If anyone’s equipped to perform during a pandemic, it’s The Flaming Lips. Even before the pandemic, the band’s frontman, Wayne Coyne, often could be found performing inside a giant bubble. For their appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday night, the band expanded on that concept. Not only did Coyne’s bandmates each get their own bubble, so too did the audience gathered to watch their performance of “Race For the Prize”. Catch the replay below.
“Race For the Prize” appears on The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Recently, the band teamed with Kacey Musgraves for a new song called “Flowers of Neptune 6”. They also released Deap Lips, a collaborative album with the garage rock duo Deap Vally.
First obvious association coming to my mind is with the visionary projects by Haus-Rucker-Co, from the late 60s on:
Put into the context of Haus-Rucker-Co’s general use of inflatables, as well as today’s emerging fresh-air market—with multiple links explaining this in the actual post—I suggest that what was once an almost absurdist art world provocation has, today, in the form of bottled air, become an unexpectedly viable business model. (Source: BLDGBLOG)
[Image: Haus-Rucker-Co, Grüne Lunge (Green Lung), Kunsthalle Hamburg (1973); photo by Haus-Rucker Co, courtesy of the Archive Zamp Kelp; via Walker Art Center, via BLDGBLOG]
While all public spaces around the world are trying to innovate and implement safety measures to open during the coronavirus pandemic, Domino Park has introduced a series of painted social distancing circles. This strategical urban design intervention ensures that people are “following proper social distancing procedures recommended by the CDC and government”.
Designed by landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations and privately-funded by Brooklyn-based developer Two Trees Management, Domino Park has been accessible to the public ever since the summer of 2018. In order to encourage safe park visitation practices, during this pandemic, the park has recently implemented social circles in its open public space.
Elaborated by Domino Park’s staff members, the project generates a series of chalk painted circles on the astroturf Flex Field. Introduced on May 15th, the intervention puts in place 30 circles: each circle is 8 feet in diameter and set 6 feet apart. Immediately famous with the visitors, the social distancing rings “took a few $.99 cans of white chalk paint from the local paint store, 2 people, and 4 hours”.
Along with this strategic tactical urbanism, Domino Park has continued to display various types of signage about social distancing and wearing masks. Moreover, the quarter-mile waterfront park highlights safety rules constantly on his social media pages. During times of peak visitation, Domino Park has even closed River Street.
This research project reconsiders writer William H. Whyte’s Street Life Project and seminal study The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). It sought to understand how the types of new public spaces have changed some 40 years after he published his book and companion film, what has changed in how people use public realm spaces, and what makes well used spaces.
The project first looked at 10 plazas in Manhattan by 10 different designers, constructed or renovated in the last 15 years. The sites range from the type of bonus plazas Whyte was observing, to infrastructural leftovers, alleys, transit plazas, private campus spaces, and tactical urbanist interventions. The team used new analytical tools such as a machine learning algorithm on video footage to develop heat maps describing dwell time, frequent and infrequent usage, and preliminary pedestrian counts.
The team also used some of the same techniques Whyte did—behavioral observations, site measurements, and hand tabulation. The goal was to identify common behavior patterns, collective activity, programming, physical elements, and understand context across the sites in order to inform future public realm design. Findings and methods were published in a booklet called Field Guide to Life in Urban Plazas. Currently, researchers are experimenting with an extension of the New York study on other international sites using infrared data that allows evening site usage to be captured, as well as a higher level of anonymization.
RESEARCH TEAM Emily Schlickman and Anya Domlesky, XL research and innovation Lab at SWA, Tom Balsley, Chella Strong, Jen Saura, and Hallie Morrison, SWA/Balsley, Anonymous, Data Scientist
This is a short drone tour of San Francisco with the shelter-in-place order in effect — it looks abandoned. Fisherman’s Wharf, downtown, Market Street, the Haight — I think I saw like 8 people total during the whole video. Heartening to see that people are taking shelter-in-place seriously.
Along streets suddenly devoid of traffic, pedestrians get a fresh look at all the space that motor vehicles have commandeered.
The New York City streetscape has become a strange, inverted mirror image of the normal world. Suddenly, if you have a car, and actually have someplace to go, driving seems weirdly pleasant, almost rational: Congestion is rare, gas is even cheaper than usual, and parking is abundant. This is the Hollywood version of getting around Brooklyn: No matter your destination, you can find a spot right out front. During the coronavirus-induced lockdown, not many people are driving to work, shuttling kids on the school run, or sharing Ubers home from a Lower East Side bar. Vehicle traffic moves smoothly, now that it largely seems to consist of what traffic on urban streets arguably should consist of: the movement of goods to people, the movement of public transit, the movement of emergency responders and other essential services.
For people on the sidewalks, the situation is much different. Those islands of street-side serendipity where friends once spotted one another and stopped to chat—clusters that, as the urbanist William H. Whyte observed, so often happened at corners—suddenly seem like miasmatic hot zones.
Things that might have only slightly rankled before—the couple insisting on running side by side down a narrow sidewalk, the dog walker thoughtlessly unspooling a long leash, the large family strolling four abreast—are now sources of real anxiety. The usual strategies by which one pedestrian might avoid walking into another, such as ducking into the small patches of sidewalk space nestled between street trees and trash cans, are no longer sufficient. Also disconcerting is the sight of people walking in the street, or in bike lanes. At my local Trader Joe’s, a portion of the block-and-a-half-long line of would-be shoppers (stretched as it was by the six-foot intervals between them) extended into the street, close to traffic, presumably to keep the sidewalk free for walkers.
Moments of crisis, which disrupt habit and invite reflection, can provide heightened insight into the problems of everyday life precrisis. Whichever underlying conditions the pandemic has exposed in our health-care or political system, the lockdown has shown us just how much room American cities devote to cars. When relatively few drivers ply an enormous street network, while pedestrians nervously avoid one another on the sidewalks, they are showing in vivid relief the spatial mismatch that exists in urban centers from coast to coast—but especially in New York. […]
The status quo became untenable when a pandemic required six feet of social distancing between people—a distance wider than many cities’ sidewalks. In Canada recently, two performance artists with a group called the Toronto Public Space Committee drew attention to this problem by building what they called the “social-distancing machine.” It was a brilliant provocation. They used a large circle of plastic—like a hula hoop with a two-meter radius—to create a skeletaloutline of government-mandated air rights around the person wearing it. One of the artists suspended it from straps on his shoulders and then tried to walk through the city, keeping everything and everyone else at a safe distance. In a video released by the group, the hoop-wearer is barely able to navigate Toronto’s obstacle-laden sidewalks, much less share those sidewalks with others.
The social-distancing machine was actually inspired by an earlier device, the so-called Gehzeug, or “walkmobile,” created by Hermann Knoflacher, an Austrian civil engineer, in the 1970s. Knoflacher’s idea was to construct a wood-frame outline of a car that a pedestrian could wear to show how much extra space someone driving alone would consume. A cheeky, visually effective cri de coeur on behalf of cyclists and pedestrians, the Gehzeug was created at a time when even cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen—now renowned for their bicycle traffic—were turning their streetscapes over to the car. [Full article]
The researchers behind The Field Guide to Urban Plazas (published by SWA Group) decided to study the public behaviour of human beings in New York City, an update on William H Whyte’s pioneering work from 1980, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. From ‘roosting’ to ‘schooling’, here are the patterns they found.
