Some students of mine have coined the term “low means go / high means slow” to describe the way gravity would naturally cause cyclists to speed up as they turned toward the middle of such a street, then slow to pedestrian pace as they pulled to the side.

I’ve got to start plugging my book now. As well as espousing design techniques such as this one, I make the case that designing bike cities and buildings is a problem for architects and landscape architects, not road engineers. I believe it’s $26.95 at book depository.

I look forward to the day when the cycling community looks to architects, and not road engineers, as the natural designers of the places they ride. Traffic engineering is a discipline that makes national and international standards. It has to. As a discipline it evolved to minimise the risk inherent in the most dicey activity humankind has ever made mainstream. Unduly influenced by that design model, most bike advocates would look at my sketch and complain that it wouldn’t work in front of their house. It isn’t meant to. It’s meant to inspire architects, landscape architects, and any city with the vision to employ such designers after they have booted high-speed machines and their engineers out of their cities entirely.

The Danes and the Dutch are too practical. Too Protestant! They leave their cargo bikes outside when they buy groceries, when they could be using them as shopping trollies. Supermarket chains, especially in the suburbs where the aisles are much wider, could be advertising themselves as places to ride through, without waking the baby, without double handling of groceries, without having to chain up outside or cover your saddle in case it rains. In the future grocery stores will chip all their items, so we can ride in, load up, and have the bill automatically deducted from our accounts as we ride out. For more great ideas, buy my book!

Thanks to 2 students of mine, Ian and Matt, for taking these photos. And thanks to The Trevallyn Grocer for letting me in with my big clunkin’ box bike

Okay, I got trouble here guys

How serendipitous is it therefore, that architects, now more than ever, should be fascinated with uneven ground planes and floors? Mies van der Rohe’s
definition of architecture as the making of “universal space” or Le Corbusier’s similar idea of the domino plan, seem like ancient history these days. SANAA’s Rolex Learning Centre is the new Farnsworth house. Universal space, just like space as cosmologists see is, has become curved.

I’m in the mood for a list, of works of architecture that make a feature of uneven floors: Lewerence’s Klippan Church Sweden; Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp; Steven Holl’s cité de l’océan et du surf; Heatherwick Studio’s ”Seed Cathedral” at Shanghai Expo 2010; Peter Eisenman’s Jewish Memorial in Berlin; Nox Architects’ Water Pavilion; FOA’s Yokohama International Port Terminal… alright, there must be hundreds!

Hopefully I’ll remember to come back and add standout examples, or perhaps you will suggest some with a comment. The point I want to make is quite simple, and has nothing to do with warped space time (as interesting an angle that may be to pursue). I’m simply saying that an interest in undulating ground planes among architects, is coinciding right now with a period in the evolution of cities when finding ways to separate bikes from pedestrians is important for the happiness of both.

Spotted in Kinokuniya Bookstore New York

I have to thank my friend David in New York for this photo he snapped of my book in   Kinokuniya Bookstore, beside Bryant Park. David works in the area so goes there often for the affordable but incredible Japanese lunch fare, and because the store has an improbably large offering of books about architecture (you guessed it, David is an architect too). So I’m about to email them now, to see if they’ll have me for a book signing next month, and perhaps let me leave with some rare Anime.

Quick thinkers they are, the police who made our pilot friend pull to the side for no reason,  radioed base and ascertained velomobiles are legal to use on the road. Next they checked and made sure the rider hadn’t been drinking. Then they took a photo and let him ride off, not wearing a helmet. Up here for thinking, down there for dancing, lad.

If you think about it, cycling is illegal in any country that does not have complete bike infrastructure—unless you’re prepared to take unreasonable risks, endure unreasonable delays, or be made to look like a clown. Even the most law abiding among us, find ourselves skirting the law, and thus at loggerheads with it, in some small way or another. If you fight the law straight you’ll be beaten. Better to fight like Mr. Bean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRZqRjxkHpk

The further you venture from the mainstream, the more you confound self-appointed and real cops alike, and the more immune you become from prosecution, or even just being chastised. Though we’ve learned today we cannot ride a velomobile under the influence, we know that just riding a bike is sufficiently weird on any other occasion, that we can ride pissed as newts and no one will care. Small wheel bikes can go on the footpath—you can even do that in New York! Pedal powered trikes can be ridden through shopping arcades; the average Joe thinks trike-bike riders are all paraplegics. Remove all your teeth except the one in the middle, and get yourself some old stonewash denim, and you can ride your electric moped as the mosquito flies, diagonally across highways or wherever you like.

Truly though, I want a velomobile, not just for the option of occasionally flouting dumb helmet laws, but so that police might tell everybody that I made it myself. “Custom Made”, sure!

One of Japan’s rewards for having a society that is better behaved, is they can experiment with housing types that would cause rioting anywhere else. Take this miniature block of walkup terrace apartments, designed around a courtyard that has been curved to receive motorbikes. To hell with motorbikes, I want to move in with my collection of push bikes! (Thanks to a student of mine, who found this fantastic example of a building designed and marketed to lovers of two wheel transportation.)

At the risk of reading too much into too little, I should like to begin this raincoat review with a deep and meaningful observation that you might find a tad sanctimonious, even for me. The marketing imagery presented by this raincoat company out of Cambridge UK, does not emphasise walking from the subway to the office in the heart of the city, or conversely carrying fresh milk from your own cow to your kitchen, but riding a bike. I’m not amazed that this cycling raincoat resembles nothing you will ever see in the peloton. I’m amazed that the Cambridge Raincoat Company have identified cyclists as such an important market segment for rainwear. I had long suspected walking was becoming a fair-weather mode and evidently, I was correct. Advertising reflects life, and these days it is mostly us cyclists who push on in all weather, and who therefore most need our raincoats.

One reason for buying this raincoat was to test my theory that 9 out 10 people were not in the top class for every subject at school (as I was, except for English—ironically), and that of the remaining 10 percent, most become dumb from watching TV (as I could not have, since I don’t watch the darned shit). This new raincoat has given weight to those numbers. If one in one hundred people who see me riding my bike in this raincoat recognise it as a reasonable thing to be wearing, the other 99 look like these puppies. Many are still wondering if that dignified gentleman they saw on his bike didn’t escape from the loonie bin, if what I was wearing was legal to wear on a bike, and if they weren’t meant to chew me. Until I am beaten to death or ran over for thumbing my nose at cultural norms, I will goad my intelectual inferiors. This raincoat is perfect for that.

I wonder if I would look so out of place though, wearing this raincoat on a bike in Cambridge, UK (sorry Harvard, we’re not talking about your plagiarised Cambridge). While I imagine old Raleighs and raincoats are as common in Cambridge as wooden rowboats or buildings from Hogwarts, I note that Sally Guyer developed these particular raincoats because she was dissatisfied with what else was on offer. Could she really not find another traditional raincoat, in all of England? Well of course she could, obviously, and I imagine many people in Cambridge own a similar raincoat and wear it while riding. The gap in the market was for a raincoat made from this incredible fabric.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYh5BKTspg

When I bought the coat, there was a link on Sally’s site to the fabric manufacturer. I can’t see the link now, and wouldn’t blame her for pulling it down. Her competitors would be all over this stuff, like fried chicken joints if they found this. To touch, scrunch and pelt with rain drops, it really just feels like your favourite old jeans. Rain drops make no sound upon impact. I’m especially fond of the bold satin lining, that as I write causes flashbacks to the night I was wed and took my dear Primrose under the sheets after 4 long hours of abstinence prior.

Couple this coat with your favourite gloves, soft shell trousers from Rapha, and a waxed cotton rain hat like the one I’ve been wearing, and you will be asking other folk on the bike path, “How’s the weather now? Better?”

So, Sally, if you’re not going to tell your competitors the name of this fabric, you should at least start expanding your range. I would like some trousers, please. Or at least make me a hat. The brown of the waxed cotton just looks so taudry, compared to something you might provide in matching red.

Swapping my MC Hammer pants and gore-tex hiking coat for this raincoat has been one of those milestones in my life of cycling, to rival buying a roadster from these guys, or packing my Brompton now when I go on work trips, or buying a box bike. In the same way that the tattooed lady started with one little butterfly on her buttocks, we eccentrics become eccentric in stages. We start with the upright style bike, then progress to commuting in regular clothes rather than lycra, and end up wearing red raincoats that are visible from the space shuttle and cause bus loads of schools kids to riot.

I freely admit, I would not look so smug in this raincoat if it let rain in, or trapped 100% of my perspiration. This leads to those pointy questions you’re dying for me to answer, on the subject of raincoat performance. As anyone who enjoys a bit of a workout while bike commuting can attest, we do arrive sweaty no matter how much the label on our spray jackets insist our sweat will be wicked from our skin. In the end we must accept getting a damp back from our own perspiration. What is intolerable, is the ingress of cold trickles.

Most rainwear attacks that old devil Cold Trickle with taped seams and sealed zips, the later cut from the same giant length of sealed zipper, that I guess must come from some city in China where all the people are employed making zippers. Evidently Sally has no trade links with that city, as her coats just have buttons. That a fastening device dating back 5000 years to Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan could be as good as modern zippers, is as remarkable really as bicycles being faster than cars in the city. But there you have it: low tech still works. And there you have the technical review of the Cambridge Raincoat you were looking for but couldn’t find on the Washing Machine Post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z2ugF7adPo

I am disappointed with one thing. I wish this new raincoat of mine had clips or garters of some sort to keep the front panels in place on my thighs. The makers of Rainlegs recognised that it is usually only a gentleman’s thighs that need protection, not the lower legs or backs of his trousers. And though this would be a gimmick, I wouldn’t mind if the coat came with a bag that I might pack the coat into when it is wet, to protect the range of new products from Apple that I choose to carry about in my pannier. In the meantime I’m scrunching it into a Rapha feed bag, mixing my first love of bike racing with my new love of cycle chic, in a way that seems more sinful than your average threesome. Yes, then gloves, shoe guards and trousers from this rain resistant fabric that feels just like cotton, would be appreciated too. Sally: I haven’t stopped spending!

But let me remind you in closing why I bought this raincoat, and that was, to cause a reaction. Better than any T-shirt with words on, this rain coat says, “drive around me, not through me, because I am god,” the subtext to that being, “I will send rat plagues to strip the flesh from your bones, if you pass too close.” But none of that of would fit on a T-shirt.  You buy this coat for the same reason you might buy contemporary art, to differentiate yourself from the 99% who weren’t in the top classes, or who have made themselves dumb by watching TV.

Dark green lines represents safe cycle tracks. Dotted green lines represent door-zone suicide lanes. It is legal to cycle on footpaths here, however, the crossings to give cars access to mid-block cars parks have been made smooth to tell drivers to ignore cyclists and pedestrians using the footpath. This city is insufficiently dense to support frequent (non-timetabled) public transport, or walking. Bikes would give people some other option to driving, but the safe cycling network looks like half digested pieces of spaghetti that came out with somebodies vomit.

One axiom was to spread out. Given the wildfire transmission of influenza in 1918, especially in cities, we can understand our forebears’ hunger for green space, fresh air and sunlight.

But another was to make that all happen using the car. It is true that the car can help people spread out. However, it is not irreducible. As clever an invention as the car seems, it does not capitalise on its drivers’ own body for use as an engine. Instead, it has a heat and noise-making lump of cast metal on board. If you were to pair back the design of the car until no part was redundant, it would weigh less than its live payload, and use that payload’s legs for propulsion. A rationalised car, would be a bike, or maybe a trike, or a velomobile.

The enlightenment project of redesigning civilisation along uber rational lines, was knocked off course by an axiomatic assumption that Socrates could have turned into mincemeat. Sure, attach a horse or a motor to your carriage if you want to move hay bales, but if your aim is to move flesh and blood engines—engines that last longer the more they are used—then reason dictates that those flesh and blood engines be put to good use.

A century of sports-led advances in bicycle technology, coupled with practical innovations from bike transport nations like Denmark and the Netherlands, mean we can now get across town more quickly by our own steam than we can if relying on privately owned machines that have motors. Break downs, traffic snarls and car parking woes always made driving a crapshoot. High-pressure tires, ergonomic design, and smoother transmissions have recently turned biking into a breeze.

Yet we go on designing cities with cars as the centrepiece. Urban fringe subdivisions, retail warehouses out beside highways, internal lock-up garages, mountaintop getaways, junior soccer leagues that require away matches—decade by decade, car dependence underpins every design decision we make as a species, from highway investment, to institutional structures, to the lengths of our raincoats.

The only full length raincoat in my household belongs to the cyclist—me

Have you noticed how raincoats have become shorter? They used to come down past the knees. Our houses had more hooks than bedrooms, right at the front door, so every member of the household could still go to school, shops and work when it was raining. These days, if we own a raincoat at all, it will most likely come to the waist and have been bought from a specialised camp store. Raincoats have become the kind of accoutrement we associate with going hiking, from car parks to mountaintops, to satisfy ourselves that a world of internal access garaging has not made us soft.

Critics of sterile Modernist architecture—Charles Jencks, Tom Wolfe, Brent Brolin, Peter Blake, etc.—blamed the failures of Modernism on the logic employed. Cold rationality, they argued, left no room for the kinds of whimsical yearnings that in fact make us human. But a whimsical yearning, for motorised transport, was at the heart of Modernist planning and the buildings, products and systems born of that planning approach. Modernism gave a surface appearance of being rational, but deep down it was giggling with excitement for whatever Henry Ford or Gabriel Voisin had in their showrooms. Look at the futurist poet Marinetti crashing his car then punching the air. Then see how Sant’Elia, the futurist architect “endowed his imaginary machine-made metropolis with mythical attributes of speed”, because, as Esther da Costa Meyer has written, “a certain naive technological determinism” pervaded Sant’Elia’s text.

How can we say cold rationality is to blame for the failures of Modernism, when its avant-garde leaders were silly for cars? At a deep level, cold rationality was never really given a chance.

If we look at some of Modernism’s most famous failures, we will find auto-centric planning there in the background. The social disasters that occurred at Pruit-Igoe and Hulme Crescent are commonly attributed to aerial streets cut off from the ground. But for the poor people living on those aerial streets, being cut off from the ground was not as bad as being cut off from opportunities available to wealthier citizens of their increasingly car-centric cities. The geographical isolation of those projects for the non-driving poor was as much to blame for the muggings as the cockeyed reasoning behind the floor planning.

Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House stands now as a cautionary lesson to any architect who would strip a building of everything they thought was superfluous to need, like curtains or fly screens. However, what narratives of Howard Roark branded arrogance completely ignore, is that the house itself was superfluous to the needs of the client, Edith Farnsworth. She already had an abode. It was in the city, and it probably had curtains and fly screens.

Highways in the country. 1939 Futurama exhibit

The idea that every professional should also have a rural retreat is an idea that was being instilled, in those times, by car manufacturers, like General Motors. They funded the Futurama pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, a giant diorama showing freeways designed for 150mph jaunts to the country and back, just for the fun. Whatever Mies designed for Dr. Farnsworth in that broader context, would really not need to have sun screens, fly screens, insulation, curtains, or perhaps not even a roof. Viewed in the context of recreational car use, it was less of a house than a marker, there to show a driver where to turn around and head back.

Dymaxion Car

If only we could turn back the clock to the mid twentieth-century! We would warn Le Corbusier about propagandising for cars with his Villa Savoye, planned around the turning circle of his favourite Voisin. We would tell him to plan it around the turning circle of a Dutch bakfiets. We would tell Buckminster Fuller to build a Dymaxion bike. We would tell the whole avant-garde that their vision of a good life with cars was steering the world toward poorer health, congestion, wars and greenhouse emissions.

It’s too late for that though. It would be easier now to get the whole world to speak Esperanto, than to untangle our civilisation from cars. Too many choices we make, about trivial things such as whether or not to let our children join soccer leagues, to things so profound as where we build housing, can be traced to a machine with two engines. The engine that wears out from use is the one that runs hot. The engine that lasts longer the more it is used, is the one that sits idle. We’re stuck with cars, just as we’re stuck using English, with all its absurdities, as the world’s lingua franca.

But what if our cities had pockets of resistance, where cars were not the lingua franca of planning decisions? What if there could be urban districts where the default mode of transport was cycling, and design thinking proceeded accordingly? Albeit on a much smaller scale, the Modernist axiom that it’s good to spread out, might live again, only coupled this time to a properly rationalised personally mobility device. I’m imagining zones within cities that, to enter, felt like entering China Town. From the way they structured their lives and their built environment, to the way they all dressed, everyone would be thinking in Bike.

Thanks for reading right to the end. I’m interested to know if any blog readers are able to join me in imagining purpose-built bicycling districts, using a purely rationalistic epistemology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1wnOUH2jk8

You heard me correctly, Dr. Behooving has moved to an even more behooving locale. This fine craftsman built edifice, circa 1940, has aperiodic geometries, anticipating architectural trends of some fifty years hence. Legend has it that the original owner, for whom it was built, suffered form the dreaded TB and thus avowed any tight corners in which germs would be able to fester. One advantage of early twentieth-century hospital plans to the modern illuminated home owner, is no rectangular space exists underneath in which to later jam a garage. The house has a garage, with an automatic opening door, but it is shaped such that it only fits bikes.

Recently the new owner [I'm referring to myself in the 3rd person] discovered, upon returning home from dropping his son off at school, that the garage’s octagonal main space matches the turning diameter of a long bakfiets. Oh what serendipity! He wishes to declare before his Primrose makes any wild accusations, that he honestly had no way of knowing their car would not fit under this house. Nor could he have known there would be room for twice as many bikes as he now owns, perhaps as many as 40.

Winding down through the catacombs beneath this fine tuberculosis centre, designed around the turning circle of a Dutch cargo bike with aperiodic geometries, one finds a very fine room (pronounced “rom”), that the new owner has converted into a bike rom. A secret bike rom, for his most precious collection, where he spends his evenings playing with allen keys, photographed here for your enjoyment using the technique popularised by David Hockney.