Stacking the Decks: How Parking Garages Got Ugly', a rather bad-tempered appraisal of Shannon Sanders McDonald's book The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form, coming down in favour of mechanisation rather than garages based on ramps, which the author believes 'sever an age-old architectural connection between you, the building and the earth you drove in on'. Whatever, it pointed us towards Parking Magazine, reminded us of this Paul Rudolph flickr set and the images from Simon Henley's The Architecture of Parking.

One forgets how strong the impetuts was for wholescale demolition and reconstruction in the first decades of the twentieth century. Geoffrey Sainsbury, in his The Dictatorship of Things, apparently published in 1905 (although our first edition says 1933), called for the construction of a 'real Jerusalem of steel and concrete' in England. Sainsbury, a committed modernist who later translated Corbusier, also shared the architect's slash and burn vision. 'Within the ten-mile radius of Charing Cross lie 314 square miles of land. If we made our buildings 20 stories high, we could house the whole population of Greater London within that radius, and yet leave room within it for something like 200 square miles of parks and gardens.... Could really bring ourselves to raze [our historic capital] to the ground? If we want a little history there is room for it. In my very rough calculations I have allowed for the conservation of 14 square miles of central London. Besides this there are in many districts beautiful houses and groups of houses scattered about. The best could be kept, but in the parks. The old architecture will not mix in with the new. To have them adjoining would be unjust to both.'

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Other things. Reference Library, a great weblog. Posts include Ebay Items I Didn't Win / 1000 thoughts or less / an enormous collection of railway history links / the living spaces of German DJs / superb, the Library of Congress flickr pages / go back to the award-winning websites of 1997, courtesy of crackunit.com.

'Online golf game handicaps productivity'. Welcome to World Golf Tour. Interesting for its creative process: 'the World Golf team has been taking high-resolution pictures of every square inch of far-flung golf courses - from Pinehurst in North Carolina to the Bali Hai Golf Club in Las Vegas - using a small fleet of helicopters and radio-controlled drones' / the Cold War History Project / the work of Stuart Haygarth, via Happy Mundane.

Mi Magazine / bikes in Beijing and Shanghai, by Aleksandra Domanovic. See also Places I have lived at, arranged by size and amount of time spent there / dear ada, via a+r=t / Bell the Cat, an art and design blog / photography by Kathrin Kur / Dan Hill's The Well-Tempered Personal Environment (video and notes).

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 19:46