Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Whatever Happened to Automated Highway Systems? AHS were once the dream of car manufacturers and consumers alike, epitomised by GM's
Firebird II concept, shown at the
1956 Motorama and the star of a film detailing the
Dream Highway of Tomorrow, one of the earliest AHS. The Firebird II could actually drive
without human intervention, provided a wire was buried in the surface of the road.
But although the idea has been around for literally decades, other advocates are still suggesting we
take the first step. The political will and public desire for automated systems expired long ago, and the last flurry of interest was just eight years ago at the
Demo '97, when 20 modified
Buick LeSabres ran along a stretch of Interstate 15 in San Diego. At the time, concepts like Buick's
XP2000 (very software-sounding) were getting geared up for the widespread implementation of automated highways, yet nothing really happened. What will change is the advent of true car-to-car communication, using Bluetooth-like broadcasting, rather than unreliable sensor-based systems. A common standard has now been agreed for cars to broadcast their position to others and monitor exactly what's going on around them; once these systems are in place, AHS are almost inevitable. Only now, the issue for the public is no longer one of convenience but of control.
More autos.
Vauxhall Heritage, nice of a manufacturer to sponsor a public site about its past, especially when that past is often
rather naff. Many horrors abound in this copious gallery of
concept cars. Is styling everything? No, according to
Detroit, Retro Has Failed You, an article in
The Car Connection which asks, 'How many looking-back cars have been big hits? Surprisingly few.' Certainly not the
Chevrolet SSR,
Ford Thunderbird,
New Beetle and horrid
Chrysler PT Cruiser (although apparently
Zaha Hadid drives one).
*Other things. Self-explanatory:
monster magazine covers, via
Tofu Hut / can someone explain the differences between the
US and
UK versions of Google maps? Type in a street name in the UK version and it brings up a list of places (or the map itself if it's a unique location). Do the same thing with the US version and you get business listings. Why is this?
Whitelabel.org, a weblog, which brings us the wonderful
London Underground accelerated time disruption map. In the grand tradition of
tube map-obsessed weblogging, Stefan has taken
Transport for London's own data on disrupted tube lines and turned it into a
mesmeric Quicktime movie. Watch as tube lines blink on and off like forks of lightning flashing across central London. The upshot of all this data mining is the remarkable statistic that the London Underground runs without problems just 22% of the time. Marvellous.
A fine collection of
vintage cameras, via
coudal. Strange to think that one day these objects will be totally obsolent, as chemical processes are slowly phased out. Last year,
Ilford, one of the oldest names in black and white photography, went into receivership. Happily, it appears to have
survived, for now /
the in crowd, a weblog /
me, my life + infrastructure, a weblog.
The China photography of
Ferdinando Rollando / how to roll a
Boeing 707. Earlier still, a homage to the
Boeing 377 Stratocruiser (via
i like) / glossy architecture:
50 Years of Record Houses / minimalist and electronic mp3s at the
dozer blog /
Happy Birthday Miffy!, A celebration of the work of
Dick Bruna /
Memorial museums, 'cabinets of misery' according to Tiffany Jenkins in
Spiked.
posted by things at 08:00 /
1 comments
Monday, June 27, 2005
It's not surprising to find a piece in the
Guardian entitled
4x4s are killing my planet. But rather than write a statistics-driven polemic like Keith Bradsher's
High & Mighty,
Robert Macfarlane (the author of
Mountains of the Mind), is more concerned with the co-option of rural imagery as a means of selling cars, a process that goes hand in hand with the 'apocalypse [that] has fallen upon the environment'.
The countryside of car advertisements is certainly seductive. By means of illustration, Macfarlane uses the example of
OneLife magazine, a glossy lifestyle publication for
Land-Rover, produced by
Redwood Publishing,
king of the contract magazine. Throughout OneLife, he finds "glossy centrefold spreads of eco-porn," and nature "being used to sell a product which embodies the principles by which nature must not be understood."
As well as noting how 4x4 names are a blend of cunning blend of the overbearing, almost militaristic, and the indigenous -
Freelander,
Toureg,
Explorer,
Pathfinder,
Navigator,
Tahoe,
Landcruiser (which 'carries the
wisdom of seven continents in its soul') - the crux of Macfarlane's piece is that off-road vehicles are one more way of widening the 'gap which currently exists between knowledge and place':
"4x4 advertising is dedicated to manipulating landscapes into generic forms. All that it requires of a landscape is that it evoke the idea of challenge - something resistant to be conquered, something natural to be tamed. A river is valued for its difficulty of fording. A mountain for its dramatic and nameless escarpments. No landscape can be only itself: it must represent an obstacle of some sort... The hypocrisies of 4x4 marketing are dark, multiple and pernicious."
More car advertising.
Helmut Krone. The book. A monograph about the art director responsible for the
American VW campaign, 'Think Small,' still held up as one of the most important and influential ad campaigns ever, and
copiously illustrated throughout the book. Krone's influence is still felt on the company's
recent ads, although I saw a woeful US spot for the
Phaeton the other day that tried uneasily to make a virtue out of the car's low sales and hence rarity.
Elsewhere. The online diary of
Zoe Young about her work in
Angola for
Medecins Sans Frontieres dealing with an outbreak of
Marburg haemorrhagic fever.
The F Word, contemporary UK feminism /
Dadblog /
Joe's Favorite Paper Airplane (via
Molgam) / Donald Keyhoe's
Flying Saucers Are Real (1950), via
exclamation mark /
Ralph Lauren's car collection, via
tmn / amazing
gigapixel images /
Personism contributes
Shelter Magazines and Living With Art to
apartment therapy /
home made jam, many links /
a Daily Dose of Architecture uses
Google Maps to give you an aerial tour of
the works of Renzo Piano (
Building Workshop homepage).
Beijing Boom Tower, a speculative view of Urban
China in 2020, at the
Dynamic City Foundation, via Ashley B's
Notes from Somewhere Bizarre. These predictions are probably rather accurate. See also
City of Sound's alliterative post from earlier this month /
Hyperkit visit the
Golden Lane Estate.
The artwork of
Lester Haas, Beaux-Arts architect / sci-fi art round-up:
Peter Elson,
Stewart Cowley and
Chris Foss, three titans of futuristic landscapes and giant spaceships. Remember the days when
this kind of artwork adorned the cassette tapes that held
ZX Spectrum games, creating high expectations of the content within that were always hopelessly unfulfilled.
Found City (via
me-fi): 'send photos and text messages from the street to your personal map and tag it, etc.' Top tag is, unsurpringly,
street art /
Dynamic Demand is a real-time representation of the load on the UK's National Grid, the intention being that someone smart will 'design electrical appliances that can react to the current grid condition and change their consumption to help smooth out imbalances.' A worthy goal, given that
standby power consumption is still such a major problem.
The history of
Suck.com, via
metafilter. The actual domain
Suck.com hosts the archives /
Consuming Things, perspectives on consumption /
Home Built Cockpit Project, via
me-fi /
Naoya Hatakeyama: Examples from the Lime Works Series, 1991-1994 and Lime Hills, 1986-91, via
flux + mutability.
posted by things at 09:12 /
0 comments
Friday, June 24, 2005
Back again, with a few tweaks and enhancements (see
what's new? for more).
Herewith a compilation collection of links to see you through the weekend, starting with this epic post on the
architectural ambitions of the New China over at
City of Sound / the architecture of
GTA San Andreas / Uri Geller
gets his comeuppance, way back in the 70s / modern houses as
film locations /
In Memoriam: My Manual Typewriter, Rick Poynor waxes lyrical at
design observer / '
Confessions of a Neo-Leachian (or How I Escaped from the Art Police)', an amusing essay at
Critical Ceramics / buy original
Billy Childish prints via
Ebay / Aquarium GalleryCassette tapes, R.I.P,
Music Thing mourns the imminent passing of the humble compact cassette /
Polish Tappers. Related,
let's tap! / wristwatches developed in conjunction with
car manufacturers, many of which cost more than decent car... /
Burning World, an mp3 weblog / all of
Coudal's fresh signals covers,
on shuffle / a collection of fine
1970s cars / the Guardian's
culture vulture weblog (for sidebar) / The
2005 RIBA Awards.
Create your own ambience with
Sound Raider (via
haddock) / a searchable list of all those who served in the
Battle of Trafalgar /
duck hunt, a retro game /
Rip-Off!, inside the 'management consulting money machine' /
Jeremy Dickinson paints rusty toy cars and
shipping containers and
more / Top tips on luxury travel from
Wanda Lust /
The Morning News gets a re-design /
Make your own Bayeaux Tapestry (via
diskant) / 'magic castle play houses' by
Capelabranca.
Rendered
fantasy architecture by Ilkka Halso /
Rake's Progress, a weblog / photos at
Catseye / one-up on
your average SUV /
welcome to my hell, the realities of maintaining a digital music library for all time. Find out why DVD is "a disastrous medium" and why you shouldn't fill your CDs right up to the edges...
Does anyone want to
buy our car?
posted by things at 12:59 /
0 comments
Thursday, June 09, 2005
We're away for a week, so there'll be no posting. Feel free to
poke around the
site a bit.
posted by things at 19:37 /
0 comments
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
How to Write for the Papers is subtitled 'a guide for the young author.' First published in 1912, this is a third edition from 1925, and in this context, 'papers' means not only newsprint, but the fiction and non-fiction publications that were devoured by huge markets in the UK and US (and Europe too). It's unclear how much of this advice is pertinent today.
In the first half of the twentieth century, London was awash with specialist publications, weekly and fortnightly papers that provided a steady diet of derring do, adventure, non-fiction and what we now call 'human interest.' The gazetteer of names and addresses at the back of
How to... lists 33 daily papers, 86 weekly papers and 37 fortnightly ones, almost all of which were based in central London, especially EC4 and WC2 (Farringdon and Covent Garden). Just one of the fortnightlies seems to have survived as a monthly magazine (
Good Housekeeping), the rest have all vanished (although names occasionally get recycled).
In the days before widespread photojournalism - and articles built around things you could buy - the stock in trade of the 'paper' was the story, be they 'bright and thrilling' (
Red Magazine, a
Fleetway publication) or 'true stories of a startling nature' (
Wide World Magazine, based just off the Strand). Romance and religion were both popular, but Albert E.Bull's book had no time for the disreputable ('contributions should be of good high tone and avoid the sordid and ultra-sensational', he notes of the magazine
Quiver. That said, you could always turn to old stand-bys like the
Boy's Own Paper for tales like '
Chased by Wolves!'.
Alternatively, build-it-yourself instructions (how to
build yourself an all-wave ether ranger) were hugely popular (a bit like
Make Magazine?). Or even '
Strange Weapons, and Stranger Ways of Using Them. Crucially, Bull notes that 'sordid and "gory" tales are rigidly banned.'
American short story publications were even more prevalent - search for
American periodicals on this page. They tended to be a bit more 'hard-boiled' than their English equivalents - like
Black Mask - or, alternatively, even soppier (
Modern Priscilla). See also the
Fiction Mags list and the magazine list at
Galactic Central, which attempts to chronicle some 6,000 publications and
this page on story papers.
*Other things. Another page on the
Maunsell Sea Forts (see yesterday), which are apparently the subject of a
£3m rescue project. The structures also crop up on the cover of
Architecture of Aggression, subtitled 'military architecture two World Wars' (our copy was last taken out of Cleveland County Libraries on 14 February 1979). Published by the Architectural Press in 1973, the book covers topics like the
Fortresses of Liege, the Albert Speer designed
Flak Towers in Vienna and the
vast tunnel network known as
Mittelwerk, where concentration camp inmates were forced to make
V2 rockets - any many thousands died to create the precursor to the Apollo programme.
The poetry of
Anna Akhmatova (mp3s, in Russian) /
satellite photos of the US / the
Eureka Tower, Australia /
Colors magazine on
the cult of the fan /
designsponge, a design weblog / the photos of
Joey Harrison /
Quarlo photographs NYC.
Love it / we love
gigposters / Rod Baird's
Ancient Routes, a guide to 'the ancient trade routes around the Mediterranean' / crafty things at
supernaturale /
Everquest Daily Grind: addiction in the world of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (and a
collision detection piece on a way out of the problem in
Slate).
Rick Poynor, editor of
Eye magazine on the
design monograph, in particular the book
3D>2D by
The Designers Republic, essentially a monograph accompanying
Sadar Vuga Arhitekti's Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Llubljana. A
great building, undeniably, but ultimately 'a slender idea graphically inflated to attention-grabbing proportions.'
posted by things at 08:14 /
0 comments
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Abandoned modern architecture is not really as uncommon as one might think. There's an undeniably epic scale and sweep to the largest modernist schemes - a sublime to ridiculous genre that encompasses
Brasilia,
Chandigarh, even
Thamesmead or the late, unlamented
Pruitt Igoe (see yesterday's post). Yet scale gives these places an inescapable feeling of emptiness and abandonment, even when they're still in use (for
filmmakers, it meant an instant
dystopia): one of the primary criticisms of modernism is that rigidity and repetition make for sterile places to live.
Halvorsen, in flagging up the amazing
Maunsell Towers, reveals the modern ruin's innate sense of drama, a blend of regret, tragedy and failed potential that adds immeasurably to the atmosphere, made all the more pertinent by its historical closeness. (we're also pretty sure that the
Towers provided some celebrated
visual inspiration).
Which is why these links to a few
Russian Urban Exploration sites are so fascinating (
Abandoned.ru is especially recommended). The structures shown here are not only abandoned, but frequently
unfinished, and convey the sense of a society struggling - and failing - with massive social upheaval. For example, abandoned
hospitals and asylums are two a penny in the UK, but an
unfinished hospital? We did a short bit of (sub)urban exploration on the Baltic coast last month, and again, the complex we visited was, again, unfinished - a factory that never built anything at all. Photos to follow.
The spectre of Chernobyl hangs over all these images, perhaps, the one modern event that can effectively rip the still-beating life out of an entire city in an instant. But the overall picture is one of economic stagnation. Images likes those of the '
sleeping giants' in the 'Moscow countryside' should bring comfort to Russia's enemies and vindicate the policies of even more. Another gallery, the
lost biker. More abandoned healthcare: the
Le Valdor Hospital and the
Sanatorium Joseph Lemaire (
now and then), both in Belgium.
Dubtown, German places. It's impossible to mention urban exploration without citing
Urbex, the endlessly interesting site about infiltrating abandoned sites in the UK.
*Some other things. The
city distance tool will give you the direct distance between any two places on the planet. Handy.
hi-res images from the
Atlas of our Changing Environment, produced by the
United Nations Environment Programme (
news story) / further to yesterday's publishing links, all about
In Coldest Type, 'a scathing indictment of the American Way of Bookselling'.
You can buy instant
showreels of old ads in Delhi: 'These CDs will be used repeatedly for nurturing employees in the art of advertising' / the landscape paintings of
Helmut Ditsch / flyers and posters by
Same Design /
bananas in pyjamas, by
David Wills /
band mind weapons.com, meet
crank.netposted by things at 21:44 /
0 comments
Friday, June 03, 2005
Jane Jacobs, super-villain?. A new play, the wonderfully-titled '
Boozy: The Life, Death and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses', villifies Jacobs in a campy, tongue-in-cheek kind of way ('putting the punk rock back into urban planning'). The play comes soon after Pierre Huyghe's
Le Corbusier puppet show, a kind of
World Police for architects, as well as news of Brad Pitt's
burgeoning architectural career. Starchitecture never had it so good.
Meanwhile.
Pruitt-Igoe stills casts its shadow, while on the other side of the world it's as if Moses is still steaming ahead:
Lightningfield charts
rapid urban change in Shanghai. Boozy would have loved it.
*What's the deal with book publishing? Answer, 'happy' and 'sad' warehouses, pulping machines and a business model that's like playing the Vegas slots.
In 2003, 34% of adult hardcover books were returned to publishers, compared with 28% in 1993. Ironically, the WSJ page is sponsored by
Xerox.
Looking for a suitably post-apocalyptic site for a shoot? Try
Locations UK. Alternatively, you might want a
garage or
hot-tub. The site is (inadvertently?) a good way of taking a tour round the capital's finer
apartments and
residential architecture, including
deco,
modernist and
contemporary (the latter is Anthony Hudson's
Drop House).
Is it possible for the internet to dry up? It feels as if it's contracting a little, pages falling apart, slipping away. We'll keep searching.
How many frames per second can you actually see? /
The Russian Mosin Nagant Page / exploring the
Cincinatti subway / a one-man
Luftwaffe life-raft. From
here .
posted by things at 15:19 /
0 comments
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
A fairly random selection today. Recycling from the sky: the
scrap-metal dealers of Kazakhstan (via
Rossignol). There's an
aura of unreality to
some of these pictures, equal parts
Mad Max,
Brothers Quay and
Jeunet and Caro, with a splash of
Terry Gilliam. It's also a
remarkable demonstration of quite how wasteful space travel is, with great
chunks of rocket booster scattered across the landscape. Some captions would be instructive, because without them, the
images slip easily in line with
contemporary myths.
A conservative US website posts its
Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. The first three are fairly predictable, but from there things go rapidly downhill / a walkthrough movie of
Jet Set Willy. Clearly not taken from the (original)
ZX Spectrum version (
emulated here), as that was apparently nigh on impossible to play all the way through (without resorting to
pokes) /
The Art of War, an online exhibition at
The National Archives / when English eccentricity meets real world concerns:
the truth about cars tackles the
Bristol Blenheim. Visit the
official Bristol site.
City of Sound's linklog / the photography of
Peter Guenzel / yet another example of religious
simulacra, the
Jesus Ultrasound (a good name for a band?) / when homogenity strikes back:
a landscape of street signs (via
design observer). Also at
DO,
Post Punk Record Sleeves /
Heures Creuses ('off-peak hours') and
Octopus Dropkick, two pop culture weblogs.
The
Shadow Robot Company will sell you a
Shadow Dexterous Hand (but not in pairs) / t-shirt designs at
Furniture Club /
Miss Representation, excellent writing on architecture and architecture culture (all too often not the same thing) / the automotive designs of
Paolo Martin /
Regret the Error. Because mistakes happen. Somehow misses off the
Guardian's busy section.
posted by things at 08:06 /
0 comments