A deathly depressing set of photos of
1980s Germany / a collection of
Avant Garde YouTube links / the smoky city of
Centralia, where a fire always burns /
Worldmapper, via the
daily jive /
Jonathan Meades' latest programme, which we missed, investigated the 'Joe Stalin Heritage Trail' / all about
hornets /
Bunker battle in Barnet, turning a former
nuclear bunker into a luxury home. See also
Silo Homes.
We're taking a short break, so even erratic updates will disappear for ten days or so. Keep checking the
projects,
photos and
archive.
posted by things at 12:31 /
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Half-formed thoughts.
Retro, in all its forms, appears to be the most propogated artistic styles on the internet. So why should a style that had effectively vanished by the time the internet was created suddenly become a pre-eminent fixture in the digital realm? Perhaps it's because the internet provided the tools to
sell what was formerly an extremely niche product - retro modern furniture and accessories - vastly broadening the potential audience (part of this is no doubt down to
eBay).
Retro design has very little sense of the antagonistic 'us versus them' mentality that characterises 'hard-edge' modernism. Instead, Retro is warm and friendly, playful rather than dogmatic. In short, it's the anti-thesis of the popular view of Modernism as a forbidding, over-powering orthodoxy. Right now, the V&A's new show,
Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939 is one of the most popular art exhibitions in London. Has our affection for the warm, fuzzy edges of Retro encouraged us to take a hit of the hard stuff? Is Retro a gateway drug?
The Guardian Group papers have devoted several long articles to the V&A's show (links
collated here), starting with a multi-page special that saw
J.G.Ballard describe Modernism as a death cult,
Robert Hughes rather grumpily repeat the old tropes about the 'luckless ones' who lived with the 'great grimy beast' that is Le Corbusier's
Unite d'Habitation, and
Fiona MacCarthy rattle off a rather unsurprising top ten of must-see Modernist-era buildings.
Then came the reviews. In the
Observer,
Deyan Sudjic makes the point about Britain being 'culturally irrelevant' in the period covered by the show, 'meagre soil for the astonishing outpouring of creative energy that transformed Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Moscow.' For the
Guardian's Adrian Searle, the show reflected the movement's 'mess of contradictions.' However, the movement's apologists had very little time to rest. Modernism's enemies soon came out of the woodwork, spearheaded by
Simon Jenkins in the
Guardian, claiming that 'It is the most terrifying exhibition I have seen, because it is politics disguised as art.' Sudjic
countered, dismissing Jenkins's 'frothing', saying tellingly: 'But if [Modernism] was really so bad, and if it was really confined to a tiny and irrelevant coterie, why does it look so good in the show, and why was it so all-pervasive in its influence?'
Modernism was undeniably political, but to lazily characterise it as pure aesthetic despotism that played well with both fascism and communism is simplistic in the extreme. The most enduring and successful manifestations of Modernism were capitalistic, responding to market forces and, more importantly, shaping that market. Think of the shopping malls of
Victor Gruen, or the crisp consumer electronics of
Sony,
Braun and now Apple. All 'Modernist' yetultimately concerned with economics rather than ideology. Even architecture got in on the act. Annabel Jane Wharton's
Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture demonstrates how Conrad Hilton saw his hotels as 'bulwarks against the communist threat', little recreations of American society parachuted into the buffer zones of the Cold War in an attempt to halt the dreaded domino effect. Today, Conrad is better known as Paris's great-grandfather, while Hilton Hotels are
asexual and bland; buildings that do nothing to advance any kind of cultural agenda, let alone a political one.
*Other things.
Vertical Inc has a
weblog charting the ins and outs of Japanese culture / the
Museum of Ephemera /
The Modern House has moved into
French real estate, especially
this one /
Placeopeida (via
white label) / absolutely terrifying '
whole tree shredding' machine, which doesn't appear to do much in the way of actually re-using the mulched-up bits of forest it leaves behind. For very lazy lumberjacks.
The whole NY Post payola scandal is great, the kind of thing the British couldn't even dream of: a gossip columnist with a
Skull and Bones-branded clothing ('with a unique
prep-punk sensibility'), tries to extort
monthly payments from a billionaire in return for keeping him off the infamous
Page Six of the New York Post. Imagine if the
3AM girls were getting bungs from Katie Melua, or Jamie Cullum.
This kind of banal speculation would make Dale Peck blow chunks. The
infamous critic entirely
fails to get into the spirit of
tmn's TOB, claiming his two assigned contestants will do little more than inspire terrorist acts, '...books like these make me want to join al Qaeda.'
Back to the refuge of retro.
Drink Me, a weblog / retro illustration by
S.Britt (via
mod*mom) /
Gas, Tires, Oil, a weblog about getting your hands greasy / nice
System 7 simulator (via
fosfor gadgets), with a great version of Asteroids / the
Twentieth Century Society has commissioned proposals to save the
National Sports Centre at Crystal Palace / the
Dora gun /
Love/Hate t-shirt.
Somehow we found this
Bird Flu Weblog in our referrers / play
xblocks, one more step on the road to authentic Star Wars-style
hologram chess (via
we make money not art, which is one of the many nominees for the
2006 Webby Awards) / big in our house right now,
Bing Bunny. Highly recommended.
posted by things at 10:06 /
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High Priority, a gallery of designs for
New York magazine, at
Design Observer. See also the article, '
When Design is a matter of Life or Death,' the story of William LeMessurier, structural engineer for Hugh
Stubbins' Citicorp Center, revisiting a classic 1995
New Yorker story,
The Fifty-Nine Storey Crisis. Engineering is perhaps the most dangerous creative discipline, and infamous failures (
Tacoma Narrows bridge;
Hyatt Regency walkway) appear to be a more regular part of everyday life;
Millennium Bridge;
Charles de Gaulle terminal;
Katowice Trade Hall;
Moscow Market;
Sampoong Department store (
more on collapsing new buildings in general).
Foster's
Moscow Tower proposal in Google Earth (via
ZNO). See also the
Aurland Lookout model, in Norway, as
previously referenced, and the
Casa Malaparte in Capri and, finally, the
Palm Islands in Dubai. We're going to need a faster computer. Related, a
Wired piece on aerial imagery being used to check for
sneaky tax violations,etc.
Observe the
ripples emanating from
Lost,
City of Sound on why the show is 'genuinely new media', taking in
all aspects of contemporary culture. Dan has even gone so far as to create a
Diagram of the interaction generated by the series, 'rippling' out from original content, through to fan-created content.
Herzog & de Meuron's
Olympic Stadium is under construction (via
archinect) / generate
silly walks, via
jo gray / the
American Punk/Hardcore Archive, 1978-1991, a flickr pool. Related,
PhotoRockStar, images of the punk and post-punk era by Peter Anderson.
Royalties or Libraries? The latter doesn't stack up for
writers /
The Great Chain of Letters. In the old days, you used to get letters in the mail that would threaten death and destruction if you didn't reply to them. Fun times / a list of London's
Gentleman's Clubs /
Lost Worlds, Michael Bywater's website.
A note about the
photo; apparently these 'stuck in the trunk' emergency cords are
quite common in the
USA. It's been a
standard item on Fords for a while. You can even
fit your own.
posted by things at 15:19 /
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Why the Schadenfreude Dailies are "ruining" culture, at
Neomarxisme ('the pop sociology of pop'). Nicely (if unintentionally) bitter: 'gossip sites staffed by bitter twenty-somethings bent on wrecking every pillar of contemporary popular culture'. There does seem to be the rumblings of a
backlash against the relentless and ultimately rather soulless manner in which 'news' (read, new products, events, technologies and the intersection of all three) is sourced, disseminated, spat out, and discarded. Nothing lasts for very long on the internet (although paradoxically everything actually lasts
for ever).
And with that in mind we plough into our not-very-snarky, far-from-daily trawl around for links of interest. Infuriating 8-bit culture click-throughs at
jodi.org / snippets from
The Cure's performance at the
Royal Albert Hall last Saturday /
Urbanzeitgeist, the usual round-up of whizzy consumables / excellent set of images of the
Montreal Expo 67 (via
me-fi) / top ten
weirdest keyboards ever, via
plastic bag /
A Guide to Unusual Maps on the Web /
You are Here, a photographic journey around recent European architecture /
Fullbright, a weblog /
I heart bacon is all about everyone's favourite thin sliced meat / living in a
tube map (via
Russell Davies).
Factbites is billed as a cross between a search engine and an encyclopedia; i.e. you apparently get interesting nuggets about the things you search about. Not a bad idea, and one we suspect will be used for inevitable research shortcuts, especially as it 'offers you real, meaningful sentences that are right on topic' / fun gallery of
spaceship art / nice selection of imagery of work by
Alison and Peter Smithson /
Map builder brings together datasets for Google maps / there's something very creepy about
The Royal Forum; the use of
Ludwig II's Schloss Neuschwanstein suggests some kind of closeted megalomania.
Happiness: The Chinese zombie ships of West Africa, a
Greenpeace activist, sailing aboard the
Esperanza (a former Russian fire-fighting vessel), encounters a rusting 'ghost' fleet 130km off the coast of Guinea, West Africa, broken down and with no hope of going anywhere. With a
gallery. Apparently some of the boats had been at sea continuously for up to eight years (thanks to
rotational).
'
Healthy sleep habits, grumpy baby', many, many comments on sleep, and lack of it /
Michael Daines' weblog. I think we linked this before / the
Nedelin Disaster, the world's worst space-related accident, covered up for decades by the Soviets /
TimeandDate.com offers a variety of tools for the chronologically challenged / digital photo-realism by
Bert Monroy.
posted by things at 11:04 /
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