streamlining

Our gratitude to Nag on the Lake for introducing us to the Franco-American industrial design pioneer Raymond Loewy whose multidisciplinary vision informs a magnitude of iconic brands and defining how form follows function.
Among his contributions are the interior of the Boeing Stratoliner, various locomotives, coaches, the Sears Coldspot refrigerator, the Schick electric razor, the Lincoln Continental, a jukebox, a version of the Coca-Cola bottle and the Coke can, Lucky Strikes cigarette packaging, subway cars plus the interior and living space of Skylab and the Concorde. Additionally, Loewy created logos for TWA, SPAR, Exxon, Shell and many others. Go over to Nag on the Lake at the link up top to see an insightful 1979 CBS television interview with Loewy, dubbed by the press as the Man who Shaped America.

saor ó dhleacht

Having passed through the gates of Shannon Airport ourselves a few times, we found it quite fascinating to learn that the terminal in western Ireland on the river’s estuary was home to the world’s first duty free shop and will be sure to make special notice of it next time around.  Planet Money fills us in on the life and times of consummate hospitality professional and marketing expert Brendan O’Regan (1917* - 2008 †) whose talents intersected with the limitations of early trans-Atlantic air travel and recognised a business opportunity.
After realising the popularity of Irish Coffee (his first contribution to the world), O’Regan catered to regular arrivals of weary, battered travellers whom had just made the rather arduous hop from North America to Europe and had to land at the first opportunity or were outbound for the same daunting journey, since early planes lacked modern amenities and range and had to make landfall at the first and last opportunity for re-fuelling—which Ireland geographically availed herself of—and saw that his rather captive consumers, elite jet-setters to a person, whose money was burning holes in their pockets, and O’Regan wanted to alleviate their boredom on this layover leg of their trip. Referencing an ancient custom still codified in the law books of allowing sailors to purchase booze without taxes if it was for export and personal consumption, O’Regan successfully pled his case to the Irish government in 1947 to allow him to experiment with an exercise that undercut the government itself by not collecting taxes and losing out on revenue with the promise that by showcasing local items, keepsakes and souvenirs including speciality Irish whiskeys—and manufacturing provenance after a fashion—at a discount, the scheme would encourage local tourism and more than make up for lost revenue on the trinkets.

The model was an instant success and proliferated quickly to airports worldwide—then cruise ships, border-crossings, etc. with some products, like Toblerone (previously) owing its cosmopolitan success to careful product-placement in duty-free stores. O’Regan’s third act was as peace ambassador, helping to end the strife in Northern Ireland and promoting cooperation between Ireland and the UK.

8x8

mother will protect you: Billy Butcher re-imagines Black Mirror episodes as comic book covers

memory hole: the fickleness of contemporary media and format-shifting could create a digital dark ages for future historians

attitude polarisation: the elusive nature of the backfire effect

gorillas in our midst: despite how plausible it may seem, White House staff did not fall over one another to create a custom entertainment channel for Dear Leader

to tell the truth: ladies and gentlemen, Miss Kitty Carlisle

dammit janet: become an flight attendant for the US’s most secret airline, the one that shuttles employees between Las Vegas, Nevada and Area 51

take two of these and call me in the morning: vintage Bank of America spot for “Instant Money”—caution auto-play

much amaze: a crypto-currency based off an internet meme created in 2013 has a market-capitalisation of over a billion dollars, via Slashdot 

flugverkehr

On this day in 1917, the German Air Shipping Company (der Deutsche Luft-Reederei) was incorporated to service a mail route between Berlin and Weimar (regular passenger flights came two years later) and a series of mergers pre- and post-war eventually led to the establishment of Luft Hansa—presently Lufthansa. The scope and mission of the company has certainly changed over the years but the stylised crane (Kranich) designed by architect and graphic designer Otto Firle has remained a constant.

roiling-stock

As if Christmas weren’t already coming early for many industry titans with the planned repeal of net neutrality consumer protections which is to include removing the burden of fair disclosure, it seems that the US kakistocracy has also expressed a willingness to ease the regulatory onus on the airlines by no longer requiring them to be upfront about fees for baggage and handling, seat-selection, boarding-priority and other services described as optional. These rollbacks would make it much harder for consumers to compare fares and would eliminate the reporting requirement that stipulates that the airlines publish what profit they make from these ancillary fees for things that used to be a courtesy. I wonder what affronts are to follow.

port authority

Though we’ve previously encountered some of these fantastic, never realised plans for buildings and infrastructure in New York City as isolated proposals, like a gargantuan skyscraper by Antoni Gaudí or an elevated ten lane highway crossing Manhattan, having the chance to see many of this past visions as an ensemble superimposed on a scale-model of the great metropolis is completely transformational.
Among the many innovative and utopian ideas that we were introduced to by this nicely researched and curated exhibition to be held in the Flushing neighborhood of the bureau of Queens the urban air authority was our new favourite—a massive airport and runway built over the docklands along the Hudson River.

plane-spotting

Hurricane Irma is still unleashing her wrath and is leaving a path of destruction in her wake including the famed Maho Beach of Sint Maarten, where visitors could formerly watch the aircraft take-off and land on the nearby runway of the Princess Juliana International Airport. Directly under the flight path of aircraft, airliners passed just thirty metres overhead but the spectacle was not without its dangers and risk to observers.

in-flight entertainment

Fascinatingly, we learn via Just a Car Guy, that the 1925 silent film “The Lost World,” featuring a cameo by its writer, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle—perhaps better known for his character Sherlock Holmes, was the first in-flight movie screened to commercial passengers in April of that year during a hop from London to Paris. An eccentric takes his team of explorers to search for a lost expedition through the Amazon rain forest to a remote plateau in Venezuela and encounter a sheltered population of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. As clever as this technically challenging act was and how we might take it for granted today, the fact that the reels were highly flammable nitrate carried aloft on a wooden-framed aircraft seemed particularly ill-advised stunt to assay. Luckily, nothing happened on this trip—otherwise, cinemas in the sky might have never taken off. And condemned to infamy, The Lost World might have not gone on to inspire King Kong and the Jurassic Park franchise.

la strada

Active during the 1920s and 1930s visionary Genoese civil-engineer and architect Renzo Picasso, we discover via City Lab, was a truly cosmopolitan citizen informing his professions with detailed studies of traffic and infrastructure from great, bustling urban centres all over Europe and North America—drafting fantastic, futuristic diagrams that appreciate the parallel, symbiotic flow of circulation as something stratified, and multi-layered.
Click on the images for a larger view.
Believing that large cities could be transformed into vertical utopias with good administration, his designs relied heavily on the use of towering skyscrapers—grattanuvole, already familiar to the aspiring architect.
Though perhaps ahead of his time and a cross-town superhighway’s moment has passed for our present (not that other solutions are being proffered) but the overpasses, underpasses and dedicated lanes that are common place may not have been integrated into city planning without Picasso’s appreciation of how complex systems function and intersect and the nature of the snarls and slums to avoid.

6x6

fish and visitors: Icelanders are growing weary of insensitive tourists

meal-ticket: clever man works hospitality loopholes to eat for free for nearly a year before people got wise to his scheme

by jove: amazing, arresting images of the Giant Red Spot of Jupiter

je pense, donc je suis: our sense of self understood through the power of attention

theatre-in-the-round: the workshop of a LEGO expert constructs a zoetrope with minifigs, plus an original precursor to animation encoded as a GIF in bacterial DNA

sanli tu: medieval abridged guide to the Chinese classics of protocol and divination goes on display alongside some of the artefacts pictured therein

biblioclasm

Disturbingly, not only can US transportation security agents demand that travellers disclose the social media profiles and passwords but are now—after trials in select airports—making it standard practise to oblige passengers to remove books and other paper goods from hand-luggage for inspection, as Hyperallergic reports. Counter to the legal legacy of keeping reading habits out of prying eyes, this change surely means that a person’s literary tastes—to include research materials, titles and covers easily misconstrued by those deputised critics and censors, will become a criteria for barring entry and making transit a very difficult matter.

super sonic

With the very busy Schipol Airport just nine kilometres outside of Amsterdam, noise pollution has posed a serious problem for residents living in that sound footprint, which can propagate over an expanse of some thirty kilometres due to the featureless plain that surrounds the facility.
Back in 2008, however, officials seeking to remedy this situation accidentally noticed that when the fields around the airport were ploughed, noise levels dropped. Inspired and drawing on the nineteenth century experiments and demonstrations of father of acoustics, mathematician and musician Ernst Chladni, an architectural firm dug runnels and raised berms to change the soundscape of the area. The symmetrical furrows are separated by the equivalent to the wave-length of the general racket and disrupt the spread of the noise, cutting it in half. The park that separates the airport campus from populated areas has features named in Chladni’s honour—whose brilliance might be most immediately recalled with his demonstrations of sound propagating through a solid medium illustrated by the way grains of sand arrange themselves according to the vibration. Those shapes (nodal patterns) are called Chladni figures.

kittyhawk oder wo ist mein fligendes auto?

At an airstrip outside of München, Lilium Aviation, Dezeen informs, undertook its first maiden voyage earlier this week with its electric powered prototype, a two-seater vertical take-off and landing personal jet.
The Bavarian start-up certainly has some robust competition, but they are pulling out ahead of the pack with this feat. With future plans for allowing a fleet to be summoned via cell-phone, like hailing a taxi, the aerial vehicle has a range of three hundred kilometres and can travel as fast per hour, and can either be piloted by its passengers or can fly autonomously with human remote supervision, as was done for this test-flight. Learn more and see video footage of the at the links above.

5x5

ærodrome: Kottke wonders if the circular aircraft runway might ever take off

no mister bond, i expect you to die: movie villain dermatological trends

my beautiful launderette: the Pope opens a free laundromat for the poor and homeless of Rome with plans for expansion

nakkaşhane: scenes from cult films depicted in Ottoman miniature style by Murat Palta, whom we’ve admired previously

bring a whistle to a knife fight and pretend you’re the referee: Texas is tendering legislation to name an official state gun—with the Bowie knife being a top-contender, via Weird Universe 

backscattering

Apparently all those deputised to keep the US borders safe at boarding and departures ought to aspire to be as frisky and handsy as Dear Leader himself with the Transportation Security Administration implementing new, more invasive pat-down methods, as Boing Boing reports, that are so aggressively gratuitous that public-relations ombudsmen are already girding themselves for the coming raft of sexual assault cases.
The TSA also ought to be prepared for legal action on the part of the airlines whose experience was already made pretty awful and now even more so. There are far bigger battles to fight but at work we’re still contending with the knock-on effects of a sloppily worded civilian hiring freeze (plus a hierarchical farce that makes me see almost see why there might need to be such purges—though not carried out this way) and we find it the irony of ironies that among the few jobs that are automatically exempt are the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) officers and unit victim advocates. I thought under Dear Leader’s at least that might be one annual, mandatory training we’d maybe get out of.

data knows best or don’t forget your toothbrush

Via the globe-trekking Nag on the Lake comes an interesting experiment, practical exercise in surrendering oneself to thinking machines that’ll eventually be better planners than any of us—not for virtue of being more adventurous or resourceful but because they can best navigate and game those electronic corridors of optimising deals and schedules and vacancies with far more efficiency than we can summon—in the form of a spontaneous vacation that’s fully arranged by a robot travel agency to specified parameters.
One doesn’t have to hunt for deals oneself or do the booking, and the computer keeps the travellers in suspense about their destination until in the departures lounge of their local airport. Of course, the machine works within your given budget and allows one to exclude places where one does not what to go (having recently been there) and seemed for a brand new service to not do all that bad. The pair enjoyed a nice weekend getaway in Basel and their only complaints were economic ones—the weak pound and the strong franc, but just imagine how perfectly tailored holidays could become if the robots doing the booking and bargaining knew the likes and interests of the travellers even better than they do themselves, pouring over their social media feeds, etc. What do you think? Would you be willing to invest a not insignificant sum of money to have an algorithm dictate your agenda? It strikes me a little like when you veer off-course from what one’s satnav is directing and the device loses its cool and gets panicky instantly, and if everyone started relying on computerised vacation packages, there’d be no deals left to be scooped up.

7x7

cabin-brew: brewery formulates a beer that’s optimised for enjoyment whilst flying

dynamo: the Earth core and magnetic field is powered by the crystallization of silicon dioxide

faster empire, strike, strike: a clever fan made a modern trailer for Star Wars Episode V

the night Chicago died: the story of how angry white men tried to destroy disco

lift every voice and sing: the lost, forgotten artwork of Augusta Savage

wiphala: the strikingly colourful mansions of La Paz

momofuku: a visit to the Cup Noodles museum in Japan

7x7

skycots: vintage photographs show how babies travelled in the 1950s on British Airways

franchissant: artificial intelligence working with composite images creates the illusion of Napoleon Crossing the Alps

fret zeppelin: a tutoring guitar that helps you learn finger placement fast


great railway journeys: tracing the new Silk Road, a train travels from China to London

c: like light, does darkness have a speed?

ЗАТО: vintage retro-future welcome signs of Soviet towns of science and industry, via Messy Nessy Chic

parfocal lens: it’s the Powers of Ten of dentistry 

8x8

sound garden: Dutch Institute of Sound and Vision lets you explore boutique radio stations from around the world

to catch a thief: artist Anthony van der Meer allows his phone to be stolen and tracks what ensues

dichronic: the incredible craftsmanship that went into the ancient Roman Lycurgus Cup harnesses nano-technology

sproglaboratoriet: beating out hygge, ‘Danskhed,’ Danishness, won word of the year

hearth and home: guide to appeasing household spirits around the world

figgy pudding: an overview of the folklore behind Christmas cuisine, via Strange Company

ward & centre: the utopian civil engineering of Ebenezer Howard influenced urban layouts for generations

fuselage, empennage: modular airplane interior could reconfigure itself for long-haul flights for more efficient, comfortable use of space, like a sky caboose

flight-path or airportraits

I’ve been admiring these sleek composite images of planes taking off and landing from airports from photographer Mike Kelley.
Of course the artist had to camp at each location for a few days to amass the right shots, angles and approaches—though probably not all that long considering the volume of air-traffic, and I notice that one of his arrangements captures a milieu that’s very familiar as I drive past the Frankfurt Flughafen on the Autobahn twice a week. Sometimes, by ones and twos only though, a jet will pass overhead and seem incredibly close and looming but I never try to capture that moment, as I don’t need any further distractions while driving. One of these days, I’ll figure out how to safely perch myself in the field or on the overpass. Read more about Kelley’s technique and travels on Colossal.