The superjail concept is back: enter the Titan. But what should prisons look like?. In fiction, the prison is an excuse for architectural extravagance, such as The Rotating Prison in the Mountain, a structure on the world of Heliconia in a short story by Brian Aldiss. This vision could be seen as an update of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon of 1791, itself proposed just a few years after Piranesi's Carceri. Although Bentham's prime intention was one of observation, the general idea through history has been that prisons should be an aesthetic representation of punishment or atonement. However, there is a wide spectrum of expectations, from the unlikely glass-walled 'post-modern' prison in Austria, the Leoben Justice Centre, which attracted some blog attention a couple of months ago (but passed us by) to the terrifying American Supermax to the so-called Alcatraz of the Rockies. The latter looks a little Michael Mann-esque in that particular shot (don't forget that Mann used Richard Meier's High Museum of Art in Atlanta as a psychiatric hospital), the unsaid implication being that criminals need starkly dramatic surroundings.

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Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold at Strange Harvest (via archinect). It's clear this little exhibition has had a huge impact on the current generation of architects, struggling to make their way in a multi-layered environment of hitherto unprecedented complexity. Although the C/S/F generation were undoubtedly trail-blazers (Sam points out that '[i]f you keep following this thread it will lead you to today's architectural mainstream']), the sense is that self-publishing, in all its pre-digital forms, was a way of creating your own culture. 'It was both the place that you could glimpse the exotic world of consumerist America and where you could manufacture new exotic worlds.'

The message seems to be that in the past, you made your own hyper-density, building up accretions of media, imagery and theory in order to bolster your position, shore up your ideology or simply accompany the visionary schemes that were, inevitably, unbuilt.

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Why are there so many notebooks for sale? The revival/creation of the Moleskine brand in the late 1990s neatly tapped into emerging themes of portable creativity, analogue obsessiveness and artistic associations, kicking off weblogs, flickr sets, dedicated websites like The Moleskine Project (via) and a burgeoning product line. It is, of course, all founded on a myth (explored in this IHT piece, 'Does a Moleskine notebook tell the truth?') / the image above comes from the G-Econ research project, which is 'developing a geophysically based data set on economic activity for the world' (flickr set).

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Great set of jaw-dropping errors made by media outlets throughout the year at Regret the Error / The Auction Rebel, make that eBay auction work / the ten rarest gems on earth / Untitled by Bolg, a tumble log / lots of stuff at Participo / Ruins Safaris / linked before? Possibly. My Dad's Architecture Photos, a flickr set by Maraid / Relics of the Franklin Expedition (from where the above buttons come from) / links at Blue Vertical Studio / more links at le club club / typography, a flickr set.posted by things at 13:47 / 0 comments