What defines the modern architectural render? Vegetation. It's a small but significant point - the quality of rendered vegetation has increased enormously, allowing prospective scenes and speculative vistas to be draped in verdant swathes of emerald green. Of course, this has the happy side effect of implying a building is not only fully integrated into the environment, but also that it might actually be green itself (reminiscent of Koolhaas's recent remarks about designs 'winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.' Check the Easy Tree Generator. Or 3dIdeas, a weblog devoted to designing vegetation.

After the bracing local history of Portsmouth Vernacular, the British Cartographic Society have spoken up about the detail and landmarks in the current generation of digital mapping. Instead they point to the OpenStreetMap project as a more representative way forward. See this post at the OpenGeoData blog: "OpenStreetMap maps a lot more than roads. All the things you mention: roads, paths, buildings, heights, pylons, fences … AND … post boxes, pubs, airfields, canals, rock climbing routes, shipwrecks, lighthouses, ski runs, whitewater rapids, universities, toucan crossings, coffeeshops (the dutch kind), trees, fields, toilets, speed cameras, toll booths, recycling points and a whole lot more."

The Lewis Caroll scrapbook collection, via Fed By Birds / see also Emma Payne's weblog / a worthwhile point at Constant Seige, referencing the work of Charles Weever Cushman, 'The Mere Passage Of Time Makes Boring Photographs Compelling' / the 12th Press, a weblog / a gallery of the abandoned Bell Labs / a collection of Transit Van Campers / the very first banner ad / Ling long Women's Magazine, scans from a magazine published in Shanghai from 1931 to 1937.

A concept we were unaware of: the 'tomason', or 'useless, abandoned leftovers' of urban architecture, according to Greg.org. There's a thomason flickr pool (the alternative spelling hints at the term's origins, which we won't spell out here, but it's something to do with Japanese baseball). City of Sound locates an Australian example. See also the flickr groups on building remnants, ghost buildings and the unconscious art of demolition. The term for the latter is Medianeras, from the Spanish meaning a wall that separates two buildings (via Blue Tea and me-fi).

Things magazine, helping to kickstart the uncompromising war on Whimsy. See also Varnelis.net, posting about the recent NYT article on Lebbeus Woods, the forgotten man of the avant-garde. The Zero of Form wonders if this is 'the beginning of a renewed voice of dissent'?

Just like the bomb in John Carpenter's Dark Star, OMA's CCTV is an object created for a singular purpose. The bomb has to explode. CCTV HQ has to swoop and spin and revel in its faceted, unconventional form. Thankfully, the broadcasting company's webmasters realise this: TVCC.com opens with a flash animation that must have warmed the stony cockles of Koolhaas's heart.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 14:36 / 0 comments

It strikes us that the online world (what used to be called the 'blogosphere', we suppose) is becoming divided into two camps, Creators and Curators, although there is naturally a fair bit of crossover. We fall into the latter category. On to the links. Portsmouth Vernacular , 'a mapping project that looks at the geography of the city in relation to the dialect and language that is used and has evolved in and around the city of Portsmouth.' A project by Jodie Silsby / interesting vanishing (via). Anyone know more about this? It is probably in Terence Conran's garden.

Put a Porsche in your drive, an interactive marketing campaign for executives to daydream with / Apartment Therapy flags up a Unicat. Official site / home-built Amphibus. Much more pleasing than the vast Terra Wind / Alphabet Trucks, at Swiss Miss / we've done this before, but worth doing again, Plan, by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga (via 2 or 3 things).

Another re-visit, but constantly updated so worth checking again: Film Stills. For example, 2001, Play Time, Barry Lyndon, Weekend / the Tricorn Centre in Lego (via) / Unique Lapin, a weblog / Horse Hunting, a weblog (contains some nudity) / Preloved is a classified site that's trying to be a bit different from the eBay/Craigslist mainstream, mixing the community feel of Freecycle / photography by Nicholas Bomal, including Private Kingdoms, a look at allotment structures.

Inventionland is the office/publicity tool of one George Davison, an entrepreneurial landscape that manages to effortlessly out-kitsch Fat. Even better, while the latter built elaborate landscapes for 'creative' clients like 10 and KesselsKramer, the output of Inventionland seems destined for the world of infomercials and shopping channels.posted by things at 14:36 / 0 comments

The French do things differently. From 'Paris Match', Maureen Orth's Vanity Fair profile of Carla Bruni's life and loves: 'She says she told Sarkozy, looking at [her] nude photos, "You must know that this is going to come out."
"And what did he say?," I ask.
"He said, 'Oh, I like this one! Can I have a print of it?'"

The Knight Rider sat nav / Core.Form-ula, a weblog rounding up developments in architecture and visualisation / giffin'termeer, a weblog / a series of short films rounding up the scene at various European art colleges, courtesy of wallpaper's Mercedes collaboration. See also the new Wallpaper selects gallery / Bustler magazine has details on the BSI Swiss Architectural Award, or Thirty Under 50 / Cattle shown to align north-south.

Now Boarding, probably Michael O'Leary's favourite game? Via Take 9 / top photography tips / Mary Beard's A Don's Life, via The Observer. See also BLDG BLG's recent two part interview. Another BB post speculated about architecture and games: '$100 hardcover books do absolutely nothing to increase architecture's audience. So what would happen if architects tried videogames?' / related, Second Place Is First to Lose, Todd Levin makes a misstep in the last battle of the console wars.

Bubble-chasing, something to dig your things 13 3D glasses out for (at Swell3D) / Museum of Art for the Arts / The Elrod House, Palm Springs icon and movie star / Scans from the Pyong Yang Times, September 2001, at The Lone Observer / Modernist schools in New Orleans, via Metropolis.

A new project, A Selection of English Cultural Landscapes. Somewhat unsatisfactory, given the strange orientation of most of the aerial photographs - click through to the largest size to get the correctly orientated view. We've matched a few of the scans to their modern day locations on Google Maps: Wembley, Isle of Dogs, Bognor. The rest will hopefully follow.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 08:15 / 0 comments

We seem to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to define the contemporary aesthetic. Past posts have speculated that the type of work favoured by ffffound and its ilk is the dominant mode of modern design, featuring - but not limited to - the intersection of rough-edged printmaking derived textures, wandering lines and smudgy forms drawn from traditional illustration, the hard-edged glistening sheen of computer generated imagery and the patterns, lines and inherent beauty of raw geometry.

This is a multi-disciplinary world where art direction, amateur photography, architecture, illustration, craft, cartoons and technology all fuse into one another, creating - dare we say it - a homogenous pop culture aimed at the attention deficient more than anything else. It's also a global culture (see 360 magazine from China, for example), having evolved from the enthusiastic sub-cultural adoption of Japanese Manga in the West into an ability to absorb specific local influences to generate an all-pervasive yet ultimately placeless sense of the 'exotic'.

So where does the profusion of imagery leave actual, concrete, physical design? We'd speculate that architecture has been fairly comprehensively damaged by the attraction and dominance of the ephemeral - what might rather unkindly be called the triumph of whimsy. Consider Ruum, a new architecture and design magazine (found via Creative Boys Club, which is a mecca for the New Eclectic). With layouts and type that draw on a variety of sources, fashion shoots that have a kitchen-sink inclusiveness and a collage-friendly emphasis on the collation and presentation of imagery, Ruum demonstrates the influence of 21st publishing successes like MARK magazine and, to a lesser extent, A10.

In these publications, architecture is reduced to being little more than the generator of the layouts, not a series of three dimensional spaces but a 2D form that inspires print design, rather than spatial interaction. MARK and A10 differ from late C20 eclectics like Nest through their fatal attraction to novelty, a fascination with the sheen of what is apparently innovation, but is more usually the blurred hinterland between render and photograph, the point at which the computer-generated becomes indistinguishable from reality. Ladel on the increasingly clip art-like imagery found on art, architecture and illustration aggregators, and you end up with design that is simultaneously timeless and utterly of its time.

But is the modern aesthetic genuinely modern? We'd suggest it was simply a hacked about histogram of the past century, with the troughs edited out in favour of the peaks. Many have noticed Late Modernism's peaky attention grabbing of late, lamenting how the 'icon' has supplanted contextual design in an attempt to snap our synapses to attention through novelty, impact and verve. Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy has a splendid post that declares We are all Googie now, noting that the spiky commercial gimcracks of West Coast America not only transcended the rather dull and acquiescent output of the ruling International Modernists ('In fact, with their deliberate defiance of the rules of gravity and geometry, their brashness and lack of precedent, googie buildings were more true to the Modernist event'), but is arguably the aesthetic mode that underpins contemporary architecture.

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Technology thoughts. 3D appears to be making a comeback, through a series of just-launched/in-the-pipeline applications that are tringing to bring science-fiction style interface control to the desktop (although the exciting-sounding Liveplace technology that everyone was talking about last week is this week's Yeti hoax). For a start, we've been playing around with Photosynth a little bit (good discussion at me-fi), and it does seem to do what it promises, although the research uses are few and far between right now / photoshop style enhancement for video. See also 10 futuristic user interfaces. The sheer complexity of modern data management is starting to manifest in unusual little ways, like the creation of 'fake following' applications that allow you to mimic real life behaviour - nodding, saying 'uh-huh' a lot, not paying attention - in the hitherto unrelentingly demanding digital realm.

Other things. A panorama of the Watercube / Re-Title, an online art directory / once and for all, WebUrbanist puts together 42 Essential Flickr Abandonment Groups (via tmn), illustrating the sheer scale of not just our ongoing fascination with modern ruins, but the amount of ruins out their to chronicle / Midpoint Meander, an architect-driven weblog.

The Lego minifigure turns 30 / the Olympics in Lego / Stimpy in Lego / after Other Simulated Worlds, revisiting Hiroshi Sugimoto's Dioramas series / Tigerluxe, a weblog by an illustrator / Postcrossing, 'a project that allows anyone to exchange postcards (paper ones, not electronic) from random places in the world' / a blog by the artist Gaston Caba / entschwindet und vergeht, a weblog touching on architecture, sound and more, including a piece on the Caretaker.

Michael Jantzen has a new website. While his largely computer-generated oeuvre isn't quite in synch with what passes for fantasy architecture these days, it's certainly prescient - consider the recently released renders of Zaha Hadid's Capital Hill Residence in Barvikha, Russia. A computer-generated fantasy made real (potentially), its form suggestive not just of architectural innovation, but of massive shifts in economic power and patronage. Mildly reminiscent of Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam / moving the Maxwell House, an icon gets relocated. Oh for the demountable lightness of an earlier generation of architectural masterpieces.

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We were pipped to the post by the release of myLighter, a flickering flame you can install on your iPhone and presumably hold aloft while swaying to the music. There needs to be a word for technological ennui, the state we exist anything where anything is technically possible and the only thing that holds us back is our imagination. No sooner can you imagine a new application of an existing technology than someone has actually does it, posting details of their hack around the world.

Labels: architecture, future, linkage, technology, things

posted by things at 20:38 / 0 comments

The Los Angeles Natural History Museum now has authentic-looking puppet dinosaurs stalking its corridors (via cake or death). Created by ERTH Visual and Physical, the dinosaurs are a hybrid of puppet and robot - presumably the human involvement is essential to avoid any chance of a 'robots ate my child' lawsuit. Certainly Minmi the dinosaur looks way more sophisticated than just an upscaled Pleo.

After 'Afterlife', disassembled household appliances, a set of photographs by Brittny Badger (via swiss miss) / related, the death of the cathode ray tube. According to Treehugger, in the past 28 years nearly 705 million CRT televisions were sold in the USA alone. Of these, just over 40% are still in use, with some 20+ million being slung out each year / an architectural Unimog.

T-Sides, an mp3 blog / Manalogue, music and mixes / Stone Cold Pimpin', a weblog / Shiner.Clay, a weblog / Mygazines (via kottke), a place for sharing magazines. A historical version of this would be interesting, as at least the noise would be almost as interesting as the signal / Radio Commercials For Kentucky Fried Chicken / art by Anthony Goicolea.

Quipsologies / Simplistic Art, a weblog / xradiograph, a weblog / The Cartoonist's collection of old Corgi Toys and Dinky Toys catalogues / a huge collection of Public Enemy bootlegs / a bit about Rodan.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 16:41 / 0 comments

Met Police Crime Maps, via Tomski, via haddock. From the initial, rather scary, map you can drill down into 'Ward-level crime information'. Still haven't anywhere that has a 'low' rating for crime, though / also via h, Coign of Vantage, a simple 3D puzzle game.

Other Simulated Worlds, a wonderful post at Pruned about historic photographs from the American Museum of Natural History / the full set of Steve Schofield's science fiction fan portraits, Land of the Free / top ten cult locations in LA.

The Telegraph creates a nice comparison image to accompany the British Library's new weird and wonderful inventions exhibition. It's not the only media outlet to haul a load of images out of the publicity material and have a ready-made gallery to maximise their page impressions. When you have objects as delightful as the Pathfinder wristwatch it's hard not to resist.

The above image comes from Gumbook, which produces beautiful Korean langage posters, including this one for the four seasons / a stand of unusually similar trees spotted on Google Maps at Photoshop Disasters / a useful iPhone app, a virtual spirit level. We're amazed no-one's come up with an iPhone Zippo emulator so you can hold your phone aloft at soft rock concerts / a useful set of Scrabble tips at ask me-fi / good silly season story: Bin Laden brother unveils 100bn plan for world's longest bridge.

How to brand a whole country (tip, use lots of bright colours, especially if your country is sunny) / a rare (and very partisan) criticism of the Bird's Nest at the fiercely anti-Chinese Epoch Times / some images of Andreu's Egg / enter the RIBApedia. Here it is, 'an Architectural Research Wiki' / Architecture Reviewed, a weblog.

'Long may you run', a review of David Boyd Haycock's Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer, which charts how 'biblical lifespans remained a yardstick for early researchers into longevity, but by the 19th century scientists were looking to more secular examples, like the 17th-century supercentenarian Old Parr'. Today we have things like the Methuselah Foundation, the 'ultimate goal' of which 'is nothing less than the defeat of age-related disease and the indefinite extension of the healthy human lifespan.' The Spectator review. See also this set of photographs taken at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Fun times.posted by things at 14:02 / 0 comments

KithKin, a creative collective (their blog, which links the Kraftwerk Casio calculation from 1981). The collective has just launched SomeRightsReserved, 'a download shop for the blueprints to design, a future concept for how production and consuming will change with more readily available technology, like rapid prototyping'. Above, 'Afterlife', 'A 1:1 scale drawing of an Epson 1270 Printer's parts with a mars lumograph 5H pencil.'

Sort of related, Your Wall House, an off-the-shelf version of the much-published Wall House project by FAR frohn&rojas / more design work, on screen and off, at renatabarros.

Emmerich (via) versus Tyson (via). We're awaiting the ruin of the former / wallpapers of Old Fiats, part of this Old Motorcycle Wallpaper page / Revisited: The GM Concept Cars. See also Junkyard Dogs, Now Best of Breed, an NYT article on the surviving dream cars and their reunion at this year's Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance / Kanye West discovers Bertone / the Korg DS-10, a studio in your pocket.

Shanghai 2020, via Rich and Creamy. Although it seems like 2030 is the new red-ringed date on city planners' wallcharts the world over (via CoS. Also appreciate this tour of the Lyons House in Sydney by Robin Boyd) / time to revisit new projects at Fake is the New Real, including Skyscrapers over 100m Connected in Height Order and America's First Great / ephemera has an interview with book sculptor Nicholas Jones.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 11:00 / 0 comments

Prss Release: 'Weekly we collect the ten posts of the past week that we think are cool, interesting, thought provoking, funny or which are worth publishing for any other reason we come up with (or not). We put these posts in a clean readable lay-out with the appropriate credits to those of who's content we publish.' / photography by Joakim Eneroth / Bakgard, an architecture weblog / Architectural Scholar, more architecture, from a (mostly) academic viewpoint / Paris, New York, Shanghai, a gallery at tmn.

We've been taken to task by Gunpowder Magazine for our dismissal of the luxury magazine industry, accused of not understanding aspirational living. The point here is not that we don't understand aspiration - far from it - but that it seems that the majority of luxury magazines speak directly to the converted, concerned not with broadening horizons but with reinforcing the existing status quo. They're not aspirational in the traditional sense, because their readers don't need to aspire to anything. We didn't mean to be bitchy, but the contemporary luxury magazine has a finely targeted readership - check out a few rate cards. Unlike newsstand-based consumer magazines, the luxury magazine is rarely bought but stumbled over at the country club, private jet terminal or boutique hotel, a freebie for the largely undeserving. Our lament is therefore that given the presumably limitless funds, broad horizons and charged ambitions of the intended readership, why is the content and aesthetic on offer so relentlessly predictable?

Every credit to Gunpowder for being the only publication to take issue with what we wrote and respond, indicating that they're not simply cutting and pasting from the LVMH press wire. Still, we believe the sector is a missed opportunity. It is sad and ironic that 'luxury publishing' has become an aspirational market sector, the most prestigious genre to be part of. It's certainly understandable, but in a less commodified era, before brands became the cross-cultural titans they are today, art and culture was where it was at for innovative publishing. Consider a magazine like Verve, published from 1937 to 1960. Contributors included Matisse, Braque, Bonnard and Rouault, Giacometti, Joyce, Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Original copies of Verve are now highly sought after, for good reason, and the name has been adopted by an Indian magazine. It's unlikely that such a publication would be allowed to exist today. Verve's relentless, uncompromising emphasis on contemporary arts and their aesthetics was not an easy approach to take, certainly from a practical and economic standpoint. From the NYT: 'The cover of the issue dated ''Summer 1940'' was once again by Henri Matisse, and once again Matisse made color and form dance for him as they danced for no one else. (Twenty-six print runs were needed to get the colors right, by the way.)' Verve was luxury publishing before the term existed, yet it directed its readership towards new experiences, new art and art direction, abstraction and literature, not gilded objects and sybaritic stopovers. Given the amount of money that lubricates the luxury industry, is it too much to hope for a contemporary successor that breaks free of the self-imposed strictures of the genre?

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Breuer before and after, the IKEA-led compromise that saved a chunk of the original building. At NY10536 / the Fantastic Contraption, an online physics-based game. See also Phun, a '2D physics sandbox' and - a thing from the near future - levelHead, a 'spatial memory game' by Julian Oliver (video), Little Computer People meets PixelChix / Procrastineering, more techno toiling and special projects.

The Growlery, a weblog / Just Cool, collating the vapourware and design speculation rampant online / Zero-Waste blog has a more tangible sense of thing-ness to it / the Daily Grail, which currently leads with today's big story in cryptozoology, a Bigfoot corpse (unveiled and instantly debunked) / finally, a skateboarding/slo mo/explosion mash-up at Buck Macabre / i like takes a trip to The Horniman Museum / Slothrop, a weblog.

Camenzind Evolution's office for Google in Zurich is rather old fashioned in its embrace of the dotcom boom workspace aesthetic - all pods, slides, fishtanks and transplanted objects. The architects have a public Picasa gallery of the project, so you can see zoom into the image of the library and see that it has been stocked with ersatz books / more zero authenticity dwellings (ZADs): The Shire of Bend, in Oregon / Building Minnesota, architecture blog.

I am rich, neat. at wrong distance / Heathrow's Terminal 5 fights back / an animated apartment building, analogue version and digital version / remembering The Face magazine, via magCulture / Constructivism - the ism that just keeps giving / The Daily Figure. Oh to have such a command of the line.

Good to see the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony up at The Big Picture, still the widescreen version of the weblog world / the teeming void on the Olympic opening ceremony: 'The other none-too-subtle message of the opening ceremony was about technology, and specifically LEDs' / the new US Embassy complex in Beijing / the freshly glazed CCTV is genuinely remarkable, although the artifice will no doubt increase / as Olympics galleries go, this one seems to have a fairly blatant non-sporting agenda / underground Beijing / Waiting for George, our Beijing story at tmn.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 08:46 / 0 comments

Technological snake oil. There's a whole sub-genre of the electronics industry, dedicated to create machines that shape, measure, alter and enhance various physical and psychological properties. The only problem is that almost all of them operate beyond the parameters of conventional science and few can demonstrate to have any effect whatsoever on their chosen field when submitted to standard testing procedures.

So, inspired by a recent Bad Science post that took a self-publicising alternative therapist to task (Goldacre is right, this is extraordinary - a link has been deservedly me-fi'd), we've collated several of the most unusual and unlikely gadgets, manufactured and sold in what we assume is good faith.

The QXCI Quantum Xeroid Consciousness Interface EPFX joins a long line of mystery machines and quack circuit boards, topped only by the E-meter itself, and all with their origins in Wolfgang von Kempelen's Mechanical Turk (link goes to a review of a recent book by Tom Standage).

The electro-dermal diagnostic tool, or Vega Machine (more) or Dermatron (not to be confused with the Dermatron, an early electronic music device created by Bruce Haack (from wikipedia, 'a synthesizer that was played by leading an electrical current through physical contact with another person')) is at the forefront of this particular field. The Vegacheck is a good example, able to 'indicate dysfunctions which by far cannot always be detected via classical methods of examination such as x-raying, ultra sound, computer tomography or in the lab.' Bad Science is awash with stories arising out of these pieces of flaky technology, invariably backroom fringe operations that, strangely, are able to create devices to counteract the precise symptoms and issues they're campaigning against. Like this Electrosmog detector (no emotive language there, then) offered by Emfields.

Perversely, these devices for measuring invisible emissions and shifts in body chemistry have a lot in common with the marketplace for ghost detection machines, another whole subgenre of technological tomfoolery and misapplied technology. Paranormal Investigations require an armory of meters, dials and switches, a sensitive array of indicators that respond to each and every bump in the night.

A lot of this spurious equipment also has parallels with the curious world of ultra high-end hi-fi equipment - see this me-fi post, Audio Accessories for the Millionaire, plus associated links like these absurd audiophile devices. Here, companies like Machina Dynamica feature prominently. MD, who may or may not be a clever hoax, offer a range of products that promise to resolve any problems you might be having with sound reproduction, culminating in the legendary 'Teleportation Tweak', a $60 phone call that somehow changes your hi-fi set-up (although 'It is not necessary for the audio or video system to be ON at the time of the telephone call') so that it 'excels in 3-dimensionality, lushness, inner detail and air. Bonus: The picture quality of any video system in the house will also be improved - better color and contrast!'.

These 'machines that go ping' are tapping into our expectations of what technology should be able to do. Their names are pure psychology. Take the Hallograph Soundfield Optimizer, which, according to a user testimonial 'peels off a previously unobserved thin layer of glaze from the music'. Central to the apparent functionality of all these devices - be they for health, hi-fi or ghost hunting - is the apparent existence of invisible fields, thrumming and throbbing about us, altering our skin, deflecting crucial details in musical passages and generally messing us about. We'd posit that once you can mentally visualise these fields, there's an element of obsessive/compulsive disorder about your response to them, be it through buying magnetic shielding, electro magnetic trauma, wi-fi allergy, etc. etc.

In high fidelity circles, there seems to be a definite correlation between aesthetics and performance (which is sometimes justified) - when something looks more akin to a piece of lab equipment than a piece of domestic electronics, it must surely perform better. This is the trick played by the 'medical' devices, which are emotively connected to your body, hence personalising the 'responses' of the machine.

There's also an intersection with quirky audio gear, where the box-with-knob aesthetic has blossomed in recent years, thanks to analogue fetishists, the gradual expiration of original late 70s and 80s electronic equipment and the desire for strange new sounds. If you like devices like the x0xb0x, the Orion, Monome, Kaoss pad, etc. Music Thing is still the place to go to read about it or Analogue Heaven if you actually want to buy it.posted by things at 19:14 / 0 comments

DIY Sol Lewitt, at Edward Lifson / Modern Capital, mid century real estate around Washington DC / Archipreneur, an architecture weblog / Night Climbing in Cambridge, undergraduate wheezes from times gone by. See also Nightclimbers.co.uk. Via The Ten Oddest Travel Books, via the morning news / Rich People Rooftops, NYC, a trawl through penthouse living.

Words Without Pictures / RIP, Andrea Pininfarina, who died last week. Pininfarina in wikipedia, and an autocar obituary / Emmerich (via) versus Tyson (via). We're awaiting the inevitable ruin of the former.

Places of Worship in Leicester, Penguin Cookery Books and a BBC discussion about Homes for All, just three of the sets by Ned Trifle / Richard Harrington's images of an abandoned NASA trailer / RAD Library, a collection of old books / thanks to JSBlog for the mention.

We're a bit late to this whole Large Hadron Collider thing, but as ever, the most interesting element right know is the thick fog of pseudo science that surrounds the project, like the hungry black hole that might accidentally gobble up the world. Try CERN in 3 minutes.posted by things at 08:25 / 0 comments

'Dharavi.org is a multimedia wiki website designed to gather information, images, and ideas on Dharavi in Mumbai. Dharavi is one of the largest informal settlement in the world.' / epic _constructed_ photographs that exaggerate and distort the human impact on the landscape by Georg Parthen (both via Atelier A+D). More on Parthen at The Exposure Project and earlier works at Conscientious. The latter - the Multiplex series - demonstrate the human propensity for creating artificial, alien spaces. Landschaften simply takes things a step further, 'painting' with landscape in such a way that the results look real (we were initially taken in, thanks Joerg). A continuation of the romantic landscape tradition, plus a comment on our desire for manufactured environments / 15 Lombard Street, BLDGBLOG on how to rob a bank in London, a speculative artbook by Janice Kerbel.

Architectural Tourism and the Money Shot at Life without Bulidings. Martin Parr had a pop at this particular image as well: soon the new cliche to shoot will be people taking photos of people posing for photos pretending they're holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Updates will be irregular as things is in Beijing.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 10:00 / 0 comments