Hasta La Ideas

Speaking of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as we were in that last post, but departing in this having absolutely nothing to do with fashion, an ongoing, vicious battle continues to rage just outside the museum’s front steps. You might recall that said war rose to more recent public prominence two years back, when the Met started asking the city to remove hot dog vendors and/or given them $1000 tickets for not being in their sanctioned spaces. At the time, the museum argued that the food carts were blocking visitors from entering, though most everyone (including us) translated that into the museum wanting less traffic for the vendors and more traffic buying food in their cafes. Those various pushes made way for Cake & Shake, a multi-cart operation run by chefs Gina Ojile and Derek Hunt, to slide in last summer, paying somewhere in the $100,000+ range per year for the prime real estate. Somehow, despite all that turmoil over the past couple of years, things seemed relatively calm…until recently. The NY Times has filed this great report on the moving in of carts run by military veterans, three new ones at the time of the story’s publication. The rub is that, due to a NY law, veterans don’t have to pay the city’s high fees to act as street vendors. This seemed to work fine for one of long-serving carts, but now others have swept in, with dubious uses of the vets, one of whom the paper observed taking a nap while someone else manned the cart. Dubbed “rent-a-vet” by the other, established vendors, it’s supposed that cart owners are hiring veterans to simply sit alongside the stands, thus technically fulfilling the legal requirement, saving the owners a bundle in fees, and being able to move in on choice plots of land. It’s a great story and we’re sure, like before, that this will all get mildly ugly for a while, all the while providing even more great reading.

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Has veteran artist Bruce McCall swiped, unintentionally or otherwise, the idea for his latest New Yorker cover? The October 3rd issue of the magazine features McCall’s illustration of Times Square, with a portion of the sidewalk cordoned off for tourists and another two sections dedicated as a “No Tourist” zone. Per usual for the magazine, it’s a clever, fun image. However, it’s also remarkably close to artist Jeff Greenspan‘s 2010 collaboration with Improv Everywhere. Entitled “The Tourist Lane,” Greenspan spray painted sections of New York sidewalks, labeling one side “Tourists” and the other, “New Yorkers.” On one hand, McCall certainly could have come up with the idea himself, explaining on the New Yorker‘s site how he came up with the concept after getting out of a cab in Times Square and being overwhelmed by the out-of-towners. On the other hand, Greenspan’s stunt garnered international press, with copycats painting variations in cities across the world, and the Improv Everywhere video receiving more than a million hits. So we suppose it isn’t inconceivable that McCall could have been aware of it and had it land somewhere in his subconscious. We’ll leave it up to you to decide. Whatever the case: interesting.

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Although it premiered earlier this month at the Toronto Film Festival, Gary Hustwit‘s latest documentary, this time about city planning and entitled Urbanized, is just starting to kick off its worldwide tour, meaning it’s apt to become the subject of nearly every design-based conversation for the next few months, like with Helvetica and Objectified were before it. Starting in New York last week with a screening as part of the Urban Design Week, Hustwit is personally taking the film around to cities around the US (and one stop in London), out until early November. If you happen to live near a major metropolis, and can get tickets quickly enough (thus far every screening has sold out), you should be able to catch it. In the interim, you should start seeing a bevy of reviews from both bloggers and traditional media outlets. The LA Times‘ resident architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, just filed his review, saying that it’s “a sharp, good-looking documentary” and that it “ranks among the smartest recent analyses of mass global urbanization and its discontents,” though he’s a bit miffed that the film doesn’t even include a second about Los Angeles, something the critic finds a glaring omission. Though we wouldn’t be surprised at all if this happens in any number of cities, given that there are only a finite amount Hustwit could cover (“What about Cleveland?!” we’re imagining the Plain Dealer‘s critic is, albeit perhaps wrongly in comparison to LA, already thinking). Here’s the trailer:

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In other cities, starchitects are hired to build skyscrapers, theaters, stadiums, or art museums. In Miami Beach… they’re given parking garages. Just before the weekend, the city announced that Zaha Hadid is the latest in a long series of famous architects and firms to be selected to create a new parking structure. The new space will be located in the Collins Park neighborhood, home to the Miami City Ballet, the City Library, a number of luxury hotels (though this is Miami after all, so everything seems like it’s near “a number of luxury hotels”), and just a few blocks away from the Miami Beach Convention Center. Those destinations listed, it’s understandable that there’s a definite need for parking, but before you judge too harshly on the use of Hadid’s talents for designing one, the city’s mayor, Matti Bower, has this to say to you: “Even our parking garages are more than a group of parking spaces. Some have become destinations within themselves and have attained individual iconic status.” Here’s a list of those parking garages/destinations from the city’s press release:

Miami Beach’s parking garages have received world-wide media attention and have become tourist attractions themselves. They include the Frank Gehry designed, city-owned, Pennyslvania Avenue Garage; Herzog de Meuron‘s minimalist, edgy space at 1111 Lincoln Road; Arquitectonica‘s Ballet Valet Garage at 7th Street and Collins Avenue as well as their newest design in Sunset Harbour, which is currently under construction; Enrique Norton‘s newly designed parking garage at 16th Street and Drexel Avenue; and Perkins and Will‘s recent City Center Garage Project at 18th Street and Meridian Avenue.

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Over the years, we’ve seen a number of instances where people have cried foul over the removal of a piece of Banksy street art, particularly when it involves the remover’s getting rewarded with a large batch of cash. After all, as we wrote back in 2008, “Banksy Makes Walls Worth Millions.” We last saw an instance of what the site VIT.B has quoted some as calling “cultural looting” back in August of last year, when a couple of Banksies were removed from walls in an abandoned building in Detroit and showed up on eBay, starting at $75,000/per. Now the Keszler Gallery in Southampton, New York is getting the same treatment with their exhibition “Banksy: Original Street Works.” Reportedly unauthorized by the artist, actual chunks of the walls holding the paintings were removed and have been put on display and made available for sale. Given Banksy’s very public canvases, which if not removed and sold to galleries are semi-regularly accidentally painted over by graffiti-removal crews or unknowing new building owners, it seems par for the course and not something that should be of any particular surprise. So depending on how you view this latest matter, viewing the gallery-produced video below will either make you terribly mad, or you’ll be interested to see how a Banksy removal is handled:

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