One of the perks of my new job is that I get a monthly MBTA pass, ostensibly for commuting. My girlfriend’s job also gives her a pass, so the two of us get unlimited scooting around the Boston area. This is ideal, because our primary shared hobby is scooting around the Boston area.
During one such adventure, I spotted this bench/sign combination at Wellington station. Looking at the spatial relationship between the bench and the sign, the most obvious design choice would have been to have the sign protruding upright from the center of the bench—but instead, it’s suspended from the ceiling. Without being bisected by the sign, the bench feels almost table-like. Where the proportions of a typical bench afford sitting upright, the broad surface of this bench suggests the freedom of position afforded by sitting on the floor. (I like sitting on the floor.) Having a gap where my brain was anticipating a solid support structure gives the tableau a pleasing sense of unlikeliness.
The nominal target of this adventure was the Wind Technology Testing Center open_in_new , a building I desperately want to see inside. (We did not see inside.) Although they’re open to arranging tours for organizations with an interest in what they do, I suspect that “I just really want to see.” doesn’t clear the bar for rationale.
We spotted these trees en route. I like the juxtaposition of the clean plane of the sidewalk with the irregular and organic bulge of the cobblestones. City trees are often such unhappy creatures, so it’s nice to see that these three have been growing long enough to challenge their revetments. The empty squares behind them hint at past companions who were not so stubborn.
Fast-forward to the following weekend, and a walk to the newly opened Kismet Cafe in Huron Village. (Really, really lovely. Best croissant I’ve ever had.)
Zoom in and take a good look at the delicious color palette of this brick detail, which I have learned is a “stack bonded header course”—“stack bond” being the term for bricks laid out in a grid, rather than offset, and “header course” being the term for bricks showing their short end rather than their long side. Similarly to the sign at Wellington, I think the most obvious design choice would have been to create this detail using the same red brick used for the rest of the building. I am pleased that these parti-colored bricks must have been deliberately, separately procured to create this particular effect.
Our adventure the following weekend took us to Fort Hill and Jamaica Plain.
On the bus over, I noticed this laundromat sign on Broadway. Although I’ve passed this laundromat dozens of times, for some reason the lettering really stood out to me. This horizontally stretched bold sans-serif text is so in line with current typography trends, although this sign has been here long before that was the case. Trends are so fleeting and cyclical. I wonder what around us is currently perceived as dull or outdated that will be hip and edgy in a few years—like how Salomon sneakers used to be considered unappealingly utilitarian but have become an iykyk fashion piece.
In Fort Hill, I saw this excellent little booth in a parking lot.
It’s such a mundane structure, yet the stairs give it a feeling of being placed upon a pedestal, almost like a museum piece. The absence of any railings contributes to this impression. My instinct is that it’s meant to be staffed by a parking attendant handing out tickets and such, yet the stairs make it both impractically tall and impossible for a car to pull up alongside it.
Perhaps the entrance to this parking lot used to be such that vehicles would approach on the back side, and this lot was used for trucking so the booth was elevated to the height of a truck cab. I’m not entirely convinced—nothing about the surroundings of this lot seems to suggest it used to be laid out differently—but I really can’t think of any other reason for this setup.
In September, I woke up very early in the morning to walk Kyrie before catching my flight to LA for Wasteland Weekend. The apex of our morning route is a wide spot on the community path where it abuts the train tracks. Kyrie likes to bark at the trains.
In the darkness of this particular morning, I was treated to an extremely bright light shining out from behind the noise abatement walls on the opposite side of the tracks. It was perfectly quiet, and there wasn’t anyone around. Because the source of the light was hidden, it was easy to imagine some kind of portal to another world open just out of sight.