You Can Only See It If You Stand Right Here

Here's a visual/conceptual treat, a little eye and brain candy, containing the ever useful reminder that sometimes your perspective is all about where you're standing.

Axel Peemoeller's avant-garage

Within a certain range, a small slice of the pie, the words are easily read. Presumably, that's at the physical point where you need it, because good design is primarily about usefulness, carefully refined functionality.

From anywhere outside the sweet spot, it's decorative; it's "Ahhht." But since a particular message isn't needed from that location, or even could be confusing and darnright counter-productive, there's no reason that space can't be used just for expression. In a case like this, any more interesting message than "parking garage" would be a welcome experiential improvement for the parkers, and the parkees.

Funny, it didn't occurr to me until now, a couple paragraphs into this, that maybe the reason I'm so drawn to a lively paint job for a parking garage is that I worked in one for a year or so, when still a very young feller. Fortunately my booth was on the street, just inside a very wide mouth of the building, so the air wasn't that awfully bad, either.

So, by all means, buy some paint! (And get those emissions checked, please.)

Here's Axel Peemoeller's home page, which I am disappointed to report is an all visual, unnavigable "artistic" mess -- no text clues on where to click for what. We're invited to "drag and drop and click on items," but mousing over the goobley graphics only offers invitations to "double click." So besides that the garage is in "Melbourne," I can't tell you anything else about him or the project, because I gave up trying to find out more. A fine model of usefulness, indeed.

So how did I come across this? The pictures above and below originally came to me via the traditional email full of non-attributed photos, which I found in this case to be sparky stuff. So I sleuthed it down, using the mighty Internet, and found the originator, in observance of our personal motto (and tag) here, "Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due."

Great Signs, and one wonders...

Found while searching for something else -- some irresistably funny signage:

(The bottom line reads, "Also, the bridge is out ahead." Oh; thanks.)

Another clever one:

Kudos to North Vancouver.

This is from an inscrutable weblog named, "City Comforts, temporarily known as Viaduct, the blog." Huh? It then contains the mysterious description, "What was this Blog About?", which they claim was, "Cities, architecture, the 'new urbanism,' real estate, historic preservation, urban design..." So naturally, the current item at the moment is on the new Apple iPhone (but I'm linking here to Macworld's take).

It appears they have a big debate going on in Seattle about fixing the Viaduct, asking the timeless question, "Could Seattle do without its elevated highway?" Funny to read from a Boston perspective, where they went in the opposite direction and Dug Big, for the greatest public work project/boondoggle in history. With that in mind, we applaud Seattle's elevated thinking.