Should electric cars make a noise or is the future a city of silence? Or is the roar of the internal combustion engine too ingrained our the urban psyche to ever be entirely banished. Not touched on by Dan is the noise that often comes with cars, the steady thud of a bass drum, window rattling noises that echo down whole streets, dopplering past. As manufacturers never tire of pointing out, car hi-fi is escalating in performance and intensity - most of the multi-speaker systems fitted to very high end luxury cars (Naim for Bentley, Bang and Olufsen for Aston Martin, etc.) comfortably outperform domestic set-ups costing thousands of pounds.

Seven designs that were never built, along with the frankly unsurprising news that the Dynamic Tower might not materialise quite as originally envisioned. Massive doses of architectural schadenfreude all round. Related, collapsing new buildings. More images.

Morgues, photographs by Rob Ball / Baekdal, a sort of image-driven content delivery site / projects and ideas by Tim Schwartz / no flying cars, but plane-like cars instead. Maybe / Favorite Worst Movies, with clips (see also, chumps).

Labels: things

posted by things at 13:23 / 0 comments

This is a Champion, a project / The Graphing Calculator Story / Le Corbusier's furniture from Chandigarh, 'salvaged from a skip' / create background patterns / The Lives of Space, a site developed to accompany the Irish pavilion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, proceeding 'from the modest proposition that the designed spaces which architects produce play a crucial role in supporting, shaping and framing our lives.'

What will happen to the Dwell Pre-fab, developed in conjunction with Marmol Radziner, one of the few architecture firms making a convincing stab at a factory-built home / Directorio d'Arco brings together built and unbuilt work from architecture blogs around the world / KaChing!, a tumblr / a tribute to Steven Wells, more here.

The Ideas Bazaar, a weblog / One Life Experience offers camper vans for hire / sculptures by Michael Ferris Jr / Q magazine's print deadlines were particularly unfortunate this month / Miglior Acque, a weblog steeped in medievalism.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 00:23 / 0 comments

The New Fauves seem kind of Stuckist. That's not a bad thing / Triangle Triangle is one of those abstract sites that seems to distil whole swathes of contemporary cultural production down into just one or two images / see also Aleatorio, a tumblr (occasionally nsfw) / Niemeyer in Paris / Pulse Laser, 'a blog on interactions and the new world of product'.

A Tissue of Lies: the Stephen R.Glass index is sadly a forest of dead links / Allen Jones-esque work by Walter Raes / pHinnWeb, online since 1996 with its 'origins in the material of Finnish techno scene reports written for the American fanzine Skreem' / Pearltrees, a site that offers a way of mapping your journey on the web (blog) / The Pop-Up City, links and urbanism.

Further to yesterday's mention of iPhone's imitating ancient technology, here's a gallery of old vintage Rockwell calculators (a shameless way of linking one of our eBay auctions).

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 23:27 / 0 comments

The 2020 vision for developing Westminster Abbey got a lot of news coverage but precious little in the way of actual imagery was available showing what might actually happen: 'Should a new 21st century architectural feature, such as a 'corona', be added to the roof of the Abbey above the lantern to honour and celebrate the place of Coronation?' While a little bit of the Sagrada Familia's absurd unfinished spirit wouldn't go amiss in Westminster (and Westminster Cathedral was never finished either), the rather literal idea of putting a 'crown' atop a building where people are crowned should be pleasantly controversial. Would Prince Charles have a potential conflict of interest?

Photography by Kai-Uwe Schulte-Bunert / photography by Marc Steinmetz (via) / retro calculators for your iPhone / related, 'Giving up my iPod for a Walkman: 'I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.' / now this is a proper conspiracy / on Christiana / dramatising the skyscraper, the ledge at Sears Tower (official site) / photography blog by Joseph Casciano.

Scrivener looks like a fabulous tool. This windows equivalent, Liquid Story Binder XE just seems horrifically complicated. There's also supernotecard, StoryView, PageFour and RoughDraft, which appears to be rather old. More information on supernotecard over at the Quantum Storytelling weblog, and also in this post by Steven Johnson, all about DEVONthink. Nothing seems terribly straightforward though. No-one does exactly what we want. This question also seems relevant.

What Alice Found, a weblog / My Migraines, a weblog / Daily Discoveries on Design / yet more from Mr Levine: General Motors Futurama New York World's Fair 1939-1940, ATT Fun and the Fair New York World's Fair 1964-1965, Observatory - Empire State Building.

Labels: architecture, software, writing

posted by things at 16:59 / 1 comments

Fifteen images of not so secret secret service buildings, a light-hearted round-up of the architecture of information. Related, "Everyone is becoming like a Stasi agent", Moolies on information technology and privacy: '.... anything out of the norm is ripe for being filmed, photo'd and commented upon. Each little cluster of social activity surrounding a slightly unusual event is somewhat akin to far too many people dialling 999 around the scene of an accident.'

This segues nicely into the introduction to Douglas Rushkoff's new book Life Inc. ('How the World Became A Corporation and How To Take It Back'). 'It's as if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward self-interested, short-term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate share-holders than members of a society.' There's a link between this slow infusion of corporatism into every day life and way of thinking and the 'clusters of social activity' described above. One facilitates the other, providing the technological backbone that enables social technology, as well as the structures that shape our response to this information. On a global scale, the patterns that emerge through Zeitgeist or even the email logs of a multi-national corporation illustrate how easily the global unconscious is expressed through information. As a result, it's increasingly easy to audit cultural responses.

Also related (and much linked, for good reason), Adam Curtis's new BBC-hosted weblog, The Medium and the Message. The filmmaker has created some of the most powerful documentaries of recent years, with a breathtaking visual style that takes what at base level appears to be MTV-like cuts and reappropriations and flows them seamlessly into narrative and music so that pictures act as a narrative all of their own. It's very powerful stuff, and undeniably manipulative for it (although probably self-consciously so). You can see almost his entire back catalogue at Archive.org (scroll down for links).

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Random link round up. Mags McGinnis, formerly of Laika, makes candles, practices law and plays guitar in Wire / Being Tyler Brule, the man made weblog / M.Inc, a design weblog / Sam Haskins' photoblog (some nudity) / Don't be a coconut, a music weblog / Ryan's Neat Stuff Blog, mostly old comics and things / the Victorinox edition Airstream (via autoblog) / seier + seier + seier's flickr stream is notable not just for the beautiful architectural imagery, but for the extended and highly informative captions.

Owen Luder is now getting his Rubble Club deluxe membership fleshed out: Southgate Shopping Centre, Bath and the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth / designing the friendly skies, an old aviation nostalgia-fest / the best 'boring postcard' ever? / Le Corbusier - Chapelle Ronchamp, Notre-Dame du Haut 1950-1955 / thank goodness for people with large, well-organised flickr streams, like Steve Cadman and Sandro Maggi.

If Famous Architecture Were Priced Like Paintings, a Le Corbusier Would Cost the Same as the Entire American GDP / go on, Fix Outlook / Heavy Metal of a different kind, photographer Anthony Oliver on tractor badges in Eye / more on Polaroid and a possible antecedent to the classic SX-70 camera uncovered by Mrs Deane.

Disappointingly small gallery of historic roller coasters (via, where there are better links) / Coast Modern is a new documentary about the modern house on America's West Coast. Should be interesting to see moving images of dwellings that have long been canonised through epic photography (Shulman in particular).

'Ghost village to be demolished', the story of Pollphail at Portavadie. Check the photography of this never-inhabited village, taken by Philippa Elliot. There's more about Pollphail at Secret Scotland / hive mind ADD. On 25 June 4 of the 10 top search terms were directly Michael Jackson related. By 27 June, Jackson had dropped to only two mentions in the top 50, the first at number 25.

We're looking forward to the BLDGBLOG book / Werner Aisslinger's Loftcube, a media celebrity project from a few years back, gets several more minutes of fame at PhotoshopDisasters / it's a shame that bad British Architecture isn't reeling off the vitriol on a daily (hourly?) basis - there's too much material there for it to stay idle.

Labels: architecture, conspiracy, future, linkage

posted by things at 08:00 / 1 comments

In the UK, the impending 'end of analogue' broadcasting is expected to be widely resisted, especially since recent plans brought forward the switch off date to 2015. In the US, all TV broadcasts are now digital, a switch that mattered less in a country with such widespread cable access (via me-fi). But apart from reducing the chance capture of errant signals, plus the crackles, whistles and pops that characterise analogue, what's happening here is the anticipated nostalgia for a lost technology (ham radio sounds).

Nobody really cares about VHS videos any more. Charity shops in Britain struggle to sell films for 50p each. In the UK, Dixons killed the VCR in 2004, while in the US Walmart followed in 2006 (although some reports claimed you could still buy a VHS on the high street in 2009). It's taken barely three years for a device to pass into technological history, implying that the emotional hold of the video cassette was never terribly strong.

But as sites like The Impossible Project attest, certain technologies transcend their obsolesence through being perpetually desirable. The Impossible Project aims for the 're-invention of analog instant film', engineering a 'new analog instant film for Polaroid vintage cameras' to supply professionals and enthusiasts who refuse to give up the fight (NYT article. 'We think it's one of the greatest inventions in the history of photography, because we're tired of tons of boring digital pics that surround as every day,' the new company's PR told us, 'but we love analog things, things you can touch, smell, see, hold in your hands, and things that surprise you. Like Polaroid does.'

Certainly there are a host of Polaroid blogs out there, either devoted entirely to the film and cameras or tangentially cribbing the hazy, memory-soaked aesthetic: Last Days of Polaroid, Peonies and Polaroids, my Polaroid blog, Polapremium and Polanoid. Predictably enough, the Polaroid name has now been attached to a range of micro-printers and digital photo frames (although our prediction that the inevitable camera with integral printer came from Japan, the TOMY Xiao). Polaroid's own PoGo launched in March but doesn't seem to have made much impact.

The loss of these things stings more than mere nostalgia, but why? Polaroid has a noble history, intertwined with commerce and culture. These days, the idea of writing about 'beloved gadgets' is simply an opportunity for a advertiser-pleasing linkfest, rather than a real consideration of why certain things and devices connect so readily, and what the inescapable (rather than cynical) planned obsolesence of contemporary digital devices. The Impossible Project is knowingly named, for the wholescale reconstruction of defunct product works is unprecedented on this scale. But should they succeed, Polaroid will acquire yet another layer of patina on its already overburdened shoulders, a form of image making that carries a serious weight of expectations.

From The Impossible Project: 'Ranging from simple screwdrivers via special spare parts up to 10 giant Integral Film assembly machines, all machinery and tools needed to develop and produce up to 100 million new Integral Instant films per year are present in Building North. Impossible b.v. has purchased the complete production setup in working order (which produced film up to the middle of the year) from Polaroid. All machines are still fully connected and operational. The original total costs of this unique and highly specialized setup today is approx. 100 million EUR.'

Labels: nostalgia, photography, polaroid

posted by things at 23:41 / 2 comments

A good point made in this interview with Dian Hanson, Taschen's 'Sexy books editor' at wallpaper.com: 'I worry about what legacy modern photographers [will] leave, having worked their entire careers in digital.' The physical archives that lurk in boxes, chests and slide drawers around the world will cease to exist as singular, unique entities. Instead, archives will become portable and impermanent, flash drives that contain a life's work, from cast-off shots to multi-layered Photoshop 'work prints', fonts, to-do lists, bookmarks, clipped jpgs, corrupted files and downloaded mp3s. The idea of restoring or reconstructing an artistic studio environment - see the LIFE series Artists At Work - becomes a question of retaining computer hardware and running the necessary back-ups.

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A chaotic jumble of things. I Love Traffic, 'a game about cars' (via rps) / Hidden Los Angeles, a new website / Bildbauten, a project by Philipp Schaerer / Urban Camping / check the feast of electronic samples at famous sounds (via haddock) / Design and the Media, how work gets published, in Dwell / Eagle House, a high tech curiosity, is for sale / Mike Dempsey's weblog Graphic Journey has an exceptional piece on the designer Derek Birdsall.

New 'affordable' art at the Modern British Gallery / related, furniture at The Modern Warehouse / Who goes to a creationist museum? Related, Genesis Expo in Portsmouth, the UK's biggest (only?) creationist museum / on 'Framing Modernism' at the Estorick Collection, an 'exhibition [that] shows how adroit the [Italian fascist] regime was at deploying modernism to put an elegant gloss on its brutality.'

Dezeen have kindly collated every single story they've ever done on Zaha Hadid, an orgy of extravagant (albeit largely imaginary) structural exuberance and highly evolved rendering software. Not long now, we reckon, before the Hadid office rolls out a prefab, probably not looking a million miles from the mini-icon, something along the lines of the absurd Libeskind prefab. This is either a not-so-subtle deconstruction of the notion that pre-fabricated needs to be boxy and boring, or a tacit acknowledgment that this kind of architecture is, first and foremost, about making a statement, form over function.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 13:00 / 0 comments

Other things. What is a magazine? / back in the YAMoPo (yet another most popular architecture sites ranking). Thanks to ArchDaily for acknowledging our architectural mix. From the listings, design sites we didn't know: PSFK, mirage.studio.7, + MOOD, Dezona/ folksonomy, 'clippings' from digital culture / photographs by empalagarme de mar / information design by Max Gadney, via Magical Nihilism (best name for a weblog, ever) / Renter Girl, 'I write about everything to do with renting and the buildings tenants live in.'

Art by Remy Lidereau / Playmakers, something we need to investitage more closely / disk space viewer to explore, Sequoiaview / We Are Bad, a weblog / Raindrop Melody Maker, a flash toy by Lullatone (via The Null Device) / Sensing Architecture, to investigate further / build me a library of lefty kids' books.

Wikipedia's list of nuclear weapons is fun reading / the architecture of Star Wars. From a cynical point of view, this kind of article seems tailor-made to be linked and clicked. It's done rather well though / nice to see that the Barrack business has even merited a metafilter post. Rogers responds. The Telegraph reports.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 21:53 / 0 comments

While this Telegraph piece praising Prince Charles' intervention in the Chelsea Barracks saga is superficially very depressing ('Chelsea Barracks: Thanks to Prince Charles for meddling', don't read the comments), what's most annoying is the way in which the piece doesn't bother to engage with the real driving forces behind the highs and lows of the now-abandoned Rogers Stirk Harbour scheme; the economy.

When the sale of the Barracks was first mooted in 2005, the stakes weren't quite as high: according to BBC News, 'The 13-acre prime building land could raise as much as £250m from residential or retail development.' The actual price realised, claimed to be £900m in April 2007 (£959m in January 2008), making it 'the UK's most expensive home property deal.' This put a tremendous pressure on the new owners to maximise the site to get any sort of return on their investment.

Initially, this didn't seem like much of a problem. The property firm that brokered the deal and subsequently (and probably fatally) lent their very slightly louche image to the whole project was Candy and Candy, then on the ascendance as purveyors of absurdly OTT apartments, houses, yachts and helicopters. One Hyde Park, developed in conjunction with RSH, is generally considered to be the apogee of hedge funded architectural hedonism. As was noted back in 2007, the Barracks sale was proof that London's 'housing market has hit a new high' (the original whizzy flash site to publicise the sale is here). The C+C moolah factory merely stirred a heady dose of schadenfreude into the mix.

But then the market plunged, and the ire aroused by the site and the plans inevitably rose. The economic need to fit on large quantities of housing to cater to both C+C's high-end clientele and the affordable quota demanded by Westminster resulted in a fairly dense bit of architecture, with tall blocks crowding apparently dark, gloomy streets. Arguably, RSH didn't handle the presentation terribly well, with a relatively bland set of documentation that failed to stress the improvements to the townscape beyond superficial rendered imagery. Instead, the CADs unfortunately emphasised the rather more dominant issues of massing and facade treatment. A second submission seems to have solved these issues, but we'll never know.

There are many rich paradoxes in the whole saga. The rather austere image at the head of this post - the sort of thing that induces twitches in any good urban explorer - is a picture of the original barracks, built on open fields east of the Royal Hospital. Undeniably hefty, as all good Victorian buildings should be, they were designed by George Morgan and demolished in 1960, replaced by an undistinguished piece of early 1960s banality, since flattened, by Tripe and Wakeham (which would be a fabulous name for a firm of undistinguished 1960s architects if they weren't still around). T+W crop up elsewhere around the country, in Stockwell (via urban 75) and also in Liverpool (via infinite thought), where they designed the marginally more interesting Royal and Sun Alliance building a few years later (another image, by Aidan O'Rourke). The only bit of Morgan's original 1863 building to survive was the chapel (pdf), turned down for listing and not retained in the RSH scheme.

In opening up the site with an expansive parade ground, Tripe and Wakeham gave this bit of London back some open space, yet the return to hefty terracotta facades was one of the key bones of contention. In very basic terms, Modernism opened up the closed Victorian city, but objectors, from HRH downwards, believe it would be far better to have a bit of opened-up-neo-Victoriana-Georgiana rather than a 'brutalist' and 'communist' piece of contemporary design. The site is also right on the edge of Kensington and Chelsea, the Royal Borough with one of the country's most vociferous planning departments. RBKC objected to the scheme's proximity to Wren's Royal Hospital (which, according to the report, had no objection to the scheme).

Given that the RSH scheme has been binned, you have to pity the poor case officer at Westminster Planning who wrote up the 121-page document for the planning meeting on Thursday 18 June 2009 (download the pdf here). In it, the council is broadly supportive of the scheme, concluding:

'Officers consider the scheme in terms of both the masterplan and detailed design to be one of exceptional high quality. They are mindful, however, that the scale of the development and design approach has been contentious from the outset. Whilst CABE and Westminster Society are generally supportive, there remains strong opposition to it from some consultees including English Heritage, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the Belgravia Residents' Association and many residents, either individually or through the Barracks Action Group [of 496 letters received, 435 were letters of objection]. Further, following the recent interest in the proposal shown by HRH the Prince of Wales there has been much debate in the national and technical press and there are divergent views amongst the architectural profession on the design merits of the scheme. There has also been a growing groundswell of public opinion against the design.... It is considered that when compared to the inappropriate and disjointed collection of 1960s buildings on the site and the austere appearance of its Victorian predecessor, the proposed development, by a combination of its architecture, generous open space and treatment of spaces between buildings, will significantly enhance the immediate townscape.'

Oh well. The whole thing was scuppered from the start, a combination of class envy, conservatism and politics. Ironically, the Duke of Westminster's comments last year were probably more troubling to the site's owners (Qatari Diar Real Estate), especially given his position as owner of the neighbouring Grosvenor Estate, a role that keeps him in the top spots of the rich lists. Charles's property holdings are small fry by comparison.

One can only hope that Quinlin Terry's [sic] back-of-envelope scrawl (a piece of theatrical underdogism that played well with the Luddite) has been worked up slightly more than as presented to the world (via, and actually drawn by Francis Terry). Major pieces of neo-classicism are relatively thin on the ground in Britain, but with each new commission the stakes get raised a little higher. As Terry Jr recently wrote, while reviewing the Royal Academy's Palladio exhibition: 'with most great architects, say Le Corbusier, Lutyens or Mies, their own greatness is indisputable but their followers are an embarrassment.' We watch the site with interest.

Labels: architecture, London

posted by things at 22:25 / 0 comments

The Scholarly Kitchen, academic publishing blog / American cities face ruin, someone at the Telegraph has shares in Caterpillar / a different kind of re-making, a recommended interview with Owen Hatherley on the publication of his book, Militant Modernism (review).

The Etsy peddles false feminist fantasy piece is interesting (via me-fi), not because of the many howls of outrage it created but because the site itself is all about 'things' and the idea of the authentic. Sites like Etsy (and Make, Paper n Stitch, Smarts and Crafts, etc., etc.) simply wouldn't exist if there wasn't a trace cultural memory of handicraft as being a somehow 'purer' expression of human connection than machine-made objects, a dangerous nostalgia.

Daft but endearing, the Baubike. We imagine there's a small coterie of anguished die-hard Bauhaus loyalists still cursing the abandonment of rigid geometry / Kosmograd has some images of illuminated billboards and empty parking lots, both looking beautiful, both rather sad and hollow.posted by things at 23:22 / 2 comments