david byrne's bike racks

i've been riding bikes all my life - as far back as when my age was expressed in single-digit numbers - i don't drive, never have in fact (legally) and so i am intimately familiar with the challenges of bike ownership. one of the biggies is leaving the bike in a public place. if you've ever had a bike stolen you'll know that it is an excruciating and frustrating experience. to counter the possibility of this happening again, you'll likely do what i did which is to buy the heaviest lock possible and suffer through the years of lugging the big bugger around, knowing that it's actually not only going to secure your bike but through the added effort that it takes to haul it up and down hill and dale, you are adding luscious form to your already curvacious calves!

so the challenge then becomes finding somewhere and something to lock your bike to. the rule-of-thumb for locking up a bike is to attach it to something. the thinking is that that makes it less likely that someone is going to remove it than if the lock is merely attached to the bike making it easier to simply carry it off and chop the lock off later. the city i live in has virtually no bike racks. even the school i work at hasn't got one! street furniture, fences, and other bikes (if i am not travelling alone), become fair game for the cyclist anxious to secure his treasured velocipede.

bike rack design is a fairly boring matter . . .

but sometimes soneone, somewhere steps out of the box and shares whimsy . . . (image courtesy of five borough bicycle club brooklyn)

which leads me to this announcement from the nyc department of transportation! it seems that the nyc d.o.t. has come up with the smashing idea that "by bringing attractive yet functional sculptures to our streets, we are elevating the profile of cycling, and we believe that more and more people will begin to think about cycling as a mode of transportation, and not just a mode of recreation."

the solutions are structurally clever and purposeful but i like this proposal from architects stephan-jaklitsch for its simple unobtrusive melding of street art with function.

former talking heads front man (and recently featured on the golden fish blog for his collaboration with brian eno), david byrne has created and installed a set of bike racks on the streets of new york city that clearly espouse a similar perspective on the dual function of bike racks. david's bike racks step out of the singular function-oriented designs that fill the streets and offer people an incidental oportunity to think about why each particular model was placed in the location that it is. maybe they'll even laugh!

so what went into all of this and who knew that david byrne was "an avid cyclist?" for answers to these burning questions let's start here with david cycling through the city on his way to the workshop where the racks were made.

now that you're curious about all of this, you should head over to david's blog where you can find a tasty page that details the process from sketch . . .
to fabrication. the bonus is that there are some wonderful pictures of the racks on location!
nice work david!! after your tour is over maybe you could become an industrialist and crank out some of these so other cities can have something decent - or something at all - to lock bikes up to!
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