Jackson, Wyoming is one of my favorite places on the planet. (Here is a ski/snowboard video that my friends and I made a few years ago in Jackson.)
Earlier this year, Eagle Point Hotel Partners and the Brooklyn-based design firm Studio Tack completed a renovation of the Anvil Motel in Jackson – it’s now the 49-room Anvil Hotel.
Apparently reclaimed motels are the new hospitality trend.
What I appreciate about their approach, is the emphasis on creating something that feels local and contextual. Here are a couple of snippets from Surface Magazine:
The designers wanted to avoid a rustic feel, or what Ruben Caldwell, one of Studio Tack’s four partners and an avid backcountry skier, calls “Mountain Modern,” referring to architecture, common in places like Vail, Colorado, and Lake Tahoe, California, that excessively uses reclaimed wood and Cor-Ten steel. “We knew we didn’t want to steer anywhere near that,” says Chou, a long-time snowboarder who more recently got into skiing. “It takes a bit of familiarity with ski towns to know what you don’t want to do.”
The vibrancy of Jackson’s local culture impressed the design team—and Caldwell so much so that he moved there full-time last year. “As a design team,” Caldwell says, “we’re hyper-aware of the need for projects to be deeply embedded into the local scene.”
It’s easier to copy and paste. But the results are always better when you take a bit of time to understand a place.
Image: Anvil Hotel
Canada has a rich graphic design history and that story needs to be told. Here is a Kickstarter project that’s absolutely worth checking out: Design Canada.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1002969621/design-canada/widget/video.html
Greg Durrell (a graphic designer from Vancouver) and Jessica Edwards and Gary Hustwit (of Film First in Brooklyn) have partnered up, and they are looking for your support to produce the very first documentary about Canadian graphic design.
As a proud Canadian, I am thrilled to see this project. Because this is obviously not just a documentary about graphic design (though in the 60′s and 70′s we were the best in the world). It’s a story about Canada, our history, and our evolving identity.
If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here to make your way over to Kickstarter.
Jackson, Wyoming is one of my favorite places on the planet. (Here is a ski/snowboard video that my friends and I made a few years ago in Jackson.)
Earlier this year, Eagle Point Hotel Partners and the Brooklyn-based design firm Studio Tack completed a renovation of the Anvil Motel in Jackson – it’s now the 49-room Anvil Hotel.
Apparently reclaimed motels are the new hospitality trend.
What I appreciate about their approach, is the emphasis on creating something that feels local and contextual. Here are a couple of snippets from Surface Magazine:
The designers wanted to avoid a rustic feel, or what Ruben Caldwell, one of Studio Tack’s four partners and an avid backcountry skier, calls “Mountain Modern,” referring to architecture, common in places like Vail, Colorado, and Lake Tahoe, California, that excessively uses reclaimed wood and Cor-Ten steel. “We knew we didn’t want to steer anywhere near that,” says Chou, a long-time snowboarder who more recently got into skiing. “It takes a bit of familiarity with ski towns to know what you don’t want to do.”
The vibrancy of Jackson’s local culture impressed the design team—and Caldwell so much so that he moved there full-time last year. “As a design team,” Caldwell says, “we’re hyper-aware of the need for projects to be deeply embedded into the local scene.”
It’s easier to copy and paste. But the results are always better when you take a bit of time to understand a place.
Image: Anvil Hotel
Canada has a rich graphic design history and that story needs to be told. Here is a Kickstarter project that’s absolutely worth checking out: Design Canada.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1002969621/design-canada/widget/video.html
Greg Durrell (a graphic designer from Vancouver) and Jessica Edwards and Gary Hustwit (of Film First in Brooklyn) have partnered up, and they are looking for your support to produce the very first documentary about Canadian graphic design.
As a proud Canadian, I am thrilled to see this project. Because this is obviously not just a documentary about graphic design (though in the 60′s and 70′s we were the best in the world). It’s a story about Canada, our history, and our evolving identity.
If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here to make your way over to Kickstarter.
I am writing this post on a Porter flight from New York back to Toronto.
For my last day in New York, my close friend and I rented scooters and rode all around Manhattan and Brooklyn. It was a great way to cover a lot of ground, but also a great way to still absorb the city. It’s harder to do the latter in a car and I never have any desire to drive in New York.
Because the great thing about New York is that as a pedestrian you feel like you control the streets. When you’re waiting at a crosswalk, you’re never actually waiting. You walk off the sidewalk and onto the street so that you can assert yourself in front of the cars and wait for an opening. This serves to narrow the portion of road that the cars can actually drive on and reminds the drivers who is boss.
At the same time, there are many instances throughout the city where New York has purposefully reallocated the space dedicated to pedestrians (and cyclists) and the space dedicated to cars. They’ve created new public spaces, widened the areas where people can walk, and seemingly blanketed the city with bike lanes. And that makes a lot of sense given that in many (most?) areas of the city, pedestrians greatly outnumber cars.
So does that mean New York is at war with the car? (I’d be curious to know – in the comment section below – if those kinds of discussions take place in the city.)
I suppose you could spin it that way. But New York also does things for cars. While riding around on the scooter today, I was so impressed by how well timed the streetlights were along the avenues. It made it incredibly easy to go downtown or uptown. In Toronto, I often feel like we time our lights to make driving as slow as possible.
But make no mistake; New York is not a driving city.
New York is about walking, biking, taking transit, and hailing cabs. There is a reason they have the highest transit ridership in the US. The city is built for it. And unless driverless cars and ride sharing completely changes the equation, I will continue to believe that transit is the most efficient backbone for any big city.
I am writing this post on a Porter flight from New York back to Toronto.
For my last day in New York, my close friend and I rented scooters and rode all around Manhattan and Brooklyn. It was a great way to cover a lot of ground, but also a great way to still absorb the city. It’s harder to do the latter in a car and I never have any desire to drive in New York.
Because the great thing about New York is that as a pedestrian you feel like you control the streets. When you’re waiting at a crosswalk, you’re never actually waiting. You walk off the sidewalk and onto the street so that you can assert yourself in front of the cars and wait for an opening. This serves to narrow the portion of road that the cars can actually drive on and reminds the drivers who is boss.
At the same time, there are many instances throughout the city where New York has purposefully reallocated the space dedicated to pedestrians (and cyclists) and the space dedicated to cars. They’ve created new public spaces, widened the areas where people can walk, and seemingly blanketed the city with bike lanes. And that makes a lot of sense given that in many (most?) areas of the city, pedestrians greatly outnumber cars.
So does that mean New York is at war with the car? (I’d be curious to know – in the comment section below – if those kinds of discussions take place in the city.)
I suppose you could spin it that way. But New York also does things for cars. While riding around on the scooter today, I was so impressed by how well timed the streetlights were along the avenues. It made it incredibly easy to go downtown or uptown. In Toronto, I often feel like we time our lights to make driving as slow as possible.
But make no mistake; New York is not a driving city.
New York is about walking, biking, taking transit, and hailing cabs. There is a reason they have the highest transit ridership in the US. The city is built for it. And unless driverless cars and ride sharing completely changes the equation, I will continue to believe that transit is the most efficient backbone for any big city.
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