Cool Hunting

Five Better Bike Racks
The bike rack is one of those urban features woefully in need of a redesign. Thanks to NYC DOT and Cooper-Hewitt, who joined forces in creating the City Racks Design Competition, New York just might continue to lead the way in making cities more bike-friendly. As many people have noticed, the city has been making great advances on behalf of the cyclist, adding miles...

Shift: 8 Custom Be.BIKEs
Shift is an exhibition of eight custom-designed Be.BIKE bicycles by eight highly-acclaimed graffiti-influenced artists: FUTURA, HAZE, KAWS, KENJI HIRATA, MATZU MTP, MISK, SKWERM, and STASH. Each bike has been altered completely to represent the artist's vision. Shift brings together a representation of the historical expanse of street art, from the 1970s to the present. Production of each artist's edition is limited to 100 units....

Mika Rottenberg
For our final video taking a closer look at this year's Whitney Biennial, we travel to the Harlem studio of video artist Mika Rottenberg. Known for videos depicting women engaging in elaborate systems of production that often harvest their own body, Mika shows us the set of her latest piece (and Biennial installation), "Cheese" and tells us the backstory of making the video. We...

Mock-Ups in Close-Up
Working in design retail, one of my favorite job perks was visiting architecture firms and sometimes catching a glimpse of building models. Beyond architect biopics, I have little recollection of seeing building models used in film, though apparently there's a wealth of footage available. Architect Gabu Heindl and film theorist Drehli Robnik recently compiled such footage (a curated selection of 80 clips) into an...

VIS/ED: Beautiful Decay Video Festival
Beautiful Decay got together with Brand New School, The Happy Corp Global and yours truly to put on a video festival, that they're calling VIS/ED. Showcasing the kind of creative, short-format video that's making waves in our visual landscape, VIS/ED will take place next Tuesday, 20 November 2007 at 7pm at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. (Click the flyer at right...

Swobo Folsom Bike: Interview with Founder TIm Parr
After living in NYC for over ten years I finally started riding around the city on a bike this past spring. Of course, as these things go, I now have all sorts of opinions on the urban bike experience. While I'm now surveying all different bikes, the Folsom from Swobo is my new favorite. (Click image for detail.) The Folsom is like a featherweight...