urban landscape – Page 3 – Alphabet City Press

22 November 201422 November 2014

Flame and jacaranda

It’s coming to the end of the flowering season, but this year the Illawarra flame trees and the jacarandas have been spectacular. In gardens all around the inner suburbs of Sydney, there are bold splodges of red and purple everywhere, almost too brilliant to believe the colours are natural. It must have been the garden fashion at one time, planting these two specimen trees together. I have a jacaranda in my garden, and for a few weeks every year the tree is covered with vibrant flowers and then the backyard becomes a carpet of purple, buzzing with bees, and we are constantly picking up the flowers that have been traipsed through the house from the yard. Some years ago I worked in an office with a bird’s eye view and, almost overnight, splashes of jacaranda with highlights of flame red would appear, as if someone had wielded a giant paintbrush and daubed the landscape.

8 October 20147 October 2014

Yellow arrow

I love red and yellow together. And I love solid blocks of gutsy colour. This arrow, on the smooth grey concrete floor of the parking lot at my local shopping centre, is positively luscious! The dirty grey stops it from having any pretensions of prettiness—another point in its favour—and highlights the unadulterated mass of primary colour. I’ll need to keep my eye on this yellow arrow: for now, the newly applied paint is vibrant and clean, but in a few months it will have been run over by thousands of dirty car tyres and walked on by thousands of pedestrians, so it could get even more interesting.

18 August 201418 August 2014

Caged M

I don’t know what this m doing here, trapped inside and looking out, but I feel a little like it today. Sydney is doing its all-or-nothing weather thing, and today it’s bucketing down. The sensible course of action would be to stay indoors and keep dry: but I have things to do which involve going outside and braving the elements. From a typographic and design standpoint, I like this scripty m, and would like to know what it’s story is. I saw nothing around it to give any clue, although the building did have a security camera and alarm—perhaps to make sure the m doesn’t make a break for it.

18 July 201417 July 2014

Importers of hardware

I really wanted this to still be a hardware store, because it would be the kind of place where I would just love to have a mooch around and stumble across some hard-to-find piece of equipment to add to my bookbinding toolbox: a thumb square, or a pin vice, or the perfect heavy duty knife for slicing through that browny grey boxboard—one that’s not too big, so it fits in my hand just so. But more predictably, it’s a cafe. I am impressed that they have maintained the hardware theme, and so cleverly used the screw clamp in the logo to thematically bring hardware and coffee together.

18 June 201418 June 2014

Danger

I can see that I’m not going to get much done today. There are workers next door, and although there is a fence between me and them, they are still only a couple of metres away. They’re using power tools and talking (in bogan) about what they had for breakfast. All of that’s ok, part of city living, but what really drives me to distraction is the radio station they’re listening to. I listen to music while I work too, but there is something about the sound frequency of commercial radio stations broadcast from tinny tradie radios, the inane chatter of ‘upbeat’ announcers, the lowest common denominator talkback, and the ads, which drill through my head as if I’m plugged into this electricity portal.

6 June 20146 June 2014

Reflection

They say it never rains but it pours, and although it’s a phrase not necessarily intended to describe actual weather, it certainly applies to the pattern of rainfall in Sydney. Two days ago I planted a small shrub to fill a hole in a garden that is suffering extreme dryness, and within a few hours it started bucketing down so heavily that I couldn’t hear myself think for the sound of rain on the tin roof. It has been relentless, and now everything is damp and soggy. I love the rain, and I love the way it transforms the world around me so that transitory patterns emerge, like this stand of lights reflected in a puddle on tarmac.

22 March 201422 March 2014

Maples

The original Maples furniture store in Clarendon Street, South Melbourne, was destroyed by fire in 1934. Rebuilding of the ‘modern warehouse’ began in August 1935—three showroom floors, two staircases and an electric lift (!), and a facade of cement with a sandstone finish, which incorporated the large letters that luckily, on the day I was there, were not covered up by the monstrous bank banner that had been strung up previously.

7 March 201423 February 2014

Lens

What first attracted me to this was the patterns and shadows of the concertina grille and the colour palette of blues and greys. It made me think that for once, the typography wasn’t primary, but then when I viewed it without the letters it lost a certain je ne sais quoi, and I revised my opinion! The typeface is Gill Sans.

26 October 20136 October 2013

Crossing

The acid yellow of the crossing sign was luminous against the perfect vignette of the cloudless blue sky. As I paused to admire the contrast of colours I heard the unmistakable thrum of a plane preparing to land. Those of us who live in the inner west under the flight path are almost immune to the sound of aircraft, but I could tell that this one was close. I hardly think the crossing sign was intended for planes, but it was so low at this point it could have been.

17 October 20136 October 2013

Central Park

Central Park — in Sydney, not New York — is the urban redevelopment of the old Kent Brewery site in Chippendale. When the hoardings first went up along Broadway I was not impressed. The typography of the logo combines the lowercase l with the uppercase P, and, imho, it tries too hard to be clever and fails in the attempt. I was also unimpressed that, yet again, they couldn’t think up a name of their own. However, the site is proving to be quite interesting. There has been some outstanding public sculpture on show, and when I walked by this week I had a great underneath view of this partially constructed suspended platform.