Extreme architecture

A certain bunker in Baghdad has been all over the news these past few days, summarised in this piece in Wired. The Daily Mirror also had a piece on the bunker, although I can’t find it online, which claimed that the bunker’s architect’s grandmother designed a similar structure for Hitler. This is qualified by this Yahoo! news story, but not reported much elsewhere. Imagine if bunker design ran in your family. More bunkers: Australia, France (more: I). It’s pretty miserable, what’s going on.

More architecture. We'd love to visit the Mystery Park, Erich von Daniken's alien heritage theme park. But then all theme parks are weird. Also considered weird in their day, the 1930s house in Britain, thanks to photographer Nick Dawe.

Elsewhere. No newthings tomorrow, so an extra helping of links. Old Props is a gallery of vintage and elderly aircraft, some of which are beautiful, some are tatty, and others are just odd looking. We love Catalinas. Related: a huge archive of travel ephemera, linked by various people last month.

Faked photos at the Museum of Hoaxes. Not a hoax, but strange and unusual all the same: the AMC Pacer press archive. Collection of vintage toy adverts. All about Barbapapa, blob-like, Hippyesque children's book character from the 70s. Obsessive toy car racing. Folk Art Ships, an exhibition of carefully composed models of historical ships and submarines by John Taylor. (thanks to John for this: the nation's best weather pictures)

The Letter Project: clever stuff. Discussion on book cover design, via Kottke. Inappropriate fan mail. Flagspot, a website devoted to vexillology. These images of conversations (large) between members of Upmystreet, create a spider's web of connections, some of which seem to mimic the country's motorway network. More maps at the Charles Close Society, devoted to the UK's excellent Ordnance Survey series.

As someone once pointed out, is there anything that someone on the internet hasn’t got time to do? Visit Edgar Governo, Historian of Things that Never Were, a collection of timelines for fictional situations. Check our favourite, the Twin Peaks timeline. Some free protest songs. Irony of ironies.

Thanks to all our readers these past two months. As you can see, things magazine, on and off line, is still finding its own voice. Please, write with links and suggestions.

posted by things at 08:16

Swamps

American Memory is a resource containing some 7 million digital items 'relating to the history and culture of the US'. These range from wooden wheels to lumber yards and baseball cards. There are also dedicated exhibits, like Ansel Adams's Suffering a Great Injustice, images of Japanese American internment, and this huge collection entitled Origins of American Animation. How to make an American Quilt.

Staying in the US, some Florida postcards from the 20s and 30s. More Florida image collections (and read Wish you were here?, the inimitable Elsa MacDougall's take on Floridan life). T-shirt versus political reality. Or vice versa.

Elsewhere. Big map of Baghad via this Me-fi thread about these cartographic bookmarks. Peanut Butter and Jelly Management is a bizarre parenting manual that apparently draws explicit parallels between corporate management and parenting skills. Board meetings, fiscal responsibility and all.

Quick, visit the excellent Little Magazines before it shuts down for good at the end of next month. Glossier publications are listed in Artbooks' extensive online catalogue. Entirely unrelated. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link, currently tearing up nearby Kings Cross, has some good construction photos on its site. Vaguely related, an archive of changing tube map design. Midwinter and Festival pottery for sale. posted by things at 10:58

Link-o-rama

Some sneaky use of hidden text to draw in search engines, via gawker - an exercise in seeing how many newsworthy and search-worthy things can be squeezed into two paragraphs – ‘Segway to Angelina Jolie, who shouted to her comrade and fellow tomb raider loana, "Hurry! We must return to castle wolfenstein!’ and ‘CNN caught morrowind of the plot, and predicted there would be neverwinter nights for years to come’ and ‘"Each man involved is an american idol," eminem told avril levigne in front of the pink gareth gates of their local Ikea’.

We also liked this quote: 'I've been all the way through this desert from Basra to here and I ain't seen one shopping mall or fast food restaurant,' he said. 'These people got nothing. Even in a little town like ours of twenty five hundred people you got a McDonald's at one end and a Hardee's at the other.' (from the guardian)

Elsewhere. Thank-you to Core77, an online design resource that we are book-marking for future use. Novelty stamps (via haddock). Some elegant illustrations of plants (via Coudal).

Stumbling Tongue is a beautifully-designed weblog based in Italy (see photos). There's a vaguely archaeological slant – and it also links to Cronaca, which is almost an arche-blog. Link too to The Gentleman’s Page, ‘A Practical Guide for the 19th Century Man' (compare this with The Chap). The Dream Factory, all about the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher (via excitement machine).

We love the guestmap concept over at Stonefishspine (vaguely related: Geourl.org - locate your weblog). Vintage model T Ford postcards and technical documents. The demolition of the infamous Fatima Mansions, previously better known to us as the name of Cathal Coughlan’s venomous band. posted by things at 08:19

Wednesday

Randomness rules today. This article about the frightening but culturally important phenomena of sleep paralysis suggests that it's the underlying event behind a whole host of contemporary obsessions, namely ghostly visions and UFO abductions. Look around, and you'll find that some will happily offer a different interpretation. Sort of related: an easy mistake to make.

Elsewhere. Art and design. Pictured is a new photography magazine. Some resources on the nearly lost art of bookbinding, via, I think, Design Kitten. There's an art history lesson from Out of Lascaux. Artsig is from the makers of Photosig - a forum for art of all types. At the moment it's teeming with the heavy use of Photoshop filters - anyone know of any good painting websites?

Some good galleries of contemporary Newcastle. Toy station wagons and woodies. Famous buildings constructed from aluminium cans, see also can-based cars and planes (latter links via the Daily Jive). posted by things at 09:01

Random

1893 is subtitled a World's Fair Mystery. This 'interactive history' is set during the World's Columbian Exhibition, a great flourish of Beaux Arts architecture held in Chicago to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World.

We haven't played 1893, but were big fans of Interactive Fiction (IF) - or text adventures, as they used to be known - back in the old days. Today, text adventures are just about the least commercial genre of computer gaming, yet they thrive on the internet. The scene is fuelled by TADS, the Text Adventure Development System, a freeware programme that allows you create your own IF world with relative ease. Install the TADS interpreter, and hundreds of games are available for free.

A similar system used to exist on the Sinclair Spectrum - the Quill, from Gilsoft. There's extensive information on the early days of text adventures at Adventureland, which also provides a history of the genre. Our personal favourites were The Hobbit (which you can play online thanks to the wonderful world of emulation) and Quest Adventure. A little later came Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (box art, solution), which contained what many gamers consider the finest moment in interactive fiction: how to get the babel fish. Other IF links: I, II, III.

One of the best things about text adventures was the emphasis they placed on locating and collecting objects, imbuing each one with a set of limited, yet essential characteristics. Lamps needed oil and matches, dark spaces needed lamps. Chests and doors needed keys, mazes needed balls of string, birds needed birdseed, etc, etc. Text analysis and vocabulary was limited, and the general lack of graphical wizardry really worked the imagination into a frenzy.

Elsewhere. The burgeoning trade in classic stereo equipment makes the old school appear tempting. Reel-to-reel recorders were the epitomy of the home hi-fi experience, especially those made by Revox.

A good Monument Valley/Navajo National Monument photo gallery. Know your early Land-Rover. A Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit at the Library of Congress, focusing on his epic Gordon Strong Automobile Objective project (that would make a very good band name in today’s confused times) - a structure that would "serve as an objective for short motor trips".

There was a great but ultimately pointless book a few years back, provacatively called ‘Cock’, all about Indian Fireworks art. This is more immediate: Crackerpacks, firework packaging via interconnected. More firework art. Fireworks Magazine is Britain’s 'only periodical for fireworks enthusiasts and the trade'.

Dumped is a photo-series by Alan Powdrill, making the many abandoned, joyridden cars that litter London's streets (only a slight exaggeration) look like part of the urban landscape (which in effect they are). His 'places' gallery is also well worth a look. New Hybrid III crash-test dummy simulates teenage slouch. posted by things at 09:25

Out of time

A couple of iconic modern movement houses are currently for sale in London. First up is a house in Frognal Close, Hampstead, designed by Ernst L.Freud, son of Sigmund and father of Clement and Lucian. The middle Freud was a classic emigre architect, escaping the Nazi crack-down on degenerate contemporary art and architecture in 1936, in the hope of finding a refuge in progressive 30s Britain.

Many stayed at the classic Lawn Road flats, racking up big bills in the Marcel Breuer-designed Isobar (perhaps reclining on this excellent furniture) and no doubt moaning about the conservative forces within the British establishment that stymied many of their designs. Numbers one to six Frognal Close were designed shortly after Freud's arrival, while his only other major English commission was 'The Weald,' in Betchworth, Surrey, built just before the outbreak of war (although he also designed the loggia, now shop, at London's Freud Museum).

Also up for sale is one of three terraced houses designed by Erno Goldfinger in Willow Road in the 1930s (also in Hampstead, the modernist mecca of its day). The story goes that the construction of this thoroughly modern terrace raised such hackles amongst local residents that one was moved to appropriate Goldfinger's name for a fictional villain. The central house, Goldfinger's own, is open through the National Trust. The current price of classic modernity? £2.5m and £1.9m, respectively.

Elsewhere. An online resource devoted to 1940s comics (via travelers diagram). We especially like Batman and Superman at the New York World's Fair. The collection is part of the Victoria Commonwealth University's online resources, which include this postcard gallery of Richmond, Virginia, a medical artifacts collection (see the dentures at left) and images of black and white schools in Virginia's Prince Edward Country from 1961 to 1963. The world's academic servers host untapped riches.

Unrelated. Cute new Sony laptop (it shames us to say this, but parts of our Vaio were so small and dinky that we've actually lost them). Better living through plastics. Scrubbles links to this Pan Am promotional disc, leading us to 365's huge list of various unusual audio sources. Scrubbles is ace, explicitly devoted to ‘pop culture and design findings’. It pointed us to Ookworld again - we’ve flagged up their magazine gallery before, but appreciate the car design section too. There's also a link to the Cool and Strange music compilation - which has been much linked but is definitely worth a few downloads.

Silly but fun desktop flash 'game' - the economists. Old but still fresh - skyscraper transformations in New York. Depressing gallery of rusty but beautiful cars. posted by things at 09:47

Beware of the dog

We've been sourcing quotes for car insurance in the last week, and time and time again, the stumbling block is our postcode. It all goes swimmingly until we proffer that magic combination of seven letters and numbers. All of a sudden, premiums shoot up and we are advised that it'll be cheaper if the car isn't insured for overnight damage or theft. We're no criminologists, but it strikes us that the cover of darkness offers more opportunity for 'damage and theft' than daylight.

How did the postcode get to rule our lives? The beleagured Royal Mail (which lost £1.2bn last year) has an interesting heritage site with a potted postcode history (pdf). From this, we glean that mail delivery has always had a dominant hold on the form of address, with streets renamed to counter the problem of many identical addresses, especially in major cities. London's original 10 districts - EC and WC (for East and West Central), plus NW, N, NE, E, S, SE, SW and W - were implemented in 1857-8 (things is split between SE and NW) and were gradually updated, with the addition of sub-districts (a number after the letters) in 1917. The current system dates from the mid-60s, and accompanied the introduction of mechanical sorting. Each postcode identifies approximately 15 addresses. Today's OCR-based mail readers identify the postcode and print a series of phosphorescent dots on an envelope for identification. 95% of UK mail is identified in this way, with the remainder being sorted by increasingly accurate Integrated Mail Processors. More on postal mechanisation.

Less evocative, but arguably more efficient, is the American five-digit system. We found a clipped obituary for Robert Aurand Moon last week, the inventor of the ZIP code system. To us, ZIP has always sounded, well, zippy and efficient, so it was a surprise to find it stood for Zoning Improvement Plan. Moon was a Philadelphia postal inspector with a penchant for side projects, and his stricly numerical system - designed from the outset for mechanical sorting - broke the entire US into 10 zones. Each additional digit identified regional sorting offices, sub-divisions, etc., until finally it got down to city blocks. The system is now even more accurate, with each postal area classified under 62 criteria (we'll try and find a list of these). Moon's ZIP codes went live on July 1, 1963, and suddenly junk mail found itself guided with unerring precision towards its target. See the ZIP FAQ and learn more about the promotional character of Mr Zip: I, II, III. More soon, perhaps, on how the post/zip code is no longer considered the ultimate demographic tool.

Elsewhere. Daniela Rossel’s Ricas Y Famosas (more) offers a set of utterly unself-conscious portraits of Mexico’s smart set. Elevated so far above the barrio and the traditional image of the middle classe, these people appear to have willingly descended (ascended?) into parody (the book also turns up on Pop-log).

Lost and frowned give us the confusing world of the Neasden Control Centre, including this remarkable sketchbook and other book art - it's like modern day Merz. In a vaguely similar vein, Beowolf, is an ever-changing font. Instructo-art (Flash, also via frowned) is all about ‘combining the art of learning with the art of art’. We liked this too - the contents of the 2003 Oscar goody bags. Unrelated. Charles and Ray Eames archive. posted by things at 08:33

Confused

For some reason, our earlier post today has decided it belongs in a curious calendar dead zone between the 18th and 19th of March.

Purely in the interest of keeping the Circle (Cabal, whatever) unbroken, we draw your attention to Speckled Paint (from which we get this collection of ‘70s pictures’ - images which to be honest actually span the decades from 1950 onwards. They do have a particularly fine set of Barbarella photos (1968), though). Also note Bifurcated Rivets, which gets full marks for brevity, and Woods Lot.

Digging through old print-outs (!) of web pages in a forgotten boxfile, we find the darndest things (such as this, the Four Waves of media interest). This far-reaching and rather pertinent Suck column from 2000 also caught our eye. (Strange to see things in pixels again, rather than paper. Don’t ask why we were printing out websites. That’s probably what everyone did in 2000, thinking that pages would just have vanished by the next day). A while ago we mentioned the folks at The Lord’s Witnesses, and their desperate and (hopefully) futile attempts to nail down the exact date of the end of the world. Suck gives us the curiously forgotten Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, whose failed doomsday predictions triggered a massacre of jilted and confused members in Uganda.

That got the people at Suck thinking – how does a meme like impending apocalypse get going? Is the idea of the end of the world actually a tangible thing that can be imported and exported like any other commodity? The piece, in the much-missed site’s typically incisive way, skewers a few other examples of cargo cult apocalypse. This is perhaps as good a time as any to reiterate our own things-ness. We're going to be pretty unapologetic about ignoring the larger picture in favour of our usual concerns; there are tens of thousands of places one can read about all aspects of the war, and I just don't think newthings needs to be one of them.

Elsewhere, Slower.net goes all Magritte-style. Prints based on moon maps, via Caterina. Labels for recycling and a complete scan of the first ever Superman comic (Action Comics No.1, June 1938), both via haddock. The latter includes such classics as Scoop Scanlon, Five Star Reporter, and Zatara, Master Magician, both of whom are surely due for a revival. A collection of Elvis Presley's jumpsuits. posted by things at 08:09

Fading fast

A huge, beautiful photo of downtown Baghdad, courtesy of Where is Raed?. You can clearly see the Monument to the Unknown Soldier at top right (detail), as well as the infamous Hands of Victory. Where is Raed? is a gripping read. Go visit it. posted by things at 07:15

Link-o-rama

The Great Team are a collection of four realtors in Yorba Linda, Southern California. Nothing special about that, perhaps, (although we're inexplicably reminded of the Celebrities of Real Estate) but their office seems to spend all its spare time looking up obscure links and cataloguing them – creating a weblog, no less. Grow-a-brain, the result of all this goofing off, certainly has its moments, for example this survey of doors and windows in Kosovo (vaguely reminiscent of the Geffrye Museum’s current ‘Gutted' exhibition).

Other great links include: the internet pinball database, a gallery of unusual playing cards (including this Star Trek deck), whale song, the dogs of the Bedouin, the ugly couch contest.

Elsewhere. When pin-ups meet an architectural masterpiece - or the parallel universe where the architect’s office is swapped for the body shop (excellent Pirelli calendar site).

A big welcome to any readers who might have come via Metafilter. posted by things at 09:03

Here today

Technology is a fickle master. Who would have thought that the latest must-have would be Drum Buddy, an improbable-looking device that boasts of strictly analogue outputs and can make noises unlike no other. Retro electronics we admire include Soviet Synths and Vintage Calculators. Theming electronics to look old is perhaps a way of making the future slow down, injecting a little bit of human warmth, recovered and recycled from our memories of the past. See, for example, this old school television. More up to date gadgets can be tracked at Gizmodo.

Related, vaguely. Found slides, rich with evocative discarded imagery. Reminiscent of the famous Found Magazine, and the happened-upon collections of many others, including Consumptive, Renewal.org, Agit8, Monkeyview, and Cardhouse. Strange, when photographs are considered the most cherished fetish of the technological age, that so many should have gone missing. Even more: I, II (especially), III.

Elsewhere. Retro futures: a Dan Dare tribute page (ironic, when Dare was a true Brit-style hero, that this site should originate in Slovenia). The Chairman Smiles vs The Commissar Vanishes. All about the Harold and Maude hearse. False Advertising: a gallery of parody. posted by things at 16:32

Full stop

These vintage Weightwatcher's menu cards have been doing the rounds. Apart from the quaint flavour-combinations, retro-tinged ceramics and day-glo colours, these innocent depictions raise the thorny technical issue of how to authentically represent food. We might consider ourselves highly sophisticated in culinary matters, but if truth be told, even today's celebrity chefs (Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Nigel Slater, Delia Smith) rely on an old-fashioned smoke-and-mirrors approach when it comes to photographing their recipes. Cigarette smoke makes a highly effective stand-in for steam, for example...

Elsewhere. The link between cars and faces. The Cottingley Fairies, Edwardian Britain's most celebrated hoax. The Artchive has sensible, almost desktop-sized scans of contemporary works. SCA is the Society for Commercial Archaeology. Lost Highways takes a look at the future we were once promised. Bluebase purports to offer us a future that hasn't yet arrived. Many, many mesh caps, all unfunny. Collection of Creation Myths and Sacred Narratives of Creation.

PostcardX: random distribution project. posted by things at 16:56

End of the line?

These evocative photo collections of the Grand Central Railway in Leicester catalogue the dismantling of great swathes of Britain's transport infrastructure. For those of us born after this era of savage cuts, yet forced to struggle by on an increasingly desperate rail network, the whole concept of taking up track and demolishing stations seems insane.

The mythological bogeyman of Britain's post-war rail collapse is one Doctor Richard Beeching, and it seemed instructive to find more about him. The railways had been nationalised in 1948, combining the various lines into one organisation, British Rail. In the two decades that followed, the roads lobby became an unstoppable force, while rail was increasingly seen as an anachronism, hamstrung by strange systems of rates and artificially low fares. For modernisers, rail was a throwback to the Victorian era, at odds with the age of the 'white heat of technology' epitomised by the new, fast motorways (see The Motorway Archive for more details about road-building).

Beeching, a former technical director at ICI, replaced Sir Brian Robertson, who was essentially pro-rail, as chairman of the British Transport Commission. Straight away, Beeching went on the offensive, and announced that he would ferret out the inefficiencies in the rail system (which was underfunded and under-exploited). His quest for efficiency culminated in the infamous Beeching Report, published on 27th March 1963. The findings were convincing, and had central government rubbing their hands with glee. For example, half of the country's 7,000 stations generated only 2% of passenger traffic. Beeching recommended closing 2,363 stations, eviscerating the system, cutting off rural communities and leaving many major towns without adequate passenger services (much more detail can be found at the excellent page at Timmonet, from which many of these figures have been taken). Deeply depressing maps are available here: Beeching's proposed withdrawals: country-wide, London area. Compare and contrast: passenger network in 1961/1969. Joyce's site also links to contemporary opposition to Beeching (pdf), and notes that the report wasn't a complete disaster as it laid the foundations for the excellent Inter-city service.

Today, the Great Central is a struggling tourist operation, running steam engines for enthusiasts, and railway heritage remains under threat (especially in towns like Swindon, which owe their existence to the railway in the first place: I, II). Of course, Britain isn't the only country with railway problems (see Poland and the US for starters), but the Beeching era is notable for its wilful bloody-mindedness: houses were often swiftly built over removed track to prevent any return to rail. Like that other great rail-related symbol of needless destruction, the Euston Arch, Beeching's 'reforms' paved the way for the mediocre service that ciy dwellers have to endure today, the total reliance on cars in rural areas and the fragmentation of cities into dismal pockets of commuter-belt.

Another transport obituary. Will the Zil soon be no more? The wilfully boxy Russian limousine used to be a Party staple, but in a free market, these automotive behemoths compare very unfavourably to the top-line products from BMW, Audi, and Mercedes, etc. Apparently, more top-spec S-Class Mercedes are sold in Moscow than the whole of Germany, so the escalating emphasis on lunatic levels of luxury at the upper of the market (see the Maybach) will find a natural home on the city's broad avenues.

Bear in mind too that many of these Russian enthusiasts might not necessarily fund their hobbies in a strictly legal way. The market for armoured cars is booming (buoyed, too, by general global jumpiness) and all the major carmakers can turn their products into mobile panic rooms for a premium. There are a fair few private companies who'll do the same - Trasco and Cloer International to name just two (we love the levels of armour specification: 'Magnum-Class', 'NATO-Class' and, presumably toughest of all, 'Dragunov-Class'. This is presumably named after Evgeniy Fedorovich Dragunov, sniper rifle pioneer). Vaguely related. Russian classic car show details. More Zil pics (descriptions in Italian). Russian toy cars.

Sorry for the lack of links yesterday - Blogger was playing up. Elsewhere. Posters and pamphlets, snipped from various weblogs (apologies for lack of attribution): Saigon, Iraq, China, Switzerland. Collections of backstage passes, via dailyjive: I, II, III. Railway food. All about train tickets, which takes you to the Transport Ticket Society. Railway history pamphlet collection at the LSE. posted by things at 08:25

Lost and found

Viewfinder is a new service from English Heritage, offering a searchable database of the heritage body's huge archive of architecture and design photographs, dating back to the earliest days of photography. If nothing else, having a nose around is perfect virtual tourism for the desk-bound urbanite - you can sample rural arcadia (e.g: gnarled old trees: I, II) at your leisure (not to mention countless urban vistas). The high quality of the images on display is a testament to the skills of the architectural photographers who worked for EH, including the great Eric de Mare (example: I).

We're reminded too of the numerous country houses (register) lost in the past century (and catalogued in Giles Worsley's book Lost Country Houses - see review in things 16 (or buy the book)). It became increasingly hard to justify these huge piles, especially after the war when many had been taken over for essential war work and half ruined in the process. John Harris's excellent No Voice from the Hall (subtitled 'Early memories of a Country House Snooper' - more here, as well as the sequel, Echoing Voices) expertly conjures up the atmosphere of these ruined hulks, their exquisite fixtures and fittings neglected, smashed or scattered. Read Harris reviewing Worsley.

Entirely unrelated. The Ercoupe was a private aeroplane introduced by ERCO (the Engineering Research Corporation - love that old school, high-tech company name) in 1939. Production halted during the war, as one might expect, but there was a flurry of interest once hostilities had finished and the little silvery two-seater was produced at the rate of 10 a day. The 'Coupe' arrived at the start of an era of rampant optimism, when it was confidently predicted that every driveway would soon have private plane (or helicopter) parked up next to the family car.

Cheap to run and easy to fly, a staggering 4,309 Coupes were sold in 1946, before the sales curve dropped like a stone and aerial commuting reverted to magazine covers and adolescent daydreams. Production struggled on in a modified form until 1970. Ercoupe.com includes good quality scans of brochures and adverts. The tiny plane even played a crucial role in the development of the jet age, when an example was fitted with rockets and sent soaring into the skies above Wright Field. These planes have a loyal web following: I, II, III, IV. They're still a cheap way to fly.

Elsewhere. Are you sure you still want to go to the dentist? (QT required). We liked the story of the uber-shopper, a tale of cloned loyalty cards and many, many frequent flier miles. More info at the originator's site: Cockeyed. TV advertising history, with scans from ads old and new. Highly detailed models of concept cars. The joy and exhileration that accompanies a doomed technology. posted by things at 08:31

Fall and rise

More on yesterday’s musings about Chinese architecture. We didn’t really say why 32bny annoyed us. At base level, perhaps, the magazine seems to be adding theoretical weight to what is pure opportunism, as Western firms fall over themselves to secure some of the billions of dollars of construction contracts that are up for grabs in these new Chinese cities. The implications are disturbing for many reasons. As Koolhaas notes in this Wired interview, the emphasis is on speed, not quality: