Drone Tax

[Image: An otherwise unrelated image of the unmanned Draganflyer X8 system, courtesy of Draganfly].

A post on sUAS News—a blog tracking the "small unmanned aviation system industry"—we read about the possibility of drone aircraft being used to enforce residential property tax.

Citing a recent court ruling in Arkansas that "has approved the use of aerial imagery to collect data on property sizes," and making reference to the already-controversial state deployment of aerial surveillance tools, sUAS suggests that drones could someday be used to manage a near-realtime catalog of local property expansions, transfers, and other tax-relevant land alterations.

Whether enforcing local building codes—keeping an eye, for instance, on illegally built structures such as the so-called Achill Henge in Ireland—or reconciling on-the-ground property lines with their administrative representations back in the city land archives, how soon will drones become a state tool for regional landscape management?

[Images: Might semi-autonomous systems such as this someday track residential property lines? Images courtesy of Draganfly].

"Imagine your local planning officer having access to your back garden at a moment's notice!" sUAS writes with alarm. "With the pullback from Iraq and other spots under way, this scenario is much easier to imagine. Perhaps it's already happening."

(Thanks to Ruth Lyons for the Achill Henge link).

A 7-Mile Rainbow for Kim Jong-il

[Image: Assembling the 7-mile rainbow one ring at a time, by Ben Masterton-Smith].

Ben Masterton-Smith, recipient of the inaugural RIBA Norman Foster Traveling Scholarship in 2007, visited North Korea for a period of architectural and spatial research. One of the many outcomes of that trip was Ben's diploma project, part of which proposed a farcical realization of a 7-mile rainbow reportedly seen on the occasion of Kim Jong-il's birth.

[Image: Assembling the rainbow; images by Ben Masterton-Smith].

Truckloads of vinyl are delivered to the capital city; teams of "volunteers" pump vast amounts of air into the unfolding structures—the imperial inflatable as architectural type; and, lo, the titanic pink and purple form ascends to its nostalgic place in the public firmament, assembled ring by ring across the sky.

[Image: The glorious 7-mile rainbow takes form].

While I have cherry-picked only one aspect of Ben's overall North Korean research project, and thus this might seem like a bit of a one-note flute, I have to say that the absurdly over-the-top scale of the proposal actually seems spot-on for an architectural critique of Kim Jong-il's surreal stage-managing of North Korean life.

In many ways, this spatial realization of the state's own ridiculous mythology serves as a sadly necessary—because totally delirious—over-compensation for the otherwise monumentally vacuous cityscapes of North Korean urbanism, as if the grotesque political spectacle of a pink rainbow soaring seven miles over the city might retroactively justify that city's empty stagecraft.

[Images: Rainbow diagrams by Ben Masterton-Smith].

In the annals of dictatorial natural history—where, apparently, "even nature is mourning" the death of Kim Jong-il—the tongue-in-cheek architectural manifestation of an otherwise impossible worldly phenomena acts not as celebration but as spatial parody. It is sarcasm, we might say, given architectural form.

[Image: The rainbow under construction; image by Ben Masterton-Smith].

In any case, a few more images from the project are available on Ben's Flickr page.

Menswear is Not Only For Men

Yesterday writer, Alice Carey, and I had lunch in the West Village at Cafe Cluny. We caught up on all of our upcoming projects and I asked Alice for advice on how to publicize my upcoming book. After lunch we took a walk down Perry Street and sat for a minute to talk about her love of menswear and why young women dress the way they do. One of the reasons that Alice loves men's clothing is that its comfortable and allows her to feel free and unique.She says, "I feel me, I'm not imitating anyone. This is the look." 91 year old Ilona Royce Smithkin expresses a similar view on style when shes says,"If you try to imitate too much, then you look like nothing. Never compare yourself, YOU are YOU."

Many of Advanced Style ladies lament the fact that so many people look and dress the same these days. Alice and Ilona no longer feel the need to conform to other people's ideas of what a women should wear. Their rule is that there are no rules. They dress to impress themselves and look at style as a means of personal expression. I have learned to become more myself through my interactions with these wonderful, confident women. I hope that they can inspire you as well! For more on Alice's style check the video above, and if you are interested you can find her childhood memoir HERE.

Glamour at Any Age

I have photographed singer, Rita Ellis Hammer several times now. As she has gotten older, she has felt more free to experiment with fashion and style.Rita is proof that you can be elegant and glamorous at any age!

Give Joy, Get Joy (Video)

People sometimes ask me if I have any friends my own age. I always find this a great opportunity to explain that I have friends of all ages, but I am especially privileged to have incredible older men and women in my life. Over the past three years I have become great friends with 91 year old Ilona Royce Smithkin. We get together at least once a week to enjoy wonderful conversations about life, love, and our creative ventures. I always love to share Ilona's wisdom. I hope you enjoy our latest small video above, where Ilona explains why we shouldn't worry about perfection.

Portfolio Futures

[Image: From the Morpholio app].

A few of my colleagues at Columbia have just released a free portfolio app called Morpholio, with the aim of creating "a new platform for presentation, critique, and collaboration relevant to all designers, architects, artists, or members of any image driven culture."

As such, the app aims to be "both a utility and a community"—part social network, part alternative portfolio. "Capable of communicating with multiple devices," the accompanying press release says, Morpholio "organizes image collections in a comprehensible and accessible format that makes sharing and presenting work seamless, and infinitely flexible."

[Images: From the Morpholio app].

As the app's co-creators explain it, "re-imagining the portfolio" like this in the form of interactive digital media was inspired by asking: "what would happen if you could merge processes of presentation, critique and collaboration into a single elastic platform?"

The app is optimized for iPad—so I haven't been able to test it out—but you can download it for free and give it a spin.

House of the Cave Bear

[Image: The erstwhile basement hibernator, photographed by Brendan Kuty/Patch.com, via Gothamist].

I'm a sucker for tales of the after-market animal reuse of domestic architectural structures—such as wildcats taking over foreclosed California suburbs, bees colonizing the internal walls of a single-family house until honey drips from the electrical outlets, or the strangely elaborate saga of a pack of coyotes living in a burned-out home in Glendale—so I can't resist this story, in which a man from the cable company descends into a basement in Hopatcong, New Jersey, only to find that a black bear had taken up residence there and had apparently been living in the basement for weeks.

According to the police, the bear had even "fashioned a den of his own in the basement, bringing in twigs and leaves, in anticipation of a winter-long stay." The architecturally inclined bear—building a more comfortable bed for himself—was getting ready to hibernate.

(Thanks, Nicky!)