MONOICONO has been working with our good friends over at Innerspring. Based out of the bastion of progressivity in Portland, Oregon, they offer services in hypnotherapy and hypnobirthing. Both of these bring a unique design challenge. After all most imagery associated with hypnosis involves spirals and swirly eyed crazy people.

To combat those associations we went for something that struck the chords of balance and serenity. Almost all the elements are symmetrical the (the rosette pattern, the monogram) or have a specific rhythm (the dots and descending letters in the wordmark). To give the identity a little life there is the stippled pattern from the monogram that subtly suggests a spring bubbling to life.

So if you're in the Portland area and are perhaps in a family way, or looking to quit smoking or any plethera of issues check her out.

First off there's the Paula Scher quote "it took 30 minutes and 30 years. Designers who have dedicated time to the profession can work quickly, but that by no means infers that the idea didn't take time to percolate. More important is the fact that the client is really paying for their time.

They are investing in their brand and their voice. When done right this can be something that holds incredible value for a long time. Hence they aren't paying you for your 30 minutes, they're paying for the years of value their brand gives them. At this point what would a rival big box retailer pay to achieve the brand value of Target? This value exists on a smaller scale as well.

Designers don't need to be afraid to charge good money for their service. Clients are getting something significant in return. Are there sometimes more important things for some businesses to spend their money on? Yes. Do designers feel as though they are in competition with those things? Yes they do. This is why designers need to stand strong in the storm of questions around their value and work with clients to help them gauge how important their brand truly is. If it makes a a big enough difference, a client won't care if the idea came to you after weeks of research or like a lightning bolt while you were on the john. Time is a valuable commodity and the more longevity their brand has the better the deal looks to them all the time.

There isn't much to say that hasn't already been said about the importance of Steve Jobs. He (along with an army of talent at Apple) has quite simply changed the way we interact with the world, what personal computing actually means and how we entertain and educate ourselves. Not bad for only 56 years of life.

Jobs had a particularly distinct impact on the lives of designers. He created a revolution in design. As with all revolutions there are losers (typesetters, production artists...) and there are those that benefit. The Macintosh democratized the wold of design and while many professionals bemoan those effects, we are all the better for it. Every designer born before 1980 remembers their first experience with a Mac like it was the Kennedy assassination.

Designers' relationship to Jobs was diehard not just because we used his product every day, but because he was the living embodiment of the idea that good design driving good business. Apple has been the shining beacon on the hill. Without Steve Jobs the light is inescapably dimmer.

Designers live in fear of the committee. When working through design problems committees are often where good ideas go to die. A huge problem with groups of people needing to sign off on ideas is the fact that once an idea gets run through a bunch of people's checklist all of the things that make something unique get stripped away. Any corners get rounded and anything that yells gets hushed. In the end the design is faceless and blends into the background.

Creative endeavors that are revered often have the stamp of an individual. Great companies are often remembered for the personalities of their leaders. Apple, Google, GE, Facebook, IBM, Coca Cola, Ford... the list goes on but all of these brands at some point were led by individuals with hugely distinct styles of leadership and public perception.

Yet even at companies large and small there needs to be "buy-in" in middle management. Hence committees are formed. It is a management problem and a designers bain. But the idea of personality can help focus committees and also help generate better designs. It is sometimes not enough to have a targeted creative brief. Creative briefs no matter how targeted can be solved in a variety of ways. Perhaps along with the companies rationale the question of what kind of personality this committee or company should have needs to be asked.

You don't even have to talk in specific traits. You can speak in generalities. Are they Elvis people or Beatles people? Are they conservative or progressive? Are they Joe Friday or Monk? These things help to define the voice they want to use and are more relevant to attitudes than color and form. The right personality is the essence of a brand. And a committee doesn't have to stand in the way of that fact.

A little while back over at Design Observer, Adrian Shaughnessy posted a tidbit about the riots in London. It was soon clear he touched off a nerve as 95 comments came rolling through ranging from "great article" to one commenter calling Mr. Shaughnessy a dick.

The thrust of the article puts part of the blame for the riots at the feet of designers. More specifically he addresses designers involvement in a culture of consumerism. This consumerism creates desires that some cannot meet and Shaughnessy suggests when the right spark comes along it releases a pent up frustration in the havenots to loot and destroy storefronts. Here's Shaughnessy:

The principal target was a highly successful chain of shops called JD Sports. It sells fashionable street wear. Other popular targets included mobile phone shops, electrical goods stores, and outlets of leading UK fashion brands.

All these shops spend huge amounts of money on branding, on store layout, on window displays, and slick advertising. Their ads leap at us from newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and the Internet. Celebrities endorse their products. They are little shrines of desire.

Despite one or two gleefully publicised cases, the majority of the rioters came from poor homes in the least desirable, least well-resourced areas of England’s major cities. They come from places with low achievement rates in education, and where employment prospects are low.

These young people are not poor in the sense in which we understand poverty in the undeveloped world. They have Blackberrys (the encrypted Blackberry messaging system was used extensively to coordinate attacks), fashionable jeans, and cool footwear: but they are poor enough to have a sense of being excluded from the great orgy of consumer acquisitiveness that is flaunted in front of them daily.

Specifically, they are excluded from the world of desire and consumption created by the brand owners, advertising agencies, art directors, graphic designers, photographers, product designers, retail designers, architects, stylists, retouchers, and copywriters.

I can see how something like this can provoke the idea that this is all patently ridiculous. Shuaghnessy does himself no favors by being overly myopic in his description of the targets. Perhaps JD Sports were targeted using smartphones, but rioters were burning cars and destroying mom and pop stores all over the city. Private property, businesses, lamp posts... it didn't matter.

Additionally it's hard to reconcile the notion that people running around with Blackberries and $100 Nikes are so upset over the fact that they can't have Mercedes and Louis Vuitton handbags that they decide to steal more $100 Nikes. I can't have Louis Vuitton luggage either. I won't even get into the armchair psychology he gets into in terms of the level of the rioters' education or manner of upbringing.

All of that said, I don't want to let designers off the hook for the role they play in consumerism. Nor do I want to downplay how consumerism and the economic realities that result from it don't have ramifications (sometimes riotous!) Designers love to talk about the "power of design" yet shy away from the idea that they would be partially responsible for something that sounds as diabolical as consumerism. We don't want our work to be labeled as "slick advertising." That makes us all sound like shysters trying to dupe someone out of a buck.

Yet you can't have your cake and eat it too. Design works. Design is good business and indeed design generates desire. Truly good design also creates beauty. In the world of branding it creates a rewarding experience. In the world of products it can create simplicity. When done correctly no wonder design creates desire. It's almost the whole point. Massimo Vignelli describes design as getting rid of "vulgarity." Design replaces those things that degrade our visual environment and improves them.

The moral question designers need to deal with are how to balance making a living (as Madonna says, we are living in a material word) with perhaps turning down work for folks that want to use design to exploit, mislead or generally inflict more vulgarity on the world. I'm not going to say the folks at Landor were amoral when they created a beautiful identity for BP that suggested BP was a shiny happy eco-friendly company. Besides, I'm sure they sleep well on their mattress full of $100 bills.

When thinking about design and consumerism, we have to remember that design doesn't create haves and havenots. Economics, public policy and political battles create them. Your moral duty as a designer is to decide who you serve and what ends do they serve. That's all you can take responsibility for, not criminal behavior of others*.

*None of this is to say that that the politics and decisions made by those in power don't deserve some sort of reaction It is above my pay grade, and out of my sphere of knowledge to know anything about politics in the UK.

Our daily commutes see us Homo Sapiens in many different environments expressing many behaviors. We can be seen as the solitary sort, mindlessly careening along at 70 miles per hour. We can be the begrudging social animal stuck in traffic with our ever-more irritated fellow man. Or we can be the herd animal rattling to and fro in a crowded bus. Given the variety and frequency of the human commute it is curious how little people take into account how design (graphic, architectural, industrial and political) plays a role in the ways we get from A to B.

“Transportation” in and of itself isn’t a terribly charged word. But when the word “public” is put in front of it, it becomes a phrase wrought with political battles as well as deign and economic impact. “Public transportation” has come to be defined by the modes of transportation – bus, train, subway, trolley – rather than simply moving people from place to place. By breaking it up into parts it has obscured the bigger picture. We talk about transportation in terms of trees, not in terms of the forrest.

America in many ways defines itself as a nation of the automobile. This is partly cultural. The freedom to move, the open road and whatnot are American bastions. But eventually the idea of the car became literally synonymous with America as made clear in the addage “What’s good for GM (General Motors) is good for America.”

Yet, America didn’t start out as car country. The Model T didn’t start production until 1908. Boston opened the first subway a decade earlier in 1897. Electric trolley cars came a bit before. But the largest transformative mode of transportation – the railroad – predates them all.

All of these have incredible influence on the shapes of our lives. They work to define the expansion of a nation and the difference between a city like New York and a city like Louisville. They are trees that define the forrest.



Like any forest, some trees are bigger than others. Some get more water and sun. Currently the sun shines brightest on the automobile. But in the world of transportation what gets the most resources is not a result of natural selection, but a conscious choice by planners, politicians, business men, architects  and designers.

Had America been pouring money into infrastructure like light rail and high speed trains we would likely be zipping around in those. But America has the interstate highway, by far the most expansive and effective system of roads in the world. Highways changed the way cities were laid out. With railroads towns developed wherever there was a stop. Without them there is no boom in westward expansion. Highways allowed cities to expand along exits. Highways allowed for suburbs, and now ex-burbs. Call it sprawl or call it expansion, investing in highways and roads made these things possible.

And there are consequences. Tailpipes, long-distance commutes, massive infrastructure, noise, oil dependence are all coming together and forcing us to make decisions and perhaps realize that the definition of America is not necessarily cars, and that the dominance of the car is not some free market, darwinian (small ‘d’) function or a natural right.

Money is a “limited” resource. Investing in one form of transport can mean letting others wither on the vine. See the incredibly fast extinction of trolleys and electric cable cars as evidence. When mass transit suffers cuts in service, like when most public services are eliminated, it effects the poor and the elderly most obviously. It also amplifies the reliance on the car which simply makes it simpler to develop land further and further out of the city core. Additionally as time goes on and services erode there is a perception that the service is insufficient (correct) and hence a waste of money (not so much).

There seems to be for many Americans a tiny libertarian sitting on their shoulder saying “if the riders aren’t willing to pay for it, transit is not worth having.” It’s almost a moral tenet. Some of them say it as they drive alone in their SUV that’s guzzling government subsidized gasoline, hurtling down a subsidized road that creates environmental externalities that are quite literally killing people. This is what we’ve been designing our lives and our communities around.

Midwestern cities face a particular conundrum in the face of all this. Long the little brother of the coasts, they are suffering in comparison to the rise of the South and Southwest. Population shrinkage, loss of their manufacturing advantage overseas, and recently a housing bubble have thrown all the ways in which Midwestern cities have developed into a rather harsh light.

Overeagerness involving highways and roads did little to help this. Many cities blighted their waterfronts, divided their cities – which destroyed neighborhoods – and developed endless repetitive infrastructure which they continue to pay for.

Many of the issues seem straight forward but ignite a tinderbox of anger when trying to deal with them. Aaron Wrenn of the Urbanophile blog says it best, “Suburban sprawl has become culturally identified with the postwar ‘American Dream.’ Indicting the system that produces sprawl is often seen an indictment of our very way of life.”

Reinvigorating these cities requires that they take steps to creating livable, vibrant neighborhoods and corridors. They need to create ways in which there are shorter (both time and distance) commutes, and an economy that creates businesses for these people to commute to.

Transit, hand-in-hand with land use planning are keys to this development. A 2009 study shows an increase in property value in areas surrounding transit nodes and an increase in the number of jobs (notable given the current employment climate). Transit along with zoning that allows for more density attracts development and increases the connectivity of neighborhoods. It isn’t an accident that very dense places are the economic engines of most every nation. Anecdotal evidence from places like Portland, Oregon show that smart planning and investing in transit can result in both economic gain and dramatically help the brand of a city, particularly a mid-size city.

So why does this discussion result in headaches and angry family members around the dinner table. The simple reason is change is painful and we avoid it, sometimes violently. However, some blame lies at the feet of the designer. Designers, advertisers and architects helped to generate the idea that freedom and cars are one and the same. Designers, architects and advertisers need to work harder to help people understand that freedom doesn’t equal automobile, freedom equals autonomy. Autonomy requires a variety of transit options.

Frankly it’s a hard sell when bus routes are being eliminated in most communities, investment in transit is trumpeted as a spending boondoggle and the wealthy in many communities  work to maintain property values rather than actual value.

Yet the success of the Los Angeles Metro in marketing it’s wares has been eye opening. It shows that when designers and advertisers put muscle into something they can move the needle. It will take designers and ad men and architects trumpeting the idea that mass transit isn’t some social engineering project but a necessity for a city to survive.

It takes designers to create usable maps that don’t intimidate new riders of transit. It takes architects working with developers to create taller more dense buildings around transit nodes. It takes industrial designers to make buses and rail cars that are comfortable and have aesthetic appeal. It happened for the car. In some ways the car changed the way we design, but mostly we designed things for the car.

Imagine a world where there is no car. Don’t imagine it to try and fulfill a tree-hugging dream of a no car utopia. Simply try to imagine what a world looks like without a car. How are cities changed? How do we move resources, both human and otherwise from place to place. Where do we live. How do we live.

It’s time designers of all ilks think about how that world could be and not how it has been. It’s time to realize how important their influence is. It’s time to sit back and dream a sustainable American dream.

Founded by missionaries following the word of Mother Anne Lee, Shakertown’s buildings dot the hills like perfectly proportioned, elegant, painstakingly geometric altars to a God with a keen modernist eye. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, aka the Shakers, are undeservedly lumped in with other religious sects like the Amish and the Mennonites as upstanding, faithful, and highly religious people who follow the tenet of separation from the modern world. Given the fact that most people only know about the Amish from the movie Witness and might even vaguely think the Quaker Oats man is Amish, it shouldn’t surprise us that this conception of the Shakers couldn’t be further from the truth.

Shakers were early adopters of electricity and the automobile. They helped to popularize photography and made a fortune by selling their invention – an automatic washing machine with powered agitators – to hotels. While some Shaker practices were seemingly odd – celibacy and speaking in tongues come to mind – they certainly weren’t luddites.

Combined with a deference to a God of love, cleanliness and honesty, and an ethic of “do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow,” the Shaker people were a perfect storm for the creation of meticulously crafted, unadorned, utilitarian, and simply beautiful architecture, furniture and design.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk, once said, “The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was built by someone capable of believing that an angel might come down and sit on it.” There is a calmness to Shaker design. It is ordered but not austere. It lacks decoration but exudes elegance. Each piece almost has an ethical purpose. A chair has a certain unyeilding “chairness.” You look at a Shaker chair and come to understand that it couldn’t be built any other way. Shaker designed artifacts are the objects casting the shadow in Plato’s allegory of the cave.

Nearly two hundred years after Mother Anne Lee started preaching her gospel, Louis Sullivan coined the phrase “form follows function” – a catchy phrase that has embodied how people view the modernist movement in design. Modernism came of age during the turn of the 20th century. A cursory rundown of a history book will tell you it was a relatively turbulent and intellectually heady time. Multiple wars – including World War I – raged on; Darwin, Freud and Einstein changed completely how we think about biology, psychology and physics; and in turn, art and design followed suit.

The advancement in mass production of this era pushed forward the idea that art and design could meet the needs of society and implied this idea that the function of a piece couldn’t really be separated from its form. All of this focus on function and production made things like materials and process hold vital importance.

The irrationality of the Great War combined with the certitude of industrialization spurred on the idea that we humans with our semi-explosion of knowledge could improve upon the world. But rather than taking a more romantic turn in our improvements design veered towards systemization. This led to streamlined design that both spoke to minimalist taste and to easier reproduction.

It seems odd, but as the mechanical scale of things allowed production to blow past human capabilities, design veered towards a human-centric ethic. Pieces were broken down to their base forms, and an austerity of decoration was adopted that both served for easier mechanical production but also a more rational spirit to combat the general upheaval of the moment.

Both the modernists and the Shakers designed around the ideas of gods and machines. One version has humans being the machines of gods, the other inverts the equation and makes humans the gods that control machines. They start at radically different points but somehow meet in the middle.



Fast forward to the here and now. Where do we stand two hundred years later? What does it say that given these lofty and quite literally sacred tenets the movement of modernism has only recently started to manifest itself in vernacular Midwestern culture?

Certainly the modernist ethos has made it’s mark on our urban cores in the shapes of skyscrapers – the true monuments to the form. But what has  Middle-America – the “real” America we oft hear of  – to show of the influence of “modern” design. Ikea? Target?   How is it forms that seem so enduring, forms that were designed to be reproducible get lost in the shuffle of other vernacular forms?

Perhaps with design, or quite possibly everything, we need to think a little deeper about what is influencing us. And maybe we should look over our shoulders every once in a while to see that whoever it is; god, man or machine, is satisfied.

In terms of the work we worked long and hard on the name and the idea that the work needed to be as layered as the business she's running. So without further ado:

"Logo"

"Monogram"

And the official invite!:

The idea is that she doesn't have a logo per se, as much as a bucket of parts that can be mixed and matched. It's more like the brand of a Bazaar than a yoga studio. Some sweet signage will be forthcoming and shown here shortly. Over the course of the next week or so the Website will have actual information. But you can check it out here.

Hope to see you next week!

Not that anyone has actually taken me to task for my last post, but I've been doing a bit more hunting around the deal that the city of Louisville filed with Cobalt ventures for development of Whiskey Row/Iron Quarter. It is abysmal. And Mr. Blue continues to be a defiant prick, as The LEO reports:

However, Blue told LEO Weekly that his company has no intention of saving the facades because it would be “cost-prohibitive.”

From Iron (Quarter) Man:

“Our proposed plan is recreating the architectural images of those facades in exactly the way they are today,” Blue says. “With today’s technology, you can recreate exactly what’s there. We can show you where the paint’s chipping off. It’s done around the country and is celebrated. We’d love to do that.”

Yikes. Re-creation is not preservation in any way. That's simple English. And that is truly tragic. The deal allows for the property to be a parking lot for 5 years. Theoretically the development could take that long, but sheesh, he's owned the buildings the same amount of time. And by using a tone of voice that sounds like a bully being stood up to, questioning his motives behind letting the buildings fall apart is rather appropriate.

This is the kind of thing that causes people to have to use the most far-reaching tools at their disposal, things like landmarking. There is no compromise here. It is a tragedy.

Both of these issues involve the concept of "Landmarking" and all of the peril that comes with it. (Note: I am neither a preservationist or lawyer so I'm sure my general ignorance of these things will result in me saying something I will regret) Two instances should help illustrate and add some color to what I'm driving at. I'll try to give some context for my theoretical, non-Louisville readers.

The Twig

Somehow, nobody complained when they painted it this hideous orange

At the corner of Bardstown Road and Douglas Loop, towards what we call the "upper highlands" is a local jaunt called The Twig and Leaf. This is a mainstay of 2 a.m. drinkers who need a greasy spoon to soak up the festivities of their evening. It has been at the corner since 1941. I had my first date with my wife there (she bought – as I was, ummm, underemployed shall we say). So trust me, I understand emotional attachment to this place. A development group out of Cleveland looked into purchasing the building as well a few neighbors in order to put a CVS Pharmacy at the corner.

As you can imagine, when news of the inquiry hit, people got their panties all in a bunch. This is a landmark! it's been there since 1941! And so ensued the great and now ongoing push to declare The Twig and Leaf as having landmark status.

Are you all looking at this building? If someone offered to build this building on the corner as new construction we'd all cry out in disbelief. And now the freaking thing is neon tangerine. The only relevant design aspect of the place is their phenomenal neon sign – which isn't even attached to the building. This isn't the diner from Nighthawks we're talking about here.

Okay, I will say it is one of the few mid-century buildings in the Highlands, but it's not a terribly shining example of the form. Landmarking this building means that when somebody finally get's tired of having to work at 2 a.m. for razor-thin margins on tater-tots and closes the doors once and for all, the prize we get is this neon dreamcicle building. Consider the fabric of the neighborhood saved!

Tops in neon!

Proposed drawings for the new building were in line with buildings that try to be "historical" on the cheap. Brick with limited details, but it wasn't going to be a cinderblock nightmare.

In a wee bit of irony (at least I think it's irony) there was a classic mom and pop pharmacy that lived right across the street form the twig. The pharmacist went to CVS down the road and now a realtor is in the space. I find the loss of a true neighborhood pharmacy (you could run tabs and even get home delivery! The pharmacist was at minimum second generation) way more disturbing than a diner that's changed hands a few times along the way and frankly has suffered dramatically under the new ownership.

So why the 6,000 fans of the Save the Twig facebook page? Why the rush to get the building landmarked? What are we losing if we lose the Twig? Some would say the culture of the neighborhood would be diminished. In a certain way it would be true. There is a certain nostalgia and pride that comes along with having a mid-century diner in your neighborhood – even if you don't walk in it because the food is mediocre on their best days and the place could really use a bleach spray down. Part of it was the desire to fight for the little guy. And you know what? That might be reason enough to try and fend off CVS.

Speaking of Big Bad Business
Todd Blue, one of Louisville's more well known developers recently struck a deal with the city that would allow him to demolish the back ends of a strip of buildings known as the Iron Quarter, while preserving or reconstructing the facades. Louisville has the largest collection of cast iron facades of any American city not named New York. Blue purchased the buildings what seems like a million years ago and has sat on them leaving them to fall into serious disrepair. In a bid to apparently become what seems (to some) to be a deep-pocketed asshole, he petitioned to demolish the buildings in totality, citing safety concerns.

Admittedly there were all manner of negotiations leading up to his petition, though things seemed to be destined to get to this point somehow. And as you can imagine people were not pleased. I am one of them. The Iron Quarter is something that actually is truly unique to the city of Louisville. Iron facades are an embedded part of the architectural culture of the city. Louisville's architectural tradition and associations are from the 1800's not the 1940's. It's one of the things people tell tourists about. It's part of our culture and brand in a way that is incredibly important. the fact that an entire block of these buildings – on Main street no less – sat decaying for decades is a travesty unto itself.

With this in mind, a rush of people ran to have the buildings put on the historic register to try and force Blue to leave the buildings standing. The entire building, not just the facades. And here is the rub. The back ends of most of these buildings are not architecturally relevant, and more importantly are not designed to house the kinds of things that that block needs. The spaces are generally too big for retail, particularly local retail, of which downtown is severely lacking. Only with significant reconfiguring are they viable for other commercial endeavors. In short, taking them down would drastically help with the development of the block.

The Iron Quarter/Whiskey Row today

The proposed development

And this is where the sticky wicket of Lamdmarking things comes into play. It is sometimes a useful tool to maintain the architectural record and help solidify architectural culture. But in some situations it's a nuclear option, particularly in dynamic areas of a city that have changing needs. These are two examples of where the past crashes face first into the future. For some people, one of these must be the winner. You're stuck in the past or heartless towards heritage.

This is a shortsighted and tragic way to view the world.

In the case of the Twig, landmarking a completely insignificant building in terms of architecture simply means that you are ensuring killing that corner for the future. Bardstown and Douglass is a corner that has incredible potential to be a dense mixed use intersection. It's at the border of very walkable parts of the Highlands and as such gets excellent foot-traffic as well as motorized traffic. It currently houses a very successful coffee shop, an ice cream shop, a bakery, a barber, a framer, a pizza joint, a hardware store as well as office space. There is a bank and two churches. Douglass Boulevard is almost entirely residential as well as are the surrounding streets. To build a multifloor building with living, office and retail space would only make the corner thrive and improve on the neighborhood's viability.

The sad part is that the Highlands is supposed to be a progressive leader in the Louisville community. But progressive policy, and actual progress sometimes mean change. And sometimes it's for the better.

In the case of Whiskey Row/The Iron Quarter you have a developer who in the beginning seemed to appreciate the meaning of those facades (note the proposed development saves them, see above photo). Then through a series of unfortunate events (economy number one), and stupid declarations about destroying the buildings wholesale, he lands on the wrong side of history. On the other side are people who in this case are saving something important but in a way that also possibly kills a corner.

That block of buildings has sat vacant for more than 20 years. An opportunity to create more viable living, working and retail space is incredibly important to that section of downtown. It's called Main Street for god's sake. It's important geographically and architecturally. Yet it has been a blighted corner for my entire existence in this city. Is the development proposed exactly what I would do? Maybe not, but it is certainly an improvement over decaying buildings.

Why the city didn't come to the conclusion that it needed to help fund the preservation of the facades in the first place is beyond me. Particularly since that's where we ended up after all the hullabaloo. And we're still actually in danger of having "rebuilt" facades rather than "restored' facades.

But all of this is to say that sincere thought needs to go into what our built environments do for a city and it's brand. Cities are often remembered for the people, the service, the interactions, but they are equally remembered for the physical surroundings and attributes. The physical attributes can spur growth and community, but only if we keep a level head and understand the implications of our actions.

For Louisville to be a place that encourages growth, progressive urban planning, community, vibrancy, economic vitality we can't afford to be overly nostalgic. To compete with our regional cities we have to be able to show we are a city that does things, not sits on the sidelines waiting.

(Note: I understand there are about one million variables surrounding both of these things, particularly the Iron Quarter debacle, but the larger point remains that consistently holding back development is doing nothing to improve our neighborhoods or our viability as a city, and this attitude seems to permeate every aspect of how we do things. Did someone say East End Bridge? Not me!)