Hidden megastructures. The other day, someone was complaining about the prevalence of cell phones at rock concerts the other day, and how live performances are often experienced through the hundreds of tiny screens people hold in front of their face as they attempt to capture blurry pictures of the band on stage. It's a fair point, although most agree to disagree as to whether the general experience is ruined or it's just another technological fetish we will swiftly subsume. A natural evolution of this behaviour is manifested in Citysense, a mobile nightlife guide that purports to not only show you where to go, but which venue is the most buzzing: 'What Citysense does is simple, yet profound. It gathers real-time positional fixes from mobile devices (so far, naturally, for San Francisco only), aggregates them and plots them on a map that is itself then pushed back to the mobile device.' Is this the future of urban life? It's certainly part of the roadmap (back to Street as Platform again).

Could these new clouds of data be considered as buildings in their own right? Just as we're now (mostly) used to the idea of using handheld GPS to help us determine the immediate environment, so products like Citysense will provide customised town plans according to our needs and desires, effectively shaping our environment; a city of shops, of clubs, or green spaces.

These virtual megastructures will eventually become commonplace. A few years ago there was an apparent rush to buy space in Second Life, dutifully reported by the business press, as corporations believed that a foothold in that particular branch of cyberspace was essential to their survival. In the event, the shift to pixels didn't really materialise. Now a different approach is emerging. Disney has arrived in Google Earth, transposing their entire real world property online. It's initially a disappointing experience (fly to 'Disney World' and make sure 3D buildings are turned on: instructions). At first, we couldn't get the whole park to ping up in 3D, just the castle, marooned in a sea of YouTube clips and information boxes, a kind of etiolated landscape of desire and expectation, stripped back to the digital scraps of memory and little else.



But once you're in the 3D model proper, you're presented with a quite absurdly detailed landscape (especially for Google Earth), including individual trees and rides and huts and the occasional hillock, all modelled in a quasi-transparent, hazy sort of way, as if a giant 3D scanner had simply made a few passes over the general locality. Here is a megastructure of the mind, a modern day Neuschwanstein that will now lurk forever over digitised Florida. Sightseeing through GE is a popular pursuit, with little individual blobs of specific data dumped on the map - as opposed to an entire digitised city - serving corporate agendas rather than the grand plans of the architect.



The real megastructures are rather banal, leaving trickery and ostentation to the virtual world. The new Thanet Earth development, currently under construction in these Kent fields. Walking a fine line between vast eyesore, job-creating godsend and conscience-assuaging purveyor of all-year-round truckable (i.e. zero air mile) salad crops, Thanet Earth has a lot to live up to. Developed by the Fresca Group (a name carefully focused grouped to convey just the right combination of fruity freshness and crisp, modernity, a juxtaposition neatly consolidated by their earthy, biodegradable logo), Thanet Earth has also been christened with an eye to making the news. After all, its publicity suggests, the structure 'is predicted to produce an additional 15% to current UK-grown salad volumes [sic]'. Even with its 'seven glass houses, each the size of 10 football pitches', the 91 hectare site won't be even close to the scale of operations in Spain. That said, the local population isn't exactly rushing to embrace this quiet megastructure, despite relatively postive articles in The Guardian (and not-so-positive ones in the Daily Mail).

At least the intention behind Thanet Earth is to localise food production. The DIRFT (Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal) centre is located smack bang in the middle of the UK's transport infrastructure, a series of monumental warehouses that are strung out across the landscape in a wholly unironic mirror of Superstudio's studied exercise in architectural banality. Here is where some of the country's key corporations have their transport hubs - Stobart, Malcolm Logistics, Exel, Royal Mail - issuing a steady stream of HGVs to form miniature megastructural strands right across the country. The new megastructures aren't buildings, they're data and logistics, stealthy, silent and unnoticeable.

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Related, Christopher Stocks, things contributor, and his new book, Forgotten Fruits: A Guide to Britain's Traditional Fruit and Vegetables, from Orange Jelly Turnips to Dan's Mistake Gooseberries. Not a lot of road freight involved there. See also the Big Fruit Little Fruit site.

Other things. ATP goes goth and fancy dress / neat little personal flying boat from Icon Aircraft / Kueleborn's World, a weblog / Spore brings out the inner pornographer in everyone (at rps) / Megastructure Reloaded, worth visiting again / On Spitalfields, the hard, shiny, generic reality of gentrification / Dumb Angel serves up another tranche of West Coast pop culture / k on tracking a virulent meme: 'I only heard it for the first time an hour ago and I'm already sick of it.' / Louis Tussaud's House of Wax, Great Yarmouth / a day in brands: Jane's Brand-timeline Portrait at Dear Jane Sample.

Photoshop Disasters is always entertaining, but this was better than the usual fare of airbrush casualties (although the site's popularity means that the comments are descending into YouTube-esque banality) / Dyckhoff on An Olympic nightmare in Beijing, one of the first critics to really lay into the Games's thus-far barb-proof architecture / all about Pulteney Bridge, at Bath Daily Photo / hey Caterina, maybe you've got time to write that piece for us now? / the city of blogs, an architecture weblog aggregator / more abandoned hotels.posted by things at 23:21 / 0 comments