postarchitectural

I watched Following by Christopher Nolan last week — I’ve always been meaning to watch it, and Le Dernier’s debut black and white awesomeness pushed me to try Nolan’s neonoir debut. Some of the shots, like this first one, could come out of any old noir, albeit with less shadows and more foreground. Other nice moments happen when the two main male characters are tangling and overlapping trying to break into an apartment. One of the longest shots happens when the main protagonist leans, dazed, on a rooftop, and it’s a nice break from the otherwise claustrophobic heaviness of the movie, especially the final shot..

I started a map of subway stops I’d been to in New York a while ago, but never really finished it. I was scrubbing away the names of the stops but preserving the lines, so there’s sort of this preserved mess of text in Lower Manhattan and Williamsbug. I’ve always thought of the subway map as a great piece of architecture — that is, it takes site and context into account, vs the Vignelli version — but this sort of made me amazed at the density of the text.

What’s also nice is this sort of fog of war that happens when I make all of my masks black:

And especially cool will be when Alicia will be able to generate ‘fog of war’ maps like these to chart unexplored waters..