as well as the rest of his blog. See it narrowed!

Las Vegas Strip (I)

I followed my wife to a work junket in Las Vegas recently (where randomly enough, Ben Mezrich spoke and later ate steak at my dinner table), and I took a break to wander up and down the city's famous Strip. Architects and brainy types love Vegas because of the purity of its simulacra, its uber-meta-ness. I kinda agree. Vegas is so proudly...artificial. No one goes to Las Vegas because of anything inherent to its geography, besides maybe the hot weather. Las Vegas might as well exist at the bottom of the sea next to Rapture—as long as you could still fly there from LA in less than an hour, I doubt anyone would care. People go to Vegas because it's Vegas, and there's no place else like it.

That's why I've always been confused by the mind-boggling width of the Strip itself, which at around ten lanes seems to be stubbornly preoccupied with almighty transport as its main function—on paper. It's as if the city planners are still in denial about what the Strip really is: a huge adult amusement park and pedestrian haven for tourists from all over the world, all strolling up and down nursing their yard-long margaritas dangling from souvenir lanyards. Amusement parks don't have freeways running through them. So why not make the Strip feel more like the Disneyland of Sin that it is? See it narrowed!