A nice piece on Poster House in Manhattan:

As a medium the poster has always sat somewhere between high and low culture. It is the conduit through which so many paintings have reached bedroom walls during formative years, but also through which visual identities are established — whether through the movies, music or products. It is precisely that position, straddling communication, culture and commerce, which has led to the slipping of this most popular, recognisable but ephemeral medium between the institutional cracks. As mass reproductions, posters lack the aura of art. Yet their authenticity resides precisely in their presence on the street en masse, in their familiarity, reach and reproducibility.

I loved this article about Kevin Kelley of Shook Kelley and his approach to reinventing retail.

“It is the most daunting feeling when you go to a grocery store chain, and you meet with these starched-white-shirt executives,” Kelley tells me. “When we get a new job, we sit around this table — we do it twenty, thirty times a year. Old men, generally. Don’t love food, progressive food. Just love their old food — like Archie Bunkers, essentially. You meet these people and then you tour their stores. Then I’ve got to go convince Archie Bunker that there’s something called emotions, that there are these ideas about branding and feeling. It is a crazy assignment. I can’t get them to forget that they’re no longer in a situation where they’ve got plenty of customers. That it’s do-or-die time now.”

Forget branding. Forget sales. Kelley’s main challenge is redirecting the attention of older male executives, scared of the future and yet stuck in their ways, to the things that really matter.

“I make my living convincing male skeptics of the power of emotions,” he says.

This is a great piece on why everyday architecture deserves respect:

Architectural preservation is often an issue of grandeur, both in a sense of size and richness, and decay. When we think of buildings that already been lost, they are almost always imposing structures—cathedrals, skyscrapers, temples. Yet the places where we enact our daily lives, and which reflect them even more than grand architectural statements, are smaller, more seemingly trivial and thus more vulnerable.

To appreciate the charms of small structures, it is useful to remind ourselves that we primarily interact with architecture from a ground level rather than the god’s-eye view employed in films and renderings. The architecture of day-to-day urban life is driven by utility and merges so integrally into our tasks that we barely notice it as architecture. There have been visionary architects who have recognized and celebrated the underrated nobility of everyday life, and there are some superlative little wonders scattered around our cities.

Knock Down The House is a must-watch.

This episode of Open Source with Christopher Lydon featuring Joshua Cohen is a really good listen.

The first full-service gambling palace has been built in Boston, that old American cultural capital. It’s a giant leap for the very idea of gambling, where, as George Bernard Shaw said, “the many must lose in order that the few may win.” It’s not just a casino but a “world above,” it advertises: 600 5-star hotel rooms over thousands of card games and slot machines.  It’s the biggest single private development in 400 years of Massachusetts; with $77 million tossed in to clean up a stinking old Monsanto chemical dump.