I don’t really think of myself as a slouch, but I’m sure there are times when I walk where my eyes tend to lurk more toward my feet than straight ahead. The photo below captures one of those moments: What are these weird rectangles in the unusually sandy ground? They look almost like cemetery plots,
As recently as my last blog article, I alluded to an unusual dichotomy in the value of corner parcels: for the most part, residences on street corners are less valuable than homes on the rest of the block. People don’t the reduced privacy one expects when a property fronts two streets, when they can easily
Where I grew up in the Midwest, most county seats enjoy an almost overbearingly consistent urban form at their historic core. With few exceptions, they feature the archetypal courthouse square. The four blocks fronting this courthouse—the four sides of the square—serve as the commercial core, with a variety of different sizes of 19th century buildings:
I generally try to avoid two consecutive posts in the same state, but I can’t help myself this time around. And frankly, the location—the geography, the jurisdiction—isn’t really all that significant. Though these images come from upstate New York (as the title indicates), the issues that they raise could just as easily be anywhere in
Some companies embed their brand into the very architecture of their locations. Prominent ornamentations or physical features on the structures assert themselves, almost as their own logo. Sometimes they ascend in importance to become the logo. After all, the famed golden arches of McDonald’s didn’t always simply hint at the letter M atop a pole-mounted
As the year winds down, I intend to avoid any aphorisms or wisdom accrued over the past year—far too cliché. New Years Day is, after all, a capricious imposition of significance to a 24-hour period that otherwise if fundamentally like any other. Just an arbitrarily agreed-upon point on the elliptical orbit. Why impart words of
The religious landscape in America is changing. This isn’t a revelation (pun intended), nor is it particularly novel; it’s always been changing. The media and think tank buzz about the nation’s growing secularization is so abundant these days that it’s impossible to ignore. It takes no great deal of detective work to find evidence that
Coming from a family that worked in the advertising industry, I cannot help myself by focusing occasionally on the use of lettering, symbols, or other carefully positioned typographic strategies to help galvanize an advertising logo into a widely successful brand. More importantly, I can’t help but focus on the non-successes—those examples where, even if the
Do you remember the good old days of bicycle advocacy, back when the prevailing ambition was the introduction of bike lanes, buy applying solid stripes on the pavement? If you’re older than twenty, you probably should remember those days; they weren’t that long ago. As recently as the mid-2000s, the standard for bike-friendliness was bike
Verdant and breathtaking as much of Alaska might be, the Last Frontier is no great shakes when it comes to biodiversity. Such is the nature of boreal forests in general: they typically host few varieties of tree species, although the ones that thrive are as abundant as one might expect in a mostly uninhabited, vast
I don’t really think of myself as a slouch, but I’m sure there are times when I walk where my eyes tend to lurk more toward my feet than straight ahead. The photo
As recently as my last blog article, I alluded to an unusual dichotomy in the value of corner parcels: for the most part, residences on street corners are less valuable than homes on
Where I grew up in the Midwest, most county seats enjoy an almost overbearingly consistent urban form at their historic core. With few exceptions, they feature the archetypal courthouse square. The four blocks
I generally try to avoid two consecutive posts in the same state, but I can’t help myself this time around. And frankly, the location—the geography, the jurisdiction—isn’t really all that significant. Though these
Some companies embed their brand into the very architecture of their locations. Prominent ornamentations or physical features on the structures assert themselves, almost as their own logo. Sometimes they ascend in importance to
As the year winds down, I intend to avoid any aphorisms or wisdom accrued over the past year—far too cliché. New Years Day is, after all, a capricious imposition of significance to a
The religious landscape in America is changing. This isn’t a revelation (pun intended), nor is it particularly novel; it’s always been changing. The media and think tank buzz about the nation’s growing secularization
Coming from a family that worked in the advertising industry, I cannot help myself by focusing occasionally on the use of lettering, symbols, or other carefully positioned typographic strategies to help galvanize an
Do you remember the good old days of bicycle advocacy, back when the prevailing ambition was the introduction of bike lanes, buy applying solid stripes on the pavement? If you’re older than twenty,
Verdant and breathtaking as much of Alaska might be, the Last Frontier is no great shakes when it comes to biodiversity. Such is the nature of boreal forests in general: they typically host
