Congestion is your Friend

"Defeating congestion is the wrong goal. All the high-value locations are both urban and congested—congested with not only traffic but with money, people, great food, art, and music.” —John Norquist, former Mayor of Milwaukee, President Congress of New Urbanists. From Metropolis Magazine, January 2010 Issue on Predictions.
http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20100113/whats-next-the-1-5-10-issue

Sleeping Beauty

Ruins and abandonment is a title in my picture collection.

Baltimore always fertile ground, sometimes with surprising beauty. Here inside the old Ice House in West Baltimore. Burnt out and waiting for a new future. Conveniently located near transit, 45 minutes from downtown DC, 3 minutes on US 40 from downtown Baltimore.

Many things could happen here, we will try to paint an intriguing but realistic route.

D:centerBaltimore, ever more real

In our quest of making Baltimore a City that cares about design with a capital D, the d:center group of activists made significant progress in 2009 culminating yesterday in the approval of bylaws, articles of incorporation, an elected board of 15 and a slate of officers. These things sound mundane and decidely non design, but let's face it: Without some kind of structure there will be little progress. Non-profit status is a prerequisite to receive grants, for example.
With this behind us now we can focus on program activities for the year. Our goal is use design to improve the quality of life and coalesce different disciplines around this quest. Baltimore, a gritty city in the process of shedding her proud industrial past in favor of an yet to be defined future, is an ideal place to explore what "creative city" could mean and how creativity, inventiveness and design in the broadest sense can follow the footsteps of a largely pragmatic but also quirky past in which many things were made in Baltimore.

The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), the departments of Architecture of the Universities of Morgan and UM at College Park are strong supporters of our effort and have vouched collboration. Design Centers have been used across the world to advance art, architecture and the cities in which they are located.
See more detail at the website of  www.dcenterbaltimore.com.

Water molecules transforming into ice become structural elments that can carry me over the pond. (Patapsco State Park 010310) Atoms in a cystalline solid are forming lattices in an example of emergence that is an everyday event and yet quite complicated.
The photo illustrates uncertainty about the nature of this surface at once movement and rigidity.