Monthly Archives: March 2010

Perpetual motion and urban drifts

The ArcelorMittal Orbit is a bit like an explosion in a rollercoaster factory, part Tatlin, part Alton Towers. Self-consciously iconic, as all good quasi-permanent follies should be, it demonstrates the final evolution of the ‘pavilion’. It was probably the Barcelona … Continue reading

Posted in esoterica, technology | 2 Comments

Illuminating the corners

Google’s Streetview has been hard at work, and large swathes of the British Isles have now been traversed, tracked, catalogued and uploaded. This empty sweep of Dartmoor exists online for no good reason other than as a place to stumble … Continue reading

Posted in ephemera, esoterica, technology | 1 Comment

Imaginary places in which to live

Move over Poundbury: buy a house at ‘The Village at Hiddenbrooke‘, the critically-reviled development that ‘translates [Thomas] Kinkade’s artistry into a neighborhood of extraordinary design and quality’, designed by William Hezmalhalch Architects. If only Britain’s best-known artist-architect, Will Alsop, could … Continue reading

Posted in architecture | 3 Comments

Backs of things

Broken Camera, a tumblr / Death Drive, a photographic project by Dean Rogers (via The Defeatist). Sort of related, art by Simon Menner. Especially Boobytraps, Minefields, and the backs of some famous paintings / art by Paul Tebbott / Into … Continue reading

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Forests and walled gardens

There’s something profoundly unimpressive about the built-in wind turbines at the new Strata London tower. Admittedly, they’re actually real (unlike the faux turbine stylings of the abandoned Anara Tower in Dubai), and necessarily experimental, but even so the potential contribution … Continue reading

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Brand Extensions

The end of the promo copy: ‘This will further change the way people talk about those records. Traditionally reviewers weren’t just trying to communicate the pleasure of listening to something. They were also communicating the joy of possessing something. You … Continue reading

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Museums in a Box

Books in the age of the iPad, or the future of things. We’ve been offline for much of the past month so the iPad kerfuffle has largely passed us by. The consensus seems to be that this is a device … Continue reading

Posted in architecture, magazines, technology | 5 Comments

This is an image test

An image test. Right now it looks like those old posts don’t want to come into our new template (although they’re still there). The refining continues.

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Starting afresh

A little bit of history. Back when things started to mess around with the idea of a regular weblog, a medium we’d seen and much admired, Blogger seemed to be the natural choice. Before that we ran something called the … Continue reading

Posted in things magazine | Tagged , | 11 Comments

This is a test

It will no doubt be the first of many such tests, all of which are aimed at making the all-new things experience better than the old one. Apparently there are 9 years of things posts floating in the ether. They … Continue reading

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Welcome to things magazine 2.0

This will ultimately become the new home – and face – of things magazine, just as soon as we’ve sorted out all sorts of online jiggery-pokery.

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