A daily blog on architecture in Chicago, and other topics cultural, political and mineral.
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Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Go Play on the Stairs!
A neat promotion from Volkswagen in which a Swedish subway stair was covered with a continuous keyboard just like the one in the movie Big, lowest notes at the bottom, highest at the top, so you can pop out your own composition on the way, or just immerse yourself in the melody of compositions for piano, two dozen feet. John Cage would have loved it. The claim is that it's cut use of the adjacent escalator 66%. Thanks to Andy Spyrison for posting this on Facebook, and to The Fun Theory.com, where Volkswagen has also posted a streetside bottle collector that lights up like a pinball machine, and a park trash bin that, when fed, makes it sound as if your trash were falling all the way down to somewhere near the center of the earth. Now that's entertainment.
And then the first person trips and the lawyers come out. That's why they didn't do it in the US.
ReplyDeleteActually when you put your hand on the handrail it grabs your fingerprint and when you step on a tread it triggers an automatic acceptance of a EULA anti-liability agreement.
ReplyDeleteI'll always treasure the memory of the guy who got onto an escalator at Illinois Center with a Dell computer monitor on a handcart, just staring like "How did that happen?" as the monitor went Thump! Thump! Thump! and the people further down the escalator attempted to flee from its path.
ReplyDelete