Audio.Out, an enormous collection of early acid house tunes and remixes, including acid brass, a coda to a three-part (1, 2 and 3) post on KLF remixes / more mp3s, Built on a Weak Spot; Pogo a go-go; The Devil has the Best Tuna / The Staufenberger Repository, things and scans and a helpful insight into East London fads and fashions (e.g. bike polo) / another glimpse into interior lives: Aspiring, 'a series of aspiring Baltimore models taken in their own living spaces' by photographer Jay Parkinson (some images nsfw).

Photolimits, documentary photography from around the world. The evocative images of an abandoned/destroyed world in RRonny Smedts' Re-construction are frustratingly untitled / an online SimCity-type game that focuses on energy consumption and distribution: Energyville. (CoS is now on the other side of the world but still seems to have a better idea of what's going on in London than we do). The original SimCity. City Creator, a similar idea / vintage color photos of US cities. Big, bulbous cars, shopfronts with elaborate, unique typography, the absence of logos, pre-modern architecture.

A lovingly curated site dedicated to the Action Transfer. Now we'd like to see scanned examples of scrappy, transfer-less paper covered in dense forests of biro, with the occasional overlooked limb or fragment of explosion still stuck to the paper (via). We hadn't made the Letraset connection before now / Robert C.Glover's 1000 Prints project, via Sara Pearce's Art weblog / the Compendium of Communist Biography / a weblog by Ethan Bodnar.

As seen above, Isolated Building Studies, photographs by Metroblossom illustrating buildings that are either 'pioneers or survivors, built by gentrification or decayed by divestment.' More than anything else, they show the death of context, the cycles of land and the patterns of land ownership, the long vision of town planning and the unpredictability of urbanism / the Google Earth Game, reality versus simulation.

Architects on screen, a flickr set. Some day in the future there will be dedicated flickr archaeologists, whose task will be to sift through the site's jumbled servers and reconstruct a coherent image of early twentieth century life. They will probably conclude that everybody was obsessed with collecting, visual repetition and juxtaposition / Soup, a personal aggregator site / Bathing Beauties, winners of a competition to create a 21st century beach hut / Tin Tabernacles, 'Churches, Chapels and Mission Halls in Britain' / an early car simulator / American adverts for the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.posted by things at 21:06 / 1 comments

We were going to lead with the striking image of Russia's proposed new artificial island, but 24 hours is a lifetime in the internet, and the renders and faux-satellite shots are pretty much everywhere by now. So here's something by Superstudio, just one node in the long tradition of megastructural provocation. It's not surprising that the Russian Federation wants to get on board the artificial island bandwagon with its miniature doppelganger to appear in Black Sea by 2014. Erick van Egeraat's scarcely credible proposal is another sign of the Dubai-ification of high-end architecture. 'According to the plans, the 250-hectare island, to cost an estimated 155 billion rubles (over $6 billion), will have two marinas, religious centers, roads, parkland and artificial rivers, mimicking Russia's major rivers.' EEA is calling the Black Sea scheme Federation Island - it is shaped like a scaled-down version of Russia itself - and notes that 'the Dutch experience in reclaiming land from water will benefit the project, which [we] consider to be unique among its kind.' Construction costs are estimated at between $6 to $10 billion.



The Russian scheme has more in common with the science fiction-scale terraformations taking place in the Middle East than the relatively humdrum reclamation schemes that have been practised for centuries (e.g. Kansai International airport, large chunks of the Netherlands, or Korea's New Songdo City, built on '1,500 acres of reclaimed land along Incheon's waterfront'. This is a grandiose, wired up version of the UK's Samphire Hoe, 'the newest part of Kent, made from 4.9 million cubic metres of chalk marl dug to create the Channel Tunnel). As the Independent points out, this is a 'land fit for oligarchs... [an] island of the super-rich'.

Arguably, the project has more in common with terraforming elsewhere in the solar system than with conventional architectural discourse. Admittedly, creating land is quite the rage in the 21st century, although the reasons are primarily political rather than social (let alone architectural). The Russians have advanced plans for a submarine land grab, a concept that seems to be catching on elsewhere (see 'The new British empire? UK plans to annex south Atlantic' in last week's papers), but there are few bolder expressions of intent than continental re-engineering and the dominance of the geographic process as a means of projecting national pride. Volcanic activity occasionally creates islands right before people's eyes, but the accepted modern method is spraying millions of tons of sand into the ocean to create the countless ongoing projects in Dubai (at least one of which, The World, is dredged, bulldozed and sprayed into a vague approximation of the world map, blurry Russia included).



Sochi will host the 2014 Winter Olympics, but megastructural plans as ambitious as these have little to do with real world concerns. Instead, this is conceptualism as status symbol, the explicit use of fantasy - i.e. the lack of reality - as a means of boosting image and national self esteem (what Ian Martin calls oligarchitecture: 'My clients' primary aim is to be conspicuously more extravagant than their rivals. So I tell them what these rivals are planning and how to outdo them. I mean, they could find all this out for themselves if they bothered to read the Times online property section, but reading their own newspapers is as unthinkable as preparing their own breakfast.'). Martin is right on the money, as usual.

Artificial islands are being talked up as the new vanguard of regeneration strategies around the world (Plan to float villages on the Clyde, in Scotland). But do we need to build any of it? Superstudio's global-scale provocations still elicit the intended chill or awe, so surely Russia's absurd ambitions can remain unbuilt and still exude an aura of power and futuristic thinking. Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema (at Quiet Please, a film review site with an extensive section on architecture and design) traces the cinematic view of the future conurbation from 'cities of hope' in the 1920s and 1930s to the steely dystopias of the present. The greater the ambitions of the architects, the more oppressive their concepts became: 'At the conference Utopia and/or Revolution in Turin in 1970, Utopie, a Marxist collective of architects, urban theorists and sociologists including Jean Baudrillard, condemned megastructures as 'chimera of utopia', thereby damaging further what little left there was of optimism in utopian architects in the 1960s.' Today, most of us are happy to leave our flawed dysto-utopias to video games. Sadly, sub-Blade Runner neon cityscapes and 'Lego-land medievalism' (from 'The Role of Architecture in Video Games') are still rife in the real world. Federation Island only serves to confirm this.

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Incredible photography by Terry Evans: Steel Work, a project about the scale, complexity and sheer weight of manpower and materials behind the modern steel industry / aesthetechtonik has a very contemporary look and feel. These renders have a texture that speaks uniquely of now, fuzzy, soft but also curiously sterile. What CAD package is used to create them? / hidden CGI in David Fincher's Zodiac, a revealing few minutes of the modern art of special effects (via golden fiddle) / Paul Rudolph on flickr, one of modern architecture's greatest draftsmen (via aggregat 4/5/6) / wallpaper has an extensive gallery from the Basil Spence Archive.

Urban Landscapes, a self-explanatory gallery. Lots to explore, especially the work of site founders Mike Seaborne and Peter Marshall (via hapax). Some of Marshall's panoramas are only a decade old but feel like they've been unearthed from a distant, long-forgotten era / London Calling: a musical map of the city. Matching lyrics to places. See also Rodcorp's slightly more useful map of October 2007's London Art fairs / how Tate Modern might have looked / art by Mark Bradford / 60 years of civil aviation in Hong Kong.

Marc Tuters' weblog, including a post on the Rear Window Curiosity Cabinet. See also The Wrong House, which looks at Hitchcock's 'single-set films, such as Rope and Rear Window, that explicitly deal with the way the confines of the set relate to those of the architecture on screen.' / How to Shop, IKEA presents a slick virtual pop-up book of what is by now bleeding obvious to everyone from Coventry to Turkey (via rat and mouse) / First We Kill The Architects, phase one of Danny Lyon's 10-step manifesto for a new New York.

Is lazy reporting harming the visual arts?, Jonathan Jones on art world reporting cliches, or how just six stories make up the majority of arts coverage. Most of his categories - expensive art works, graffiti, lost masterpiece rediscovered, art world plagiarism, 'earth-shattering' discovery (on the up since the Da Vince Code, probably), restoration news' - apply equally to architectural journalism, with the possible exception of graffiti and lost masterpiece.posted by things at 19:19 / 0 comments

Back in 2003 some speculated whether 'Thomas [was] sending children off the rails' ('...the large number of accidents in the programmes could have a negative influence on children.'). Since then, the levels of fictional railway vehicle-based violence have exploded exponentially (see also Thomas the Really Revolutionary Engine). These little home-grown YouTube remakes are compelling snapshots of early 21st century domestic interiors; watch as plastic trains whirr through wheel-high forests of deep pile carpet and rugs, or chug underneath soft furnishings and occasional tables / more toy trains: Japanese Brio sets / Giant Child Guidance Railroad (via wee wonderfuls) / S.Berliner III's Erector Set Page. The Dinky pages are also wonderful (road signs). S.Berliner III is a 'Consultant in Ultrasonic Processing, Technical and Historical Writer, Oral Historian, Popularizer of Science and Technology, Rail, Auto, Air, Ordnance, and Model Enthusiast, Light-weight Linguist, Lay Minister, and Putative Philosopher'.

D and AD through the ages (via do). We can't do ampersands on this weblog for some reason. Why is that? / Density of homes for sale across the UK, over at estate agent aggregator Nestoria, who note that the 'database corresponds very nicely with UK population density' / the Anatomy of Credit Card Numbers, including the try-it-yourself genius of the Luhn algorithm / a nice bit of marketing: microscopic questionnaire / Dienacht Magazine, 'photography, design and subculture' / future games, undated speculation / One Day on the Internet, at tmn.posted by things at 15:58 / 0 comments

Blog a Penguin classic. Related, the notorious Clarkson classic. The whole debased notion of a design classic got one of its regular - and predictable - outings in the press last weekend, with Bayley and Conran's 'Design: Intelligence Made Visible' inspiring yet another round robin of me-and-my-spoon-style name-checking and taste-making involving the usual suspects (such as the Guardian's recent and rather spurious Top 50 UK designers or the BBC's Great British Design Quest from a year or so ago).

These little exercises would be far more challenging if the participants were not allowed to select anything designed in the past decade, thus forcing them to seek out true 'design classics' that have melded gracefully and purposefully with the chaff-rich wheat of the consumer cycle. In other words, what is usually described as 'good design' has a fast-decaying half-life, fading quickly from the public view with only a slim chance of being ressurected as a 'design classic' many years down the line.

Faced with this potentially catastrophic decline in reputation, many designers appear to be creating 'design classics' straight out of the box, objects steeped in references and knowing winks, with cute names and attention-seeking materials. But what goes around, comes around. Just as that thrift-shop staple, the artfully esoteric glob of coloured glass, perhaps in the shape of a fish, has skyrocketed in value in the past five years, so the stringy and bendy chairs of the noughties will ultimately end up being defined as a 'classic' in some way. And the word will lose a little bit more of whatever meaning it might once have had.

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East End Shopfront Shutter Letters, by London graffiti artist Eine. More images and info in Creative Review. Collected at Dave Gorman's neat flickr page / everything, and we mean everything, you ever wanted to know about Nick Cave, who recently celebrated his 50th birthday / Watch the K Foundation burn a million quid (via me-fi (the comments introduced us to this old, but wonderful, rumour, as well as Gimpo's M25 25 Hour Spin, 2006, and the 2007 version, and A Pylon Walk) / metal detecting, a weblog.

Elements of John Carpenter in this cutesy contortionist film from the 50s (at Ben Hammersley's page) / ilike is five. Happy birthday ilike / 9 of the most repulsive buildings on Earth? Criticism is subjective / cupboards covered in the artwork of Guido Crepax at Opus Interiors. Often erotic and cinematic, Crepax's art seems tailor-made for the post-ironic, new pop era (see more information at Moss's online store) / what do I do with this?, your source for surplus building materials / scour the Unclaimed Baggage Center for that long-lost holdall, before it's sold to someone else (via BBC News).

In Every Dream Home A Heartache: The Great Australian Dream and its architecture, an epic post at City of Sound / There is a field, a weblog with a marketing focus / book carvings by Brian Dettmer (via me-fi / upscale RVs from Earthroamer and Sportsmobile / art by Tricia McKellar, via Lost at E Minor / Born in the Basement, on punk, hardcore and garage / architecture in Portugal / Maison Lunatique, a weblog / 26 Different Endings, photographer Mark Power's chronicle of the cartographic fringes of A-Z London.

Famous huts through history and other home-working tips at Shedworking. See also kottke's recent post on The Most Beautiful House in the World, in particular author Witold Rybczynski's description of George Bernard Shaw's workplace / great, if slightly obsessive, stuff, Stephen Fry on his obsession with smart phones. Almost satirically intense / some structures that span borders / office life revisited: 5 minutes to kill yourself.posted by things at 10:23 / 0 comments

The Shackleton Centenary Expedition website (via fed by birds), re-tracing the legendary 1909 Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole. Related, although literally poles apart, the Northwest Passage becomes passable (via kottke). See also Souvenirs of the Shackleton Exhibition, or buy a small part of Shackleton's house in Sydenham, close to his school in Dulwich (and also home to his notorious younger brother Frank). See A Low-Latitude Antarctic Gazette for more polar tales.

Map Of Boston Hidden Inside Cane / Written on the City, graffiti and more / architecture photos by Andrew Paul Carr / printfetish, a weblog about publications / go on, show us your metal t-shirt, via izreloaded / a lovingly compiled website dedicated to miniskirts and hotpants, through vintage imagery. Relatively tame stuff, and mostly just fantastic snapshots of fashions gone by. Ann-Margret entertains the troops / Break and Enter, a London weblog / Ninth Letter, a weblog / Puerto Rico in the 40s and 50s, a flickr set.

Anthony Lane on the enduring mystique of the Leica: '...when Winogrand died, in 1984, at the age of fifty-six, he left behind more than two and a half thousand rolls of film that hadn't even been developed.' / Blanka, photography and prints / 20x200, artists' editions / Video game teaches medics how to treat blast victims / icon magazine relaunches its website. Dezeen launches a redesign / did Stephen King murder John Lennon? Just one of the world's weirdest/stupidest conspiracy theories, collated at swallowing the camel. Our new favourite is the Phantom Time Hypothesis.

Found things; we have a new gallery - Thomas Kalak's intriguing street photography from Bangkok.posted by things at 20:24 / 0 comments

The Lindbergh kidnap is a lesson for the McCanns - and the media, Ian Jack in the Guardian, in a piece about the parallels between the Madeleine McGann case and the Lindberg case, tells how the case inspired Isamu Noguchi's rather eerie radio nurse, which has become a totemic modernist object. Some more images. There are also visual parallels between Jacob Epstein's sinister Rock Drill, which coincided with the birth of the machine age, and the association of the machine with death and destruction. The Measures Taken on Epstein, Vorticism and Wyndham Lewis. Besides the other obvious references (fencing mask or abstracted Samurai mask) the sculpture is also weirdly reminiscent of the Royal Guards from Star Wars - a fool in the forest on the George Lucas connection.

Angela Singer, an artist working with recycled taxidermy. More about Singer at Coolhunting, and an interview at Nothing Mag / Phantom Cell Phone Vibrations (via kottke). So it's not just us, then / is BioShock art? Who gets to say? A literary reviewer? / a new book looks at the power of key domestic objects, Dr. Johnson's Doorknob: And Other Significant Parts of Great Men's Houses, a neat combination of shelter porn and literary detection.

Sealed Game Heaven, one of the more esoteric arenas of collecting. A counter to the unboxing phenomenon, which one could see as symptomatic of the desire for content and depth in a world of superficiality / artwork by Alexander Heaton, reminiscent of Zaha Hadid's early paintings / what publication sums up your specialisation? At ask me-fi.

From a review of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre comes this quote, '...we now look to photographs for guidance on what we should buy to look good in photographs...' / a fool in the forest also points us to these incredible images of Stockholm's Tunnelbana underground system / the photography of Eric Baudelaire / Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual, at Peterme.com / The Pritzker Architecture Prize on Flickr.posted by things at 09:58 / 0 comments

A bundle of random links today. Digital Urban - The Tutorials, everything you need to know about stitching the cascade of geographic and mapping data into panoramas and virtual spaces / Vastpark, create your own virtual world (via Wonderland). See also the Pruned post on Simulated Worlds, creating virtual spaces the old fashioned way with bulldozers and dynamite / weblogs: Take Every Day as it comes / Ritual Landscape / Nascent Ideas / The Ephemerist / The Magistrate's Blog, fascinating insight into the English legal system.

Someone, somewhere, is out there cataloguing everything: Record Envelope, 'a little library of factory sleeves' (via tmn) / matchboxes / What's the Jackanory, fashion, photography, etc., from New York, by photographer Andrew Hetherington / Lost at E minor, a culture weblog / good thinking at Ortholog: Stand on Hawaii and Box Clever / mp3 blogs: Good Vibrato, Who Needs Radio?, motel de moka, Keytars and Violins, and a useful aggregator, the hype machine.

Bike paths not worthy of federal support, says transportation secretary / Marius Watz's Unlekker, a repository of design and artwork. See also Code and Form / Naomi Klein's film The Shock Doctrine takes up where Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self leaves off, only it doesn't have any of the latter's cynical wit / headzGallery, Japanese culture meets Eastern European toy cameras. Nudity involved. See also PowerShovel AUDIO / The Rushmore Academy is a site dedicated to the films of Wes Anderson / architetti senza tetto, a weblog / moderific, wallpapers and more.

The National Serro Scotty Organization devoted to a little-known Airstream rival / VW Bus ads / the modern equivalent: Viano Marco Polo - neat Quicktime interior animations / a set of townscape photos by Thomas Struth, via The Cartoonist / Texas Bird's-Eye Views, an interactive exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum. Top image, Denison in 1891 / Paperholic / the Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments at the Museum of Hoaxes, via the Kirscher Society, which has grim imagery of Vladimir Demikhov’s desperately sad Two-Headed Dogs / amazing Lego Tower / photography and art by Pogus Caesar / Inspired Design, illustration and art weblog / a year of sleep observer by flip flop flyin

Abandoned Plane Wrecks of the North (via me-fi) / are architects moving into Second Life? / flickr's computer simulations pool (via haddock). Invaluable to people like us who get their flight sim thrills from watching videos on YouTube and screenshot collections / lovely little animation by Mansilla + Tunon for their proposal for the redevelopment of Chatelet Les Halles in Paris, mixing self-conscious digital visualisations with a quirky analogue sensibility / 20 years of urbanism, condensed into 10 seconds: Shinjuku Skyscrapers Time-lapse. See also earthquake simulation (via Pruned) / are we entering the age of vocal terrorism?posted by things at 22:58 / 0 comments

Sit down man... tackles the curious landscape of the British railway , noting that the Beeching-era Brutalism saw 'the mutilation of the British Rail network only around 10 years before environmental research would make it plain that all those pointless little stations were in fact far more urgently needed than they probably were when feverish 1840s speculation got them built.' (see our earlier Beeching post). The history of the environmental movement is littered (sorry) with major events (Silent Spring, oil spills, gas leaks, nuclear worries), each of which fed back into all aspects of contemporary culture. Although we don't remember it at the time, there was a strong strand of environmentalism running children's books in the 70s, which appear quite radical with the benefit of hindsight. The message in the Barbapapa series, for example, and this little gem of a Ladybird, What on Earth are we doing? is surprisingly strong. According to this page, in 1976 the average Briton produced 159kg of rubbish a year. By 2004/05, that had risen to 517kg (page 6 of pdf). What on earth caused waste to triple in less than two decades?

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The Farnsworth House, afloat (pics at Steve's Basement, via loud paper - we like their 'boring' tag). The water sets off the design quite effectively (the site has flooded several times before, most notably - and expensively - in 1996) and for a brief few days, the house looking like something from Ballard's Drowned World. A fine set of Farnsworth House images (via Almale). More floating architecture at the 2005 Rotterdam Biennale / a true archived life, Rick McGrath's extensive site, which has a set of Richard M.Powers' cover art for Ballard's books, concert photos from the 70s, a collection of psychedelic postcards and, appropriately for today, an interview with Robert Plant from August 1971 / related, vaguely, Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8.

Modern Architecture and Design News, a weblog / Patent Pending Blog, on 'Patents and the History of Technology' / imagining the internet: the 'Radiated Library' (at kottke) / Yamazaki's Notebook, a weblog / the Eames Lounge Chair makes its debut in 1956 on NBC, at Today and Tomorrow / Suggested Donation, 'A blog about Museums, Archives, and Libraries: and the poor suffering lot who work in them.' / Japanese arcade game driving beetle extinction.

Ben Murphy's images of the UN Building in New York / sold then torn-down? The Paul Rudolph-designed house at 16 Minute Man Hill. Interesting discussion follows second link / more profiles and primers at Arbitat / Burning World brings back the spirit of the mix tape (see also Thurston Moore's Black Weeds, White Death) / PS3 not for casual gamers? / The Ladybird Series. Essential.posted by things at 21:33 / 0 comments

Meet the Bloggers; are the new wave of architecture weblogs the modern equivalent of the architecture zine? If anything, a weblog is even more ephemeral than even the flimsiest pamphlet, but influence is a tough thing to gauge: the interest generated by the exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold (The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X - 197X) demonstrated how sub-mainstream journalism has a habit of lingering. The article cites Postopolis! and its proponents - BLDGBLOG, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and City of Sound (now safely esconsed on the other side of the world).

Mass in architecture. There's a distinct correlation between architectural ambition and the size of practices. Not content with conquering space, the latest releases from the Foster PR machine illustrate two vast design and planning projects; a Libyan eco-resort ('an area the size of Wales') and a zero-carbon city in Abu Dhabi. Admittedly, Foster was only contacted three months ago regarding the former, but even so the whole concept reeks of indecent haste, a world where architecture studios have reached the status of nation builders.

Meanwhile, Tom Wolfe is still beating the same anti-modernist drum as he was 25 years ago. Paul Goldberger, from 1981, 'The problem, I think - and here we get to the essence of what is wrong with this book -is that Tom Wolfe has no eye. He has a wonderful ear, and he listens hard and long, but he does not seem to see. He does not see, to take but one of so many examples, that Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building is a lush and extraordinarily beautiful object.'

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Phlight, a curious (and provocative) installation: 'Simon Tyszko has contracted engineers to build a full size replica of a section of a dakota wing that literally cuts through his living space, a 5th floor flat in Fulham, London. Tyszko has removed most of the internal walls of his flat so that he cannot escape this intervention, be he having a bath or preparing a meal.' Tyszko once created something called 'Suicide Bomber Barbie', which Julie Burchill was moved to call 'a piece of infantile wank masquerading as art'. See also the Uncle Abdul character from the Seamour Sheep series.

Car-related things at Carburetti. Related, more wing mirrors / the Old England watch, sold at the Beatles' Apple Boutique. The Official Beatles site, just because it's rather slick. Staying psychedelic, meeting Roger Dean, the master of fantasy art and design (official site). Dean's aesthetic (also translated into architecture) is coming back into fashion. See also the work of Chris Foss / Unusual Life, a weblog / Blogs by Iranians. Reminded us of the Fearless Iranians from Hell.

The Architecture of Authority, photography by Richard Ross at tmn / diskant's films weblog offers some fresh perspectives on movie soundtracks, old and new / Soiree Shot, fine art photography for sale / an ultra-slick CGI rendering of Falling Water, so crisp and iconic that you now never need to actually go there. Reality could never match up (and rarely does). Via me-fi.

Bottled Drinks by The Writers, at tmn, in which we reveal our passion for French soda pop / We Love to Build, fantasy architecture (via swiss miss) / an interactive map of urbanisation in Britain, 1960 to 2000 / the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and Other Voices, 'a meander through the Arcades project of Walter Benjamin', both linked via Power and Everyday Life.posted by things at 13:52 / 0 comments

We have searched unsuccessfully for information on silk scarves featuring a circa 1949 edition of the London Underground map. Instead, we found out about collecting Underground Maps after Beck, including landmark maps and some 'myths' that attempt to debunk the cult of Beck. More information at A History of the London Tube Maps and the London Underground Railway Society. A distinguishing feature of the 1949 map is the proposed extension of the Bakerloo line to Camberwell. According to Camberwell Online, this might eventually happen in 2026, nearly a century after the suggestion was first made.

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The Guardian runs a weekly feature on Writer's rooms, invariably the spare back bedroom of an airy London terrace, filled with stacks of paper and anecdote-loaded trinkets. Only Will Self's looked as if any actual plotting, character crafting and genuine thought took place within its walls ('I'm going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash - yet I do not fear this.'): most are places of contemplation and repose. More images of Self's room at the official site Will-Self.com (thanks Tom).

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Muriel Auclert Immobilier, modernist houses for sale / BlogBus, a culture weblog / hypediss, collated culture / cut to the heart of faceless corporations using Bringo, or the Gethuman 500 database / SAMETIME, a project by Brad Walker and Michael Lease, 'a friend and I take a picture everyday at 7:15 for a year and post them on our site, month by month' / The Black Hole: Los Alamos Laboratory Salvage Yard, via projects.

A polychromatic platter of retro interiors (via, via). But is it any less retro than Foster and Partner's Space Port for Virgin Galactic (via, via)? Together with Marc Newson's Space Jet for EADS/Astrim, the visions of tomorrow appear fatally undermined by the baggage of the past.

d/visible, an 'international online design magazine' (thanks for the link). Thanks too for the link at the Internet Eclectic, a site which brings together a host of forecasting, future-divining, trend-watching, culture collating and other aggregation links under the banner of Ideation. On the other hand, are we just drowning in quirk?

Is it just us, or are architecture-related weblogs breeding like flies? Habitaxion, architecture, construction, weblog / Meeftah, more architecture / The Perfumed Garden puts out Peel Sessions for your listening delight, dredging up lost gems from 80s and 90s-era indie / a sad day, the end of slower / Penguin Orange auction, the return of the classic cover design for contemporary books / map scarves, a city on a scarf.

The Untitled Project (via me-fi) / Bouncy Buildings, 'Why is a bouncy castle so enjoyable as a formal idea?'. Instant architecture meets play / tunnelling, photographs by Gerry Amstutz / rolu / dsgn, a weblog.posted by things at 12:55 / 0 comments