Category: Creativity

Invisible Bicycles: Tokyo’s High-Tech Underground Bike Parking

[ By WebUrbanist in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

Sufficiently advanced science has been said to look like magic, like this subterranean cycle storage system – except in this case images and videos give you a peak at the secret workings below the surface.

On the space-starved streets of Tokyo, every bit of spare square footage counts, making the city’s investment in this complex-seeming solution a sensible way to tackle bike storage and theft.

Users simply walk their bike up, input a card or code, and let the machinery do the rest. The bikes are then taken underground, sorted and stored in a cylindrical shaft until needed, then available at a moment’s notice – bikers can be back on their rides faster than a valet at a fancy hotel could bring a car around.

The Eco Cycle Anti-Seismic Underground Bicycle Park was designed and built by the engineers of Giken Seisakusho and can store up to 800 bicycles at a time. Its creators have also developed similar system designs that would work the same way but with cars.

The real wonder is not that it already exists in Japan, however, but that it has not been imported to other countries. There could be issues with water tables in certain cities, but the solution could also potentially be adapted to spaces like abandoned subway stations that already exist in others.

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Unstealable Bike: Theft-Proof Bicycle Frame Doubles as Lock

If you are sick of worrying about your bike being stolen or taking a lock with you wherever you go, this design will solve both of those every problems faced …
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The Charge Cycle: Bike-Powered Public Phone Charging Station

Soon, you’ll be able to charge your iPhone at strategic locations around New York City – but you’ll have to put in a little leg work.
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Abandoned Mine is Now World’s Largest Indoor BMX Bike Park

Boasting 5 miles of trails, ramps and obstacles, this cavernous subterranean space sits 100 feet underground and totals 320,000 square feet. The wide-open …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 26, 2015
Ghost Rider: Disappearing Audi Billboard Made of Water Vapor

[ By Steph in Design & Guerilla Ads & Marketing. ]

It’s a wonder nobody crashed their real cars doing a double-take at a glowing Audi that seems like an apparition, appearing in a fog and then disappearing just as quickly. German ad firm Thjnk came up with this ephemeral ad campaign for the hybrid-electric Audi A7 Sportback h-tron quattro to highlight the fact that nothing but water vapor comes out of its exhaust.

“We asked ourselves, where do you place ads for the most environmentally friendly and progressive engine Audi has ever built? Nowhere. So for the car that leaves nothing behind but vaporized water, we created ads that leave nothing behind but vaporized water.”

Though the agency doesn’t specify how the effect was achieved, it seems that an LED image is projected onto water vapor to get that ghostly look. The ads were placed in busy areas of big cities at night, flashing briefly and then vanishing.

Check out 300+ other creative advertising campaigns, from guerrilla marketing to controversial ads using revolting imagery and graphic content to hawk hand soap, nose trimmers and other products and services.

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Modified Water Bike: Inventor Commutes San Francisco Bay

Both the first person to bike across the San Francisco Bay and over the Hudson River is great, but being able to skip traffic jams and cycle to work over the …
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Billboard Trailers Turned into Tiny Parasite Apartments

Advertising is so ubiquitous that billboards aren’t even restricted to fixed positions anymore; they’re often found moving from one spot to another …
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15 Clever & Creative Billboard Advertising Campaigns

Some advertisers think outside the box – literally – with billboards that step outside their own boundaries and interact with the world at large.
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[ By Steph in Design & Guerilla Ads & Marketing. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 26, 2015
Drawing with Darkness: 24 Incredible Works of Shadow Art

[ By Steph in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

How is it even possible that a mess of steel wires or a pile of useless scraps of trash can produce shadows that so perfectly mimic human faces and figures? Whether bringing forth unexpected shapes by combining abstract sculptures with a light source or exploring the psychological connotations of shadows, artists make light and darkness a physical element in each of these works.

Amazing Illusions by Kumi Yamashita

Faces appear out of the most unlikely shapes and materials, from scrunched fabric to numbers mounted on a wall, while figures spring out of thin strips of metal. Says artist Kumi Yamashita, “I sculpt using light and shadow. I construct single or multiple objects and place them in relation to a single light source. The complete artwork is therefore comprised of both the material (the solid objects) and the immaterial (the light or shadow.)”

Steel Wire Shadow Art by Larry Kagan

Though they do have a certain beauty in and of themselves, look at Larry Kagan’s wire sculptures on their own, without a light source, and you may find yourself scratching your head at what the word ‘art’ even means. But when they’re illuminated from just the right angle, they transform into something different altogether, becoming birds, insects, ladders and maps of the world.

Plasticine Body Cast Shadow by Rook Floro

Artist Rook Floro made a plasticine cast of his body to create this eerie shadow sculpture, which he displayed in a gallery while sitting nearby with his entire body painted black. “My sculpture/performance piece is inspired by Carl Jung’s psychological theory about the shadow. It concerns with the repressed ideas, weakness, and desires of oneself that the conscious mind refuses to acknowledge. It represents my ‘shadow’ which involves my hidden desires to be different and become perfect in y own right. We always feel the pressure to be perfect by everything around us such as the media, social network, advertisement, friends, and family.”

Interactive Shadow Picture Book by Megumi Kajiwara and Tathuhiko Nijima

This adorable Japanese children’s book by Megumi Kajiwara and Tathuhiko Nijima is enhanced with the use of a flashlight to bring out extra figures via pop-up silhouettes. The book is hand-made to order.

Dancing Shadow Sculptures by Laurent Craste

Two static sculptures suddenly start to dance as a light source swings maniacally around them in this interactive art installation by Lauren Craste, created for the Chromatic festival in Montreal. It seems straightforward at first, but then the figures seem to take on a life of their own, moving in ways that don’t make sense. The secret is a hidden projector that tracks the movements of the light source to create certain effects.

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Drawing With Darkness 24 Incredible Works Of Shadow Art

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Shadow Sculptures: Illusions from Clumps of Junk

Seemingly random bits of junk produce the most unexpected shadows when a light is shined upon them from a certain angle in these sculptures by Diet Wiegman.
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Cement Bleak: Haunting Shadow Faces on the Sidewalk

Ghostly shadow faces appear on the sidewalks, cast through hand-shaped metal colanders by the street lights, in an installation by Isaac Cordal.
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25 (More) Incredible Works of Art from Ordinary Objects

Recently a number of readers have written in to submit their own works or works they have constructed from everyday materials.
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[ By Steph in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 25, 2015
Figures & Ground: Crafty Wood Miniatures Create Urban Vignettes

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

Inspired by everything from personal experience to famous photography, this street artist crafts small wooden cutouts to frame scenes of action, adventure, romance and life.

Living in New Jersey and working both there and in New York, Joe Iurato illustrates his miniature creations with black-and-white details, setting them apart from the colorful cityscapes they occupy.

While the specific sizes and subjects vary, a common thread is found in their site-specific nature and detailed drawings – each figure or set thereof participates directly in its surroundings.

“From break dancing to skateboarding to rock climbing to becoming a father, all of these things have helped define my character. For me, it’s just about revisiting those moments in a way that’s familiar. I’ve always appreciated seeing architecture and nature in a different light.”

“As a skater, the tar banks behind a local supermarket, a flight of stairs, a parking block, a drainage ditch, a handrail, a wall – they all present possibilities for interaction and fun in ways they weren’t intended to be used.”

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Cel(l) Shorts: Crafty Urban Augmented Reality Animations

Employing a cellular phone coupled with traditional transparent cel animation techniques, this artist inserts strange characters and surreal stories into …
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Urban Geodes: Crystal Street Art Hidden in Broken Spaces

Breaking open even the dullest rock may reveal amazing crystals. This street art project exposes formations in cracked concrete, broken brick and rusted pipes.
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Tread on Me: 15 Crafty Metal, Wood & Spiral Staircases

Stairs aren’t just a handy way to go between the levels of your home; they can be a pet project for inventive architects and a favorite feature of a home.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 25, 2015
The Dryline: BIG Plan Fights NYC Floods with Waterfront Park

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

A huge infrastructure project designed to prevent future Hurricane Sandy-style devastation, the Dryline is a perfectly-named solution for a city already sporting a successful High Line and an underground Low Line currently under construction. In the wake of that devastating super-storm, over 300,000 homes were left damaged or destroyed and nearly 20 billion dollars of destruction was caused in total – the first section of the Dryline is slated to cost a few hundred million, which in contrast does not seem like so much money.

Developed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the scheme continuous to evolve with each iteration. This latest video illustrates many of the mechanisms of action through easy-to-understand sketches and diagrams. It also features interviews with New Yorkers about their vision for a greener southern tip for Manhattan.

Designed to be deployed incrementally, the grand plan involves many discrete steps, each intended to shore up the lower portion of the city – the place that takes the brunt of incoming tides. The individual interventions vary, from berms that double as parks to sliding barriers that move into position during unusually high tides. Ultimately, “the Dryline imagines a landscaped buffer stretching all the way from West 57th Street, looping down to the Battery and back up to East 42nd Street, bestowing Manhattan with a protective green cushion.”

At the same time, the design follows classic principles of urban landscape pioneers like Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, taking this environmental challenge as an opportunity to create more park and civic space. Per The Guardian, “With a sprinkling of fairy-dust, the shoreline becomes furnished with undulating berms and protective planting, flip-down baffles and defensive kiosks, promenades and bike paths, bringing pedestrian life worthy of Lisbon or Barcelona to the gritty banks of Manhattan.”

BIG is a firm known for thinking large and this project is no exception. Then again, lessons learned from the other ambitious urban projects (like NYC’s High Line) can be applied here: built it piece by piece to reduce one-time costs and provide room for adjustment, and take citizen input into account. In the end, anyone who has walked the south edge of Manhattan knows it is a disjointed and, in many places, unwelcoming space – there is a huge opportunity for a new kind of part to provide connectivity and green space from this disparate set of urban landscapes.

“The Dryline consists of multiple but linked design opportunities; each on different scales of time, size and investment; each local neighborhood tailoring its own set of programs, functions, and opportunities. Small, relatively simple projects maintain the resiliency investment momentum post-Sandy, while setting in motion the longer-term solutions that will be necessary in the future.”

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Turning Tides: 10-Mile Park to Protect NYC from Flooding

Designed to shield the exposed edges of Lower Manhattan from increasingly-disastrous storms, this impressive system of parks and other public spaces is also …
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Lowline for NYC: World’s First Underground Park in Manhattan

Using fiber optics as “remote skylights” to pipe illumination down from the surface, this bold plan aims to transform a century-old trolley station …
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Urban Nest: New Round Amphitheater Section for High Line

New York’s elevated park is expanding in new directions both physically and proverbially, its new addition a stark circular shift from the overall linear …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 24, 2015
The Beauty Beneath: Ceramic Tile Illusion on Electric Box

[ By Steph in Drawing & Digital. ]

The ugly banality of a worn beige electrical box in a Lisbon plaza seems to give way to colorful ceramic tiles hidden beneath, the paint cracking and peeling to reveal a glimpse traditional Portuguese patterns. Street artist Diogo Machado (known as Add Fuel) completed this optical illusion as part of the Trampolins Gerador project, which aims to revitalize the city through urban art, performance, music and other interventions.

The work is a continuation of Machado’s Ceramic series combining contemporary street art with Portuguese ‘azulejo,’ tile patterns that have been a part of the country’s history for centuries. The artist often collaborates with other street artists to fuse these decorative historic details with other styles, bringing them to the city streets in a new way.

Electrical boxes, substations, bathrooms and other less-than-aesthetically-pleasing elements found on city streets are generally eyesores, making them an ideal canvas for imaginative transformations.

Street artist EVOL turns them into tiny buildings, while Dutch designer Roeland Otten disguises them by blending them into their environments.

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Rural Underground: City Pops Up Beneath a German Field

Under a quiet field in Hamburg, Germany, a tiny city has appeared. Its temporary existence is thanks to a street artist who is turning his talents underground.
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Flowering Potholes: Lovely Tile Plants Fill Ugly Street Voids

An uniquely elegant solution to a dirty everyday problem, these gorgeous handcrafted tile mosaics are turning unfilled potholes back into functional pieces …
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Urban Infill: Colorful Tile Mosaics Patch Potholed Streets

In a city with over a half-million open potholes, one artist is helping address the problem and raising awareness by installing his own creative patches, …
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[ By Steph in Drawing & Digital. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 24, 2015
Architectural Fiction: 35 Impossibly Surreal Structures

[ By Steph in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Unbound by gravity, the need for structural soundness or any sense of real-world aesthetics, architecture becomes like a life form of its own, multiplying and mutating in strange and unsettling ways. These fictional architectural assemblages explore unlikely configurations that are only possible with digital art and photo manipulation.

Surreal Structures by Matthias Jung

The architectural creations of Matthias Jung seem to inhabit a fairytale realm where gravity doesn’t apply, raising Brutalist concrete structures on tiny stilts, floating stained glass windows like balloons and untethering some from the earth altogether. Some designs, however, seem like they might actually occupy some hidden rural meadow in Europe where aging country homes are actually topped with sheep-dotted hills. Jung is a German-based graphic designer who refers to his strange photo collages as “architectural short poems.”

Fictional Architecture by Victor Enrich

Victor Enrich’s ‘architecture gone wild‘ twists, bends and turns, splitting down the middle as if the buildings are being unzipped or seeming to disassemble before our eyes. Balconies become giant slides leading down to the street, staircases meander off into the sky and individual apartments stretch out of their building toward the sun like leaves on a plant. The Barcelona-born designer travels the world and takes photographs of cities, digitally manipulating them for results that would generally be impossible in the real world.

“Once the object is chosen, it is shot from a point easy to recognize by users, not pretending to achieve the greatest picture ever, but instead, a picture that anybody could do. The shot is the basis to produce a replica of the building by using very detailed photogrammetric techniques that end with the creation of a three-dimensional model that fits almost perfectly into the picture.”

Jim Kazanjian

Shadowy passages and strange interiors from horror films like The Shining and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft tinge the disorienting and disquieting work of Portland-based photographer Jim Kazanjian, who’s inspired by “our inherent anxieties about isolation and vulnerability.” Kazanjian draws on his experience as a CGI artist working on games to create these ‘hyper-collages,’ cobbling together images of buildings, sinkholes and foggy landscapes from an archive of over 30,000 photos.

“My interest in gaming stems from my fascination with architecture and its potential to generate narrative structures,” says the artist. “My time in game development has definitely informed my photographic work. I find that the immersive qualities in both mediums have a strong correlation.”

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Architectural Fiction 35 Surreal Fantasy Structures

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Fictions: Architectural Assemblage by Filip Dujardin

Filip Dujardin creates his own fantasy architecture out of gritty urban images he takes of buildings near his home in Ghent, Belgium.
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Architecture Gone Wild: Surrealist Designs by Victor Enrich

Buildings split down the middle, sprout slides, bend over in strange ways and send stairs into the sky in these fantasy architectural designs by Victor Enrich.
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Surrealist Disaster-Proof Structures for Dangerous Locations

Some spots are such beautiful potential locations for a home, yet repeated natural disasters make them inhospitable for all but the strongest and most durable …
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[ By Steph in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 24, 2015
Sans Ads: See Tokyo Scrubbed Clean of Signs & Advertisements

[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Graphics & Branding. ]

Tokyo seems inseparable from the banners, billboards, logos, slogans and other flashy neon alerts, except when seen through the lens of this French graphic designer in a startling black-and-white image series turned into a alternating GIFs.

Tokyo No Ads by Nicolas Damiens illustrates just how shocking the contrast is, particularly when switching back and forth between before and after versions. Each of the seven scenes here was meticulously edited with attention to every last pixel of graphics.

To outsiders, Japan’s capital is nearly synonymous with signage saturation, so stripping them away changes the character of the place dramatically. Promoting everything from TV shows and movies to local shops and businesses, it is almost impossible to find a place in the city not showered in advertising. Perhaps the biggest surprise: the landscape almost looks more alien without its characteristic adverts.

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Super Clean City: São Paulo Entirely Scrubbed of Outdoor Ads

What does a city wiped clean of all advertising look like? Like São Paulo, Brazil, which removed all billboards and other ads from every public surface in …
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The Power of Paint: Mini Spruce-Ups Act as Advertisements

Billboard-sized paint jobs on buildings that have seen better days give passersby a glimpse of how much fresher and brighter the structure could look with a …
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Clean Streets: Guerilla Marketing Meets Reverse Graffiti

This group has managed to turn a street art hobby into a guerilla marketing campaign strategy.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Graphics & Branding. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 23, 2015
Mufflers: 10 Artistic Acoustic Highway Noise Barriers

[ By Steve in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

These artistic acoustic highway noise barriers combine form with function, neatly blocking the sound of road traffic while looking darned good in the process.

This proposal for an environmentally-friendly acoustic barrier (“Forest Corridor”) in Hong Kong was designed by Bread Studio to meet three strict conditions: masking the sight of the highway from nearby residential buildings, improving the view of the highway’s underside for people in the park below, and relieving drivers from any claustrophobic impressions as they cruise through the de facto tunnel.

Leapin’ Lizards!

Stretching for six miles along both sides of the Pima Freeway’s sound barrier wall in Scottsdale, AZ, “The Path Most Traveled” by artist Carolyn Braaksma evokes the essential nature of the region’s desert ecosystem.

Interspersed among a mix of abstract and Native American-style motifs are prickly pear cacti standing up to 40 feet tall and enormous lizards almost 70 feet long.

Clearly Beautiful

Melbourne’s freeway network is the largest of any Australian city, and without sound barriers the aural impact on residential neighborhoods would be substantial. Cheap and unimaginative acoustic walls would also have a detrimental effect on drivers so a pleasing compromise was achieved that satisfied both.

Tinted acrylic plastic panels set into sound walls along the EastLink Freeway maintain audio insulation while adding visual interest at a reasonable cost. Want to see the world through rose-colored sound barriers? Get your eyes to Australia!

“Sixty Seconds of Architecture”

Louwman Exclusive Cars is a high-end exotic automobile dealer located in Utrecht, the Netherlands, just off the A2 highway between Amsterdam and Maastricht. Instead of making do with a bland and boring sound wall, the dealership opted instead for an acoustic barrier “designed from the perspective of a flow of cars passing by with the speed of 120 km/h.” Fast company indeed.

Stretching 1.5 kilometers in length, the 5,500,000-euro barrier designed by Kas Oosterhuis widens to a 30m “cockpit” that accommodates the auto dealer’s showroom and service bays. No doubt it’s quite quiet inside as well.

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Mufflers 10 Artistic Acoustic Highway Noise Barriers

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Dial it Down: Noise-Cancelling Device for City Street Sounds

The background sounds of urban environments can be invigorating when you are out and about, but enervating when you are at home and want to tune them out. Now …
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Intelligent Interstates: 5 High-Tech ‘Smart Highway’ Systems

Color-changing and glow-in-the-dark paint, mini windmill-powered lights, a lane that charges your car for you magnetically while you drive and more.
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Signal or Noise: 8 Mysterious Unsolved Sounds

Was ‘The Bloop’ made by a mythical sea monster – and did aliens try to send us a message? It’s hard to say if these 8 unidentified sounds are signals or noise.
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[ By Steve in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 22, 2015
Table for Two: Window as Bridge & Barrier Between Shared Seat

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

Putting you in the spotlight with a stranger, this installation in New York City is a perhaps-paradoxical commentary on both connection and isolation in urban environments.

Located at 7th Avenue and Carmine Street in Manhattan, Table for Two by Parisian native Shani Ha was designed to separate the participants with a window, yet by its placement and proximity makes simultaneously for intimately-shared moments.

Vicky Gan describes it as “part sculpture, part performance art, it challenges those who sit down to look up from their smartphones and into the eyes of a friend, a stranger, or their own reflections in the glass. A self-conscious homage to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the work realizes the age-old concept of the big, crowded city as a lonely, isolating place.”

Like any good piece of interactive art, the stories about its usage are what show it works – deaf people communicating in sign language across the glass in one case or a couple talking to each other (like in prison) on phones in another.

Technology, claims the artist, is responsible “making us more self-centered because [it gives] us the power to access only the people we decide to access,” whereas the intention in this piece is “to break the bridge between the outside and the inside, and allow a new form of interaction between people.”

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Window Sketches: Minimalist Landscapes of Steam & Glass

No smoke-and-mirrors or post-production here, just fleeting vignettes swiftly staged on steamed windows and set against natural outdoor backgrounds. Jim …
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Neighborly Art: Surreal Sky Bridge Spans 2 Typical Homes

Houses can be isolating … but what happens when you break down – or bridge – the gap created by yards and fences between two otherwise-ordinary homes?
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Mirrored Street Facade Art Turns Pedestrians into Acrobats

At first: vertigo. You are moving along the sidewalk, when suddenly you see the front of a structure, only on its side, extruded from the ground below you.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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WebUrbanist

March 22, 2015