New Orleans Days 3 & 4

Though Monday didn't go quite according to plan, it was still very enjoyable... but lesson learned: for the most part, the Big Easy takes Mondays off.  Brooke and I planned to spend the day in the Garden District and Uptown and later City Park.  We soon learned, however, that most of shops on Magazine Street were closed.  After deciding to save it for Tuesday we hopped on the Canal St. streetcar to City Park to look at art at the museum and take a break from the sun.  Our plans were again spoiled when the museum was locked up.  Nevertheless, we took a lovely stroll through its sculpture garden...

New Orleans Days 1 & 2

Nick and I are celebrating our anniversary in New Orleans, and we are having a great time! Here's a little recap of what we've done so far:
Day 1 was travel day - we rode for our first time a real passenger train from the humble Amtrak stop in Birmingham to New Orleans!

Day 2 we hopped on the St. Charles street car right outside our hotel and went down to explore the French Quarter. Before we even knew it we were walking down Bourbon Street, and I have one word for it - funk, as in the smell. But we quickly found our way over to Jackson Square which was packed with tourists and local artists. We walked around the Quarter and Warehouse District all day checking out the fun galleries and shops. We also stumbled across Cafe Beignet which was a delight...

...It was so quaint and quiet as compared to Cafe du Monde that had a line down the street to even get in. For dinner we ate at a cafe in Jackson Square and sampled gumbo, red beans and rice, and jambalaya!

FiN Submissions

These were my submissions for the Future is Now.  This first one is a proposal for an "incremental" urban park the City has been talking about.  Replacing a parking lot with a public park is a great idea, but the images the Development Department had put out were uninspiring and unresponsive to the human needs for which the park should provide -- like shade and seating.  Click the image below to see the actual proposal with diagrams and explanations.

The next is an idea of how to reuse some of the unsightly parking decks around downtown.  The concept is basically 1) to infill the bottom with leasable space that would activate the sidewalk with pedestrian life while still providing parking above 2) clad the parking floors to make the building feel more like part of the urban fabric.



Finally is a proposal I did with a Mike Shows for the riverfront entry.  We heard the City was wanting to improve the entry and give it prominence (with very little money) so we showed some simple changes to make the underground entry noticeable and more inviting.  I think of it as a temporary solution... maybe soon we can design a more inspiring and permanent intervention.

Five Years

Today marks our fifth anniversary! It has been an amazing five years. Today, I am thanking God for giving him to me to be my other half in this life and for blessing us with two beautiful children. I could not ask for more. We are heading to New Orleans tomorrow to celebrate!

FiN exhibition

(This post is a little overdue.)  A couple Friday's ago, I had the pleasure of being involved with "the Future is Now," an exhibition put on by Helicity of Montgomery.  Though I had recklessly procrastinated, my submissions for the show came along more efficiently than I had expected.  After sending them to the printers - and paying way too much for it - I somehow still had a night to work up some last minute programs for the show.  They were nothing too fancy; my main intent was clarity... but I did do some geometric play with Helvetica.

Having nearly finished the programs, I thought I could finally take a break the night before the show, until my friend Mike wanted me to stop by and give my thoughts on set up for the exhibition... which ended meaning staying up until 3 in the morning to help him make an impromptu installation out of rope and old sheets of plywood - go figure.

Though exhausting, we probably had too much fun figuring out different ways for the rope to interface with the timber columns.  Our favorite was one in which the rope basically folded around one corner of the column before shooting up to the ceiling and back down to another:

To terminate the rope, we unravelled the ends and poked them through a floor vent at the foot of the last column as if these parasitic fibers, having found there way into the space, had stretched themselves across its structure... it seemed so witty at 2 in the morning.  After all of this, I did not feel too selfish taking some of this new prime real estate for two of my own boards:

The show was a lot of fun... great people, good music, tons of ideas.  I'll post my actual submissions in the next couple of days, but until then HERE was one of my favorites from the show.