Strongsville, OH

This is sad.

Thank you McCain and Palin.

This is of course in response to Senator McCain's bizarre third person soliloquy on house rescue plans culminating in the Senator calling Senator Obama, "That one." The That One '08 website is fairly funny, and is set to be today's most emailed link (and make the owner some advertisement money and T-shirt cash).

I feel a bit queasy even calling this out since I don't believe the author is trained in design, and all of the shibboleths and nomenclature which comes with the profession. But the author's butchering of Obama's logo is just horrible; well intentioned, but horrible. I've already gotten complaints from my friends questioning why I would complain about something as "trivial" as typeface choice with others positing that they used a different font to differentiate themselves from the campaign. Frankly, I think whomever created this is well intentioned, just design illiterate. Which is fine, because not everyone cares what kerning is or that there are two typefaces used in the NYC Subway system which look very similar (Aksidez Grotesk & Helvetica).

The reason this logo even stand out is because the original is so very well designed and executed. But part of this is the result of the Obama campaign releasing 14 logo versions covering groups as diverse as the LGBT community to sportsmen to Republicans to National Delegates to Environmentalists. There are even third-party logo creators to customize to "O" logo. You don't see McCain supporters remixing the McCain-Palin logo. Which goes to show that the visual identity which was created around Obama has moved past the simple logo to something which people identify with and appropriate to their own cause or want (myself included). I don't believe the logo made the man; rather, the logo was created around the man and ideas, which reinforced the visual identity. I would not be surprised to see case studies and undergraduate courses revolving around the Obama visual identity in the near future.

Which brings us back to the remixers and DIY logo enthusiasts: keep on supporting Obama in your way; but please, aspire to make it better. Design a logo we can believe in!

Just something to argue about.

• La Guardia's Expressway Visual (also nice is National's River Visual Approach)
• High-Speed Rail on the Ballot in California
• The Metropolitan Life Tower
• Bicycle Bailout
• Mad Men Typography
• Sensors powered by trees
• More on City Competitiveness & The MEniverse
• Strange Maps: The Semicolonial State of San Serriffe & Tea As A North/South Litmus Test
• GeoCommons Maker! Awesome or super awesome?
• On highways being built as speculative ventures, but rail requiring existing userbase: Trains to Nowhere, and to Somewhere
• Medium Speed Rail
• MTA Installs Second Prototype of Flood-Proof Vents
• Anti-Tsunami Landscapes
• Improper Pricing of Surface Transit
• When Shipping Container Architecture Goes Bad...Apocalypse Bad

Peter Eisenman's Aronoff Center at the University of Cincinnati is in need for a $4.5 million façade renovation (pdf):

Façade renovation of the Aronoff Center. The Aronoff Center is a six-story structure built in 1996 with an exterior insulation and finish system (EIFS), window assembles, and a single-ply membrane roof with associated flashings consisting of a floor plate of approximately 130,000 gross s.f. total area. This project will renovate/restore the existing building envelope and complete renovation to exterior wall systems and interior finishes/assemblies damaged as a result of moisture or water damage.

The first part of the design will include all forensic investigations to develop the Program of Requirements to eliminate the migration of moisture, establish the priority of work scope with schedule and budget. The University will provide a previously commissioned façade investigation report upon request.

The second part of the design phase will include design document preparation for construction, bid/award, contract administration of construction and project closeout. Construction phase sequencing will be required to facilitate the existing building’s operations, as well as those of the surrounding buildings, throughout the construction period.

The total cost is budgeted at $4.5 million with design services starting in January 2009, construction contracts completed by April 2011 and professional services completed July 2011. When I attended UC, the Aronoff Center's piazza skylights were replaced and the interior plasterboard in many areas were also renovated. This will be the second major renovation to the brilliant, if functionally challenged, building.

As Eisenman's projects in Ohio go, he is now 2-for-3 in projects needing extensive repair; the Wexner Center at the Ohio State University built in 1989 was renovated in 2005 to secure the building envelope, control interior moisture and to calibrate gallery natural light (Renovation fact sheet pdf). No word yet if the Columbus Convention Center, built in 1993, is in need of repair. Or if batting .667 will get Eisenman into the Hall of Fame.

Both the TED Spread and LIBOR, lending rates banks are willing to lend money to one another which illustrates measures of risk, are off the charts today. The TED Spread is at 3.81% and LIBOR is at 5.33%. AND California is seeking $7 billion in emergency loans because they can't secure cheap short-term credit. AND new jobless report came out showing 159,000 new jobless, lucky duckies.

Right now as of 1121 EST the markets are up, probably in the hope that the House will pass the bailout bill. Right now there are two Democrats and two Republicans who have switched from "nay" to "aye," the previous bill only needed 12 votes to pass. I would look for both sides of the aisle to flip 6 each to "aye." If you want a play-by-play, this Daily Kos thread is useful.

If the House Republicans continue to play chicken with the economy, then Monday's losses will be just the beginning.

If I was attending Yale this fall, or could afford to take the MEDIUM FAST TRAIN to and from New Haven to sneak into campus like some 1980's plot device, and had my choice of first semester classes, these would be my top three seminars I would fight to attend:

• The Construction of Exactitude: Classicism and Modernism

  This seminar critically considers modern classicism not only as a compositional design method and as an evocation of precedents, but also as a language of clarity, reduction, and economy resistant to an unquestioned avant-gardist predilection for the "new."

• Modernism and Environmentalism in the Twentieth Century

  The seminar explores connections among the social, technological, and formal proposals of architectural modernism as well as the connections between the growing concern over the destructive nature of human interaction with the natural environment.

• Opulence and Excess: The Architecture of Techno- Romanticism

  This seminar posits that during the past decade digitally produced architecture based on geometric, mapping, and performance-based ambitions has failed to yield the intended results.

Go forth Yale students, and earn your degree.

Also check out the whole Flickr set.

New policy paves way for first Paris inner city tower since 1977:

"The Triangle is conceived as a piece of the city that could be pivoted and positioned vertically. It is carved by a network of vertical and horizontal traffic flows of variable capacities and speeds. Like the boulevards, streets and more intimate passages of a city, these traffic flows carve the construction into islets of varying shapes and sizes.

"This evocation of the urban fabric of Paris, at once classic and coherent in its entirety and varied and intriguing in its details, is encountered in the façade of the Triangle. Like that of a classical building, this one features two levels of interpretation: an easily recognisable overall form and a fine, crystalline silhouette of its façade which allows it to be perceived variously."

I wonder if Paris has learned at all from La Défense. The renderings are quite sufficiently compelling, but God is in the details. Lukily, this project has a few things going for it:

• Herzog & de Meuron designed the building and they will go down in history as the preeminent designers of the 21st Century.
• While the beauty of Paris undeniably is generated by the boulevard's and height restrictions, this allows the designer freedom to deviate from the norm. And in the right hands, the solution can be powerful
• The tower is situated far away from the "Centre" and will create an axis with the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe

Prediction: Parisians will hate it for the first twenty years then adore it.
For reference, below is the location map of the proposed tower.

View Larger Map

Draplin has uploaded a series of "First Day of Issue" United Nation Envelopes. You: go, see, now!