GOOD TASTE: Neon in the City
If you’re like me, you have mixed feelings about advertisements in the city.
We all have our favorite freeway-to-skyline view messed up by a misplaced billboard.
But I bet most of us really dig Times Square:
Every night-time entertainment district should be encouraged to provide neon.
Robert Stern, the architect who planned Celebration, also rewrote the zoning for Times Square. He wrote a requirement for signs into the zoning for new buildings when Disney got involved.
To the gratification of some and the dismay of others, some sleaze is returning to Times Square, in spite of Disneyfication:
Yeah, who says…? Not Jenna Jameson. And not Pamela Anderson:
Skivvies in the snow:
When it comes to advertising that lights up, Hong Kong is New York’s peer, but for different reasons.
For one thing, whole skyscrapers are covered in Hong Kong without any pretense that it’s part of the architecture. You can get a really distant view onto the neon from across the harbor in Kowloon:
For another thing, neon is more interesting than plasma screens, because—being old tech-- it seems more miraculous, like the Wright Brothers’ airplane.
Also, most of us can’t read Chinese characters, so the inane advertising message is not part of what we see, just abstract calligraphic patterns.
Finally, the sign ordinance is much less limiting about placement. In Hong Kong, you can actually span the street. At night, you are in an outdoor room, complete with a ceiling of light:
In the daytime, it looks like this:
Some places in the city it makes sense to soft-pedal good taste. Here, imo, is another such place:
http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=112795#post112795
The New York photos in this post came from various places on Wired New York:
http://forums.wirednewyork.com/
If you’re like me, you have mixed feelings about advertisements in the city.
We all have our favorite freeway-to-skyline view messed up by a misplaced billboard.
But I bet most of us really dig Times Square:
Every night-time entertainment district should be encouraged to provide neon.
Robert Stern, the architect who planned Celebration, also rewrote the zoning for Times Square. He wrote a requirement for signs into the zoning for new buildings when Disney got involved.
To the gratification of some and the dismay of others, some sleaze is returning to Times Square, in spite of Disneyfication:
Yeah, who says…? Not Jenna Jameson. And not Pamela Anderson:
Skivvies in the snow:
When it comes to advertising that lights up, Hong Kong is New York’s peer, but for different reasons.
For one thing, whole skyscrapers are covered in Hong Kong without any pretense that it’s part of the architecture. You can get a really distant view onto the neon from across the harbor in Kowloon:
For another thing, neon is more interesting than plasma screens, because—being old tech-- it seems more miraculous, like the Wright Brothers’ airplane.
Also, most of us can’t read Chinese characters, so the inane advertising message is not part of what we see, just abstract calligraphic patterns.
Finally, the sign ordinance is much less limiting about placement. In Hong Kong, you can actually span the street. At night, you are in an outdoor room, complete with a ceiling of light:
In the daytime, it looks like this:
Some places in the city it makes sense to soft-pedal good taste. Here, imo, is another such place:
http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=112795#post112795
The New York photos in this post came from various places on Wired New York:
http://forums.wirednewyork.com/
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