OllieOllieOxenfree!

When is a flower not a flower?

When it's the BP/Amoco logo.  The Vienna-based philosophy/design group Monochrom asked people to draw, from memory, as many corporate logos as they could.  The results are surprising:

http://www.monochrom.at/markenzeichnen/index-eng.htm

Open the link and click on a logo, otherwise nothing really happens.  It's interesting how long some of our memories of logos are.  Check out the old star-shield of Philips, or the abbreviated-marijuana-leaf that once was Adidas. 

Tesselated geography

If you're interested in cities, maps, quilts, or photography, I can't recommend highly enough the work of Nikolas Schiller, www.nikolasschiller.com.  His images of altered aerial photographs are like taking a kaleidoscope to your favorite places.  Site won't show up in a Google search (why?  see the Washington Post 3/14/07), but is an interesting example of stealth web presence.

Twelve-story skyscraper, anyone?

I often need to research individual buildings for walking tours.  This can be a surprising challenge.  The big cities (Chicago, New York, London, Los Angeles) offer an embarrasment of coffee table book pornography, and a few brilliant overviews.  For the next tier one can usually find at least one decent historic record in print.  Often, though, I'm not looking up the Chrysler Building, but need to get the construction date on an annoyingly prominent but bland telephone company headquarters.  Small cities rarely have information outside the local building department, and the people who manage real estate know surprisingly little about architects and construction dates.  Current construction is even worse; it can be almost impossible to track down a project's architect once the tenants move in and construction banners come down.

What's an architectural historian to do?  Emporis, http://www.emporis.com/en/, has created a database of buildings around the world.  They've done a great job pulling together data from suburbs, small cities, and places generally overlooked.  They list buildings by city, and allow searching across architect/height/geographic region, with decent photos so you can be sure the entry you're looking at is the same condo tower that caught your attention last week in Dubuque.  Even better, they're capturing entries of buildings under construction now around the world, getting data from construction companies and as-built drawings to capture the status of works in progress. 

This is terrific resource, one I'll be using when planning future vacations. 

Want something more bricks-and-mortar visitor-friendly?  Try the Skyscraper Museum, http://www.skyscraper.org/.  After years as an online venue, in 2004 they moved into a nifty NYC location.  Check out their Skidmore Owings Merrill facility in Battery Park City next time you're in the City.