Tag: Korea

Bikes on Seoul subway

June 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Brandon found this photo on an irritating website called ffffound. Why irritating? Because there’s no respect for attribution and authorship. I have no idea who took this awesome photo.After a little investigation on Twitter, I determined that the language is Korean. Then I searched for “bikes seoul subway” and found that the Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit company was testing bikes on trains in 2009. I couldn’t find any more recent information, nor information in English about bringing a bike on the train on the MTR website.

Anyway, if you ignore all that you’ll agree that what you see in the photo is pretty cool. I’ve been writing about how Americans put their bikes on trains for quite some time now, and I love seeing how other transit systems accommodate passengers and their bicycles.

More good transit news:

Michigan Department of Transportation and Amtrak will begin roll-on bike service on three of their Amtrak lines, the Wolverine, Blue Water, and Pere Marquette in spring 2012. That means I can take my bike with me next year to the 2012 Movement Festival (or Detroit Electronic Music Festival).

Same bad news as last year:

The South Shore Line to Indiana still doesn’t allow non-folding or non-boxed bikes aboard. So you can’t bring a regular bike on the train to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

Over-landscaped Asian parks

February 11, 2009 / / 0 Comments

BLDGBLOG’s post about “over-landscaped” parks in South Korea makes me think of my favorite “natural” space in Chicago, Ping Tom Park in Chinatown on the south branch of the Chicago River at 18th St.

The article discusses Korean photographer Hosang Park’s new photography work featuring these tight, semi-open spaces typically installed at high-rise apartment buildings.

The article talks about how the park’s amenities and features are so crammed together that the park is more a symbol of what a park can be. I was hoping Nicola or Park would address if there’s an inherent cultural style found in the park. That is, are they really over-landscaped, or do they resemble other artistic designs of East Asia.

Would we say that Korean Hangul characters are “over drawn” or have too many lines crammed into one character?

The Ping Tom Park in Chinatown has many similarities to the small parks featured in the blog post: They both have a strictly designed layout, as opposed to the free flowing shape and boundaries of American forest preserves; each features a pagoda; there is a lot of hardscaping using various materials of many colors to form the walkways.

A perception I take away from the article, Ping Tom Park, and the photos of the parks in Korea, is that the open space and green or grassy areas are available purely to watch and respect, but not to step on.

It seems the author’s opinion, which may be the same as the photographer’s, but that’s not clear, is that these parks are so perfect and manicured that we can’t appreciate them as much as more “natural” looking recreational spaces. However, the photographer, Park, unconsciously speaks to its benefits and why they continue to be constructed: “the trees, paths, and water features, no matter how artificial, push up property prices by providing an implicit guarantee of ‘the environmental benefits of a place where they belong.’ ”

I also wrote about two other Chicago parks, Jackson and Millenium, in November 2007.