Reverse bascule

The copy says this is inspired by van Gogh’s Drawbridge with Carriage, except that bridge is a double regular bascule, not a single reverse bascule. The inspiration is that, unlike 20th century bascules like the current Strauss bridge, the counterweight is a panel instead of a cement block. It’s hard to make out in the distance sketches, but the way it works is the horizontal panel hinges to vertical when the bridge opens. I can’t find a picture of an open reverse bascule, so I think they must be uncommon.

Rolling bascule

As far as I can tell, the Canary Wharf area has a bunch of bridges and proposed bridges: one of them is a rolling bascule.* According to the city of Victoria’s director of engineering, the Canary Wharf bridge has the rolling mechanism below the deck with a walkway passing through it: the Victoria version has the rolling mechanism above deck to be more visually striking.

I believe the Te Wero Bridge being built in Auckland is a rolling bascule bridge; I wish Victoria’s bridge could be so cool:

Cable-stayed bascule

You get to choose your tower shape and angle, as well as how the cables are connected but these bridges all basically look the same:

Writers to the Times Colonist have suggested a replica of the current bridge or of London’s Tower Bridge.

I voted for the rolling bascule because I think it has the best combination of industrial girders to reference the working harbor and stupid modernist curves to reference tourism.

* The City’s website stole the photo from WikiMedia, violating copyright.

One issue handled carefully by the journalists was poor maintenance standards: they did not want to suggest that those people were bad tenants. But most recommendations for improvement included, in the small print, training for tenants in housing maintenance. The argument was made that many of the conditions, including poor maintenance, are widespread in ghettos all over the world (no matter what ethnic group is ghettoized). And I would add that making home ownership illegal probably doesn’t help.

I’m not sure why it’s taboo to say that most natives don’t know how to maintain a Western home? Why would they? Reservation schools were successful at dismantling past cultural practices without being successful at assimilation, which would include house-culture. Even if traditional native culture were intact, what relevance would it have to Western homes?

They traditionally haven’t had the experience of building upkeep, and they didn’t need to. If the building returned to the forest, that was what it was supposed to do.

I’m sitting in Artigiano/Victoria for the first time. I’ve been in Artigiano/Hornby a few times in the last month, so this is a perfect time to contrast the locations.

Artigiano/Victoria is in a two-story-high hotel lobby, strictly partitioned from the hotel by a human-height wood and glass wall. I would have made the wall all-wood because the coffee shop is not so small that it would become claustrophobic without the glass and seeing the hotel is odd. Hanging from the soaring ceilings are huge, round lamps with soft light: they’re interesting, but a far cry from the cozy, fake-stone, lowered ceilings of Artigiano/Hornby. Overall, I’d be less likely to sit in this location than a Mirage or Habit – it feels more like a place to get coffee to go (which ruins the experience of a high-end espresso).

The coffee, however, is better than Artigiano/Hornby’s: more smooth and with a better flavor balance. It’s a shame Artigiano couldn’t get a better location for their first store in Victoria, but I’ll be back for the coffee.

Postmodernism has now been given a rather different implication and weight by sociologists and geographers, who are concerned with the way categories of knowledge develop within late capitalist society in harness with power and privilege.

This is a Foucaultian view in its emphasis on the study of power-relations. I have only recently come across the idea that postmodernism is an ontological pursuit (what exists?) compared to modernism as an epistemological pursuit (what can we know?), so I can’t say more about that.