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Fantastic Blog

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Effingham, Illinois

Effingham is in the middle of nowhere.  At least from the perspective of driving between Philadelphia and St. Louis.  Those are cities with larger stars on the map.  Effingham gets a dot.  That said, marketing can make a big difference.  Effingham get this.

Very cleverly, Effingham used the pattern made by the intersecting highways as its city logo.  I like that they are embracing what they are.

Just down the hill from the sign, there is a 60 foot high cross.  Effingham really is at the crossroads of opportunity. 

Overheard at Graduation

Someone's Mom to Random Graduate in bathroom: You are that girl who got the Master of Spatial Analytics, right?

Random Graduate: Yes.

Someone's Mom: What is that?

Random Graduate: Geographic information systems, mapping...

Someone's Mom: You mean like Google Maps?

Random Graduate: Yes, like Google Maps.

Somehow, I fear that this poor girl has had this conversation several times before.

Center City District Makes Another Mistake

Before I left Philly, I needed to run an errand. Much to my dismay, when I arrived at the southwest corner of Rittenhouse Square, I saw these devastatingly ugly garbage cans. While this isn't the first time that Center City District (CCD) has made a terrible design decision, shame on them! Rittenhouse Square is an important public space, with a distinctive design. I don't know why the entrance was shown such little regard. There are other garbage cans inside Rittenhouse, so why ruin the elegant entrance with these? Or, why not replace the cans inside the park. Hideous. To me the garbage cans are a blight. All over town. Sure, we need cans that prevent bag blow outs, but these seem like a waste of money in a cash strapped city (much like the late-to-the-game and completely ineffective Office of Sustainability.) Bottomline, bad placement and ostentatious waste of money in the name of the environment.

Little Boxes

I finally started to watch Weeds.  I have gotten through the first two seasons and started on the third.  I really like it.  I wish there was more critique of cookie cutter life in the third season... I am not far into it, but I don't like all this U-Turn stuff. 

At any rate, the theme song is fantastic.  I love the utter dismay of the cookie cutter lifestyle of suburbia.  At the Rittenhouse Square Fine Art show, I fell in love with these pastels.  The boxy houses with glowing blue swimming pools came to mind when I heard the song.  Lol, I wonder if this artist would consider adding hideous plastic columns, vinyl siding, fake brick/stone facades and those stupid mini round windows to his critique.  Disposable, unsustainable, crap construction.  Funny thing is that the houses that inspired the song are actually pretty cool looking.

Mural Arts

Philadelphia wants to be known as the City of Murals.  There are murals everywhere.  Empty buildings, blank facades adjacent to empty lots are reworked with these murals.  The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program website has a wealth of information about the art and even maps so one can plan a walking tour. 

Last school year, I repeatedly butted heads with a classmate over this type of program.  He suggested that our client to start a program like this in order to "decorate the walls" behind the empty lots along their commercial corridor.  The community had a history of being taken advantage of by the local and state governments that occupied the nearby business district.  I felt that if the community came together and supported a mural, the mural would become sacred.

The problem is that this corridor really needed to fill in large gaping holes in the street wall with buildings.  The corridor needed to rearrange its uses in order to create density and high-quality space to house the growing community college.  My classmate told me at the onset of this debate that the whole point of the Mural Arts Program was to see the murals eventually torn down or covered up as part of the redevelopment of the surrounding neighborhood.  This is conceptually problematic to me.  If the goal is to build community, as symbolized by the mural, what does it mean when the art is destroyed by the process of gentrification/development/change? 

I felt that the client-community was so disenfranchised that it would require tremendous effort and growth in order to accomplish the mural in the first place.  So, if completed, how would that community react to the mural being taken down?  I felt it would destroy and hurt the community.  If the issue about whether to destroy the mural was avoided (meaning that there was an effort to save it in the face of development) then the entire neighborhood would suffer from the lost opportunity to fill an empty lot and provide upgraded facilities to a key anchor on the corridor. 

This probably reads as a completely ridiculous argument to an outsider.  What are the long term ramifications of a theoretical mural?  Maybe planners care too much about this stuff.  But, it is crazy to me that I repeatedly argued against public art.  It still makes me uncomfortable over a year later.  I did win the argument and we compromised  by recommending temporary uses for these lots, like street fairs or farmers markets.  What stupid planning school logic-- that was a victory. 

At any rate, I saw this mural at 15th and Waverly Street.  It made me wonder what community it stands for... vampire prostitutes. Or, a secret league of burlesque spies?  Is this a huge, local voting block?