Clinging precariously to sheer cliff faces or perched on towering mountaintops and volcanic plugs, these 12 rocky monasteries throughout the world certainly provide inspiring views of the natural landscapes and cities around them.
via Monastic Marvels: 12 Cliffside & Mountaintop Monasteries | WebUrbanist.
Free wifi is becoming so ubiquitous in many cities, it’s hard to find a street corner where you can’t instantly connect – and most of us like it that way. Unrestricted access to virtually all of the knowledge and information in the world is nothing to sneeze at, but with it comes people who are glued to their devices instead of talking to each other. Kit Kat has a new marketing campaign that actually blocks all wireless signals within a radius of 5 meters.
via No Wi-Fi Zones: Taking a Break from Constant Connection | WebUrbanist.
When we think about borders, we tend to think of administrative boundaries. Those demarcating lines, often grown out of rivers and mountain ranges or diplomatic quirks, govern our daily lives, and that’s doubly so if we live near a neighboring country or state.
via The Invisible Borders That Define American Culture – Arts & Lifestyle – The Atlantic Cities.
Outside of the nonsensical urban tesseract known as the West Village, Manhattan’s street grid system is famously simple: Avenues run north/south(ish), streets run east/west. A phrase like “5th Avenue and 33rd Street” isn’t just an arbitrary address, it’s a cartesian coordinate that can actually help you get to where you’re going as well as recognize when you’ve gotten there. With a system this easy, it’s hard not to wish the whole world used it. Harold Cooper’s brilliant Google Maps mashup, ExtendNY, gives you an idea of what such a world would look like: Punch in any address or location on the globe, and it tells you what its NYC-style address is.
via Infographic Of The Day: What If The NYC Grid Took Over The World? | Co. Design.
Dabringer uses maps that are standard size (“the ones that were made before maps were these big books”). She spends time looking at the maps to decide their character. First, she sees shapes. “I’m constantly pulling focus with my eyes. Sometimes I focus on the color, other times topography, other times black lines or colored lines or the landmass. I also let my eyes go blurry and focus sort of behind or in front of the map. Once I sift out a contour I don’t lose it. In the end, I see all of the separate elements all together,” she tells us. She prefers to draw cities with water–whether they’re rivers or lakes is no matter–she finds them dynamic.
