The news that St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital in DC is to become the HQ for the US Department of Homeland Security adds another layer of mystique to the monumental structure. Whereas old asylums are almost a cliche of the Urbex movement, the new multi-million dollar DHS HQ will effectively turn the building into an enormous no-go area (or as the Washington Post headline, 'As the Feds Take Over, St. E's Moves Further Into Shadow'). Fine photograph (if real) of the former staff members at Unremitting Failure. It's obviously a tough place for urban exploration (although some shots taken on official tours are around), but the shuttered exterior is epically grim, and pretty much perfect for a Homeland Security HQ without a single architectural intervention.

London Brownfield Sites, an interactive map. Apart from providing a high-res Ordnance Survey overview of London - always useful - it's pretty hit and miss, featuring plenty of sites in our locality that have recently been developed / the title of this image-driven weblog, More Ways to Waste Time encapsulates our growing feeling about the 'ghastly good taste' of the visual internet (where instead of Betjeman's preference for architecture from 'all centuries to my own' we have no point of contemporary reference, just a mad collage of 'good work' from past decades.

A recent event that looks fabulous: the surviving members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop played a gig at London's Roundhouse. Plenty of RW info online, from the wikipedia page, a brief history at Sound on Sound, an engineering perspective at The White Files, which also has an image gallery), samples at myspace, the great page devoted to Workshop guru Delia Derbyshire, etc.

Modernism and the little magazines, the world of the small literary publication in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on the Modernist Magazines Project, an index of 40 or so modernist magazines from the period 1880-1945 (the 'so-called 'little magazines''). See also the Modernist Journals Project which contains scans of magazines, including the seminal Blast and its successor The Tyro, Robert Graves' The Owl (owl) and Le Petit Journal des Réfusées.



The Design Council image archive goes online (via CR Blog): it can be found here: Design Council Slide Collection. A fascinating collection of fragments from Britain's largely vanished industrial age, a swathe of long bankrupted industries and forgotten names, their abandoned aesthetic standards superseded by outsourced manufacturing and a pervasive global standard of 'good design' that is strangely characterless, despite the initial seductive thrill generated by visual aggregation. The toys are especially pleasing - Four toy guns in stained wood, made by Tall Tree Toys Ltd., 1969; Noah's Ark made from kit of printed cardboard (?) pieces, designed by Maureen Roffey, 1969 - and the technology typically nostalgia inducing / Police Notebooks of Charles Booth, part of the LSE's massive Charles Booth Archive.

A couple of lesser-known magazines in the Great Google cupboard: The Rotarian (which had some spectacular cover art in the early 30s, before descending into post-war whimsy) and Kiplinger's Personal Finance (via magCulture) / Star Wars Collectors' Archive / welcome to mobile Photoshop, the swift death of the idea that images from cellphone cameras could have a greater veracity than 'real' news photography.

Popshot Magazine, poetry and more / augmented reality starts to pop up (excuse the pun) in advertising material, as in this new Citroen spot / No Pattern Required, retro things / We Are Independently Wealthy, a weblog / move over Richard Scarry, the Snaeffel (via me-fi) / matt has a tumblr.

Fortune magazine covers by Antonio Petruccelli / contemporary photo-realism by Diego Gravinese (on flickr) / Pasa la Vida, a weblog / Love is a Prelude to Sorrow / Deputy Dog has shut up shop; instead, visit Letters of Note, photographs and images (occasionally nsfw).

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posted by things at 17:21 / 10 comments