back in early November

on hiatus until November 8th…when i’ll be back with a series of urban planning posts inspired by my current travels to Edinburgh, Paris, and Mexico City, along with some links on the global real estate meltdown. so please come on back real soon…and in the meantime, eat your veggies.

Walkscore

Walkscore is a website that analyses how successfully walkable your neighbourhood is. and Palmerston Blvd scores very well… 85/100, which is excellent. the algorithm isn’t perfect (it doesn’t consider public transport, street design, or crime stats) but it’s an interesting quick window on how a neighbourhood functions for pedestrians.

the website is designed for “America”, which we’ll just take to mean North America, since Toronto seems to work pretty well, as does Thunder Bay. interestingly, the system breaks down for foreign addresses (an address in Paris, France, for example, comes up as “42/100, car-dependent” because the site doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish a sense of scale very well.)

overall, a really interesting addition to the web. rate your own address, here

homes that spin

in the it-had-to-happen department: dynamic skyscrapers featuring whole floors that rotate, from Italian architect David Fisher.

two towers are planned for 2010 – one in Dubai and one in Moscow – with movement powered by wind turbines between each floor. apartments will apparently be “vocally controlled”…which leads me to imagine standing in my living room & yelling “Move, now!” at my floor or windows. my home is my castle, indeed.

on the company’s website, inventor/designer Fisher says:

“From now on, buildings will have four dimensions, the fourth dimension is ‘Time’ to become part of architecture… Buildings in motion will shape the sky line of our cities.”

very nice. but surely he’s noticed that time is already a major fact of life for buildings. time, history, good old wear ‘n tear – making buildings interesting from day to day without any spin at all.

in the meantime, the company’s image links are currently broken on their website – which means i’ve pulled an image from the BBC website. but if Dynamic can’t get jpg technology uploaded today, i’m just a tad concerned about how 70-storey buildings are going to dance by 2010.

Guy Maddin, dreaming

white block house: last night i went to see Guy Maddin narrate his film My Winnipeg, and what keeps turning around in my head is his obsession with the strangely-shaped building where he grew up. the experience of watching the movie feels like sharing someone’s dreams, the way a childhood home morphs into other characters, learned history, buildings that we’ve passed a thousand times on the street, fantasy and fears, becoming a remembered myth of home.

Maddin’s film reminded me that home isn’t always a good or easy thing to define. the word is loaded with emotional issues. is “home” a building–for Maddin, the white block house that contained two apartments and a hair salon, where he grew constantly bombarded with the smells of hair spray, the scent like “the inside of a purse”.

or is “home” a city, My Winnipeg, or my Paris, or my Dawson City? or maybe, most importantly, home is a state, a dream state, that we seek to create with home furnishing shops and, often, a Maddin-esque melange of truth and invention.

palmerston’s tiger

for the Taste of Little Italy fest over the weekend, the intersection of Palmerston & College was graced by the arrival of a huge inflatable tiger. the slide had rather a rough weekend – the poor cat kept getting rained out & being deflated due to high winds.

it’s not ever day your street gets decorated with a tiger the size of a house. made me think about all the buildings shaped like animals & odd objects that are scattered across North America…a restaurant the shape of a whale or the shape of an ice cream cone. but i’ve never seen any actual homes that are shaped like that. would it be wonderful or simply too surreal, to come home every day & walk through the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger (or whatever your whim required) as a front door?

instead we seem to have gone for lions as guardians, rather than entrances. there’s a whole collection of  international lions out in front of homes on Palmerston, including these Chinese lions (also known as Foo Dogs)

lions seem to be the most popular animal for guarding a home–they beat out the eagle as preferred icon, maybe because of the lion’s stupendous cross-cultural history as the king of the beasts. just as pillars were once used only on palaces & temples, but were eventually adopted for private mansions, lions too have stepped down from their pedestal.

maybe we’re inspired by the strange skinny stolen lion outside the Arsenale in Venice, or by New York’s central library’s Patience & Fortitude (Gotham City Insider describes them in a hilarious rant), and we’re subconsciously remembering these grander beasts when we see the lions in front of a friend’s front door.

most of our domestic lions actually look pretty good, better than swans or ballerinas or salamanders. but why not go whole-hog & install a front door with wide-open jaws? like this entrance to Gatorland in Florida…

although possibly it wouldn’t be all that comforting as the entrance to a home.