I like Tory St. Partly because it is my most direct route down to Courtenay Pl and the harbour. And also because some of the buildings have a zany quality to them. Like the kiwiana painted on the side of MW’s, or the zebra backpackers, or the art nouveau of the Norris Barbers building, or the odd projecting balconies added to Lone Star. I’m not sure why traffic needs to use it at all, except for building access. There generally isn’t a lot during the day, altho there are queues trying to turn in to Vivian St in the evening rush hour. I’d be all in favour of traffic calming in order to encourage traffic on to Taranaki St and Cambridge Tce.

Although, if Durer did the actual woodcut, he can’t be the one at the desk about to spike his eye on the model of the eiffel tower. I mean, what’s all THAT about? 375 years before Eiffel even built it !

And, if this really was done in 1525, and the famous hare seems to be dated 1502, so in 23 years his drawing ability has gone drastically backwards. It’s all just tooo confusing.

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However, to be honest, I’m more worried that she’s going to fall off the bed, and he’s too busy drawing to catch her in time.

Let me attempt an explanation:
Telephoto lenses compress perspective, reducing the perception of space and volume, and making all subjects on different depth planes within the image space appear about much closer together in terms of distance away from the viewer. This is nicely illustrated in the Taranaki Street images above, flattened perspective of the zoomed-in image makes the hills seem much steeper, with the cars appearing almost stacked on top of each other. Similarly, compare the effect of the traffic lights, which appear to be quite close together in the zoomed-in image, but they contribute to a much more realistic sense of receding street perspective in the normal image…

Here is a classic archgitectural image, where telephoto has been used to almost eradicate the sense of perspectival depth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nybldgs.jpg

There endeth the lesson… Test on Tuesday…

And of course, the thing about NZ is the verandahs. Uncommon in many countries, they’re obligatory for most of our cities, to ward off the weather – both wind and rain. But then we have a different attitude to architecture – cos for the most part we can’t see it. We can’t look up. We just look sideways.

Apropos the streets – last Thursday I was wandering around as the streets had just been closed for the carnival. How weird and strange things looked. And then I realised that one never sees things, as a pedestrian, from the open middle of the road. Our views are usually obscured by other pedestrians, and by overhanging structures. One of the nice things about pedestrian-friendly streets is not just the actual spaciousness but the _sense_ of spaciousness.