Exploring American Urbanism Through Art & Graffiti

With urban artists like Ox, Ludo, Vermibus or Neko being specialized in this kind of critical vandalism and cities like Berlin and Madrid getting ad-busted on a grand scale, street ad takeovers seem to be quite popular these days. Now it’s Toronto’s turn… Mainly targeting billboards and advertisement street signs, the cARTographyTO crew has been responsible for 35 ad-busting hacks all over Toronto. A spokesperson for cARTographyTO stated, These structures are billboards masquerading as sources of useful public information. When you look at the pillars, it’s hard to find the maps, and this goes against the City’s own public space guidelines. How could City Hall allow this to happen? Beyond mere visual pollution, these pillars are a safety hazard. And Astral’s influence on our city is a public insult and embarrassment - more power has been given to those who already have the loudest voices, to the detriment of all who use these spaces. ...

I just read about the USA and their prison problems and first was quite flashed when I noticed that the State of New York is hoping to sell its old prisons, before I entirely thought about it… As the New York Times explains in their New York Has Some Prisons to Sell You article (which by the way reads like a property description), the ideal buyer is someone who craves space to spread out, and who does not mind a property that has had thousands of guests over the years, what made my day because including me I know several others who could use such huge urban places to transform them into architectural research centers (as BLDGBLOG describes), to create impressing exhibition spaces, urban art centers, youth clubs, etc. ...

The MIT’s Green Building recently hosted the world’s largest Tetris game! The 90 meters tall academic and research building was designed by noted architect I. M. Pei, whose window facade suited perfectly for a 17x9 pixel Tetris screen… Tetris on the MIT Green Building As The Tech pointed out in a corresponding article, the mysteriously appearing Tetris hack, which was described as The holy grail of hacks was the culmination of over four and a half years of work by an undisclosed number of hackers! The group of hackers used the already installed LED arrays to light up the windows with a variety of colors for the super-sized video game, allowing not just students to play a fully functional game of Tetris on the Green Building! ...

French/German photographers duo Lucie and Simon created with Silent World a great series of deserted places in cities like Paris, New York or Beijing, well-known around the world for the incredible amount of people usually populating public spaces. It seems, the photos capture entirely deserted cities and they make us somehow understand that what makes a city a city is not just the man-made monumental buildings, but the temporary elements within… ...

Stephen Wilkes is not unknown when it comes to astonishing fine art and commercial photography. For more than two decades he has been widely recognized; his photographs can be found in magazines such as Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, Time, Life Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. For his urban photography series Day To Night, Wilkes photographed during one day the same spot over and over again to document the specific daily routine and the places unique flair during day and night. The special thing about those photos is, that Wilkes merged them together in one single image, what allows him to show day and night-time together as it would be one impression! ...

About 2500 old NYC subway cars, including 1000 so-called Redbirds, have been buried about 80 feet underwater off the US east coast during the last years, as the Spiegel recently published! After running round about 40 years in one of the world’s largest subway networks, this is their last stop… Redbirds - Anti-Graffiti Subway The Redbirds, which are named after their cinnabar red anti-graffiti coat of paint and got famous during the early 1980th, when New York Cities graffiti scene reached the peak, are now helping to create an artificial reef off the coast of Delaware (named Redbirds Reef), what sounds really weird in my ears… ...

The Black Hills (named after their dark appearance from a distance) are a small, isolated mountain range rising from the Great Plains of North America in western South Dakota. In November 2011, Shepard Fairey and his team created a huge mural in Los Angeles to call attention on the many problems of the native’s reservation… We worked together with Shepard Fairey over the next several months to collaborate and bring something to the streets of Los Angeles. With help from Miguel of La Barracuda this 20x60 wall on Melrose Ave at Fairfax was secured. What you see here is the culmination of the tireless efforts of Aaron Huey and Shepard Fairey. ...

I already heard a lot about wired urban sports, I mean there are people playing Capture the Flag in Berlin, some use their bikes to play polo and others run burning through the city, but I never saw someone freestyle skiing in an urban environment. Maybe that’s because we don’t have snow that often here in Berlin or - and that’s what I prefer as a good reason - pro-skier JP Auclair is really killing it! His piste is the City of Trail, a smaller village in British Columbia! ...

Today I have a nice hint for urban explorers or urbex enthusiasts who are fascinated by abandoned architecture: Matt Lambros is a photographer based in New York City, urban explorer and runs the After The Final Curtain blog, a photographic documentation of the effects of years of neglect and decay in some of America’s greatest theaters. What first sounds like a time-consuming obsession is just a great way of preserving and presenting forgotten and lost cultural symbols! ...

Seven years ago, Andrew Faris took a lot of brilliant and unique Polaroid photos of New York City. Recently he revisited his stacks of Polaroids and started to share them as the “New York City Polaroid Project”. “This project began Spring 2003. At the time, I had just graduated from Kent State University and was ready for a new adventure. So I moved to NYC with my new acquired diploma and my parent’s Polaroid camera.” (Andrew Faris) ...