Phil Patton

"Speed" in New York

Just watched Speedy, the 1928 silent film for which Harold Lloyd placed a camera atop an ambulance and drove it through Manhattan.  Babe Ruth plays himself as Lloyd’s harried taxi passenger, trying to get to the game on time.   The film of the daredevil drive through New York provides  unique footage of the streets and traffic of Manhattan in the late 1920s.  One can see briefly one of the bronze traffic towers whose model is included in Cars, Culture and the City, at the Museum of the City of New York through August 8.  they were designed by the architect of the museum’s building, Joseph H. Freedlander.   Christopher Gray wrote about the towers in 1997: ”… in 1922….the Fifth Avenue Association paid for new, more ornamental traffic-light towers. “After a nationwide architectural competition with 130 entries, Joseph H. Freedlander's design for a $125,000 series of seven bronze towers was selected. The first tower was unveiled in December 1922. These 23-foot-high structures set a standard for street furniture yet to be equaled. Five feet square, the towers were decorated with deeply modeled neoclassical ornament, including four eagles at the corners. They carried illuminated clocks with bells that sounded the hours, and they rested on granite safety islands for pedestrians. “Freedlander told The New York Times that the design was meant ''to awaken in the public mind a real and enduring love for artistic symmetry and the beautiful.'' Expanding this idea, Architecture magazine editorialized that the esthetic design in the public realm was a ''substantial contribution to better citizenship.'' “In 1926 the towers were put under the control of a single officer when the Police Department found that centralized traffic lighting could free officers for other duties.” The film also offers wonderful vintage views of Yankee Stadium, the Bronx and Luna Park on Coney Island.

Supercar Designer

David Crafoord,  a versatile Swedish designer was in town recently. Crafoord was called in by Christian van Koenigsegg to turn the owner’s rough sketches into the design of the first  Koenigsegg super car.   The CC was first produced in 1996.

 

But he has also done work for Ikea, Siemens,  ITT, and Ericsson. S and 3M as part of the firm Ergonomidesign.  He was in New York because a design he had done for an asthma breath tester was including the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Triennial, titled “Why Design Now?”

 

The portable Nioxmino tests for asthma and helps determine the proper dosage of medication, ameliorating side effects and cutting unnecessary costs.

 

He said that far from contemplating a purchase of Saab, as reported last year, Mr. Koenigsegg, who founded his company in 1994, only seriously considered the idea after being asked about it by reporters.

Lady Gaga Goes to MIT

This week Polaroid donated a large photography Lady Gaga, the company's creative director, to the MIT Museum. "Polaroid stands for the iconic magic of instant photography, while continuing to evolve and adapt to evolving technology," said Bobby Sager, Polaroid's chairman, in a statement.   The photo was taken with one of the legendary 20 by  24 inch Polaroid cameras that require special film and have been used by fashion and art photographers over the years.  William Wegman shot many of his famous photographs of Man Ray and other dogs on the camera.   Polaroid is now emerging from bankruptcy.    Lady Gaga is a Polaroid fan who used the cameras in a music video.

The picture will be included in an exhibition the MIT Museum is planning of Polaroid artifacts and images for 2013.

Safety by Better Type

Driving safety is not always a matter of air bags or brakes.  The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has honored a road sign typeface that was designed to improve legibility and safety.   The  National Design Triennial show now on view at the museum, called “Why Design Now?” includes Clearview, the improved type used on some highways.  

http://exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org/Why-Design-Now/project/clearviewhwy-typeface

The type font is the work of graphic designer Donald Meeker, typeface designer James Montalbano and a team of human factors experts, according to the curators of the show,  Ellen Lupton, Cara McCarty, Matilda McQuaid, and Cynthia Smith.   It was tested and improved at The  Larson Transportation Institute at Pennsylvania State University and  Texas Transportation Institute.  Texas and Pennsylvania.   I wrote about it for the NY Times in 2005.

    The letters are easier to read at night, especially helpful for the increasing number of aging drivers on the road.  The designs replace the older ones, used by most states and cities, called Highway Gothic.  The team behind the type faces spent fifteen years refining and testing it. 
Headlights tend to blur type, an effect called halation. The improvement is larger open spaces in the letters and bolder descenders or tails.
The catalog for the show explains that in the old type “the open spaces in the characters, such as the bowl of the lowercase ‘a,” are too small, making the letters hard to read.”  This is especially true at night, when headlights strike the reflectorized signs. The new letters have larger open spaces.

The designers have also raised the height of cross bars, which tends to make letters easier to distinguish.  Lifting the waistlines of letters is called by type designers increasing the ‘x level” where the cross bars strike.  Tests showed that Clearview could be read at 1000 feet away while its older rivals required getting within 700 feet.
The challenge was not just creating a clearer type, but creating one that fit the same space and did not require new and larger signs.
Sign standards change slowly, thanks to conservative and careful organizations of transportation officials and engineers. 
It took years of testing before the Federal Highway Administration would grant even interim approval of the new type face, in 2004. Now over twenty states are using it to some degree.   Drive I-80 in central Pennsylvania for samples.