Elsewhere

Cincinnati Enquirer Mistakes Downtown Marietta for Downtown Cincinnati!: umm…

Film Screening: Urbanized by Gary Hustwit: Monday night at the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati.

The King Street Lots in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York: the history of a community garden in Brooklyn.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Heller House Hits the Market Today: only $2.5 million for a well-maintained 1897 beauty in Chicago.

Deciduous Lampposts by luzinterruptus: an amazing temporary public art installation in Madrid.

SOM Chicago Wins Competition to Design the Wujiang Greenland Tower: insanity featuring a 30-story tall operable window.

Brokelandia — Did You Eat It?: for fans of Portlandia, this definitely counts as meta humor, but it’s well done.

What the What?

Here’s a fun new game: I show you something I’ve recently come across, and you try to tell me what it is. What exactly is “coming soon” to the former Fashion ¢ents & Plus at 6th and Race in downtown Cincinnati? Anyone know?

Plexiglass Ghost Sign in Brooklyn

This ghost sign is located on Bedford Ave., just a hop and a skip from Roebling Playground named after your friend and mine, the civil engineer John A. Roebling, whose Brooklyn Bridge is modeled after his earlier Roebling Bridge in Cincinnati. But what exactly does the ghost sign say?

Paper Architecture by Ingrid Siliakus

Inspired by the work of M.C. Escher, Amsterdam-based paper artist Ingrid Siliakus creates highly complex buildings and even entire cityscapes, each out of a single piece of cut and folded paper.

Walking Routes in Downtown Cincinnati

Have you noticed these directional signs in downtown Cincinnati? I’ve been seeing them for the last few months. At first, I thought this was some sort of prank: the signs are almost too official-looking with their Modern pedestrian icons, arrows and distances. So, basically these are instructions for how to use the sidewalk, right?

Elsewhere

All in a Day: Chris Glass explores Cincinnati and shares pretty photos.

Charley Harper: A Birds Eye View: a retrospective of the work of Cincinnati’s own Minimal Realist, now on display at DAAP.

Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Design: written from the fringes of contemporary architectural practice.

The Commuters of 1982: Jeremiah Moss waxes nostalgic about the ghosts of Port Authority commuters past.

Questioning the Rust-Belt-Cities-as-Laboratories Concept: a counterpoint to conventional wisdom as it’s applied to Detroit, Pittsburgh and the rest of the Rust Belt.

Detroit Re-Photography: an antidote to Detroit ruin porn [if you don't have time to check out the entire slideshow, just look at this].

UR New York’s Own Art Cards: a harmless little subway prank.

Map Prints by Marisa Seguin

Marisa Seguin was born in Vancouver, BC and now lives in Milwaukee, where she’s studying illustration. Her series of illustrated city maps is very sweet and includes Milwaukee, Vancouver, Paris, Venice, and San Francisco [I love that Milwaukee is part of a series that includes a couple of grand European cities].

Love Letter to Brooklyn by Stephen Powers

In what seems to be turning into a tradition for us, we took a long-ass walk through Brooklyn on Christmas morning, exploring with relatively few other people around. Our destination was Love Letter to Brooklyn by Stephen Powers a.k.a. ESPO, which went up a few months ago on the Macy’s parking garage in downtown Brooklyn.

VisuaLingual in Just Design

It’s an honor to have our work included in Just Design: Socially Conscious Design for Critical Causes by Christopher Simmons of San Francisco-based MINE™, which has just been published by How Books.

John Breiner Ghost Tile in Over-the-Rhine

John Breiner was born in Austria-Hungary in 1880. He was a tailor by trade. With his wife Anna and their young daughter Frances, he came to the US in 1904, settling in Over-the-Rhine. By 1915, the family was living above Breiner’s Dry Goods, their store at 126 Elder St. between Race and Elm, shown here.