11/12/09

Unofficially, students affiliated with WashU's school of medicine put on a pubcrawl each fall and spring. The theme this year was early 90's hiphop -- complete with dancers in Salt N Pepa jackets, boomboxes, and Hammer pants.

11/11/09

Saint Louis, King Louis IX of France, watched over Art Hill this beautiful Saturday just as he's done every day since 1906. Before the Arch he was the symbol of the city.

Happy Rememberance Day (or Veterans' Day to Americans). It's important that we do not forget the costs of war.

11/10/09

Wow, keeping up with regular photos is tough. I've been super busy lately. But happily, the beginning of November has been so beautiful -- it makes up for the October that should have been. On Saturday I went out to Art Hill in Forest Park and lay in the sun with my book. It was so tranquil with people outside, just hanging out, flying kites, enjoying the weather.

I've started taking a letterpress printing class at the (fabulous) Firecracker Press and I want to take some shots of the shop sometime. They do wonderful design work on antique letterpresses. The presses are absolutely amazing machines -- built with real craftsmanship, built to last.

11/05/09

I really need to go out and get some new photographic material, but in the meantime here's a shot I took kayaking the beautiful Apostle Islands shoreline in northern Wisconsin in the summertime.

11/02/09

Currently on at the Kemper Art Museum (on WashU campus) is the exhibition Metabolic City, which examines plans for urban design understood through the metaphor of the human body. Like a human body, a city needs interacting systems, operating at different levels of analysis, that work effectively in order to maintain a healthy state. The exhibit focuses on work from a few different countries (Japan, the UK, the Netherlands) and most of it seems to be from the 1950s-1960s.

Some of the visions from that era are really interesting. It's especially interesting to me that the work highlighted here emerged in the postwar period, the period when it seems to me that suburban sprawl and the decline of city cores really accelerated... yet it was a visionary time when people were really interested in how they could change their cities into something that they wanted them to be. It's been in the later decades that there's been a preference movement back to pre-war characteristics such as core density, but for new reasons such as their environmental footprint.

I'm a fan of the dense, vibrant city core and follow developments in that direction in the St. Louis area with a lot of interest, but without any formal background in the urban planning field it can be difficult to develop and articulate my opinions in more detail, or feel confident doing so.

11/01/09

A man was carrying this wonderful rendition of the house from the movie Up at the Central West End's Halloween parade yesterday.