I really like photography and I really like cool light things. And so this Kickstarter project — called the Looking Glass Portrait — caught my eye today. I haven’t backed it (yet), but it strikes me that three-dimensional image capture and creation is going to be something pretty important going forward. I can’t wait for that to happen.
Tag: light
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Blaze Laserlights
This is a great idea:
It is a bicycle light – by a London-based company called Blaze – that forward projects a bicycle symbol 6m in front of you as you ride. It also has a really bright white light.
They will be (or have been) installed on London’s entire bike-share fleet and they are currently being piloted in New York City. Here is a video of it in action.
One of the things I always watch for when I’m cycling is being in a car’s blindspot. Signalling seems to be a dying art, so you never know when someone might turn into you. If this light is able to project in front of the car and signal to the driver that a cyclist is nearby, then I could see this being a big safety improvement. Of course, this is just one scenario where a light like this might be helpful.
Have any of you tried it?
Image: Blaze
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Let there be light
My condo has an east exposure. That means I get direct sun in the morning and no direct sun in the afternoon, once the sun has crossed over onto the other side of my tower.
But a funny thing happens in the late afternoon and early evening. The sun reaches just the right angle and begins to reflect off the apartment across from me. That apartment is about 11m away.
Once this happens, it then feels like I’m getting direct sun again. It floods my apartment. This may seem like a small thing, but I love it when this happens. It’s happening right now as I write this post.
So I can only imagine what it must have felt like for the residents of Rjukan, Norway when they got their first taste of winter sun back in 2013.
Rjukan is a small town of approximately 3,400 residents. It’s located about 2.5 hours west of Oslo and is situated within a deep east-west valley.
As a result of its geography, the town is cast in shadow for about half of the year, from September to March. The elevation of the sun is simply too low for direct light to reach down and into the valley.
So what the town did was install a set of solar powered mirrors on top of the mountains. The mirrors – also called heliostats – track the sun and reflect it down into the town’s main square. Now the town gets winter sun.
Interestingly enough, many residents opposed the mirrors before they were built. They viewed it as a frivolous expenditure. Petitions and Facebook pages were created. But now that the mirrors have been installed, most of the naysayers seem to have changed their tune.
I think it goes to show just how important light is, but also how difficult change, of many varietals, can be.
Image: Flickr
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Urban infill case study: 1234 Howard Street in San Francisco
Urban infill developments can be tough. The sites are often small and/or narrow and that creates a lot of design challenges. Access to light is a common problem.
But constraints can also be beautiful, because they have a way of forcing creativity.
When I was in architecture school, I used to find it easier to work when I was given constraints and challenges. It gave me something to latch onto, as opposed to just starting with a blank canvas. A big part of design, at least for me, is about solving problems. So give me a problem to solve!
One of the ways that architects and designers often deal with the access to light problem is by carving out lightwells or courtyards to bring light down into the building. This can be used when you have a deep site or when you’re building right up against the property line and you can’t have any windows.
One project that I’ve always liked for this reason – as well as the fact that it’s beautifully designed – is 1234 Howard Street in San Francisco. It looks like this from above:
The site is 50′ x 165′ and it spans an entire block.
In order to get lots of light into all of the units, the architects (Stanley Saitowitz | Natoma Architects) split the site up into 3 “bars”, each of which would be somewhere around 16′ x 165′. The middle “bar” was then dedicated to a courtyard that cuts through the entire building.
The two flanking bars were then further subdivided into 2 units per bar, which translates into 4 units per floor x 4 floors. The ground floor is just common areas and parking.
The advantage of this design strategy is that the apartments now have windows running the length of the courtyard, where as typically on narrow deep lots you would end up with “bowling alley” units and windows just on one end.
The disadvantage of this design strategy is that you’re now just over 16′ away from seeing what your neighbor is eating for dinner, among other things.
But with the right window coverings, I’m sure we’d all survive in these apartments with their Bulthaup kitchens and Miele appliances.
I love seeing creative solutions to tight urban sites. And one of the things that I worry about, with things like the Mid-Rise Performance Standards here in Toronto, is that we’re reducing or even eliminating the possibility for these kinds of creative solutions.
I recognize that 1234 Howard is not the same as an avenue mid-rise site in Toronto with low-rise residential behind it. But the thought still crossed my mind as I was writing this piece.
All photos via Stanley Saitowitz | Natoma Architects Inc.
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A few photos from Art Basel
It’s raining here in Miami Beach this morning. But the city is still buzzing with Art Basel and everything else that is going on right now.
It’s been interesting to learn about some of the measures that Miami Beach is taking to deal with flood risk. The city is highly vulnerable to rising sea levels.
A post on that topic is in the works, but I don’t have time for it this morning. So instead, I’d like to share some of my photos. Many of them are already on my Instagram.
I particularly liked the work of South Korean artist Chul Hyun Ahn. He works primarily with light and the perception of depth.
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From seigneurial land tenure to condominium plans
One of the things I noticed this past weekend when I was on my Porter Escape in Quebec City was that there’s still evidence of the seigneurial land use system. I saw it on île d’Orléans.
Established in 1627 in New France, the seigneurial system was a feudal way of distributing land and creating subsistence farming for those who occupied it. It was ultimately abolished in 1854, but you can still see vestiges of it.
With the seigneurial system, a typical farming lot was a long and narrow strip of land emanating from the water, which in this particular case was the St. Lawrence River. Here’s a map from 1641 showing what that looks like:
The reasoning behind this spatial arrangement was rather simple. By having long narrow lots, it meant that you could maximize the number of farmers who had direct access to water. This was needed for navigation, but also for many other obvious reasons. This was an efficient layout.
At the same time, the long strips meant that each farmer had access to a broad cross section of different kinds of land. They had fertile land for growing, land for their home, and frequently land with trees so that they had material to build, fuel to burn, and so on. It also meant that, despite the overall lot sizes, people actually lived fairly close to each other. It created communities.
Of course, there’s a lot more to the seigneurial system than just its physical form and there are reasons it was eventually abolished. But today I just want to focus on spatial layout. Because I think there are parallels to how we continue to plan our communities.
If you live in a city you’ve probably come across a narrow rowhouse, a narrow townhouse, and/or a long and narrow condominium – which many people like to pejoratively refer to as a “bowling alley” plan. In these cases, the width of the home could be somewhere between 10 and 13 feet.
If you stop and think about this, it’s exactly the same spatial principles as the seigneurial land use system. But instead of maximizing the number of people with access to the St. Lawrence River, it’s about maximizing the number of people who front onto the street and who have access to natural light.
In tight urban conditions, it’s not uncommon to have no “side yard windows.” In my case, I live in a condominium with 20′ feet of windows on one side only. The other 3 sides of my box have none. And that’s a fairly common urban condition.
I find this interesting because as much as the world is rapidly changing, some things don’t actually change all that much.
Image: Wikipedia