Two economic indicators. Do 1.3 million people really earn their living from eBay? Probably not, but we can certainly expect the number of people trying to rise in the next few years. We don't imagine that eBay has much of a presence in Monaco. Perched on the hotter edge of Europe, it seems the Principality now represents the start of Dubaisisation's creeping spread. The news that Cramped Monaco is planning a new district represents the first evidence of a pure architecture of economics in Europe. The project - for which the usual names have been mooted - is an interesting evolution of the Tokyo Bay megastructures proposed by the late Kenzo Tange.

The more curious parallel to draw is with the isolated, ocean-going communities that have attempted to declare themselves independent states, kick-started by Sealand, which occupies the former HM Fort Roughs, one of the set of forts designed by Guy Maunsell (and hugely inspirational to architects ever since). The idea was taken to its logical conclusion by the endearingly absurd Freedom Ship concept (downscaled by Wally Yachts in a rare lapse of taste) and has recently surfaced in the Seasteading Institute, described in this Wired piece ((via archinect). The socialist utopianism of the megastructure is translated into a bid for political freedom, or rather, freedom from politics. One has to wonder where today's proponents of megastructural utopias stand politically, and whether they feel their designs are better suited to one or other approach.

More musings on the pitfalls in paradise. Just as the Sultan of Brunei and his brother's automotive ostentatiousness effectively subsidised the global luxury car industry throughout the 80s and early 90s, with endlessly expensive and labour-intensive requests for custom cars, so the rendered worlds of hypermodernism are financing modern architecture. The super-rich are buying off-plan architecture that is essentially unlivable in the environment in which it has been placed - glass, sun decks, no services, no culture. The rejoinder is that the buyers will never see the finished property, never use them. No one will. The computer generated render remains the mental image of the building, furnished in the slick modern idiom of the international developer. The physical architecture itself is non-existant. There was a rather unreadable architectural novelette a few years back called The Ephemeral of Real. A great title, which summarises this phenomenon.

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Tinselman, a weblog / Counterfeit Chic, a weblog (via) / this is brilliant. The Celica driver at around 0.20s needs to put a call in to Michael Bay. And the winner's speech is pretty good too / a fuel prices graph. Another article on energy, consumption and the apparent lack of progress in cutting fuel consumption. See also this view from the other side of the Atlantic, Gasoline is cheap / ghost cars of the world at dark roasted blend, which has also collated a page of designs by Luigi Colani. It was about time someone did.posted by things at 12:45 / 0 comments