The Next Big Trend In Urbanization Will Revolve Around Small Cities
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/small-cities-population-growth-by-2050-2012-5#ixzz2NDVIQLYG
So, this is a thing. A great thing! I love how people can put a lot of work into some extraordinary & wonderful random things.
![mflikes:
[Data Viz] An incredibly detailed map shows the potential of global water risks.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/b0889fc61faebfa935c02d3caeb28b4b/tumblr_mif5rtfP1u1rq924fo1_500.jpg)
From our colleagues at the MoMA library
Every day at the library reference desk I look at a poster version of this chart. Ever since Alfred Barr composed it for the catalog cover of the 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, the chart has been scrutinized, criticized, historicized, revised, and deliciously parodied.
There are so many references I’ve made an ongoing bibliography with entries from the most scholarly of deconstructions to one of my favorite riffs.
My colleagues have also been scrutinizing charts lately, sparked by the exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925. Investigating early abstraction as a global phenomenon, the curatorial team used the chart as a point of departure for visualizing contact among modern artists of the period. This in turn has opened up the general topic of visualizing art history, as seen in these ongoing entries about charts on the exhibition’s in-depth blog.
The chart fascinates me in terms of something Barr wrote in 1946, arguing for popularization
through research which makes publication effective more than that which makes it true, of what might be called the pragmatic rhetoric of education rather than its data.
The “effectiveness” of the chart lies precisely its oversimplicity. Unlike even the most erudite essay, exquisite lecture, or the landmark exhibition itself, Barr’s idea is immediately graspable (effective). In this way the chart forcefully conveys an argument—however flawed—that the art world can (and continually does) push against. -jt
Image: Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 3.C.4. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Quote: Alfred H. Barr Jr., “Research and Publication in Art Museums,” Museum News 23, no. January 1 (1946). Reprinted in Alfred H. Barr Jr., Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (New York: Abrams, 1986), 205–13.
4 Ways To Amplify Your Creativity
By Bruce Nussbaum, fastcodesign.comCreativity is key to innovation. So how do you expand your own creative capacity and that of your business? Through social engagement, argues Bruce Nussbaum.
The holidays are over, the weather is lousy, and we’re sober again. We made all kind…
A new webzine of critical perspectives on contemporary urban design and its responses to social, cultural, political and economic patterns globally.
DIY picnic table: now would you rather have that or bicycle racks?
(Thanks Nicolas Nova for the great pic)
The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10 Diagrams
Note: The significance of these diagrams are described in the source articleLe Corbusier’s plan may not have had such power if he hadn’t put it on paper. The French modernist architect wanted to reform the polluted industrial city by building “towers in a park” where workers might live high above the streets, surrounded by green space and far from their factories. His idea was radical for the 1930s, and it was his diagrams of it that really captured the imagination.
Le Corbusier’s iconic plan for his “Ville Radieuse” was an obvious choice when Grant and SPUR began to curate a new exhibition, “Grand Reductions: Ten diagrams that changed urban planning.” Le Corbusier’s tidy scheme for “towers in a park,” drawn as if on a blank slate, would influence planners for decades to come. Some of the other diagrams in this survey are a bit more surprising.
The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.
“The diagram can cut both ways: It can either be a distillation in the best sense of really taking a very complex set of issues and providing us with a very elegant communication of the solution,” Grant says. “Or it can artificially simplify something that actually needs to be complex.”
Over the years, some of these drawings have perhaps been taken too literally, while others likely lie behind some of your favorite spots in your city. “Even if you don’t know the diagram,” Grant says, “you might know the places that the diagram inspired.”
[Source] The Atlantic Cities, The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10 Diagrams
