Time for New Plates
sustainability November 6th, 2009
notNeutral makes a line of porcelain plates that depict maps of the downtown core of 20 cities on a black background with key buildings in red, water features in blue, and public spaces in green. There are 5 different collections of four plates that run $190 each set. The cities depicted are Berlin, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Cairo, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, Dubai, New York, St. Petersburg, Brasilia, Melbourne, London, Rome, Mexico City, Tokyo, Chicago, Montreal, Paris and Mumbai.
Each collection has a theme that comes with commentary. The themes are Gateways, Culture and Capital(ism), Capital Migration, Visionary Thinking and Empire Building. Here’s the commentary for the Culture and Capital(ism) theme:
“The theme is Culture and Capital(ism) and the chosen cities are New Orleans and Washington, D.C., both rich in history and culture, and the booming megalopolises of Las Vegas and Dubai.
Our notion of how cities usually arise (if antiquated) usually follows an organic model—a natural feature of the earth’s topography lends itself to the support of human existence, and provides the foundation for human progress (a bottom-up process.)
But in the current age of man’s almost complete control of the environment, cities can be fabricated almost instantaneously (in geological terms) and at the whim of greater and greater feats of civil engineering (a top-down process.)
If culture and capital are two of the products that define a successful society, what happens when they are used as preconceived notions, planned into a city rather than spontaneously resulting from the natural course of a city’s development over time? That is, how does a capital investment in manufacturing culture impact city form?”
Definitely on my Christmas wish list.
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