Tomorrow's Thoughts Today is running a symposium this weekend, 'Thrilling Wonder Stories', 'a roundtable event on speculative urban futures and the role of science fiction at the Architectural Association in London'. The event invites you to 'embark on a future safari into the brave new worlds that may evolve from our own.'

Bolerama, a site devoted to the Boler Travel Trailer, a sort of plasticky, slightly more 'pop' Airstream. More on Flickr, full of very evocative images / in browser things: ships, a Google-earth derived simulator. Which we haven't tried, but just like the idea of / Doom, and a couple of other games of that ilk. Which we did try.

Art and Architecture (the UK site, not the US magazine) has redesigned / L-13 is a new London gallery space which would like to be known as 'The L-13 Light Industrial Workshop and Private Ladies and Gentlemen's Club for Art, Leisure and the Disruptive Betterment of Culture' / dirtycanvas: the art and photography of ErinTheArtist. See also Ephemerat, a website charting a 'paper obsession' / an extract from The City & The City, the new book by China Miéville (via flavorpill).

Nostalgia, blogs, critique, infinte thought on the Abrahams article. See also Fantastic Journal's riposte, criticism not what it used to be, and The Future is Boring, a quite frenetically focused rant on the sheer drudgery, predictability and ultimately disappointing nature of the 'future'. As always, we're letting the side down by splurging fifty odd links of throwaway banalities and lovingly scanned dog-eared copies of old Expo programmes and graphic design annuals. But we don't care.

We like Schulze and Webb's Here and There project, 'maps of Manhattan look uptown from 3rd and 7th, and downtown from 3rd and 35th [that are] intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward.' Very reminiscent of the Stanford Torus, Ringworld, Halo, etc., etc., or any number of speculative futures defined by a shallow arc, endless horizon and sense of massive scale. Related, the Manhatta Project, 'have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city?'. Also related, a map from the New York World's Fair.

Arthur Erickson has died, one of the last of the late-modern iconists, a small group of post-Wrightian modernists who created buildings that were brash, angular beacons long before it became fashionable - or even de rigeur - to do so. Related, and presumably seen everywhere else, the Frank Lloyd Wright Lego set.

Public Space and its discontents / Junior: celebrating life at the bottom, a 'union for young creatives', based in Australia / Viva Print, tmners on old fashioned bits of stamped and pressed paper that still warms the cockles of their collective hearts / related, the death of print, seen through Wired's eyes in a relatively good humoured forum looking at why print is better than web, or vice versa.

Is this Mies's worst building? / My Cassette's Just Like A Bazooka?, the history of the freebie cassettes doled out by the NME in the 1980s (via haddock).

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 21:25 / 1 comments