Designed by Inesa Malafej and Arunas Sukarevicius from Lithuania, the Dancepants converts kinetic energy from running or dancing into electricity for your MP3 player.

More info here.

BLDGBLOG is featuring a series of images called Aqualta by Studio Lindfors that depict Tokyo and Manhattan after a catastrophic flood. From BLDGBLOG:

Similar in spirit to Squint Opera’s earlier look at a Flooded London, Aqualta is hard—if not impossible—to separate from the context of melting ice caps and global climate change. However, it deserves visual attention in its own right, even outside such politically charged discussions.

Far from stoking fear about a coming catastrophe, both of these projects—Studio Lindfors and Squint Opera—offer a vision in which people, and the cities they live in, have learned to adapt to the overwhelming presence of water.

See the BLDGBLOG post or head over to Flickr for a full set of the images.

I would love to see a community library like this in Los Angeles!

“What began as an assemblage of 1,000 empty beer cartons pulled together by residents in East Germany has now evolved into an incredible open air public library. Designed by Karo Architekten in collaboration with local residents, the grassroots project revitalizes a post-industrial district in Magdeburg, Germany by creating a cultural center and pop-up library where books are free to take and leave 24 hours a day. Opened this past June, the project introduces plenty of green space and reuses the facade of an old warehouse to beautiful effect.

Libraries and book lending are a great green practices insofar as they encourage the use of shared resources and cut down on crates of pressed tree pulp circulating the globe. They’re even better when they foster a communal spirit of sharing, as does Magdeburg’s new Open Air Library.

The library was built from the ground up with the support and interaction of the surrounding community – first as a 1:1 model made from beer cartons and later as a finished project with the help of Karo Architekten, who incorporated parts of the facade from the city of Hamm’s demolished Horten warehouse. During its entire planning and construction period the library accepted book donations, which are now available to borrow any time of day without a membership – simply walk up to a cubby and pull out a tome.

In addition to its book lending facilities the Open Air Library also introduces a burst of green public space to a post-industrial district. The grassy plaza features a reading cafe and a stage that hosts elementary school theater plays, public readings, concerts, and other cultural events.”

Photo by Anja Schlamann

Original article: Shareable: Pile of Empty Beer Cartons Evolves into Open Air Library

Thanks, Clay (via Zach).

Via Coudal.

Schools in Los Angeles are getting lots of attention lately. You might have heard of Steve Barr, a sort of educational desperado, whose Green Dot Schools wrested away several poorly-performing schools from the Los Angeles Unified School District and transformed them into educational powerhouses. But what Barr did for these communities is far more than that. He brought these schools back to life inside extremely well-designed buildings, often in empty warehouses and abandoned lots that sat like black holes in low-income neighborhoods. Barr has proved what educators and architects consistently try to demonstrate: Creating a safe, sustainable environment for students in a building that becomes a landmark in their own neighborhood is critical to learning.

There are other smart examples in Los Angeles. Inner-City Arts (above), designed by Michael Maltzan, is like a lighthouse in L.A.’s Skid Row, its angled walls as white as an eggshell in a rough neighborhood. The Camino Nuevo schools, a series of charter properties sprinkled around a neighborhood west of downtown, used the skills of architects Daly Genik to gracefully squeeze classrooms into whatever spaces were available—including, remarkably, a wasted sliver of space between two major thoroughfares. Of course, the reaction to a new, architecturally-significant school is not always positive: A performing arts school in downtown Los Angeles designed by Coop Himmelblau with what looks like a Monsoon Lagoon-worthy waterslide attached to it has been derided as a multi-million dollar boondoggle for the city. Even though the kids inside say they like going to school there.

For each of these schools, the fact that they’re housed in the shiniest new building on the block, or a warehouse that used to host drug transactions, makes a new connection to the neighborhood that changes the way students think about their education. But the not-yet-complete Central Los Angeles Learning Center No. 1, on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel in Koreatown, will have to work a lot harder.

In 2006, after much resistance from preservationists, the Ambassador Hotel, a 1921 building designed by Myron Hunt, was torn down. The building was famous for many reasons besides its stately Spanish-style looks: It held a coffee shop designed by Paul Williams, one of L.A.’s first African American architects; it was host of several Academy Awards ceremonies; it was home of the legendary playground for Hollywood glitterati, the nightclub The Cocoanut Grove. But it was also a place with extreme historic significance: In 1968, after delivering a speech in the hotel’s ballroom, Robert Kennedy Jr. was assassinated there. After decades of neglect, LAUSD gained control of the property, which it planned to demolish and turn into a school. Although many groups, including the LA Conservancy waged a long, emotional battle headed by its board member Diane Keaton (she delivered a eulogy at the building’s “wake”), the building was deemed unfit for preservation. The architecture fans howled. But in a neighborhood where thousands of students were being bused elsewhere every day, there was no disagreement from anyone that there was great need for a school.

The architects at Gonzalez Goodale were awarded what was probably their toughest project to date. When I visited the construction site recently with one of the project’s architects, Harry Drake, he acknowledged the challenge. Using the footprint of the original building, they designed a new plan for the site that would acknowledge the form and history of the hotel but deliver a more healthy, environmentally-friendly learning environment. “We’ve taken the elements of the original design and added more sustainable, substantial materials,” he says. And they were able to take many of the historic elements of the structure and give them appropriate educational context.

The Cocoanut Grove, renowned for its opulent Moorish-style interiors and curved roof, will become an auditorium with public programming.

The Paul Williams coffee shop, with its entrance shown here, will be preserved in its 1968 state and turned into a faculty lounge. Coincidentally, Drake told me, this area was the most difficult to restore because of all the films which had been shot here: So many set designers had added their own “period details” that it was hard to tell what was original and what was not. (See: Bobby.)

And what was once the ballroom, with a soaring arched ceiling and cut-out windows, was redesigned using Hunt’s original drawings, and is just as stunning in the context of contemporary architecture. This will be a library and center for social justice, with history about the hotel and many of Kennedy’s papers, speeches, and artifacts.

Since the hotel’s walls were essentially concrete made with beach sand, this is the only one that will remain (reinforced, of course) but many of the building’s original fixtures and windows will return to the structure. Also the hotel’s famous palm trees will be returned as well.

More features will increase interactivity with the community. The school’s pool will be open to the public in the summer. And a park will open the Ambassador’s front lawn onto the street for the first time, welcoming people onto the property where they can reflect among Kennedy’s words and images (the neighborhood is also park-deprived).

Although the school won’t open until next year, the elementary school immediately adjacent, serving K-5, opened in September. It is situated in line with the Ambassador’s strong north-south backbone, and is just downhill from the high school, so kids here can literally look up to their upperclassmen. It’s a bright, graphically-exciting place, with public artworks that acknowledge the Ambassador’s tile patterns from the former pool and a fantastic mural that chronicles the hotel’s history. As we wandered through the gates toward the school’s entrance as school let out, dodging soccer balls and scooters, I was surprised to see not only hundreds of screeching kids, but adults. Dozens and dozens of parents had walked to the school to pick up their kids, and were now gathered here doling out after-school snacks, using the courtyard as a type of public park. “We used to dismiss the students out onto the street but now I just let them all come in,” the principal said to us as she showed us the library. “Sometimes we can’t get them to leave.”

The saga of the Ambassador is still too tender a subject to broach with some preservationists I know. Keaton recently penned a beautiful essay for the Los Angeles Times about how the loss still stings—two years later. No one wanted the building to go; it’s a situation where no one could have won. But I wish that at least some of the people who are still angry about it could see what I saw at the school that day. What was once a landmark due to its exclusivity is going to be a landmark because of its inclusiveness: a place designed to be far more appropriate (and safer) for the people who will use it now, yet hopefully capturing all the importance of what came before. Whether its students truly appreciate that context remains to be seen, but one fact is certain after seeing the families congregating in the K-5 courtyard: It’s somewhere they want to be. That’s something any school could hope for.

Photos courtesy of Inner-City Arts, Michael Maltzan; Ambassador Hotel postcard, lagenealogy.com; Renderings, Gonzalez Goodale; K-5 photo, Tim Street-Porter.

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

via swissmiss

The most culturally revered street art is often wrapped in an element of intrigue: Banksy’s quasi-anonymity has garnered as much attention as his artwork. But what happens when that intrigue swells far beyond the bounds of mere mystery and consumes the very message of the art?

The biggest guerrilla art movement of our time is older than Banksy, more geographically promiscuous than JR, and has remained unsolved for nearly three decades. Known as the Toynbee Tiles, they are plaques embedded in asphalt, usually at major intersections and pedestrian crosswalks, each containing a variation of the inscription:

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN KUBRICK’S 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER

The first Toynbee Tile dates back to the early 1980s. Today, more than 250 have been discovered in more than two dozen North American cities as well as in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, many inscribed with instructions to make more tiles. Even the material they’re made of was a mystery until recently, when it was determined to be a rare kind of linoleum combined with asphalt sealant.

The message itself, cryptic and seemingly nonsensical, has been the subject of much speculation, from political conspiracy theories to religious dogmatism to space-travel futurism. Most look to the obvious references for clues—Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who is best known for his 12-volume synthesis of world history, analyzing the rise and fall of civilizations.

The first tiles appeared shortly after the release of David Mamet’s 4 A.M, in which the protagonist—a radio show host based on Larry King—talks to a caller who claims that Kubrick’s movie is based on the writings of Toynbee and contains a hidden plan to recreate humanity on Jupiter. Though this call was fictional, in 1983 a social worker named James Morasco called The Philadelphia Inquirer with an oddly similar (and admittedly wacky) idea for resurrecting humans on Jupiter. Were these two incidents related? It would seem so, but how?

Despite ample media attention and countless efforts, no one has gotten to the bottom of it. In 2001, a Toynbee Tile enthusiast even tracked down Katharina Kubrick, Stanley’s daughter, on a Google Usenet group to ask if her father had known anything about the mystery. She said he hadn’t.

Though many attribute the original tiles to the social worker James Morasco, that theory doesn’t quite add up. Not only does his widow firmly deny he had anything to do with the tiles, but new tiles have continued to emerge in the years after his death in 2003. The newer ones vary on the inscription to read:

TOYNBEE IDEA
MOVIE 2001
RAISE DEAD
PLANET JUPITER

In 2005, Philadelphia artist and researcher Justin Duerr began working on a documentary about the mystery. The film is yet to be released and its website has been stagnant since 2006, but it led some to surmise that the newer tiles featuring the word “movie” were laid by the filmmakers in an attempt to pique interest in their project. (In an NPR interview, Duerr denied this and attributed the tiles to a copy-cat.)

But even if the newer tiles were a guerrilla marketing campaign, it still begs the question of who laid the tiles between 2003, when Morasco died, and 2005, when work on the film began. If we believe Morasco did lay most of the tiles, he would have been in his seventies when the bulk of them were deployed. Was he, on a social-worker’s salary, really hopping around to over two dozen cities laying tiles that late in his life?

What makes this mystery so fascinating is that, unlike traditional street art, it no longer embodies a clear social or political statement by a single author. Instead, it has taken on a life of its own, one in which the medium has truly become the message—these plaques continue replicating, driven, presumably, by several people acting without a real understanding of what the original message was. Indeed, the Toynbee Tiles mystery thrives on its own, inspiring speculation, intrigue and interpretation to this day, which may have been the creator’s original intention after all.

And in a way, though not on Jupiter, he—or she—has been resurrected.

Guest blogger Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired U.K. and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter. Photos by Eric Haag.

The Wooster Collective talks to Ji Lee about turning video billboards into glowing art pieces.

Ji Lee is one of New York City’s most prolific street artists. Lee’s day job is in advertising, and his art is a reaction to the prolific and uncreative advertising on our streets. He is most well know for the “Bubble Project,” where he placed empty speech bubbles on outdoor advertisements and allowed the city to fill them in. Here, we’re highlighting the Abstractor Project an easy way to adjust digital billboards in your neighborhood, and turn them into them art.

WOOSTER: Why did you choose the specific placement?

JI LEE: The Abstractor can be installed in any digital billboards. It literally takes about 3 minutes to install once you have the boards ready.

W: What do you think your piece adds to or subtracts from the community?

JL: It instantly transforms the intrusive digital billboards into soothing and beautiful public art pieces.

W: What type of reaction did you get from the community?

JL: A few weeks after the launch of the Abstractor online, other forms of “Abstractors” started to be created by artists like Jason Eppink, Poster Child, and Steve Lambert. That’s when I realized people were enjoying the project. It’s the most rewarding feeling when a project serves as a platform for other new projects. In terms of passersby, not everyone notices the piece, as it can be rather subtle. Once people see it, though, they really stare at it for while with a sense of wonder and joy.

W: Is there a story about putting it up?

JL: I started the Bubble Project about six years ago, where I placed 60,000 speech-bubble stickers on top of ads on the streets of New York. A few years ago, I noticed the digital billboards were popping up everywhere in the city. I very much disliked them and wanted to find ways to transform them. The bubble stickers were not going to work,  so I had to think about a new way. I had been installing the Abstractor on my TV for a while, so I started to install it on digital billboards. I also wanted to make an instructional video so others could do it themselves.

Click To Play

W: Why did you choose the subject matter you did?

JL: I’ve been working in an advertising agency at the time. I believe advertising is like money. It’s not good, nor bad on it’s own. You can do great things with it, or you can create boring, insensitive junk which is the 99 percent of the case. When I saw the insensitive ads invading every inch of the street, I felt partially guilty for being part of the industry that created such ads. At the same time, as a citizen, I felt violated for being forced to look at them everyday. So, I’m very sensitive to advertising in the public realm and I always think about ways to transform them.

W: What is inspiring to you now?

JL: There are lots of things which inspire me. One of biggest sources of inspiration to me is New York City, a constantly changing, always surprising, global melting pot.

To see more of Ji Lee’s work, visit his website. To see more great street art, visit the Wooster Collective.