A piece by Lev Bratishenko from triplecanopy:
The Roma build their palaces just like the rest of us, one cinder block at a time…
TIMOSORA, ROMANIA - Like Saint Petersburg before she was operated on for her three-hundredth, the brie-colored streets and decaying facades have a dusty continuity. Against this backdrop, the Roma build their Disneyland.
Forced by the Communists to settle in the ’60s, they have embraced a style of permanent renovation. Their mansions, in primary colors, stick like fingers in the dead dictator’s eye. But this provokes nothing beyond tourists snapping photos and locals shaking their heads.
“How do you think they pay for them?” they ask me and then spit.
More…
An essay by Richard Powers at Granta…
You’ll have heard how the city once ended in fire, and around these parts, it threatens to end in ice every few years or so. But once, not too long ago, Chicago flirted with ending in water, an entirely preventable man-made inundation that few saw but everybody felt – a two-billion-dollar sucker-punch tsunami that weighed in among the dozenmost costly floods in American history.
The groundwork for the Great Flood of 1992 was laid a century before, when the Illinois (later Chicago)Tunnel Company built a series of semi-official, semi-clandestine tunnels under almost every street downtown. The tunnels were only supposed to house telephone cables, but in a nice Pynchonian twist, the operators covertly decided to install a narrow-gauge railway for delivering freight, as well. The dirt hauled out of the tunnels filled in the lakefront and formed all the land now under Grant Park, the Field Museum, Soldier Field and McCormick Place. You’d think that amount of landfill ought to have tipped off more than a few officials that something besides phone cables was going in underground. More…
From Kate Rockwood at Fast Company:
The engineer is holding his breath. Beside him, the project manager grimaces. A dozen Emerson employees, all in khaki pants and button-down shirts, are gathered — silent and expectant — around their teacher as he squints at their creations. Back in their real roles, making aerospace controls or medical machinery or marine valves at the $24.8 billion St. Louis-based manufacturer, these people are not often met with bewilderment. But then, they rarely bring raw ideas to consumers either.
Here, in the Pittsburgh offices of MAYA (”most advanced yet acceptable”) Design, a mashup of design firm and tech-research lab, these people are students. Given 30 minutes to imagine a TiVo-like car radio, they’ve built prototypes with construction paper, markers, and stickers. Chris Pacione, director of MAYA’s innovation boot camp, is playing an average consumer — and he can’t find the on button. “Some companies are not used to working across silos — design, marketing, engineering,” Pacione says later. “They still think design is something that happens at the end: ‘Should we paint it red? Or blue?’ They’ll have brilliant minds working on a project for two years before it hits shelves, and it’s not until then they know it’s deeply flawed.” More…
