The Fort Collins Bike Library is closed until April, but its Googie-style building at 222 Laporte Avenue draws attention to itself all year round. Turning your head is what the building is about. Its v-shaped, upswept butterfly roof captures the energy of American culture and commerce in the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, when the future held only achievement and prosperity. I can't think of a better building for the Bike Library to occupy with its vision of a sustainable future.

Still, putting aside the building's 1950s cultural metaphors and its contemporary didactic possibilities, it's a quirky building and one surrounded by blacktop – which I think makes it an ideal subject for trying out Instagram's retro-filtering for iPhone photos.

Instagram is a mobile photo-sharing app, which publishes your iPhone photos to Facebook, Twitter and other social sites but not to a web page or blog. Instagram's eleven cheesy filters are what got my attention. You can find numerous examples of Instagram filtering online – where a serviceable iPhone photo becomes transformed into a faded snapshot from a 1960s photo album. Which is, clearly, something that needs to be done.

Shown below are my Instagram photos from yesterday of the Bike Library.