The 2020 vision for developing Westminster Abbey got a lot of news coverage but precious little in the way of actual imagery was available showing what might actually happen: 'Should a new 21st century architectural feature, such as a 'corona', be added to the roof of the Abbey above the lantern to honour and celebrate the place of Coronation?' While a little bit of the Sagrada Familia's absurd unfinished spirit wouldn't go amiss in Westminster (and Westminster Cathedral was never finished either), the rather literal idea of putting a 'crown' atop a building where people are crowned should be pleasantly controversial. Would Prince Charles have a potential conflict of interest?

Photography by Kai-Uwe Schulte-Bunert / photography by Marc Steinmetz (via) / retro calculators for your iPhone / related, 'Giving up my iPod for a Walkman: 'I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.' / now this is a proper conspiracy / on Christiana / dramatising the skyscraper, the ledge at Sears Tower (official site) / photography blog by Joseph Casciano.

Scrivener looks like a fabulous tool. This windows equivalent, Liquid Story Binder XE just seems horrifically complicated. There's also supernotecard, StoryView, PageFour and RoughDraft, which appears to be rather old. More information on supernotecard over at the Quantum Storytelling weblog, and also in this post by Steven Johnson, all about DEVONthink. Nothing seems terribly straightforward though. No-one does exactly what we want. This question also seems relevant.

What Alice Found, a weblog / My Migraines, a weblog / Daily Discoveries on Design / yet more from Mr Levine: General Motors Futurama New York World's Fair 1939-1940, ATT Fun and the Fair New York World's Fair 1964-1965, Observatory - Empire State Building.

Labels: architecture, software, writing

posted by things at 16:59 / 1 comments

Fifteen images of not so secret secret service buildings, a light-hearted round-up of the architecture of information. Related, "Everyone is becoming like a Stasi agent", Moolies on information technology and privacy: '.... anything out of the norm is ripe for being filmed, photo'd and commented upon. Each little cluster of social activity surrounding a slightly unusual event is somewhat akin to far too many people dialling 999 around the scene of an accident.'

This segues nicely into the introduction to Douglas Rushkoff's new book Life Inc. ('How the World Became A Corporation and How To Take It Back'). 'It's as if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward self-interested, short-term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate share-holders than members of a society.' There's a link between this slow infusion of corporatism into every day life and way of thinking and the 'clusters of social activity' described above. One facilitates the other, providing the technological backbone that enables social technology, as well as the structures that shape our response to this information. On a global scale, the patterns that emerge through Zeitgeist or even the email logs of a multi-national corporation illustrate how easily the global unconscious is expressed through information. As a result, it's increasingly easy to audit cultural responses.

Also related (and much linked, for good reason), Adam Curtis's new BBC-hosted weblog, The Medium and the Message. The filmmaker has created some of the most powerful documentaries of recent years, with a breathtaking visual style that takes what at base level appears to be MTV-like cuts and reappropriations and flows them seamlessly into narrative and music so that pictures act as a narrative all of their own. It's very powerful stuff, and undeniably manipulative for it (although probably self-consciously so). You can see almost his entire back catalogue at Archive.org (scroll down for links).

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Random link round up. Mags McGinnis, formerly of Laika, makes candles, practices law and plays guitar in Wire / Being Tyler Brule, the man made weblog / M.Inc, a design weblog / Sam Haskins' photoblog (some nudity) / Don't be a coconut, a music weblog / Ryan's Neat Stuff Blog, mostly old comics and things / the Victorinox edition Airstream (via autoblog) / seier + seier + seier's flickr stream is notable not just for the beautiful architectural imagery, but for the extended and highly informative captions.

Owen Luder is now getting his Rubble Club deluxe membership fleshed out: Southgate Shopping Centre, Bath and the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth / designing the friendly skies, an old aviation nostalgia-fest / the best 'boring postcard' ever? / Le Corbusier - Chapelle Ronchamp, Notre-Dame du Haut 1950-1955 / thank goodness for people with large, well-organised flickr streams, like Steve Cadman and Sandro Maggi.

If Famous Architecture Were Priced Like Paintings, a Le Corbusier Would Cost the Same as the Entire American GDP / go on, Fix Outlook / Heavy Metal of a different kind, photographer Anthony Oliver on tractor badges in Eye / more on Polaroid and a possible antecedent to the classic SX-70 camera uncovered by Mrs Deane.

Disappointingly small gallery of historic roller coasters (via, where there are better links) / Coast Modern is a new documentary about the modern house on America's West Coast. Should be interesting to see moving images of dwellings that have long been canonised through epic photography (Shulman in particular).

'Ghost village to be demolished', the story of Pollphail at Portavadie. Check the photography of this never-inhabited village, taken by Philippa Elliot. There's more about Pollphail at Secret Scotland / hive mind ADD. On 25 June 4 of the 10 top search terms were directly Michael Jackson related. By 27 June, Jackson had dropped to only two mentions in the top 50, the first at number 25.

We're looking forward to the BLDGBLOG book / Werner Aisslinger's Loftcube, a media celebrity project from a few years back, gets several more minutes of fame at PhotoshopDisasters / it's a shame that bad British Architecture isn't reeling off the vitriol on a daily (hourly?) basis - there's too much material there for it to stay idle.

Labels: architecture, conspiracy, future, linkage

posted by things at 08:00 / 1 comments

A good point made in this interview with Dian Hanson, Taschen's 'Sexy books editor' at wallpaper.com: 'I worry about what legacy modern photographers [will] leave, having worked their entire careers in digital.' The physical archives that lurk in boxes, chests and slide drawers around the world will cease to exist as singular, unique entities. Instead, archives will become portable and impermanent, flash drives that contain a life's work, from cast-off shots to multi-layered Photoshop 'work prints', fonts, to-do lists, bookmarks, clipped jpgs, corrupted files and downloaded mp3s. The idea of restoring or reconstructing an artistic studio environment - see the LIFE series Artists At Work - becomes a question of retaining computer hardware and running the necessary back-ups.

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A chaotic jumble of things. I Love Traffic, 'a game about cars' (via rps) / Hidden Los Angeles, a new website / Bildbauten, a project by Philipp Schaerer / Urban Camping / check the feast of electronic samples at famous sounds (via haddock) / Design and the Media, how work gets published, in Dwell / Eagle House, a high tech curiosity, is for sale / Mike Dempsey's weblog Graphic Journey has an exceptional piece on the designer Derek Birdsall.

New 'affordable' art at the Modern British Gallery / related, furniture at The Modern Warehouse / Who goes to a creationist museum? Related, Genesis Expo in Portsmouth, the UK's biggest (only?) creationist museum / on 'Framing Modernism' at the Estorick Collection, an 'exhibition [that] shows how adroit the [Italian fascist] regime was at deploying modernism to put an elegant gloss on its brutality.'

Dezeen have kindly collated every single story they've ever done on Zaha Hadid, an orgy of extravagant (albeit largely imaginary) structural exuberance and highly evolved rendering software. Not long now, we reckon, before the Hadid office rolls out a prefab, probably not looking a million miles from the mini-icon, something along the lines of the absurd Libeskind prefab. This is either a not-so-subtle deconstruction of the notion that pre-fabricated needs to be boxy and boring, or a tacit acknowledgment that this kind of architecture is, first and foremost, about making a statement, form over function.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 13:00 / 0 comments

While this Telegraph piece praising Prince Charles' intervention in the Chelsea Barracks saga is superficially very depressing ('Chelsea Barracks: Thanks to Prince Charles for meddling', don't read the comments), what's most annoying is the way in which the piece doesn't bother to engage with the real driving forces behind the highs and lows of the now-abandoned Rogers Stirk Harbour scheme; the economy.

When the sale of the Barracks was first mooted in 2005, the stakes weren't quite as high: according to BBC News, 'The 13-acre prime building land could raise as much as £250m from residential or retail development.' The actual price realised, claimed to be £900m in April 2007 (£959m in January 2008), making it 'the UK's most expensive home property deal.' This put a tremendous pressure on the new owners to maximise the site to get any sort of return on their investment.

Initially, this didn't seem like much of a problem. The property firm that brokered the deal and subsequently (and probably fatally) lent their very slightly louche image to the whole project was Candy and Candy, then on the ascendance as purveyors of absurdly OTT apartments, houses, yachts and helicopters. One Hyde Park, developed in conjunction with RSH, is generally considered to be the apogee of hedge funded architectural hedonism. As was noted back in 2007, the Barracks sale was proof that London's 'housing market has hit a new high' (the original whizzy flash site to publicise the sale is here). The C+C moolah factory merely stirred a heady dose of schadenfreude into the mix.

But then the market plunged, and the ire aroused by the site and the plans inevitably rose. The economic need to fit on large quantities of housing to cater to both C+C's high-end clientele and the affordable quota demanded by Westminster resulted in a fairly dense bit of architecture, with tall blocks crowding apparently dark, gloomy streets. Arguably, RSH didn't handle the presentation terribly well, with a relatively bland set of documentation that failed to stress the improvements to the townscape beyond superficial rendered imagery. Instead, the CADs unfortunately emphasised the rather more dominant issues of massing and facade treatment. A second submission seems to have solved these issues, but we'll never know.

There are many rich paradoxes in the whole saga. The rather austere image at the head of this post - the sort of thing that induces twitches in any good urban explorer - is a picture of the original barracks, built on open fields east of the Royal Hospital. Undeniably hefty, as all good Victorian buildings should be, they were designed by George Morgan and demolished in 1960, replaced by an undistinguished piece of early 1960s banality, since flattened, by Tripe and Wakeham (which would be a fabulous name for a firm of undistinguished 1960s architects if they weren't still around). T+W crop up elsewhere around the country, in Stockwell (via urban 75) and also in Liverpool (via infinite thought), where they designed the marginally more interesting Royal and Sun Alliance building a few years later (another image, by Aidan O'Rourke). The only bit of Morgan's original 1863 building to survive was the chapel (pdf), turned down for listing and not retained in the RSH scheme.

In opening up the site with an expansive parade ground, Tripe and Wakeham gave this bit of London back some open space, yet the return to hefty terracotta facades was one of the key bones of contention. In very basic terms, Modernism opened up the closed Victorian city, but objectors, from HRH downwards, believe it would be far better to have a bit of opened-up-neo-Victoriana-Georgiana rather than a 'brutalist' and 'communist' piece of contemporary design. The site is also right on the edge of Kensington and Chelsea, the Royal Borough with one of the country's most vociferous planning departments. RBKC objected to the scheme's proximity to Wren's Royal Hospital (which, according to the report, had no objection to the scheme).

Given that the RSH scheme has been binned, you have to pity the poor case officer at Westminster Planning who wrote up the 121-page document for the planning meeting on Thursday 18 June 2009 (download the pdf here). In it, the council is broadly supportive of the scheme, concluding:

'Officers consider the scheme in terms of both the masterplan and detailed design to be one of exceptional high quality. They are mindful, however, that the scale of the development and design approach has been contentious from the outset. Whilst CABE and Westminster Society are generally supportive, there remains strong opposition to it from some consultees including English Heritage, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the Belgravia Residents' Association and many residents, either individually or through the Barracks Action Group [of 496 letters received, 435 were letters of objection]. Further, following the recent interest in the proposal shown by HRH the Prince of Wales there has been much debate in the national and technical press and there are divergent views amongst the architectural profession on the design merits of the scheme. There has also been a growing groundswell of public opinion against the design.... It is considered that when compared to the inappropriate and disjointed collection of 1960s buildings on the site and the austere appearance of its Victorian predecessor, the proposed development, by a combination of its architecture, generous open space and treatment of spaces between buildings, will significantly enhance the immediate townscape.'

Oh well. The whole thing was scuppered from the start, a combination of class envy, conservatism and politics. Ironically, the Duke of Westminster's comments last year were probably more troubling to the site's owners (Qatari Diar Real Estate), especially given his position as owner of the neighbouring Grosvenor Estate, a role that keeps him in the top spots of the rich lists. Charles's property holdings are small fry by comparison.

One can only hope that Quinlin Terry's [sic] back-of-envelope scrawl (a piece of theatrical underdogism that played well with the Luddite) has been worked up slightly more than as presented to the world (via, and actually drawn by Francis Terry). Major pieces of neo-classicism are relatively thin on the ground in Britain, but with each new commission the stakes get raised a little higher. As Terry Jr recently wrote, while reviewing the Royal Academy's Palladio exhibition: 'with most great architects, say Le Corbusier, Lutyens or Mies, their own greatness is indisputable but their followers are an embarrassment.' We watch the site with interest.

Labels: architecture, London

posted by things at 22:25 / 0 comments

The neat conflation of several of this site's key concerns: ruins, architecture, ephemera and modern history, at The Rubble Club, 'an organisation to remember buildings demolished in their architect's lifetime... We have three key ground rules: Firstly the building's architect must be alive and not party to its destruction, secondly the building must be built with the intention of permanence (exhibitions, shops and interiors are not eligible), and thirdly it must be deliberately destroyed or radically altered, it can't simply burn down.' (BBC News). As yet there's no entry on Owen Luder, who should win some kind of Rubble Club Life Membership Grand Wizard Award (the Tricorn Centre, Gateshead Car Park, etc. etc.).

There's potential for this to be a nice little database, along the lines of a slightly-too-late Risky Buildings, but it also exists as a supreme example of the perpetual architectural rant against callous, uneducated, ungrateful humanity. It would be somewhat churlish of us to link to the Berners Pool by Hodder Associates and recall the Clissold fiasco. But we have. The most generous conclusion is that a certain strain of contemporary architecture is badly briefed, poorly tendered, detailed ineffectively and then incompetently constructed. As a result, we expect the Rubble Club's membership to be positively overwhelmed in the years to come.

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Aimless pleasures of psychogeography, Joe Moran on low-key strands of online psychogeographical exploration (also published in the New Statesman). Mentioned in the post: The Manchester Zedders, The Loiterers Resistance Movement, Remapping High Wycombe and John Davies. The world is gradually being divided into 'drifters' who are happy to see where the world takes them and their polar opposite ('drivers'?) who are desperate to know absolutely everything about where they're going before they've even set off.

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The Fiat-ization of the American male: 'Even though Chrysler will probably continue to make big cars for macho American dudes, the magical Euro-weeniness of the name "Fiat" alone will cause them to figuratively shrink.' The piece is something of a stick poking at the wasp's nest of the American Right, which swarms predictably. But then again, look at the country's best-selling car. What's more interesting is how the national stereotypes associated with cars have been exaggerated by branding in recent years, despite the fact that the global sharing of technological, engineering and design talent is higher than ever before.

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More ruins. The abandoned palaces of Saddam Hussein, images by Richard Mosse, via me-fi. Somewhere, there is a palace architect lamenting the insensitive partitioning of his ornate ballrooms and the destruction of his grand staircases / can you trademark a chocolate rabbit? / new sculptures by James M.Harrison / illustration by Tyson Anthony Roberts / product design at Made Bath / something we missed last time round, virtual realities by NL Architects (official site).

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 15:00 / 2 comments

Why are ruins so inherently fascinating? Is it really about rampant nostaglia? How you can be nostalgic for something you've never experienced? The romance of ruins applies equally to the creeper-strewn columns and porticos of the long-lost ancient city as it does to the rust-spattered girders and empty machine halls of forgotten industry. Artificial Owl is a good name for a website. So is Bearings. An apparently abandoned submarine (seems to be still powered up, so probably just mothballed, rather than abandoned).

The usual collection of image link blogs and tumblrs: Ablest Image; Ephemera Assembly (exceptional); Re-think; the white ship; Brief Epigrams; Sara Zucker. Ultimately, what sites like tumblr are resulting in the slow death of attribution, with trails dying swiftly like tracks in the sand. E.g. nearly 550 pages of things (some of which are nsfw).

A fine round-up of Op-ed pieces on Why GM failed, collated by Kottke. Just about every reason under the sun, really. Related, Production Cars, a vast collection of scanned adverts and brochures

Underground Cities and Bunkers: Living Down Below / Decommissioned: Turnstile Nuclear Bunker / The Japanese Village at the Nevada Test Site (pdf) / productivity destroyer: Crush the Castle / the official website of Ghosts of the Civil Dead, made in the late 80s but revisited in 2005 / @Paris, a photographic competition.

Moving Cities, 'a Beijing-based think-thank investigating the role that architecture and urbanism play in shaping the contemporary city' / movies in frames, reducing cinema down to its essence. Sort of related, runpee.com (via) / Staying Put on Earth, Taking a Step to Mars, with a great gallery.

Wayfarer, a retro dungeon-foraging type game (via), very reminiscent of the old Spectrum game Out of the Shadows. From an April 1985 article on the game's developers: 'The next game will be releasing is going to incorporate a naturalistic landscape, displayed from a projection. The closer you get to, say, a coastline, the more detail you will see. To do this, they will be using the same sort of mathematical techniques, involving fractal numbers, as the programs on the Cray II to produce animated landscapes.' Now this is nostalgia: ZX Spectrum classics. Play them here (including OOTS).

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 08:53 / 1 comments

Jonathan Schipper's Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle is very reminiscent of Chris Burden, especially his 1985 piece 'Samson', a machine designed to destroy the gallery it is exhibited in: 'a turnstile connected to a gearbox and a 100-ton jack, the latter pushing against the ends of two giant timbers wedged between the outer walls of the museum. Every visitor to the show, passing through the turnstile, pushes the museum's walls a little farther apart.' (source, Outrageous Acts Give Way to Eccentric Sculpture, NYT, 24.09.11). Video. 'Real slowly, each person coming into the museum is helping this jack to expand.'

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Objects and accumulations. From a recent Guardian piece, As I love them, so my dad loved me: 'Frankly, I still can't face properly sorting out all the old photographs, memorabilia and cuttings. What do you do with the mementos of someone who has died? I can't even bring myself to throw away his old school reports (terrible ones!) or photographs of long-ago weddings of relatives whom I don't know. I am no longer surprised that there are people out there who will do it for you for money. It occurred to me what a burden we may be putting on our children, who will inherit our vast digital archives.' And what about the future? Will we have digital house clearance specialists who will come and sift through your files,

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How does American Apparel make money? 'If you trace the textile industry it is a timeline of the development of world economies, first the South, then Mexico, China and now Vietnam.' / paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal / photography by Sophie Brasey / Photocartographies: Tattered Fragments of the Map.


Yet more from David Levine's photostream: The Port of San Francisco Annual Report 1938 - 1940 and LOOK's Guide to the New York World's Fair 1964-1965 / Knitting Pattern Handsome, self-acknowledged nostalgia / Never had a dream come true..., a visual collage of alt culture references, clips, vids and scans / SGIstuff, a 'source for SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) related information on the web since 2001'.

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Small scale iconism, the Living Architecture project (related story in Building Design). There's a blog as well. There's something inherently frustrating about this approach, opening up so many questions about the role and definition of 'modern' design, as well as who it is actually aimed at. Helmed by Alain de Botton (he of The School of Life, amongst other things), the resulting projects, by Peter Zumthor, Jarmund Vigsnaes and Nord, amongst others, presents a strange mix of chic holiday home, modernist utopia and show house. This self-conscious definition of contemporary architecture marks it out as a place of otherness and aspiration, 'retreats' designed to elevate the senses and the spirit on a very temporary basis. There is no room for the prosaic or the ordinary, effectively broadening the gulf between architecture and non-architecture (as architects tend to see it), or, in other words, keeping the good stuff bottled up and out of reach.

Labels: architecture, art, things

posted by things at 09:00 / 0 comments

Nostalgia is no substitute for criticism, a response part II (see yesterday's post). Nostalgia undoubtedly exists, and some sites fuel it more than others. But what's far more interesting - certainly in terms of design - is the reliance of contemporary architecture and design journals - on and off line - on the striking image as a means of snaring eyeballs and gathering clicks. There's nothing retro or nostalgic whatsoever about the churn rate in contemporary design imagery, a cottage industry that demands constant reinvention, novelty, form and drama.

Here, by way of illustration and in no particular order, is a tiny fraction of the various outlets for 'creative work' currently seeking fresh content: Dezeen / ArchDaily / Design Crisis / but does it float / we make money not art / Cool Hunting / Apartment Therapy / MoCo Loco / Architectural Review / AnArchitecture / AMNP / Blueprint / Icon / Inhabitat / Ace Jet 170 / Cosas Visuales / ArchiSpass / design work life / print and pattern / Swiss Miss / Better Living Through Design / Notcot.org / etc. etc. Or just look here. Or here.

Admittedly, these sites offer varying degrees of depth when it comes to actually commenting on what they post. Some generate new content, others are happy to simply recycle (usually crediting when they do, sending you off along a click-driven path). More than ever before, contemporary architecture exists to be seen, consumed via a through choice images, rather than actually experienced.

The impact is twofold; not only does this turnover vastly raise public consciousness and awareness of new design, but it also encourages the design and construction of miniature icons, houses that can be consumed with a single glance and not understood on anything other than a superficial level. A critical position? Gestural, theatrical architecture has gained a vast following in just a couple of years, raising expectations about the role of modern residential design. Yet the desire to make an impact - on the street, the page or the site - has largely overshadowed more thoughtful, less photogenic approaches.

We also wanted to take issue with the idea that criticism and complexity don't exist online. If you want denser writing, simply click through some of Owen's links: Infinite Thought, the box tank, Design with Intent, it goes on and on. Critical thinking is not the preserve of magazines, just as a fascination with the past - and the presentation, cataloguing and collection of the past - is not a sign of gravid nostalgia.

And another thing. We're not in a position to write of magazines just yet (far from it), but comments seem to be largely in favour of more eclectism, connectivity and randomness, something many more established print publications are in no position to provide. As Stephanie writes in the comments: 'I think this process creates a lot of unease for people who are used to having the exalted position of information curation to themselves, to having mainline control of ways of seeing and understanding. Their reign is at sunset.' We need more collections of life guard chairs and ice cream vans, not less.

Ironically enough, the latter post, at Fantastic Journal, was about celebrating the 'DIY qualities' of the vans (and their chimes) yet didn't cite an early enthusiast for the genre, Reyner Banham himself. Banham is quoted here in Naomi Stead's thesis, The Rocket-Baroque Phase of the Icecream Vernacular: On Reyner Banham's Criticism of Architecture and Other Things (a Tom Wolfe-esque titled pdf, also available in the writings section of her own site):

'As an example [of design practices that do not employ drawings, such as those based on patterns, or on direct, applied adjustment at the time of manufacture] Banham describes the case of ice cream vans, which he describes as 'the biggest invisible objects in residential Britain', the design and manufacture of which were, at the time and place of his writing, dominated by a single company. He describes the way that this firm operates entirely without drawings or 'design' as such, but nevertheless produces remarkably sophisticated 'styled' objects, drawing inflections from popular culture such that there is an identifiable 'Rocket-Baroque phase', influenced by the aesthetic of the space race and of Batman.'

The original essay is included in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham, published in 1996. There might not be anyone 'replicating the work of the Venturi's in Las Vegas or Reyner Banham in Los Angeles', to quote Blueprint once again. But if Banham were alive today (and the Venturi's were 40 years younger), you can be certain that their explorations of the built environment would be mediated not just by the built environment and the ephemera of pop cultural production, but by the myriad ways these things are collated, observed and curated online.

Stead again: 'in Banham's terms it is precisely those things we consume and then toss aside that define our contemporary culture, and in his attempt to make journalistic writing as current and disposable as the things that he wrote about, Banham also approached a kind of durability, even timelessness.'

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Just to stay predictable: burning opera house. Everyone used their 'end of iconism' line last time a signature building went up in smoke / David Levine continues to stuff his flickr stream full of interesting things. Does this mean Tate Modern is nostalgic about the Soviet Union? See also ephemera assemblyman, and his startling collection of Russian Revolutionary Periodicals 1905-1906.

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A beautiful 1920 guide to drawing stylised animals / Dan Baum's tour of journalism's sausage factory, kottke collates part of an article disseminated, infuriatingly, via twitter / Still lives by Diarmuid Kelley / Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas, Allison Arieff on the work of Steven M. Johnson.

Labels: architecture, things

posted by things at 20:47 / 0 comments

The current issue of Blueprint Magazine (issue 279) has a comment piece on the growth in 'self-published architectural criticism' by Tim Abrahams, the magazine's associate editor. Arguing that 'many of these blogs are purely indulgent retrospection', Abrahams cites things magazine as a prime offender in this new era of digital navel-gazing, a self-contained environment of cross-linking and shared gawping at 'visual effluvia, a flotsam and jetsam of jpegs'. 'Inherent in the system is writing in isolation and then linking with other bloggers. In architecture and design, this search for consensus is creating a general attitude of nostalgia, which is pathetic at a time when the future is up for grabs. If you cannot agree on the present what chance do you have about agreeing on the future? Far better, it seems, to concentrate on the past. Not in any critical way of course, but by designating some grainy images as interesting. Probably of a John Carpenter film. Or Poundbury. If the future is frightening, retreat from it.'

Nothing exists in isolation, but we feel it's important to point out that we're not criticism, we're curation, an (ongoing) attempt at navigating the ongoing and potentially endless transfer of analogue information into the digital realm. It's true, a lot of this stuff is giddy-making, some of it is even dull, and we admit to occasionally feeling 'entertained, a bit poorer and none the wiser' on a regular basis. But this website is not a 'slow retreat from the future' - far from it. It's actually the chronicling of the creation of the systems and knowledge and structures that will underpin the future on an ever increasing basis.

things grew out of a fascination with objects, at a time (1994), when there was no virtual realm to speak of, and little hint that it would be not just text, but physical representations, imagery, ephemera and memories that would soon start accumulating at exponential rates. Nonetheless, the point about the web 'becoming a medium for nostalgia' is highly valid, an issue that becomes more and more apparent. The sheer density of ephemera sometimes threatens to overwhelm cultural production, chasing away original thought and turning everything into a visual quotation from something else.

Right now, people want a visual internet; we sense a slight depression in interest in relentless, link-heavy, text-driven weblogs. As striking imagery becomes the dominant mode of communicating ideas - the relentless reel of the tumblelog, for example - texts are too easy to disregard unread. Our traffic spikes on the rare occasions when ffffound finds some image from our archives (I, II, III), or when we lead with a slice of grainy jpeg nostalgia. Otherwise, it seems that stats are down, month on month, sliced and diced by the exponential growth in competition, or, more likely, by the gradual realisation that any more information, imagery, links or comments is not automatically good, but just so much noise that can easily be filtered out.

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A case in point. This set of scans of the Big Book of Cattle Brands is a fascinating object, a collection of the unique brands that marked one cattle herd from another. To look at these scans is not a negative nostalgic experience. True, it serves little functional purpose, save for historians of the era or those interested in the etymology of brands and brand culture. We can't simply ignore such a thing. All collections, be they real or virtual, convey a message about the collectors and viewers. The hunger for ephemera, in all its forms, is surely indicative of a broader cultural shift. That shift is what things was created to discover.

Labels: architecture, criticism, things

posted by things at 16:15 / 3 comments

LSE Pamphlet Collection (via haddock). See especially the section on housing, which illustrates that contemporary concerns about planning, style and policy are actually nothing new. From 'Castles in the Street', from a wartime series called 'Design for Britain', calling for greater attention to quality, space and greenery in new housing for all classes. 'It is preposterous that it should be possible to "tell at a glance" whether a block of flats or a street of houses is working-class or middle-class; the section of society to inhabit the homes should have no bearing whatsoever on their architecture and general planning'. And yet style became inextricably bound to class identity.

A modern way to think about the modernists, an extract from Owen Hatherley's new book, Militant Modernism, laments the lack of socially progressive architecture and the retrospective application of a dull veneer of failure over the aspirations of the modern movement. With the 'icons' of modernism being fetishised and fawned over, Hatherley writes that 'modernism is proclaimed, again, to be too good for the worker (or the "underclass"), and is left for the affluent to play with.'

Mr H has swiftly carved a niche as an informed commentator on social housing, both from the perspective of its role as a totem of heroic/brutal failure (depending on your viewpoint), and the way mass housing projects are now kicked around between politics and aesthetics, with any sense of wider social purpose overlooked in the scramble to preserve and gentrify (or demolish and start again from privately-funded scratch). In Penthouse and Pavement, a recent Guardian piece on Sheffield's Park Hill Estate, now in the agonising process of being Urban Splashed, he notes that the looming block is 'an overwhelming reminder of what the city once wanted to be - the capital of the socialist republic of South Yorkshire, rather than what it wants to be now, a local service-industry centre.'

Most of the time, the debate about the need for more, better, denser housing remains mired in aesthetic squabbles, ably illustrated by lists like 15 housing projects from hell (via kottke), a peculiar mix of social housing megastructures, unbuilt conceptual designs and large scale private housing. Optimism and dystopianism blend into one.

Obligatory flickr sets: Council Estate of Mind; London Council and Social Housing; Council and Social Housing; Council Estate Maps; Social Housing from France and Beyond and the related, but not entirely relevant, Finisterre (and Geoffrey Fletcher's London). The above image, Sheffield 1982: Hyde Park and Park Hill, comes from Simon_K's photostream. There's also an impressive set of Sheffield pictures here, with a dedicated Park Hill section.

Castles in the Street again: 'The war on the slums has still to be waged, and along with it war on the potential slums. War on the jerry-builder, war on the shoddy little bungalows, on the pseudo-Tudor, and the whole creeping sickness of the cheap-and-nasty.'

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Other things. Article title straight from Wes Anderson, 'The Preppy, Eclectic Dorm Room of Drew University Senior Maximilian Sinsteden. 'By the time Sinsteden was 12 years old, he’d redecorated most of the rooms in his parents’ house a few times, and had started in on the guest bedrooms of family friends. He had a precocious understanding of the perfect detail.'

We love the Bombardier B-12 / N-word dilemma bounces on for Dam Busters II, cultural sensitivity and historical accuracy collide, messily / Retail Facility, buy products designed by Industrial Facility (review) / an exhibition of Carlo Mollino's (nsfw) polaroids.

The illustrations of John Hanna, at Asbury and Asbury, via MagCulture. Also liking Dodge or Fall?, 'See if you can tell the difference between a corporate tax avoidance scheme and a Fall song title'.

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 10:09 / 0 comments

Stop Smiling magazine / Mananarama, 'tomorrow never came', a weblog about architecture and things in Mexico in particular, e.g. this post on the devastating 1985 Mexico City Earthquake (wikipedia) / photographer Cristobal Palma in the Falkland Islands for Monocle magazine / China's Grand Plans for Eco-Cities Now Lie Abandoned, delving deeper into the Dongtan deception, if deception is what it was, rather than just over-ambition.

David Levine has scanned huge quantities of old Expo pavilion brochures from the 1950s and 1960s (example) / images of Saint-Denis by Frederic Fontenoy (rest of site is nsfw) / a selection of emulated old drum machines / the Audiotool / kottke presents a selection of recent media packaging mash-ups.

Colin Pantall's photography blog / Fortune Magazine once had art direction pretty much sewn up / the 1970s house lovers pool / architecture, art and design criticism from Naomi Stead / alternative architectural education practices explored in learning architecture / the BBC is running a Changing Cityscapes series looking at the local impact of high profile (iconic?) architecture on cities around the UK.

The Mudhoney Tourbook, 'an attempt to catalog all of Mudhoney's live performances, as well as the live performances of selected Mudhoney-related bands' / I Heart Noise, band biographies and discographies.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 10:58 / 1 comments

Chelsea Barracks: which design do you prefer?. It's traditionalist zombies versus modernist spin-doctors. But as Gabion points out, 'The Rogers Stirk Harbour design at Chelsea Harbour is Not. Very. Good. In fact, it is Shockingly Bad. So far as one can tell from the limited images available, it is a dog's breakfast worthy of Kanine Krunchies.' It's not Chelsea Harbour, of course, but some good points raised. Ideological battle lines are being drawn all over again, traditional versus modern, left versus right (e.g. The Indepedent (predictably pro-Rogers) versus The Telegraph (predictably pro-Charles)).

Both sides miss the point posed in the Gabion piece - this is an over-priced site that is now totally unable to pay for itself in the current economic climate, meaning that any architectural proposal, regardless of style, will be inevitably flawed. Ed West in the Telegraph is especially myopic, calling Rogers' plans 'post-modern starchitecture' and stating that 'even the Lloyd's building is at best considered interesting and should have been stuck outside of a historical baroque area'. He also claims that the 'terrible [architectural] vandalism' of Coventry began in the 1930s, when most people would point out that 14 November 1940 was a far more inauspicious date for the city's architecture.

Back to the source. A review of Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture, with Hatherley on the wisdom of revisiting Corb through a contemporary lens, 'the Modernist notion of the architect as improver of mankind's lot is replaced by the superstar designer of three-dimensional logos'. Ultimately, he concludes that it is 'the architect who transformed buildings for communal life from mere filing cabinets into structures of raw, practically sexual physicality, then forced these bulging, anthropomorphic forms into rigid, disciplined grid' who is more interesting, if less influential, than the iconic late-period Corb currently in vogue (and usually overlooked by the zombie faction). The worst thing about this 'battle of the styles' is that it's not in the least bit entertaining; both sides of the argument are simultaneously dour and myopic, capable of being fogged by dogma and hidden agenda.

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Zumthor imagery collections: Kunsthaus Bregenz; Bruder Klaus Kapelle; Kolumba Museum (via Archinect) / thrillingly miserable flickr set of images taken in Cardiff at night / The 98th Parallel, an epic post at A456 on Frontiers, great piles of buffalo skulls and boundary making.

Today's challenge: find the Car Garden on Google Earth. Check the thread for updates / related, a dead pixel in google earth / Curatorial Chaos, 'An annotated daily photo project taking place in Providence, RI' / small ritual, a weblog / paintings by Stephen Dinsmore, especially this one / the Wolds Print Studio / An Army of Adas, inspiration women in technology.

J.J. Abrams on the Magic of Mystery, from the great-looking Wired 17.05 (ironically timed just right to raise the bar ever higher above Wired UK - although arguably this story demonstrates the influence of Abrams/Lost chic) / reductivist paintings by Michael van Ofen (via 2 or 3 things I know).

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 16:45 / 3 comments

David Hepworth on What really killed Maxim (via magCulture) - the idea that the current fashion for ultra-photoshopped imagery has essentially sucked the life - and eroticism - out of a genre that was once a license to print money. 'It's years since any of the pictures in any of these magazines had even the faintest erotic charge. All the girls have got the same straight hair, the same make-up and the same pouty lips, appear to have been photographed in the same un-specific context and, where the thighs have been slimmed, the spots excised and the eyes whitened, are eventually bathed in that same Venusian sheen that leaves them looking as alluring as a pair of cable-knit tights.' Compare and contrast with old issues of Playboy, and take a stop-off at Photoshop Disasters on the way to see how the human form has become utterly debased and distorted.

Clive Thompson on Etsy: a Revolution in Micromanufacturing: 'Indeed, as this market evolves, the physical world is going to be increasingly customized—built to your specs by craftspeople. Etsy now runs a service that lets you describe something you want—a pair of pants, a shoulder bag, a table—and how much you'll pay, then artisans can offer to make it for you.'

The time travel cheat sheet, via me-fi / see also Unbelievable Time Required to Cover Immense Distances of Space, at Modcult, via A Whole Lotta Nothing / how to build a futuristic city in under 10 minutes / the simple pleasures of objects, a post at metacool / Teen-Age Booby Trap, an American anti-drug comic from 1970.

Caterina gives some background on the topics, questions and correlations that have emerged so far in Hunch's beta period. 'People who have broken a leg like video games such as Madden NFL 09 and NBA 2K9, whereas non-leg-breakers prefer Little Big Planet, Katamari Damacy, Super Mario Galaxy and World of Goo'.

Google's latest: News Timeline and Similar Images (e.g. Villa Savoye), which effectively kills sites like TinEye (see our earlier post on TinEye). In practice, Similar Images works best as a way of tracking how a particular press shot or wire picture gets disseminated and reproduced again and again and again. Choose something more abstract (e.g. bamboo) and you get a slightly more interesting selection.

Breaking down the mix of content and advertising: anti-mega on UK Wired / Urban Design for Google Earth, a post at an-architecture on designing for the bigger picture. See also this post on the growing trend for rooftop advertising to tap into Google Earth.

The Blascka glass flower collection at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, a flickr set from Curious Expeditions / New York's New Architecture by Fortune 1964, a flickr set / patterns and textiles at Neville Trickett's flickr stream / Unusual Books, a weblog (quite nsfw in places).

All about the envelope, one of those absurdly comprehensive wikipedia articles / Crimes Against Music, a weblog by Ben Sisario, with a fine collection of monster-about-to-chomp-babe posters / The Arting Starvist, a weblog by a painter / Invincible Cities, a 'visual encyclopaedia of the American ghetto' by photographer Camilo Jose Vergara.

The Art Cave at Archinect / real estate schadenfreude continues almost daily at Luxist, where the beautiful homes of conmen, embezzlers and proponents of Ponzi schemes are regularly placed on the market and wither and depreciate before your eyes / what does the downturn mean for the pavilion? Will the fashion for temporary architecture-art as architecture-sculptural architecture evaporate as swiftly as it arrived? Will there be more desire for the tangible over the fantastic? More starchitect backlash: more at AMNP / Visualising MPs' Expenses Using Scatter Plots, Charts and Maps / Not even prostitution is immune to economics of supply, demand.

Labels: architecture, media, things

posted by things at 12:00 / 0 comments

Zion on the Prairie, the architecture of a very particular kind of utopia, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). An article by Adam Marcus on the environment created by this briefly notorious polygamist sect in Eldorado, Texas. This is design with a very particular brief: 'the typical FLDS house strives to project the idealized image of American domesticity, yet everything is scaled up in size as needed in order to accommodate the numerous sister-wives, as the brides are called, and scores of children who live inside'. The piece, in Museo Magazine, comes with a useful interactive map of the compound. See also our earlier post on Mormon architecture.

This is an architecture of preparation: 'The logistical foresight is staggering; the FLDS were able to build, from nothing, an infrastructural apparatus that includes a water pumping station; wastewater treatment plant; provisions for food including agricultural fields, orchards, livestock pens, and grain silos; and education, healthcare, and security systems, while also making plans for the construction of future buildings, with the intent of supporting a population in the thousands', topped off with fortified religious structures that embody 'American tradition of neoclassical municipal building that can be found in small towns throughout the country'.

Compare and contrast to another (speculative) utopian community. The Venus Project offers a comprehensive guide to creating a new future (via No Tech Magazine). Although the Project states explicitly that it is neither 'utopian nor Orwellian, nor does it reflect the dreams of impractical idealists', the Venus Project is unashamedly idealist, with a glossy, retro-modern cityscape - a blend of Corb, Calatrava, Mayer H and Niemeyer - purporting to be the future backdrop for a new society built on a set of lofty ambitions (starting with an experimental city and theme park).

The Venus Project is driven by what one would now call an old-fashioned faith in the power of technology to 'banish boredom and repetition'. These city renderings and transport concepts are straight out of the pages of Eagle or 2000AD or even the work of Luigi Colani, all of which posited the survival of base human and corporate instincts as driving factors in tomorrow's world. Instead, Jacque Fresco ('project founder and director') has created a lifeless, empty urbanism, devoid of human feeling or presence, all in the name of progress towards a world of endless leisure. Yet seen side by side with the Eldorado complex, and it appears that each shares a touching faith in the role of architecture in shaping behaviour and expectations. See also wikipedia's list of utopian communities.

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We used to notice slight spikes in traffic when we led with an image, but these seem to have tailed off (as has traffic in general). Things will always be about physical things but the role of text and analysis has and always will be central to the publication (although readers might have noticed that the physical publication itself has been in an extremely long stretch of self-imposed limbo). As talk of design, objects and collections shifts from the linguistic to the strictly visual, it seems ever more important to write about objects and the role they play in contemporary life - and, by definition, the role that collecting and collections play as well - rather than simply add to the ever-growing museum that is the internet. It seems increasingly clear to us that things' role is not one of curator, but guide.

An Ambitious Project Collapsing, a weblog with an emphasis on the found photograph / old negatives scanned by Jason Lapeyre / images from Andrew Bush's Driving While Standing Still project at tmn / a treasure trove of contemporary radio: shows by Adam and Joe and Chris Morris for download.

Basically, at the moment, every time someone watches a video on YouTube, it costs Google about 10¢ / Even Cleveland, a weblog / the Waldo Wiki / Interstate Outlaws, a remake of a classic 90s PC game / watch e-commerce take place at the Zappos Map (via atlas(t)).

A selection of retro flickr groups: Atomic Housewives; vintage cook books; vintage advertising; Vintage Craft and Needlework magazines. Other groups that caught our eye: Xeroxes, Scans, and Faxes; Scotland: Then and Now; Vintage Engravings, Etchings, Lithographs and Wood-block Prints.

More alternative collections: women losing their shoes in movies / Welcome to the Time Machine! Bikini Science Chronology, via Coudal, which also links WebUrbanist's fine set of 20 iconic concept cars / Microkhan, a weblog (via, via) / and still the ephemera keeps coming: Pennsylvania Turnpike System circa 1953 and John F. Kennedy Int'l Airport 1964, two souvenir booklets / 3600 VHS video covers, helpfully placed in alphabetical order.

RIP JG Ballard: watch Ballardian for the tributes. And, of course, Metafilter for the links.

Labels: architecture, collecting

posted by things at 21:15 / 1 comments

The Daily Icon is refreshingly honest, reflecting the way design is packaged and presented as a fabulous fait accompli, polished to perfection. It's little wonder that companies like Nestlé flock to firms like Rojkind Arquitectos, ultra adept at creating buildings like candies, adding to the sense of internet design commentary and coverage as being little more than tray after tray of brightly coloured sweets to gorge upon before the next one swings into view. Within the industry itself, one senses the emergence of a growing distaste for this feast. 'Zaha Hadid bore the brunt of a spirited attack against "jewel-making" starchitecture'. The approach of the jeweller and chocolatier are not so different. Both depend on the supremacy of the image

Straw Dogs, a weblog chronicling art, pattern and modernity / the Museum of Bad Art is a long-standing website (the original MOBA was founded in 1993) that seems to pre-date snark and irony, not to mention Stuckism) and the cult of the amateur / Coagula, an art journal / things to look at is as visual as one might expect.

I love grain elevators. See also Pruned / a stash of unplayed Burns guitars found in a basement and sold to a collector who doesn't play. More on Burns / we were just about to add Edificial to the sidebar when it shut up shop for good.

Roadside Architecture, reducing buildings down to an aesthetic of sideways, fleeting glances / another kind of roadside view at Sweet Juniper!, a street in Detroit where 60 out of 66 homes were vacant or abandoned on a single block. See also this selection of Detroit posts at landscape + urbanism / a photo essay on the village of Sipson, soon to be replaced by Heathrow's Third Runway / The Wintles, stalled eco village in Shropshire.

Pritzker prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor is interviewed by the Architects' Journal by Patrick Lynch: 'Basically I’ve come to think that I work like an author. There was a time when I thought that all architects work like authors, but when I looked around I saw that they were implementers and service providers.' The beautiful portrait - timeless, really - is uncredited online. Another quote: 'Everything today is often just images...'

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 12:42 / 0 comments

All The Joy I See Through These Architect's Eyes, an illustrated post on the architecture of Megacity-One at D'Blog of 'Israeli, via me-fi. Posted as part of a series on the creation of the new strip Lowlife, this is artist Mat Brooker's personal take on creating a contemporary comic universe. 'And it occurred to me that, really, the city is the actual star of Judge Dredd'. The how-to sections are dazzling in their complexity, revealing how the modern panel is a mix of 3D models, vector art and ink drawing, all seamlessly comped together. See also our selection of stills from the 1995 Judge Dredd movie / or even RPS's recent eulogy to the Rogue Trooper game / a few days late for April Fool, Swedes plan flat-pack home on the Moon.

Abandoned Virgin Megastore, via Racked / mapping the imaginary: the UK Television Series Map, at Meish / Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown / we're not making an enormous amount of headway at the moment. Random links. LabGuy's World: Museum of Extinct Video Recorders and Accessories / Eye Blog observes the redesigned Architectural Review. See also this new vs old comparison at things to look at.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 23:16 / 0 comments

The Angels of Mons in total fiction shocker. A good example of the retrospective application of false memory - see the Fortean Times article for more on the back story, and indeed forward story, of Doidge's Angel, a contemporary PR stunt that loosely wove in the Angels of Mons story but used the crucial hook of 'physical evidence' to draw people in to a false belief. See also 'A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories', a paper by Wade, Garry, Read and Lindsay (pdf) at the Empty Memories site.

Bigger is Better: 7 Insane Soviet Projects (via viadegem). See also animated anti-American Soviet Propaganda / pulpy book covers / welcome to the new Architectural Review / also to the new UK Wired, which demonstrates that the old future looks a lot like the new future, only perhaps slightly less orange / downsizing advice: how do I live with no current address?

The Infomercantile, a weblog / Found underground, a lair. See also the German Bunker in my garden site / lightning hits the Burj / My Pantone Past, something we missed. David the Designer's 'real time capsule of the colours that I've used or specified over the years' / postcards and ephemera from Carl / Can you tell me more about the BMW April Fool's adverts? / sometimes the not-so-subtle ones are the best / the internet has simultaneously killed and invigorated the idea of the annual pun / Building Services Porn, via Projects.

The architecture of the drug trade, Sam Jacobs on the hidden world of the grow house and the subversive effects of drugs on the built environment. Monocle had a piece on Narcotecture in Afghanistan a year or so ago, looking 'at the building boom in the western Afghan city of Herat, where gaudy palaces are wiping out the face of the medieval city. Much of the construction is being fuelled by money from drugs, guns or graft'. All economies are fatally skewed by the black market: the Afghan example is just more explicit than most.

Labels: architecture, linkage, weird

posted by things at 13:00 / 0 comments

Robert Propst Tries To Set Office Workers Free: 'Propst invented Action Office 2, a modular office system introduced in 1968. Its main innovation was the partition panel, a screen between 4ft and 6ft high, covered in padded fabric. For Propst, it was a way of giving workers control over "exposure overload" and the "continuous idiot salutations" necessary in bullpen offices where workers had to "invest in a recognition act every time someone goes by".' Related, Playtime.

Spoon and Tomago, a design and culture weblog / The Best Part, a daily art and design blog. Sample link, the paintings of Ian Carpenter / 'A Perfect Storm for Modernism', a rather bad-tempered rant about the longed-for implosion of 'modern architecture' thanks to the credit crunch. Related, Prince Charles' Poundbury Fire Station. Comparisons to Trumpton are cliched but inevitable and unavoidable (via).

World-viewing city walking at click opera: 'I want the internet to get ambient, to get dull', and a celebration of the subtle flaneurism facilitated by Google Streetview, bringing the daily mundanity that exists outside every window onto your desktop. The weblog has seemingly evolved from diary to scrapbook, with every pasted entry a little stab of attention deficiency designed to hook you in. Posted relentlessly one after the other, the weblog becomes little more than a box of digital truffles; good for a dip, but not all at once. Twitter is more of the same, a steady drip feed of information that is usually fascinatingly Pooterish but which crushes the ability to soak up text in larger doses.

Things that may or may not be related. Less Is More Again - A Manifesto by Gabrielle Esperdy, in which she suggests the modern refrain is 'Design Less! We must subject ourselves to a period of privation in which we refrain from designing and suspend the very practice of design itself'. On the other hand, another take on post-crunch econaesthetics comes in Bruce Sterling's Product Panic: 2009: 'The standard virtues of fine industrial design—safety, convenience, serviceability, utility, solid construction... well, when you're heading for the lifeboats, you can overlook those pesky little details'.

Hunch! is here, a decision-tree based site that sifts through preferences to help you make informed choices. The consensus seems to be that this will evolve into a kind of a uber-Kelkoo, whereby tastes and preferences are bolstered by consumer reviews to steer people towards buying things they actually need. How long before the phantom marketers sneak into the Hunch! arenas and try to skew things towards a particular product?

Labels: architecture, cities, things

posted by things at 23:40 / 0 comments

Is a planning exemption for large country houses producing the innovation that was intended?, a recent piece in Architecture Today by Timothy Brittain-Catlin summed up the state of big house building in the UK and the requirements of planning Clause PPG7 (mentioned on the site about six years ago). This originally stated that 'An isolated new house in the countryside may also exceptionally be justified if it is clearly of the highest quality, is truly outstanding in terms of its architecture and landscape design, and would significantly enhance its immediate setting and wider surroundings,' as quoted in this Country Life article.

When revised to PPS7 in 2004, it was amended to state that 'very occasionally the exceptional quality and innovative nature of the design of a proposed, isolated new house may provide this special justification for granting planning permission... The value of such a building will be found in its reflection of the highest standards in contemporary architecture', our emphasis. Given that many of the clients angling for this kind of house in the first place favoured neo-classicism over radicalism, there was an inevitable tussle of ideologies.

Brittain-Catlin's piece ultimately dismisses the existence of a real rift, although he notes that certain members of the classicist contingent are quietly delighted that tradition frequently prevails over high-profile modern schemes. Most notably the abandonment of Kathryn Findlay's vast 'starfish' for the Grafton New Hall Site in favour of Robert Adam's vast neo-classical mansion. As the Independent noted last summer, ''Starfish house' plans are left dead in the water'. According to someone from Jackson Stops and Staff, it was never going to happen: "Say there are 10 buyers who want to build a country estate you can bet that nine of them will opt for a traditional classic design."

In the article, Findlay countered by saying that 'when the designs for Grafton Hall first came out, the Emir of Qatar immediately asked me to build something similar for his wife." And look what happened to that. Since we first posted that thread on 28 days later one of the job architects has posted on it: 'It was indeed weird and wonderful to see the pictures of Sheik Saud's unfinished villa. i was working at ushida findlay at the time and was in charge of the little ufo (majlis) for over a year, it had several nicknames: the mushroom, the sea urchin, and although the main villa was going to be the grand statement, i was always very fond of it's little M&M sidekick. we were all very sad when construction stopped due to the facts you described'.

See other PPG7/PPS7 houses mentioned in the article: in the classical corner, there is Quinlan Terry's Ferne Park and Great Canfield, Robert Adam's house at Ashley, Craig Hamilton's Lowther Park House and Tusmore House by Whitfield Lockwood (which replaced the original, demolished in the 1960s).

And for the moderns, we have the Corbin House by ShedKM, Paul+O Architects' The Wilderness House (pdf), houses by Eldridge Smerin, Marsh Grochowski Architects and Seymour Smith, and the Mines Farm house by 6a Architects.

If nothing else, many of these examples illustrate that ideological differences aside, the idea of the truly large house has become entirely redundant in the modern age, with no system of visual or spatial organisation up to the task. Aesthetic success seems closely tallied with scale.

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Other things. Kasino A4 describes itself as "the most melancholy magazine" / finally, Google Streetview arrives in the UK / Slide Show Photographs, a new book by Adam Bartos. See also the inevitable but addictive flickr groups: Thriftstore Hell, Secondhand Toys and Yard Sales and Garage Sales / strangely fascinating designer caravans by German firm Tabbert / it's back, Paul Ford's annual music journalism marathon: Six-Word Reviews of 1,302 SXSW Mp3s.

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 15:10 / 1 comments

Images of China in the 1980s by Leroy W.Demery, via the Shenzhen Biennale weblog. Fascinating, e.g. steam locomotives from 1983 and an early image of Shenzhen itself, from 1980. The city today / Giant Soviet Signs Cut into Forests, self-explanatory post at Strange Harvest / photos by Susanne Ludwig.

After the rather glum 'day out with Corb' article by Lynsey Hanley several posts have surfaced offering trenchant criticism, especially My stupid day as a Corbu hater... at Douglas Murphy's Entschwindet und Vergeht, and an earlier deconstruction by Nigel Warbuton (Goldfinger biographer, no less).

The Pocket Square, a new weblog / Juxtapoz publishes a selection of work by Alex Lukas. Very (although not deliberately?) Ballardian / Bristol Models at First Gear Collector / Vague Terrain / On mobile cities, Archigram, invisible networks and ubicomp.

Everyone is suddenly on twitter, twittering a constant buzz of architectural and cultural criticism from one to another. This unseen world is something of a revelation to us. See feeds from Kieran Long, Hugh Pearman, Ian Martin (amusing), Sam Jacob, Geoff Manaugh, Jimmy Stamp, Alexander Trevi.

Labels: architecture, linkage, photography

posted by things at 23:41 / 0 comments

100 Abandoned Houses, a photographic series by Kevin Bauman, just one of many, many projects collated by SpaceInvading, an new(ish) aggregator site that scrapes the architecture and design blogs for a selection of bold thumbnails of new architecture. It's a bit like a ffffound for architecture, with similar problems to that site's relentless spool of 'cool new work' and gratuitous eye candy. Ultimately, the net cast by SpaceInvading seems to suggest that now, for the first time in modernism's near 100-year history, the hunger for innovation and the avant-garde has reached a kind of critical mass, a mass popularity that no amount of propogandising and eulogising by the conventional architectural press managed to achieve.

The sheer volume of imagery of 'modern architecture' rather than, say, 'traditional architecture' has effectively ended modernist's stance as the 'other', inverting the conventional relationship between the ordinary and the avant-garde. In fact, we'd go so far as to say that the conventional house, the pitched-roof, unironic, neo-vernacular, Monopoly-token symbol of domestic shelter is underrepresented, especially given its overwhelming dominance in the 'real world'. Do a google image search for 'house' and 5 out of 18 images on the first page correspond to 'modern' designs. Cast around the design blogs, and the archetype has been replaced by a new domestic object, the box, whether white, wooden, crisp, slanted, cantilevered, stealthy, or simple.

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Fantastic Journal on The Odd Couple of Terry Farrell and Nick Grimshaw, once an architectural partnership of some interest, despite their inherent ideological differences. Today both are pillars of the establishment. This is the flipside of the architectural eye candy feeder site; a neat little piece of historical research, containing fresh thoughts on key aspects of architectural history that just wouldn't be found in any other format or place.

Margate in the 1920s (via haddock) / also via h, we mentioned the book Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie in a recent post. Apparently it also contains an interview with Morris Cassanova (aka Mr Chicken) / a new architectural anthropomorphism at Shanghai 2010: Bob the Lost Dog Building (shades of Nigel Coates' Body Zone - 'A poisoned chalice from the start') and Macau's Rabbit in a basket.

25 times a second, a tumblr with an architectural focus / 15 skyscrapers on hold, one of oobject's contemporary curations / Becks Futures, collecting Britart beer bottles / the fallacy of symbolic height / East eats West, a weblog from Switzerland that seems to offer some useful insights into the country's culture and the world of luxury goods in particular.

The Michael Jackson Catalogs / Design your Own Cabanon, 45 minute holiday retreats / The Mess We're In: Britain's dogs produce 1,000 tonnes of poo a day / Soundscrapers, 'A sonic slice through the global military atmosphere', short broadcasts from abandoned spaces (via archinect) / The Happy Pontist, 'A blog from the UK about bridges and bridge design', with a special focus on competitions.

The Hollaway Wall, Manchester / torn1, a weblog with an architectural focus / Apuntes Criticos, Spanish language, but visually rich for non-speakers / Coachbuild.com contains a huge gallery of images from the golden era of automotive coachbuilding and beyond / more Corb Cabanon, this month's fetish building of choice / ssahn.com, over 2,500 'one eye photographs'.

Rulers of the world, a clickable map / The Beauty in Brutalism, Restored and Updated / dothomes is a property finding website, which will apparently shortly become onemap / house-hunting adventures of the real-estate kind at Housespotting / Travel with Frank Gehry, an architecture blog (which presumably isn't written by someone sitting in Frank's pocket) / visions of future past, a gallery at weburbanist.

The Modelmaker, a weblog / Marcle Models, supplying card kits / an archive collapses in Cologne, 1000 years of physical knowledge compressed, crushed and destroyed. Image / intentional deconstruction, paintings by Ben Grasso (at Colectiva) / Blitz and Blight, 'a growing resource of information about Britain’s changing landscape and the contention it has caused'.

What has the weblog taught us? That an exclusive, singular focus is now one of the rarest commodities in contemporary culture. To be connected is to void your ability to be entirely without influence. Worse still, to be involved in creating comment - such as this weblog - destroys the objectivity of solitary focus, broadening everyone's aesthetic and cultural horizons to the point where our attention is unable to be satisfied by depth. We are unable to focus.

Labels: architecture, linkage, thinking

posted by things at 16:53 / 1 comments

'We're in danger of losing our memories', in which Dame Lynne Brindley, BL CEO, worries about the impermeance of digital culture and the ongoing problem of archiving the world (via me-fi). The Daily Mail quotes historian Tristram Hunt: 'Do we want to keep the Twitter account of Stephen Fry or some of the marginalia around the edges of the Sydney Olympics? I don’t think we necessarily do.' Hunt rather misses the fact that history is shaped by marginalia. Mind you, Lynne Brindley predicted the end of conventional printing by 2020 back in 2005.

Stuffing our faces (with information), redub on the cultural loss of 'freezing things in print' / roof dwellings from a bygone era (via Treehugger) / emu graphic design has a weblog / digital culture tracked at serial consign / Delayed Echoes, a weblog / a movie of Greeble City over at Digital Urban - demonstrating how quickly the building blocks of imaginary digital cities can be put together.

Beirut is an amazing cityscape. Images by Cristobal Palma / infuriating piece of retro-post-digital design / 300 images from 1800 sites (via see saw) / Bryan McKay's weblog / Unburying the Lead, tumbling with more words than one usually finds on this kind of site / Vaughn Shirley's weblog. See also Filthy Skies / Cut with flourish, a tumblelog.

Must we kill the street? at sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, which also links to Au carrefour Ètrange, a mostly nsfw trawl through old imagery / photographs by Gaia Cambiaggi / Sy Willmer builds houseboats and other things / but does it float, a tumble log / Windows 7, is it worth it?

Marginalia and other crimes, a photographic survey of 'the destruction to the collections [of the Cambridge University Library' caused by some of its readers' / The Valve, a literary organ / William Mullingar Higgins's book The House Painter, or, Decorator's Companion ('Being a Complete Treatise on the Origin of Colour, the Laws of Harmonious Colouring, the Manufacture of Pigments, Oils, and Varnishes: and the Art of House Painting, Graining, and Marbling: To Which is Added, a History of the Art in All Ages') was published in 1841. The 'plates' which illustrate it are actually painted paper which is grained or marbled by an artist'.

Labels: architecture, archives, linkage

posted by things at 00:30 / 1 comments

The growth in sites for art direction reference continue to proliferate. The latest is Spy Vibe, a site devoted to the set design of the 1960s era spy film (via Dwell). There's also a weblog / Aporva Baxi's expanding collection of Nintendo's Game and Watch at the Eye blog / large scale photographic works by Wang Qingsong, including Dream of Migrants, 'a very disappointing scenario'.

Getting some comment, The Demon-Haunted World, 'the past and future of practical city magic', an essay by Matt Jones. This engaging romp through futurism past and present, from the Stanford Torus to Chile's long-lost Project Cybersyn, is fundamentally a call to arms for enabled objects, devices that facilitate our interaction with the city in ways which will parallel the growth of the automobile industry in the C20. It's no coincidence that one of the very first webcams pointed at a coffee pot.

Recreate catastrophic astronomical events with the space explosion Photoshop tutorial / New Red Tractors at the Factory, Luoyang, China / imagery of Lost London, via me-fi, and also see Hermione Hobhouse's amazing book Lost London (images from which found their way onto an earlier Skyscrapercity forum post, Your city's lost heritage: Buildings that should never have been demolished).

Owen Hatherley recently wrote of a tragic tale of two Thamesmeads in Building Design (after, we think, undertaking this walk chronicled at youyouidiot. The tags say it all: sarcasm, brutalism and romanticism, the triptych of emotions generated by British architecture of the past half century).

Heavy little objects, a self-explanatory journey into 'material obsession' / Boars and Fury, a tumblr of ideas and language / -pli - plic - plex, a thesis blog (new genre...?) / the White Noise of Everyday Life.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 17:20 / 1 comments

Yet more swings and roundabouts on the Dubai story: Dubai's skyline is a mark of vitality, not superficiality / a brilliant cave for sale / we haven't tried this, but are intrigued: Pastiche, 'a dynamic data visualization that maps keywords from blog articles to the New York neighborhoods they are written in reference to, geographically positioned in a navigable, spatial view'. Now all someone needs to do is create one for Dubai.

Half Map Half Biscuit / a life in coffee / the Westinghouse Time Capsules / How To Drive Exotic Cars, 'for Valet Parking Attendants, Car Enthusiasts, and Voyeurs' / 'Last' Woolies pic'n'mix on eBay. At time of writing, this particular auction had slightly lost the plot, and those '800g of delicious nostalgia' were priced at £2,050,300. (update, apparently the 'Last' pic'n'mix fetched £14,500).

Langley Collyer: The Mystery Hoarder Of Harlem, who ended up buried beneath the debris accumulated in the house he shared with his brother Homer. Some more famous squalor survivors / The Day of St. Anthony's Fire, an example of Ergotism.

How accurate was Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" about the future? / I love you forever and always, via kottke, from the era of the circle-as-dot on top of the 'i' / Half Full Half Empty, a project by Barbara Bloom / a modern hamlet, the start of a new experiment in collective living.

Booooooom, collating creative portfolios from various disciplines. A couple of links: paintings by Leah Tinari and Roberto Bernardi / Shrapnel Contemporary, a weblog / We Will Become, a weblog / The Pop-up City, both visually driven.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 23:45 / 0 comments

Extracting meaningful analysis and comment on the architectural scene in the Middle East and Far East is a fool's occupation. The combination of flaming icons and crashing, burning economies is a happy inversion of everything the last five years have apparently taught us. Today, the icon is out, and schadenfreude stalks the financial pages and comment section (Dubai's six-year building boom grinds to halt as financial crisis takes hold, from the Guardian).

It was noted almost everywhere, and the subject of frantic link making and dot-joining, so we're rather late to the party, but the idea that the TVCC fire is a neat bookend to the iconic era is too big to ignore (and the CCTV's site recent poll question is well-timed as well). And so the early analysis demonstrated (Steve Rose on what the TVCC fire means for the starchitecture export business).

In isolation, the fiery end of a key part of one of the most high-profile buildings of the century, Arup and OMA's self-consciously ironic symbol of the power of state and media, probably doesn't mark the end of the boom. Paul Goldberger rather presciently noted that 'I suspect that we will see some of the same tendency to read into tragedy more architecture criticism than the situation calls for'. The sight of a thing that moved straight from virtual image to charred wreck before its physicality had ever really been absorbed was rather shocking.

There are two narratives here, each highly conventional in its way. The first is the awestruck admiration for rampaging economies on the up, their ambition and the structures that result from that ambition. The second is the loving chronicle of their collapse. Interest in Dubai from the former position has largely fallen away: it's the latter story that everyone is interested in.

Germaine Greer is the latest commentator to weigh in on the unsustainably rampant growth of Dubai, sustained by dirt cheap immigrant labour and the promise of an already fatally compromised plan to create a burgeoning tourist industry. Read the comments to the Greer piece, however, and you get a dose of irate ex-pat, eager to extol the virtues of the place ('Plenty to do, never bored here. Great nightlife - there's always the Yok Hotel (know what I mean, lads).The wife and kids love the shopping, I get to go shooting at Jebel Ali or fishing over in Oman - whats the problem?').

Now the press trips are drying up, will this be a more common piece of commentary on Middle East megastructuralism? The other side of the coin is getting harder to find. Herbert Wright's essay in the latest issue of Blueprint urges us to Reject the Dubai Clichés, yet at the same time, the New York Times' headlines state baldly that Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down (the image of the abandoned cars at the airport being a particularly potent image with which to lead a piece).

Which to believe? Both stories have their hooks; the 2,684 foot Burj Dubai rarely fails to draw a verbal gasp from those writers that have seen it (Greer: '... I noticed with a thrill of something like terror that there were cranes still working on the top of it, half a mile up in the air...'), but then again, the tales of failing, sinking, collapsing modernist infrastructure has an addictive air of new century schadenfreude. From the NYT: 'Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out.'

Piers Morgan, a man not exactly known for his exceptional insight, also wrote about Dubai last month, in the Daily Mail. His piece, titled with typical Mail spread breathlessness 'Over the top. Dripping with money. Adored by celebs. Big, brash and loaded with ambition. No, not Piers Morgan - the incredible city of Dubai', was front-loaded with the predictable cliches (on the Burj Dubai: 'an astonishing needle-like edifice that reaches, almost literally, to the stars'). Morgan notes almost in passing a few 'uncomfortable realities', pondering about Dubai's apparent lack of the things that dog Daily Mail Britain, 'the worst rates of teenage drug abuse, binge-drinking, pregnancy, obesity and yobbery in Europe'.

Dying Dubai and abandoned icon stories are the architectural lead stories of the era and there will be many more of them to follow (bizarrely, Google Earth imagery of Dubai dates from 2006, whereas Google Maps are bang up to date. The 3D skylines of both cities look sadly empty). Perhaps we're witnessing the start of an architectural dead pool, where suitably OTT structures of potential candidates for picturesque modern ruins are lined up in anticipation of the next big sign of the times.

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 20:07 / 0 comments

Weblogs are creating unprecedented interest in architectural history, in particularly the ephemeral imagery that has - until now - not survived as well as the words, terms, genres and neologisms. Both The Sequipedalist and no2self brings us some AD covers from the 1970s. It always strikes us as perverse that the people who created these covers in the first place never bother to put them into the public domain, preferring instead to leave it up to the enthusiasts. A happy exception is the incredible Concrete Quarterly archive, a full set of scans dating back to just after WWII (related, C+A, the modern Australian equivalent). The above image is of Riccardo Morandi's Great Hall in Turin, from page 13 of issue 47, Winter 1960.

A (Not-comprehensive) List of Books That Changed The World at The Rumpus / the end of music thing (for now) / if there was a Victorian-era Ffffound, these paintings would surely be getting many clicks (via (what is this?)). See also the work of Mira Ruido (via Netdiver) / the Draupner Wave, first scientific evidence of a rogue wave. Something that looks very like a rogue wave appears at around 2m35s of this excerpt from Deadliest Catch, a documentary about fishing in the Bering Sea.

AbeBooks' Most Expensive Sales in 2008 / Asian Movie Posters, a collection of mostly fantastically overblow imagery / They Were Collaborators, a series at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats / 30 ways to die of electrocution at Puppies and Flowers, which also links to the London shopfronts tumblr.

We can't let this one pass. Dorling Kindersley's new book 'All this makes life work living' is, according to the all-important blurb, 'a phenomenal book of wonders that will feature a vast array of astonishing items that add something to the world we live in. Whether it's the thing itself such as the first football or what the item represents like Monet's paint palette, everything featured in the book will astound and impress you.' And yet this content is being solicited through the internet. Weblogs have been bombarded with earnest emails asking for contributions, presumably a swift (and cheap) way of getting content without having tiresome things like writers or editors on the payroll. Compare and contrast with TOFHWOTI.

A great piece of urban and literary archaeology: The Real Concrete Island, tracing the real inspirations for Ballard's book. Linked within, the Notting Hill Timeline and a flickr set, Ballardians in Notting Hill / Nihilsentimentalgia, a photography blog (occasionally nsfw) / the Tomorrow Museum, a weblog / 'Swiss Made is a label used to indicate that a product was made in Switzerland'.

Beware of the Imp of the Perverse / From Light To Sound, sound a bit like Year of No Light / Earth Invaders, a weblog / enter the world of prog rock with Hal's Progressive Rock Blog. This might be a rich seam to mine: there are other blogs out there, some shortlived (The Progtologist Studies), others more comprehensive (Sakalli) / kottke redesigns: 'I like that kottke.org is one of the few weblogs out there that can reach back almost ten years for a past design element; the site has history'.

Children under Stress, by Sula Wolff, published in 1973. This is apparently one of the great classics of child psychiatry, the work that established the field. Wolff (b.1925) has made her life's work the study of difference, and the origins of that difference (as shown in her recent book Loners: Life Path of Unusual Children). Much of her work looked at the impact of autism and Aspergers. On page 191 she writes 'in a recent survey, it was estimated that between four and five out of every 10,000 children are autistic.' According to the National Autistic Society, recent research suggests that there was a prevalence rate of 0.9% for autism spectrum disorders or 90 in 10,000. The rise in autism is an accepted phenomenon: here's a graph.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 00:30 / 2 comments

Some things seem too good to be true. 'Whatever happened to the Dongtan Eco City? asks Ethical Corporation magazine, which dubs the Arup-led project as an 'eco-potemkin village'. Treehugger goes further, branding the Arup-led design for a truly zero-emission community totally dead: 'Rather, as a mythical Shangri-La, the [Dongtan] plan would serve China as the ultimate greenwashing tool, greening the country's image while in practice its cities could continue to develop along the same unsustainable path at breakneck speed.' Even the Telegraph noted rather cynically that 'The plans for Dongtan have helped to raise Arup's profile considerably in China, allowing it to bid for other prestigious projects'.

The idea of an eco-city remains mythical. Abu Dhabi's Masdar project, which includes Masdar City 'the most ambitious sustainable development in the world today ... the world’s first zero carbon, zero waste city powered entirely by renewable energy sources', masterplanned by Foster and Partners is current front runner for the project most likely to be completed, and equally likely to evaporate. OMA's very pragmatic failure, the Ras al Khaimah eco city (the 'City in the Desert', overseen by Reinier de Graaf) fizzled out, after the firm attempted to buck the 'monotony of the exceptional' by creating something deliberately austere - and ultimately unwanted by the client in actual physical form.

The UK's much-vaunted then swiftly back-pedalled Eco-towns have nothing on these megaplans, which have strung enormous political and media capital out of pie-in-the-sky proposals, something people have been saying for quite some time. In the end, Dongtan provided little more than some spectacular CGI (compare and contrast: this with that), making it the ultimate example of the render-centric architecture that dominates contemporary discourse.

The imaginary image not only sates our desire for fantastical forms but also acts as a salve for the conscience. The shift from iconic, hypertechnical images of a steely utopia - all soaring chimneys and glowing blast furnaces - was a characteristic of all developing countries, be they communist or capitalist. Now, our fantasies are represented by ageless, glossy buildings, bathed in golden sunshine and smog free air, a future of perpetual freedom. Dongtan exists as a theoretical utopia, a way of mentally counterbalancing the X million tons of 'recycling' shipped to China (where it is buried or burned).

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There's something up in blog-ville, a Seussian way of saying that the conversation has changed and the debate is all-too-often neatly manufactured or pushing a not-so-hidden agenda / another JB post: guitars and graphics / mining the referrers. Bundestrendscout Phillip Roth Koln, a weblog / yatzer, a design blog / Creative Voyage, more imagery / Give Them Rope, a blog from Boston / White Noise of Everyday Life, photography, etc. / Betsy McCall Paper Dolls. Dressing up on a budget.

Closer Than We Think!, a late 50s comic anticipating the push-button future (via Treehugger) / a bit late with this: Kottke's best of 2008. Recommended / CoS has a fine piece on historical ephemera: Cables / a lot of work went into these: My day yesterday / stuff journalists like, apparently.

Abu Dhabi: building in a vacuum: 'There is no currently no art to hang in the Louvre Abu Dhabi and no orchestra to play in the [Zaha Hadid] Performing Arts Centre' / Mister Jalopy in Japanese Tool Magazine, that excellent combination of interior design and automotive nostalgia that appears unique to a very few specialist magazines / food sculpture (thanks Mike). See also the tiny broccoli people.

On modern levels of volume: both Come on, feel the noise and ensuing letters lament the technology-driven increase in noise at gigs: 'Describing [My Bloody Valentine's] noise section as like a jet engine is more than
fanciful journalese, as 119db(A) is, indeed, the sound pressure level
of a jumbo jet taking off experienced at a distance of six metres.' 119db(A) was the limit allegedly imposed on the band by the venue. Anecdotally, the soundman on the main desk refused to tell us what the true reading was, presumably for legal reasons.

Not quite empty rooms: an abandoned school in Harlem (via kottke) / a map of V2 attacks on London during WWII (via metafilter). Utterly fascinating / the Prado mapped by Google / The Water Systems of Manhattan / a fine collection of automobile cutaways at Cartype (via ffffound). These could all benefit from being considerably larger / a neat piece of Vintage Travel brochure illustration at swissmiss.

Architecture writing by Eva Hagberg / art by Cliff Holden / Jenny Wicks' project 'Root Ginger' is very striking / 50 beautiful examples of Tilt-shift photography. Self-explanatory. The emergence of Tilt-shift photography has been driven almost entirely by the internet. The tableaus and vistas that it creates

Simon Henley's The Architecture of Parking celebrates the unadulterated function of the (mostly concrete) car park. Thomas Hine on the automobile's influence on avant-garde architecture: Ramps give a slant on design, archived on Quondam for your reading pleasure: 'The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, whose work with his Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture is the subject of a current exhibition at the Museum of Modem Art in New York, would probably have trouble with the Americans With Disabilities Act if he tried to build in this country. The buildings he proposes have entire steeply slanting floors, with slopes long enough to propel an unwary wheelchair user right through the plate-glass window.'

The magnificent but doomed Saunders-Roe Princess Flying Boats (via hemaworstje, which is occasionally nsfw). This mighty plane was the last gasp of the Flying Boat, at least in the UK, and was constructed on the Isle of Wight, once the heart of the British flying boat industry thanks to it being the home of Saunders-Roe (later bit players in the UK Space Program). Another Saunders-Roe history, and an image of the vast Columbine Shed in Cowes



We had to sabotage the Pelican Project for a short time yesterday, after a whole chunk of images were leeched. With a bit of luck it's all been sorted and they're back to normal now.

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 14:00 / 2 comments

The Empty Room is a ghostly presence in contemporary culture. For, despite our aspirations to minimalism and reductivism, these are simply not natural states of being. Rooms are rarely empty; the architectural photographer a master of furniture moving in order to simplify the vision. Even abandoned spaces aren't empty; urban explorers find spaces filled with rubbish and remnants, not scrubbed corridors and spotless spaces.

The empty room still has a grip on our minds, a symbol of both loss ("Whisper your name in an empty room") and release from material constraints. Martin Creed's Turner Prize installation in 2001 defined empty space with a blinking light, an installation that perplexed and infuriated in equal measure, the implication being that absence of content implied absence of ideas.

This is one of the great hang-ups about modernism, which tends towards the minimal, as opposed to the overstuffed. This was theoretically a reaction to the excesses of Victoriana (I, II, III, and IV, V). In the modern era, the empty room came to symbolise both poverty and wealth. These diametrically opposed conditions come together in John Pawson's design for a monastery in Novy Dvur, Bohemia, an ideologically confused project where a visual shorthand for sybaritic emptiness is reappropriated as spiritual simplicity.

Novy Dvur is beautiful, sure, but it raises the question as to whether or not the idealised, reductivist object actually exists. Simplicity, the building implies, is hard won and only a few deserve it. According to Deyan Sudjic, 'it is also true that the monks asked Calvin Klein to design their robes. He agreed, but they changed their minds when they realised that it might not be a good idea to be quite so stylishly turned out and to attract quite so much publicity for it'.

While minimalism represents the logical extension of the International Style aesthetic, less has long since ceased to be more. In an ironic rerun of the overstuffed Victorian interior, to be modern today is no longer about presenting an absence of things, but a presence of things. True, they're usually entirely different things to the ones the design reformers got so worked up about (although ironically it's taken 100 years or so for the purveyors of trinkets and other ornamental baubles to finally expire. See Ian Jack on 'how the display cabinet killed Wedgwood), but it's stuff nonetheless. Now, modernism is conveyed not through empty space but through objects, leading to the creation of what we'll call the modernist treasure house, tracking the rise (in both appreciation and value) of modernist ephemera, a semi-ironic accumulation of space age optimism, mid-century objects and corporate identities and atomic era futurology, etc. etc. Functionalism has become funky.

So out of clinical modernism has emerged a new eclecticism. Arguably minimalism peaked too soon, before the desire for perfectionism in interior design and presentation could imitate the glossy perfection of the computer-generated image. Other genres of design haven't been so lucky - check the automotive hyper detailing community if you want to see how the 'original object' can be transcended and elevated towards a Platonic ideal with the judicious and lavish application of specialist cleaning fluids: this Lamborghini cleaning in particular. Without the means or technology to generate CGI-generated perfection in the late 80s and early 90s, the minimalists had to go ahead and create it from scratch, with predictably less than perfect results (save in the photographs).

Perhaps there's a parallel with the environment of the computer game. The first virtual rooms were necessarily bare (as World Builder attests), leaving their furnishing to the player's mind, extrapolated from minimal description. The opening scene of The Hobbit ('You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall'), as seen above, distilled several hundred pages of Tolkien into a few hundred pixels. The first games were about emptiness; with imagination overlaid on top. Today, the gaming environment is as baroque and OTT as the most overbearing Victorian drawing room, lilies gilded with clock cycles rather than the craftsman. We remember emptiness, even aspire to it. But what it actually looks like is fast fading into the past.



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A post about empty spaces - or lack of - feels like a suitable place to put Quondam, Stephen Lauf's epically impenetrable 'online collage', a real labyrinth of a website. Here, for example, you'll find information on the First Virtual House of the 20th Century, Robert Venturi's Franklin Court. Not just an empty room, but an empty house.

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 00:55 / 1 comments

Epic images from NASA's Cassini Probe / be careful what you wish for. Back in August 2007, icon magazine included a feature called Why design needs a recession / paintings by Dane Lovett / Have you ever thrown a book across a room? And which books? / Radio La, a weblog / Grevytrain, a weblog / Schematic Map of UK Postcode areas and the United States.

Thanks to Fantastic Journal for the recognition. It's pretty rare for architects to maintain weblogs, and it must be even rarer for two out of three key partners in a major practice to run sites that neatly cross boundaries between architecture and culture and totally dispel the myth that architects are closeted in ivory towers, utterly unaware of things like instant decorative snow (strange harvest) - an undeniably architectural object - and submerged buildings (fantastic journal)

The Language of Things, a rather scathing review of the new Deyan Sudjic book, which laments the abscence of a 'theoretical agenda', stating that the 'design community' needs to be 'as comfortable as the art world with the idea of questioning itself'. What theoretical tools are there to be unpacked? It seems to us that the role of design spectator has become the defining position of the age; we consume design not through use, but through observation. Sudjic's book would seem to confirm this, with its focus on the emerging (and receding?) luxury industry, characterised by Selfridge's Wonder Room and countless hideous objects.

Abandoned London, photos by Ianvisits. See also the Derelict London group, inspired by the website of the same name / Saskatchewan Ghost Towns. You have to dig about a bit to get to the photographs / Squashed writers / thanks to Slaw for the mention / Ruffly, a weblog / Life at HOK, an example of the new breed of corporate blog. The Whole Buffalo one is also a 'corporate' blog, in that it's run by members of the St Luke's agency in London / The Endsheet, a weblog devoted to book design.

Jonathan Beller's project 'Fans' is a collection of obsessives. See also James Mollison's gallery of disciples / we have a new project, 'Touring', 'the famous automobile card game' published by George, Charles and Edward Parker in 1926.

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Pelican of the Week, an occasional series. Learning to Philosophize, by E.R.Emmet, with a cover by Robert Hollingsworth. Not a lot to find out about the designer, apart from this Design article from October 1972, when the publisher's design department was overseen by David Pelham. Pelham was given carte blanche to revitalise the aesthetic approach of the series - the visual mish-mash of the mid to late 1960s is very evident. Learning to Philosophize isn't perhaps the greatest thing to come out of the era, with its self-conscious 'computer-style' typeface and awkward patterns.

We're indebted to the transcript of Pelham's 2007 talk at the V and A on the Creative Review blog, which reveals how he drew on work by artists like Eduardo Paolozzi and Allen Jones, who would not only provide original works but also their magpie-like eyes for the ephemera of the late Pop era: 'Every now and again [Paolozzi would] give me a rather fat file of visually interesting little cuttings that he habitually clipped out of magazines: technological magazines such as Scientific American and wonderful science-fiction magazines and so forth'. From Design: 'Other writers are simply dogmatic: Nabokov insists on his own design [although the Design article contradicts this], which means that nearly every cover looks different; Salinger insists on the same plain silver backs being written into every contract; Gunter Grass does the covers, like everything else, himself.' Many other insights on that page.

There are also some contemporary covers reproduced at this Designer Daily post on Pelican/Penguin cover art. Also related, Scientific American Cover Art, with particular emphasis on the artwork of the 1950s and 1960s. The Penguin Collectors Society.

As for the book itself, Learning to Philosophize was described as a ''think-it-yourself' handbook for the application of logic and philosophy in daily life', a sort of proto-de Bono or de Botton, with the 'digital' design tapping into then contemporary thoughts on the emergence of artifical intelligence and the relationship between the brain and the computer. Next time we do this we'll try and include an actual extract from the book in question. Promise.

Labels: architecture, linkage, pelican

posted by things at 18:30 / 0 comments

The Beaford Archive, 'established in the early 1970s to document the land, its people, and their traditional way of life in rural North Devon.' The archive contains 80,000 images by the late James Ravilious (son of Eric, more images at Rennart) / Magazines now archived on Google Book Search. Thus far there doesn't appear to be any way of finding out which magazines have been filleted for the purposes of scanning (e.g. New York Magazine, for example). This is one way to do it, but is surely not very comprehensive. From Popular Science, April 1948, '10 Easy Ways to 'get that Extra Room''.

Aviation in Rio de Janeiro, a host of imagery from the era of seaplanes and Zeppelins (via Continuity in Architecture) / Jonathan Jones (or a sub-editor) asks, 'Is the Sagrada Familia being banalised in the name of tourism?' The old maxim applies - if an article is being posed as a question, the answer is inevitably 'no': 'Far from betraying Gaudi's spirit, the belief that the Sagrada Familia should be finished is in accord with a religious sensibility in which the architect is a worker, not a star.'

UseLess objects by JVLT. Although the designer claims to be making a comment about Design/Art culture ('The works of "UseLess is More" represent the essential difference existing between Design and Art. Industrial design produces useful objects with good taste. Art produces useless "things" from a functional point of view, but with meaning as its essential prerequisite.'), these seem to work better as a critique of image-led design culture. They are highly crafted objects constructed, photographed and then distributed in such a way as to make widespread reproduction inevitable.

Photographs by Matthew Porter. Lovely / photography by Leon Chew / art by Michael Clyde Johnson. We especially like the 'room for forced perspective' / the London Architecture Diary / me-fi has the requisite round-up of Oliver Postgate links / live stats from BBC News / ask me-fi has some fine death metal recommendations / try out the radio / need a random number?

Our initial thoughts (since excised) that the merging of the editorial teams for the Architects' Journal with the Architectural Review implied a 'less than rosy future' for the titles. On reflection, this could be read as a slight against those working on the titles. Far from it - the Architects' Journal is probably the best architecture publication in the UK right now (although we will greatly miss Patrick Lynch's column). We were simply worried that the move was a first step on the road to closing the AR altogether. We'd be very happy to be wrong - few magazines have such inherent potential (and such a glorious legacy - check Eversion's AR-related sets) as the AR. The 'outrage' column (which might nowadays fill a whole section), the spirited campaigns for a more human urbanism, the sheer depth and quality of the design.

As our sidebar attests, the signal to noise ratio in the contemporary architecture scene is high. The architecture blogs crackle with static as the image - both real and rendered - achieves a kind of primacy that even the most enthusiastic advocates of architectural photography could not possibly have predicted. In other words, it's hard to write about architecture when the popular hunger - mostly amongst other architects, it seems - is not for text, but pictures. As a result, we have a whole generation of designers who have learned to take advantage of this literary blight by diagramming their work, reducing structure, program, planning and theory to a set of criticism-deflecting visual codes.

Labels: architecture, linkage, media

posted by things at 14:20 / 0 comments

Victory City, Orville Simpson's epic attempt at creating a private utopia (via me-fi). This example of amateur urban planning is defiantly high rise (in exceptional detail), a rarity, as the fantasy conurbations of fiction and the imagination are rarely vertical. In the real world, going up remains the definitive statement of modernity (although the passion for tall buildings may well wane considerably). Related, a gallery of the Burj Dubai at IconEye featuring photographs by David Hobcote (who has contributed to BurjDubaiSkyscraper.com, a site that appears perpetually astounded by the relentlessly upwards progression of this building).

However, unveil an unlimited landscape of infinite possibility, and what is the architectural response? Nostalgic homages to a lost modernism. In Original Sim ('For the architects of Second Life, reality bites') a tour around the virtual spaces created by real world designers, the real and the surreal abut each other. For architects, the attractions of 'building' in Second Life are obvious: 'There are no planners, no building regulations, no thermal loss calculations, no value engineering by developers.' Yet this is a quote from a designer who 'also maintains [Second Life's recreation of the] Farnsworth House', surely the most iconic example of architectural arrogance ever created. When left completely to their own devices, architects either create chromatically extravagant, structurally improbable buildings or attempt to develop and finesse the more rigorous aspects of modernism.

Perhaps amateurism should be given free reign. The traditionalists are attempting to strike back, with limited success. 'I'll show you a real carbuncle, Charles,' Poundbury takes a pounding (excellent photographs by Paul Russell, demonstrating that so-called 'bad' architecture often makes a far more interesting subject than 'good' architecture, perhaps due to the accommodation of context). Two more things that relate to adhocism and individuality: all about The Story of High Street, a new book from the Mainstone Press about the retail variety of 1938. I want to get on with my life but the market won't let me, a photo-essay at infinite thought, a journey along the Piccadilly Line to the wretched Westfield ('the new home of luxury', the Gherkin looming out of the website in a deliberate perversion of the city's geography to lure the unwary) and on to the miserable (and doomed) Trocadero.

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What are some great lost albums? / Slow Painting, a weblog / architecture photos by flickr user rucativava / the Gibson Dark Fire, a 'robot guitar' that looks intriguingly stuffed with all manner of sound-tweaking technology. Something for a future edition of music thing to obsess over.

Farewell to Oliver Postgate / at the other end of the creative spectrum (although linked, perhaps, via the Clangers, 'Sci-fi 'creator' Forrest Ackerman dies' / Strawberry and Cream, craft and art / 25 times a second, a tumblelog / The brilliance of creative chaos / Istanbul (Not Constantinople, a weblog.

Atelier Malkovich, a collection of half scale idealised artist's ateliers / revisiting the Taos Hum, 'a low-pitched sound heard in numerous places worldwide ... usually heard only in quiet environments, and often described as sounding like a distant diesel engine' / the demons of Building 280 / Iain's C64 homepage / paintings by Laura Moreton-Griffiths / buy stuff off the police with Bumblebee Auctions.

'The New Examined Life: Why more people are spilling the statistics of their lives on the Web' / thanks to David for the following digging at the New York Public Library's portal, including a selection of NYC Atlases, a huge image library, including the work of Bernice Abbott. Related, an Austeresque venture: a photo of every single street corner in Manhattan, by Richard Howe (via kottke).

Labels: architecture, future, linkage

posted by things at 12:45 / 2 comments

Travel Brochure Graphics, revisited / Grey Room, a place to escape from / a mobile crane simulator / David Guy's website highlights self-curated delights like The Pointless Museum, an self-declared portal of ephemera, Throttling, 'an archive of comic book throttles', and the celebrated Ladybird title 'How it works: The Computer', scanned in its entirety (related, Douglas Keen's obituary) / highly recommended, The Morning News Annual 2008.

Referrer mining. the whole buffalo says some nice things about us / always pleasant to be sidebarred, this time on RAR / Books Covered / the Flickr Friends of The Twentieth Century Society / thanks to an earlier anonymous comment for pointing us to Brokers with Hands on Their Faces, contemporary studies of despair / Barbie beats on the Bratz / the British speaking clock is now sponsored by Tinkerbell. Accurist have taken themselves online after 22 years.

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 documentary posted in its entirety. Highly recommended (via me-fi). See also the new book from Actar, The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, edited by Kazys Varnelis. Varnelis was recently found asking where is the good new architecture?, a question that wasn't answered especially satisfactorily / The Planet X Saga / a selection of guilty reading / kottke on the first mall, a little bit of Gruen history / 'various resources and links to articles related to North American syllabic writing systems' / an Audi brochure from 1939, rather unfortunately pitched at week-ending Nazi officials.

Lapland UK 'is NOT and never has been in any way associated with Lapland New Forest'. And now the news that Lapland West Midlands has also failed to live up to snowy expectations. Shades of Flamingo World (at 4m10s). 'Disappointing theme parks' is a flickr group that has potential / flickr sets by Unexpected Bacon / Dallas Clayton has the air of a Stateside Shrigley, although no doubt he would love to mimic the latter's marketing acumen / mentioned in passing in the last post, the entire Diary of a Nobody, as rendered online by Kevan Davis / a real nobody, the Stranger in Alexandria / it's depressing that the plummeting American car industry should be dragging down the carefully cultivated niche brands bought around a decade ago, plundered for technical information, and ultimately stripped of prestige.

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Getting a lot of linkage, Star Wars: A New Heap, 'Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death Star', John Powers' visual essay at Triple Canopy (linked via me-fi, k and KK, amongst others). In summary, George Lucas's Star Wars brought the aesthetic of the 'used future' into the mainstream, painting the technology and culture of an uncertain tomorrow (although the films were actually set in a distant past) as a bastardisation of the sleek minimalist/modernism of the Empire. This ad hoc world, where everything is greebled to within an inch of its life, is deliberately contrary to the quasi-fascist aesthetic of the Galactic Empire ('a slapdash world of knuckleheads pursued by industrial-scale minimalists'). It's tempting to suspect that the entire essay was triggered by the surely intentional visual parallels between the Death Star and OMA's RAK Convention and Exhibition Centre in the UAE.

Nonetheless, the essay effectively juxtaposes images of the minimalism of post-war American modern art with the Empire aesthetic, and that of 2001, a utopian impulse on an epic intergalactic scale that has more in common with the fantasy Berlin of Albert Speer than the dusty spaceports and rusty ships ('a flying saucer had never been a slum before'). Ultimately, Lucas's vision became culturally dominant, and the post-post Banham-era Los Angeles of Ridley Scott, a neon-soaked, rain drenched city awkwardly retro-fitted for a tomorrow that arrived too fast, continues to define the image of the modern dystopia. The art and work of the original minimalists evolved into a formal critique of the automated megalomania of the military industrial complex, culminating in works like Michael Heizer's 'City' (previously mentioned). Here we have an artwork that combines the aesthetics of modernism, minimalism, and eclecticism, fulfilling the visual predictions of both Kubrick and Lucas and yet somehow even more mythological than any fantasy world they ever dreamt up, thanks to its remoteness and almost legendary status.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 20:00 / 0 comments

The emergence of SLRs that can shoot short bursts of video threatens to undermine one of the last remaining bastions of technological perfection, the broadcast quality film clip. Commentators have noticed that cameras like the Nikon D90 or the Canon SX1 IS offer the potential to totally undermine the established media's stranglehold on how, for example, sporting events are chronicled. By creating a situation where photographers are also potentially TV cameramen, the market that values Broadcasting rights for the Beijing Olympics at around 1.7 billion dollars will have to be reassessed. Ultimately, the new technology will place more and more emphasis on time, the need to instantly review the immediate past.

The advantage will be gained by those able to push vast amounts of data - Gi-Fi - allowing HD slow motion footage to be streamed practically live from anywhere in the world. The corresponding increase in storage media will open up new complexities in human interaction. A year ago, someone was asking whether current technology would allow someone to make an audio recording of their life. In a world of 5 gigabit/second data movement, the internet's de facto status as a rolling archive - the slow but gradual accumulation of all the world's media, bit by bit - becomes entirely irrelevant. Instead, the amount of data generated will rise exponentially as we create a constantly expanding record of the present, swiftly overwhelming our memories of the past.

The catalogued life - like that of Gordon Bell (digital) or Robert Shields (analogue) - is all-consuming; the very nature of chronicling anything and everything simply precludes one from reflection. Memory will become exclusively short term. In 50 years time, when the Pooteresque ramblings of Robert Shields finally become public, we will all be too immersed in the ongoing chronicles of our daily lives to presumably even notice.

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JunkJet is a fanzine with spirit / how to max out your triangle, another attempt at graphing the work/life balance / abandoned Japan versus full Japan / photography by Maximilian Haidacher. The images of out-of-season Alpine hotels are fantastical (via Curio + Abyss) / the Erase weblog / an A to Z of New Zealand in stamps, via Hero Design Studio / images of Japanese custom cars by Satoshi Minakawa.

Camberwell Illustration, a companion to Camberwell Design / Maiike, a weblog / the model gallery at D*Hub is rich with content, if rather poor in interface. Examples, C19 plaster fungi and anatomical models / Baby It's Cold Outside, a weblog, especially C'est La Vie / Alessandro Carloni's beautiful sketches / Books Covered, a weblog / Truckspills.com / Planes on Fire, a gallery at tmn / the Loneliness Map of England.

It's tempting to see Jorn Utzon as some kind of Roarkian ideal, so stubborn as to deny himself any pleasure from the creation of one of the world's most iconic buildings. Ironically, neither the BBC or the NYT articles mention Ove Arup, the man who turned Utzon's 'sails' into a reality. There's little point in trying to evince any 'national' characteristics from the difference between Utzon's gruff self-denial and Arup's cultured anonymity (the cover of Peter Jones's Arup biography, Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century, shows just the back of the engineer's head), but they each represent an extreme facet of the architectural personality. Studied Arrogance versus apparent aloofness. Utzon's attempt to disengage from his creation was in vain - he will forever be associated with the Opera House and hence the architecture of shape and place, not function.

Related. We forgot to attribute the Rand quote recently posted. The source is Rand's The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, published by The New American Library of Canada Limited, a Signet book printed in September 1971 (part of a box set of Rand paperbacks). The quote starts on page 129.

Labels: architecture, linkage, media

posted by things at 00:30 / 2 comments

'Modern Antiquity, The Paul Rudolph housing crisis.' Regularly featured here (see Chris Mottalini's series 'After you left, they took it apart'), Rudolph's modernism appears ever flimsier, concrete rendered as slender panels abutting great expanses of thin glass. Ironic that the architect's work should have had a reputation as being brutal, impenetrable and opaque during its lifetime, when it has now been rendered as temporary, diaphanous and fragile by economic conditions.

Automatic Washer, 'The website, cyber-library and discussion forum dedicated to automatic clothes washing machines, dryers and dishwashers, collectors of antique and vintage Automatics, as well as anyone who likes to do laundry and dishes Automatically!' Complete with private collections, the patent of the day and owners' manuals galore and fantastically obscure threads.

A history of Iliffe Yard, still a thriving artists' colony in South London. More village London at the Newbon Family History site, including this image of Boyce's Cottages on Garratt Lane; suburban London vernacular before the arrival of the suburbs themselves.

Support Spontaneous Thinking, a weblog / flickr sets with a high degree of interestingness by Robotsluvme, especially the record covers / on image use and bullying by picture agencies / Le Peu Introverti, a weblog / Boss Virtual Pedal Board. Compare and contrast with Hobnox / Boicozine, UK design culture.

'I'm on a bus in London'. Genius idea that plays very badly with mobile Opera (via haddock) / Justice for Audio, the Metallica mastering debacle rumbles on / Things to Look At, a weblog / why create a single vehicle simulator when you could simulate them all? See also Rig of Rods.

Down the Rabbit Hole of the Pentagon Graphics Machine, or how I learned to stop worrying and love clip art and Excel, via Infosethetics. A job for AMO? / PIN-UP is a magazine of 'architectural entertainment', with the occasional genuine pin-up lurking amongst the mid-century modernism / guilty pleasures collated at Shelfari / architectural photography by Leonardo Finotti.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 19:30 / 1 comments

The end of the world is nigh, perhaps. The temples of doom, a recent Guardian piece by Rory Carroll draws parallels between the 'population explosion, ecological disaster and weak leadership' that did for Mayan civilisation and the apparent limits being approached by today's global culture, six centuries after the Renaissance.

The piece isn't especially alarmist; there's plenty of hand-wringing online and elsewhere. It wasn't so long ago that merchants of doomsday saw the enemies of progress as those most likely to send global culture backwards. Unsurprisingly, the writings of Ayn Rand, particularly those that date to the heady, corrosive, pick-your-corner period of American environmental history, kick-started by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (given an 'honorable mention' in Human Events' list of the 'Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries').

Why so harmful? As Rand pointed out gleefully, the environmentalists were hell-bent on returning America to the Dark Ages:

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'Your wife gets up at six A.M - you have insisted that she sleep until the coal furnace, which you lighted, has warmed the house a little. She has to cook breakfast for your son, aged five; there are no breakfast cereals to give him, they have been prohibited as not sufficiently nutritious; there is no canned orange juice - cans pollute the countryside. There are no electric refrigerators.

She has to breast-feed your infant daughter, aged six months; there are no plastic bottles, no baby formulas. There are no products such as "Pampers"; your wife washes diapers for hours each day, by hand, as she washes all the family landury, as she washes the dishes - there are no self-indulgent luxuries such as washing machines or automatic dishwashers or electric irons. There are no vacuum cleaners; she cleans the house by means of a broom.

There are no shopping centers - they despoil the beauty of the countryside. She walks two miles to the nearest grocery store and stands in line for an hour or two. The purchases she lugs home are a little heavy; but she does not copmlain - the lady columnist in the newspaper has said it is good for her figure'
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This lengthy fantasy about an enforced return to a life of pre-push button drudgery, dimly lit and bereft of the benefits of planned obsolescence and consumer desire was a central element of Rand's rant against the apparently Luddite tendencies of the emerging American left. It's a perverse combination of Threads and the River Cottage.

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Other things. Stills from the Fountainhead at the LIFE Archive / Show me your wardrobe, a sort of in-your-face Sartorialist / a fashion blogs, Miss at la Playa / Make Mine Shoebox, a neat retro styled animation by Chris Harding. Some stills / English translations of Asterix / the guitar toolkit seems like a very good reason to have an iPhone.

Why mailmen give up / playing Mirror's Edge apparently makes you sick / paintings by Stuart Shils / paintings by Michael Tompkins, represented by the Paul Thiebaud Gallery. Fine art websites are stuck in a world of frustratingly tiny thumbnails / the Objectivist dating site, currently getting a lot of online attention.

Labels: architecture, esoterica, future

posted by things at 21:17 / 2 comments

The recent news that the design of the forthcoming American Embassy in London is to be limited to American firms only ('British firms barred from US Embassy competition') isn't enormously surprising; the modern American embassy structure don't exactly extend the open hand of cultural freedom. In Beijing, Berlin and elsewhere, recent buildings are effectively fortresses in the post post-modern idiom, insular compounds that are as aesthetically dated as their websites, the architecture wrapped up in protective layers that are now overtly physical as well as electronic. Back in the heat of the Cold War, the threats were from bugs secreted within. This 1987 Newsweek piece, 'The Battle of the Bugs', chronicles the efforts of the Americans and Soviets to electronically get one over one another during the 80s: 'Washington sent in another debugging team, and a huge array of microphones was detected in the structural concrete. The bug network covered the most sensitive area of the eight-story chancery building, a windowless floor that was obviously intended for secret operations.'

Physical defence has now entirely overridden aesthetic concerns. Given that the new US embassy is unlikely to have river frontage, it's hard to imagine exactly where the new structure is going to end up. Nine Elms isn't exactly the most exciting of locations, with most of its history effectively grubbed up and concreted over by first the railways and the wharves and warehouses (including the long-demolished Cold Store), then by decades of non-descript industrial estates and vehicle depots and the occasional little gem like The Optimists of Nine Elms, an obscure Peter Sellers film, complete with large false nose (stills, introduction and short clip).

Seen from above, the opportunities for world-class architecture seem minimal, to say the least, in amongst the big sheds and arbitary street patterns, all far removed from the open fields and timber wharves shown on Greenwood's 1827 Map of London. But the words is that New Covent Garden Market, opened in 1974, is now due for major redevelopment, which will involve the demolition of the expansive space-framed structure (home to a sprawling car boot sale at weekends, full of Eastern European foods and products). Presumably this site, once the site of the Nine Elms locomotive works (moved out of London in the late C19), will then become to a piece of major diplomatic architecture. Will the new American embassy become the first international mission to represent the ideals and intentions of the new 21st Century Democratic Era? The site could hardly be more inauspicious, the blankest slate available in a city of perpetual change. What happens to Grosvenor Square - (Save our Saarinen! The American Embassy in London under threat.') - is another matter altogether.

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Room with a View (via Ample Sanity) a record of hotel rooms: 'The interior shots are always taken first and feature the window with the curtains drawn. The bed is included in the frame whenever possible to give a sense of the space. Ideally, I try to photograph each room immediately upon entry, capturing the layout, furniture and effects precisely as I first see them.'

Art by Matt Bellamy / BuchananSmith has redesigned / illustration by Tommy Perman, via The Flavor / horrific: GetAFreelancer.com, '260 words articles @ $1.5 each' / Wretch, a weblog / plsj, a tumblelog.

1985 Jetsons Layouts, animator John K on creating cartoon layouts in Taipei (via Bradley's Almanac) / Tom Kundig: Prototypes and Moving Parts, a sort film / the dpreview blog / B of the Bang finally limps out of the starting blocks. Flickr view.

Is this the origin of the term 'ground zero'? From the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey: The Effects of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (via kottke).

The Big Big Question, a slightly denser version of Ask Me-fi or even Notes and Queries or the New Scientist's Last Word. There's also the original journal Notes and Queries, around since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Microtypography, Designing the new Collins dictionaries: 'There is quite a difference in feeling between Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 and today’s Collins English Dictionary, but the structure of information and the way in which it is made visible are identical. The two- or three-column grid with its three-letter column headers, the outdented headwords, the cascade of entries and quotes; all these are familiar elements of contemporary dictionaries.'

All about the Cadillac Eldorado Brougham, a history capsule / From Zero to the Moon, a record label and blog / revisiting the 1982 Eurovision Song Contest / architecture in Brazil / Pearman on Venturi, c1987 / now this we like, FourTrack, an iPhone application / Hobnox is a pretty extraordinary site, allowing you to hook up and tweak any number of electronic music making devices.

Life on Google, millions of images from the archives of LIFE magazine, searchable through a Google interface. Disneyland, California, July 1955.

Labels: architecture, design history, linkage

posted by things at 10:30 / 0 comments

Jalou Galerie, 'les archives de L'Officiel de la Mode' (via On Shadow, mildly nsfw), a treasure trove of archive imagery from France's L'Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode, dating back all the way to the first issue in 1921. The above image shows a selection of covers from 1933, when Leger was clearly all the rage.

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A fine exposition on several contemporary topics, Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture / we missed this: Life Without Buildings interviews Charlie Kaufman, on the occasion of the release of Synecdoche, New York, a film about a world within a world (rather than a film within a film, the original meta digression that denoted a knowing post-modern treatment). Official site.

It would be a bit trite to point out that video games pioneered the art of packaging alternate realities, giving us the ability to casually acknowledge the grandiose yet also macro scale world vision demonstrated by Kaufman's protagonist, Caden Cotard. From the look of the stills, the film has a patina-rich analogue feel, something that seems increasingly within reach of digital fx houses (see this 'making of' piece about Eternal Sunshine...). Kaufman's imaginary world is always explicitly just that - imaginary - a multi-layered set in which places and people from the 'real' world are mirrored and imitated. We look forward to it.

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Other things. A happy coincidence that the NYT should publish a story ('A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence') on the same day as an entirely fake edition of the NYT was distributed, "all the news we hope to print", with the website here / small drawings, a weblog.

Eating bark, a weblog / the John Peel wiki page / nutty's nuggets, a weblog / tigerluxe, a weblog / the photography of Christopher Herwig, via O Meu Outro Eu Esta A Dancar, a weblog with occasional nudity / photography by Deirdre O'Callaghan / a 2D flash version of Mirror's Edge, a game that presents the imaginary city as a place of perpetual movement.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 00:30 / 0 comments

Yskira is the new architectural yearbook from Skira Publishers, just about to launch its 2007/08 edition. Yskira is symptomatic of a new digital slickness in architectural publishing, a genre which is having to learn fast from the internet, where weblogs and tumblelogs shape the definition and perception of 'new' architecture. These day a building makes its debut on the world stage as a render before - if it's lucky - becoming a fully fledged structure and being artfully captured by two or three 'iconic' images that can then be rapidly disseminated around the architecture blogs.

The Paris Exhibition of 1900, an earlier age of iconic architecture / Do you remember Olive Morris? Local history in Brixton, starting off with a 'Council building named after a female Black Panther.' related, the work of Emory Douglas, 'First and only Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party' / Dubious Dubai: faux eco bling - a new architectural trend / The Little Professor, 'Things Victorian and academic' and always interesting / Bezembinder's Illustrated Links, with an outsider art-ish edge / the main thing one notices about enormous resources like Canada's Digital Collections or the Digital Librarian is that five or six years is an eternity in online archives and exhibitions and resolutions that might

The Bessember Saloon, part of a comprehensive post on the saloon and other experimental ships, tracking bits of nautical and architectural salvage as they make their way from ocean to country house to educational establishment and then bombsite. For more lost architecture, see Bessemer's House in Camberwell, a vast mansion, all trace of which has been eradicated in the modern era. All via Apothecary's Drawer.

The History of Visual Communication, a pretty comprehensive primer / Stair Porn, 'stairs and nothing but' / The Wandering Architect, a travelogue / top tips for living on a boat / speak your brains, now plotted on a map / the Gio Ponti Archives / election night: the pundits, the newspapers (both via k).

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 00:30 / 0 comments

End of week round-up. From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family's Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre / Cemeteries of the Century / Paper Jam, excellent UK weblog / Piran Cafe, a weblog that links the National Media Museum's flickr page, with sets including spirit photographs of William Hope, one of Britain's premiere spirit photographers at the turn of the twentieth century. Whatever happened to spirit photography?

Mixin'Jams, the weblog as box of chocolates. Drill down to find soft centres, like Henry Bursill's Hand Shadows to Be Thrown upon the Wall / Bodas/Weddings, a photographic project by Juan de la Cruz Megías / design by Enzo Mari / photography by Tamir Sher.

Showing a savvy understanding of the kind of story that drives site traffic via sites like this one, the AJ presents the 10 scariest buildings in Britain. A pretty broad selection, but not really scary as such, just frightening in an Orwellian or ugly kind of way. Once again, St George Wharf comes in for a well-deserved kicking, but its inclusion merely highlight the clippings job nature of the article.

Key Ideas, a weblog allied with the Camberwell College of Arts and overseen by Peter Nencini. The weblog attempts to put a bit of theoretical heft back into the endless stream of imagery that has become so prevalent / 12 clay car mock-ups. at oobject, via Twirk Ethic. The site also linked to this NYT article from last year, Sketches of Optimism From Detroit's Glory Days

Browsing through other people's lives and likes / Adam Macqueen, a weblog / Today is a Good Day, a weblog / Le Peu Introverti, a weblog / The Lamp Post, a weblog / 3D printers approach the mass market, now 'As Cheap as Laser Printers Were In 1985', via haddock. We're waiting for the killer app that turns the 3D printer into the must-have item for every home.

Phil Beard's 'notes on the visual arts and popular culture'. Great stuff, including this post on illustrator Tony Sarg, purveyor of art to London Transport / graphic design and photography by Jon Spencer (not that one) / the Victoria and Albert Museum has its own Vimeo page, featuring just four films so far, but with huge potential.

Before we turn into the BBCS, or delve deep into the world of skunk apes, chupacabras and dead black panthers, things hears credible word of some cryptozoological goings on in Wiltshire. Watch this space.

Labels: architecture, illustration, linkage, photography

posted by things at 11:00 / 0 comments

There's a void at the intersection between aesthetics and technology. When someone suggests that robotised and computerised house-building could revolutionise a rather staid and conservative industry, the mental image is of baroque concrete follies and slick, appliance like pre-fabs that ape German cars in their build quality and attention to detail.

The truth is unfortunately more prosaic. Aesthetics are running far in advance of manufacturing technology. While creations like Enric Ruiz-gelli's Villa Nurbs are possible, they ultimately are still bespoke objects, plotted on computer but stitched together layer upon layer like a piece of marquetry.

Consider the case of the concrete house printer, the ultimate pre-fab making machine. First mooted back in 2004, the 'Contour Crafting' project, helmed by Behrokh Khoshnevis, has recently given funding by Caterpillar.

Khoshnevis, working at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, initially created a system that is necessarily rather angular, as you can see from this YouTube video; right angles dominate. The idea has evolved, as shown by this small scale contour crafting device which can do curves but looks rather impractical to scale up to house size. The Contour Crafting website demonstrates that the solution would be a mix of the two, but would still fall far short of the generative fantasies that represent modern futurism.

The original Contour Crafting announcement resulted in this New Scientist article, which quotes Greg Lynn as saying that "I believe that aesthetically there's a great potential to make things that have never been seen before." Yet Behrokh Khoshnevis's ambitions - "to be able to completely construct a one-story, 2000-square foot home on site, in one day and without using human hands" - were more about volume than aesthetic innovation. This is the kind of future cityscape a robotised army of Contour Crafting machines would create:



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Other things. The Quiet Feather bows out / the Sesquipedalist moves on to a new iteration / a new publication via Archinect and InfraNet Lab, [bracket]. The html for that is going to get irritating / Saudi car culture (video) / huge collection of old car brochures for sale / the website of the book Medical London (via Further) / stolen novels, a great but bizarre story / crashed plane in Russia.

Paintings by Oana Lauric / the ladies of Star Trek, both via Rashomon / on Chaplin's Modern Times / the Swaggart Bible College Dorm, a gem of late evangelical brutalism at Abandoned Baton Rouge / Old Milwaukee / four years on, and Lynn is clutching a Golden Lion, saying "We Want Your Toys.

Labels: architecture, linkage, technology

posted by things at 12:30 / 2 comments

The Architects' Newspaper Blog reports on the strangely out-of-step male fantasy that is the 2008 Esquire House. Promoted via a Shulman-apeing shot of Koenig's Stahl House, the actual location is a dreary McMansion (emphasis on the 'man', as AN points out, rather obviously), stuffed to the gills with increasingly hard-to-shift consumer goods sourced from major advertisers.

The most overwhelming impression is one of aesthetic and materialistic conservatism. Compare and contrast with the Playboy Town House of over 45 years ago, a modernist inner city pad (previously mentioned) that still looks utterly contemporary. The Rudolphesque/Kahn-like facade of the PBT is in stark contrast to the faux vernacular of Esquire's 'modern' equivalent. Is this a reflection of cultural stasis? Or simply an acknowledgment that 'modernism' is, to all intents and purposes, now irrevocably fixed in time as a style, and not a progressive, evolving movement.

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Other things. Is there a British equivalent to Shorpy? There should be / essays by Lee Sandlin (thanks to the Chicago Reader / Perpetual Motion, RB flits between subjects / Zoom Music, a new world of things to listen to. Recommended. See also favourite instrumental music? / Kieran Long on the Biennale, which he finds is a bit like nerds talking about sex / some nerdery, the Elite Wiki / Jet Set Willy X, the sequel.

WM, a tumblr / Mad Men gets only 1.2m viewers in the US? Probably the same number download it in the UK... / relatively old, a Beck-style music map / Space Collective / Kaiju Anatomical Drawings, a series of fantastical illustrations that x-rays the insides of Japan's fictional monster foes. At Pink Tentacle, thanks to Ludwig (whose Blue Plaque Map we can also highly recommend) / yewknee, a weblog / delighted to make it into the Stuckist press archive.

'This is an obituary for the generation gap: Up with Grups / viewers LIke You, a weblog / eye spy, a weblog / Let's talk crap, Salon on global sewage issues / the global culture of queuing / a set of covers from The Economist, charting 11 years of impending financial doom (via magCulture). Related, watch Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 23:04 / 0 comments

SuperSpatial makes some fine points in A Night at the Opera: 'Hadid's Opera House in Dubai is the first true architecture of the 21st Century. Digital. Sleek. Perfect. So why build it?... The sheer beauty of the renderings is breathtaking. I want to inhabit its spaces (virtually). I want to fly through it. I want to explore its surface, its textures and materials. But I have no intention of visiting it.... But the reality will never live up to the beauty of the proposals. So why bother? The future of architecture is not Dubai, but Dezeen.'

In a piece called 'Empty Vessels', Jay Merrick recently described iconic architecture as 'essentially the spatial implementation of corporate decisions'. So why not bring iconism back home? That seems to be the thinking behind the inclusion of Michael Jantzen's M-Velope structure, a $100,000 folly listed in the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book.

Presumably intended for the country estates and beach retreats of the (crunch-shielded) ultra-wealthy, the M-Velope is fascinating and well thought out, but also has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the idea of architecture and design as a source of eye-boggling tchotkes, all the better to impress and enhance. We didn't expect anything more of Neiman Marcus - their traditional annual orgy of consumption has always boggled the mind. NM's Christmas Book is a feast of the absurd, from the 1969 Kitchen Computer (developed with Honeywell) to today's rather more nostalgic offerings: 'our exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime gift. The folks at RiRa Pubs will design a fully functional, traditional Irish pub and build it in your home in 2009. It will be crafted from historic Irish architectural elements and authentic Guinness artifacts'.

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Other things. A collection of music from ATP NY2008 at Strange Attractor / album covers, via Print Fetish. Also via PF, Vector journal / bathing beauties / Kino fist, the website of a film collective. Fine post on Threads, by Owen Hatherley. The whole film is on Google Video / Oolite, an open source Elite, with copious add-ons / neat little 3D java viewer / Timelapser posts film on vimeo (via slowernet).

Dooce unpicks her teenage diaries. Like a personal version of FOUND magazine: 'Satan himself called at the most vulnerable point of my entire semester yet. And how did Heather do? But of course she prattled to the tyranny of Satan and his servants.' / buy a slice of underground London / industrious subterranean Palestinians.

Great tip via ask me-fi: Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk at Waxy - it's all about dividing up audio into little, swiftly digestible packages, apparently. We've used Casting Words before, but this looks like sound advice / 169 Errors, 178 warning(s), thingsmagazine.net gets validated. At least we're not alone (via).

Swiss Miss on browsing, or How Michael Finds Good Stuff on the Web. Quote: 'Yes, I open about 200 blogs in tabs. I know! I know, oh so very analog! RSS readers just don't do it for me. I want to see content in its original environment...' / the Battle of Bergisel (1809), a vast cyclorama. Via Tecnologia Obsoleta / further to our earlier post, The tallest building in the world: the contenders

Did the Olympic Parade really merit a couple of Apache gunships over the Thames on Thursday? Or were they there for something else?

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 12:30 / 2 comments

Try applying Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 'Black Swan Conjecture' to architecture. Is there such a thing as architectural capitaulation, whereby the nadir of one particular style or aesthetic is reached and beyond that point everything surges in the opposite direction? One might argue that Dubai's 1km tower is the capitulation of the modernist aesthetic. At 1,000 metres, design is reduced to the status of feeble greebling, manifesting itself only in the jagged spires that grace the final few metres of the building. These are physical spikes that flow in precisely the opposite direction to the financial ones that currently seem to be digging their jagged way to the bottom rule of the graph.

For some, this is pretty thrilling stuff. Dubai's expansion - mimicked by other Gulf states - has physically impacted on the country's appearance from space, giving succour to the idea of architecture as the mother of all arts, able to bend and shape whole countries to its will. For others, the relentless pace will inevitably culminate in a catastrophic engineering oversight, environmental rupture or financial meltdown. It's not just schadenfreude, but a growing suspicion that things can't last in their current state. Whether it's architects apparently willing to turn their backs on the possibility of career-making commissions (Mayne warns Dubai set for 'ecological disaster'), or smaller stories like the 'Raw sewage threat to booming Dubai' or the problems on the Palm, the region is being set up as a ticking timebomb, a soon-to-be deserted wasteland (quite literally) where the half-finished spokes and spikes of abandoned starchitecture rapidly succumb to the dunes.

Perhaps the 1km tower and other recent designs like the Michael Schumacher tower (with automated boat parking, apparently), denote the final flourish of this era of architectural extravagance (via tatosite). In any case, from this evidence, India is the new Dubai (via Indian Skyscraper Blog, via me-fi).

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Other things. The marvellous Modulex Planning System (via Peter Nencini), developed by the Lego-owned Modulex company (still in existence) and apparently a favourite of Eero Saarinen / Sci-Fi-O-Rama, a popular source of things to be ffffound.

Pop Art Zaha / illustration by Justin Blampied / The School of Life, 'a new cultural enterprise based in central London offering intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life'. The school of life weblog is worth a read, too / The Manual, a handmade newspaper that will probably remain a one-off (via mag culture).

Noisy Decent Graphics has a small, but no doubt burgeoning, collection of credit crunch graphics / Brief Epigrams / Rawsthorne on Ken Adam / Material World, a weblog we'll be paying more attention to in the future. This past post celebrated the life of Judy Attfield, one of the first people to get things interested in things.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 16:50 / 0 comments

A few thoughts on the incredibly limited interaction between architecture and contemporary literature, triggered by the occasion of David Foster Wallace's death. DFW is perhaps best known amongst those with only a casual relationship with his work as someone who turned the footnote into a meta digression, a literal subtext that could then occupy another space within the main narrative, a place for digressions, expansions, and diversions. His journalism, if one could call it that, was a particular favourite, dense explorations of the apparently trite or over-worked, extricating fresh meaning and inevitable absurdity from each situation.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is the stand-out essay on the relationship between place and space (originally published in Harper's as 'Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise' (pdf)). For Foster Wallace, the cruise ship was not simply a closed, hermetic environment, but a place for a dense, tragicomic exploration of social interactions and expectations. The piece also touches on suicide and the 'unbearable sadness' of the entire concept of cruising, making much of the ironic contrast between the pristine whiteness of the ship itself and the human decay within - 'every type of erythema, pre-rnelanomic lesion, liver spot, eczema, wart, papular cyst, pot belly, femoral cellulite, varicosity, collagen and silicone enhancement, bad tint, hair transplants that have not taken'.

Those gymnastic sentences and deep pile footnotes were once revolutionary. But even though all text is supposed to be multi-layered and hyperlinked, few have exploited the digital medium with the innovation that Wallace brought to the printed page. A recent visit to the Venice Biennale made us wonder about layering and complexity, and how theoretical and analytical complexity is evaporating like a puddle in the sun, replaced by extreme visual complication. Above all, this is a new world of explication, where clarity is wilfully overturned in favour of multiple paths. In a way, the architectural avant-garde has evolved into a landscape where the footnotes - in the form of half-baked theory and intellectual posturing - are already in place. It's left to the reader to choose their own easy path through a text.

As we walked down to the Giardini for the last time, two vast liners sailed east along the Lido di Venezia, heading from the cruise ship docks at the Bacino Stazione Maritima to the open sea. Each towered above the terracotta roofs and elaborate facades of the palazzos and churches, modern monuments that will forever have a sheen of faintly misguided mechanistic fetishism about them (one wonders what the effect of the last twelve years has on the atmosphere of the cruise industry; bigger, better and more seem to be the watchwords, a trajectory it shares with architecture yet both are strangely reluctant to draw parallels to each other). Corb's passion for the mechanical ultimately turned out to be rather fickle; he was in love with the romance of the machine, not the mechanisation of romance. Strange that such a totemic slice of modernism, an object so integral to the modern movement itself, should enjoy notoriety as the site of a fatal self-analysis.



You can read also the chapter 'derivative sport in tornado alley'. See also Consider the Lobster (pdf) and the selected material from Harper's (The Depressed Person (pdf) is particularly difficult). McSweeneys is running a tribute front page, while tmn has a round-up (Jessanne Collins' My Life in Jest is also a must-read), as does The Howling Fantods' comprehensive collective of online tributes and obituaries.

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Other things. An essay on the Biennale by Jonathan Glancey (whose new book, Lost Buildings encapsulates the sense of modernism-as-nostaglia) / Venice Biennale coverage at the AJ / strange object found in space? / the H1 Fugu helicopter concept; we're living in an age when this kind of aesthetic is starting to be expressed in real products / 5B4 is a weblog devoted to the photographic monograph / artwork by Esther Stocker.

A Little Piece of Mind, creating a quilt from multiple sources / Floater Magazine offers a utopian view of future architecture / Confessions of an awards juror: '... we don’t know what graphic design is for any more' / the work of Neave Brown, architect and artist / Lego instruction scans / more intense cruise liner axonometrics at the website of Beau Daniels and Alan Daniels. See also their automotive portfolio / a cup of tea and a wheat penny, a weblog.

Very happy to be mentioned in RB's The Digital Ramble - tracking sites that are 'meaningless deep down, sure, but still charmingly poignant on the surface.' We (think) we knew nothing of Jjjjound, which more than anything reminds us of a modern day collection of Gainsboroughs, a world of self-aggrandisement in which the perfect lifestyle pose simply mirrors Mr and Mrs Andrews, replacing their sweep of Suffolk with semiotically dense dioramas of urban life. Also, nothing like a big link in to get a post up swiftly.

The man clutching box image is a very modern form of visual shorthand. The BBC website spotted this, noting that for many newspapers the main challenge of a big story like the Lehman collapse is 'how to illustrate the collapse of a bank with pictures of pretty, high-achieving, Home Counties thirtysomethings carrying their possessions in a cardboard box'. It's been a visual trope since Enron, and presumably many years before that.

We'll be away for a week.

Labels: architecture, linkage, writing

posted by things at 00:28 / 1 comments

Analagous Spaces, a conference looking at the parallels between architectural space and theoretical space - the structuring of knowledge, if you like. Presentations included 'From Civic Space to Virtual Space: The Past and Future of Early Public Library Buildings in Britain' (pdf). There's also Koos Bosma's 'In Search of DataSpace' (warning, 13mb pdf), which posits that the relationship between the physical world and the world of data is no longer clear cut: 'The analogous space is denoted as a city of bits and bytes, an analogous urban, wireless space that communicates via satellites. Generally this space is visualised by means of metaphors. The best known is the Electronic Highway, with a junction to another metaphor, the Digital City, which is situated under a dark DataCloud. But metaphors are not very helpful, they are soon worn out.' Rather than the linear grid of the city, the interlinked relationship between data encourages a new, random DataSpace, a digital city of nodes and links.

Sonja Hnilica gave a presentation on memory and planning, describing how the remnants of cities past left imprinted on the urban landscape. In History or Fairytale? (pdf), she invokes the work of Camillo Sitte, the Austrian architect whose 'City Planning According to Artistic Principles', published first in 1889 eschewed the formalism of the block plan - by then finding favour in the New World - and also the relatively sterile grand designs of the City Beautiful Movement. Instead, Sitte favoured the dense and the layered, the adhoc appearance of 'urban rooms' in the medieval city as it swallowed up what went before, although he noted that inevitably there was an 'innate conflict between the picturesque and the practical'. In this sense, the 'metaphor of urban space [is] as a memory' of what went before, an idea that displeased the modernists no end, in particular Le Corbusier - an architect who, as others have noted, 'hated streets.'

See also Naoya Hatakeyama's Untitled/Osaka Diptych. The ultimate solution for Osaka Stadium was Namba Parks, designed by Jerde, reinventing the space left over by the stadium as a 'green oasis'. Below, Piazza del Anfiteatro, Lucca (left) versus Namba Parks, Osaka (right) - both links go to respective Google map pages.



Vaguely related to the shape of data, cities and lives lived: does a surfeit of personal data mean the end of privacy? Anecdotally, it seems the younger generation - those for whom the internet is as natural as breathing - are less concerned with their inevitable digital trail, seeing it as part of their lives, as impossible to erase as footprints and also the means by which people engage and commune / another set of mental images: "I think most men carry around a secret library full of films they've shot of every woman they ever met. Crude little sequences strung together that help us imagine what life might be like with a particular person - buying a car, going to Disneyland, standing around in Sears while she checks the price on bath towels. Despite popular belief, guys don't mentally undress every woman they meet; they simply thread them up and run them through the imaginary film projector in their heads to see what comes of it." (Neil LaBute, from "Look at Her" in Seconds of Pleasure).

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Other things. Pica + Pixel, a design blog / Eightfish, photography by Justin Guariglia / all about Distill magazine at via magCulture, a new publication which seems to be doing what a weblog does, except in print - collate, curate and re-present. Via the comments, Permanent Food magazine, an Italian equivalent: 'Every issue is an amusing, sometimes shocking and ironic selection of images, literally ripped out of other periodicals from around the world. The instant before an airplane crashes on a pic-nic field, a stolen frame of a skinhead rally, a girl throwing up with a finger stuck in her throat or a Raymond Pettibon drawing are just a small selection of the images you could probably stumble into while skimming one of the latest issues'.

Osteria L'Intrepido di Milano, a nice little place in Milan (via Fooled Again via tmn). The response / Buck Macabre, a weblog / another concept caravan, by Niels Caris (via Muuuz ) / Tiina Itkonen's photography series Ultima Thule at the Michael Hoppen Gallery / Songsterr, an 'online tab player' (via largehearted boy).

Jimmy Stamp has a comprehensive post about New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, Three Years Later. Vaguely related, Kosmograd on the largely bungled Eco-town saga, the struggle for bucolia ??? and the complex shadings of brown- versus green-field that tend to overshadow the debate about the need for more houses TKTKT / to accompany the new exhibition 'Modern Times: untold story of modernism in Australia', City of Sound presents a collaborative map of Modernism in Australia, 180 'buildings and structures, located pretty exactly, and many with links and images'. More to come apparently (check the CoS link for details of the collaborators).

a short history of anatomical maps / a brief history of female robots, both at design boom / Build Blog, design and architecture / photographs of Wiltshire / Matrixsynth, everything to do with synthesizers. See also the peerless Music Thing / a handy shopping list of military aircraft prices / drive big (and very big) diggers with Bagger Simulator 2008 (via rps) / Juxtaposed Tatlin, the endearing aesthetic legacy of the unbuilt.

The world's tallest finished building has just opened, albeit 142m shorter than the world's tallest incomplete building / Architectural Styles of Contemporary Universities / The Archdruid Report, 'Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society'. Turns out that in this context 'Druidry' really does refer to the 'traditional British Druid practice that explores the Sun Path of seasonal celebration, the Moon Path of meditation, and the Earth Path of living in harmony with nature as tools for crafting an earth-honoring life here and now'. Perhaps it's unsurprising that Druidry should pay a keen interest in the Coming of Deindustrial Society.

On the left above, a new apartment complex by Sou Fujimoto, currently nearing completion in Tokyo. On the right, Herzog + de Meuron's forthcoming VitraHaus at the Vitra campus in Germany.

Labels: architecture, linkage, urbanism

posted by things at 16:30 / 0 comments

There is a long tradition of concealing spaces - even whole worlds - within existing structures. From CS Lewis's Wardrobe to the expedience-driven space and time shifting properties of the Tardis, through to the pragmatic continuation of the streetscape through structures like 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, a famous false facade in London (and surely in need of being given a fitting fictional character as its occupant). Wikimapia shows what's behind the facade. Another picture at Geograph and another at flickr, part of an abandoned buildings set.

China Mieville's short story "Reports of Certain Events in London", which appeared in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (it's also collected in his book Looking for Jake), examines the sudden and chaotic appearance of ghost streets within London's fabric, spaces that open and close leaving little evidence of their existence - a roof tile, some broken glass. Mieville is another author with an established alternative world, in this case New Crobuzon. See also the Fictional Cities and Towns page on wikipedia.

More architecture of concealment (portals concealing practicality). The 'Transformer Houses' photographed by Robin Collyer and covered in a typically thorough BLDG BLOG post, the comments to which revealed a rich thread of false architecture, concealing structures and dummy houses. Related, the Swiss Bunkers series by photographer Leo Fabrizio. More of Fabrizio's Bunkers, all concealed so as not to denigrate from the spectacular landscape. Also of interest, Fabrizio's ongoing series about the Sonnenberg Tunnel (wikipedia).

Also related, The Pet Architecture Guide Book, Atelier Bow-Wow's monographic guide to 'the buildings that have been squeezed into left over urban spaces'. More about Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of AB-W at Archinect. See also the work of Joel Tettamanti. Above image of the Inversion House, a 2005 installation in Houston. Archinect gallery. The project was subsequently tagged then demolished, although it lives on virtually on thousands of weblogs. The site is now a Coffee House.

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Other things. 'Entdeckung der Korridore/Discovery of Corridors', an artwork by PRINZGAU/podgorschek, via anArchitecture, a 'buried autobahn' set into the landscape as a piece of found archaelogy, the remnant of a lost civilisation. Yes, that does sound rather Ballardian. Should you so desire, there's even a track called 'Abandoned Motorway' on Ballard Landscapes 2, an album by Cousin Silas.

Chris Morris visits the Large Hadron Collidor, via cook'd and bomb'd / Picdit, yes, a link blog / Wolfenflickr (via Wonderland) / extremely large tanks, a top ten. More pictures here of the heaviest and biggest tanks / My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance, Sam Jacobs on sonic holocausts and growing old / Top Architecture News, an aggregated list / Emu Graphic Design, a steady stream of links / the Greene and Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection.

O Meu Outro Eu Esta A Dancar, a weblog / phantom plate, evade speed cameras / Grow your own home / some more anti-whimsy, albeit in extended rant form / Best Practices for Time Travelers, a 2003 post at Idle Words that can be used as reference for kottke's Survival Tips for the Middle Ages / related, Empirical Evidence of Time Travel, a post at Wide Scope. Check the wikipedia time travel page for more discussion.

Wannes Deprez's content rich flickr stream (via continuity in architecture, which has also linked to Britischer Architekt, the classic Rover commercial from the late 80s. It seems it was actually called 'Schnell'). See also this fine suite of beach houses at the California Coastal Records Project, including Craig Ellwood's Hunt House of 1955. Also, the Rose Studio Pavilion, better known from its role in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and designed by David Haid of Cowell and Neuhaus. Also, New York, 1978, all that theoretical potential. The construction of Claude Bell's Cabazon Dinosaurs.

Recent British architecture, some photography / thanks for inclusion in the east coast Architecture review's favourite 20 design blogs / contribute to Capsule's Home of Metal, an 'online digital archive that actively engages its audience in the creation and shape of....online digital archive of memories, images and pictures to tell the story of this unique moment of Midlands' musical heritage' (via diskant) / thanks for the link at Beyond the Beyond.

Labels: architecture, future, linkage

posted by things at 16:00 / 0 comments

The art of Francois Schuiten, creator of Les Cités Obscures (together with Benoit Peeters), a fantastical series of books about an alternative reality, obsessively detailed and chronicled. The sort of thing that might be lumped in with Steampunk, although the emphasis is more on urbanism and technology. The official site, Urbicande, is lavish and inclusive, opening a whole world of fansites and source material. Obskur is another very good place to start, although there's are rather clunky sites at Les Cites Obscures and Tram 81. The Obscure Cities page is also a good English language resource, while the obscure dictionary chronicles the micro-managed history, objects, places and people that make up their world, like this gazetteer of the imagination.

Schuiten and Peeters painstakingly created a world that was part Metropolis, part Art Nouveau fantasy, extrapolating alternative histories, physics and even biologies (animals specific to the world include the aquatic Spongias, the bunyips and the Boustrophedon). Part of the world's internal consistency derives from the use of real people and places, intermingled with the fictional, but integral to the narratives. Thus Victor Horta becomes a central figure in the series. Schuiten and Peeters own the architect's Maison Autrique in Brussels, which they saved and restored. Through the restoration, the artists purported to find a 'passage' to the 'Obscure World' chronicled in their books, using historical characters as passeurs ('often artists, writers or architects') to facilitate moving between the two worlds.

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Other things. 50 books, a weblog / a modernist doll's house / photography by Benedict Redgrove / the flickr page of Michael Surtees / car company logo rip-offs, at cartype / ebay to go (via bowblog) / photography by Ilona Jurgiel / A bit of curating. Lost and Found photos, a dissertation project / House 2.0, a weblog / now voyager, a weblog / Polanoid, 'building the biggest Polaroid-picture-collection of the planet....' / Hi + Low, a weblog / Bevel and Boss, a weblog / mafia hunt, a weblog / The Brand New Honda, a weblog.

Is it just us, or is everything lists? Listophilia has infected the internet to such an extent that the dominant mode of weblog post is the illustrated list / adaptivereuse, 'contemporary metamorphoses' / hyperscale, a resource for modelmakers / 100 years of illustration / Rad Library, book plans / Le Cool Books, a slick set of travel guides / The Toolbox Book / Unknown Knowns, a weblog / The House Vote, one way of rating the link stream (via Coudal) / Odd Instrument, self explanatory / does the Livescribe actually work?

The origin of the Apple key symbol / Things, a new task manager for Apple products. Looks slick. On the other side of the divide, we are boggled as to why Yahoo seem unable to integrate a calendar into their new Yahoo Go 3.0 application / Tuvie, a useful repository for the constant stream of conceptual products / the reality is shaped more like Paroxody, which produces physical things, eking novelty out of strictly analogue processes, rather than digital ones.

Thanks to Paul K for pointing us towards the concept of Greebling, ably explained in this tecznotes post as 'all those little nubs on the Imperial Star Destroyer and other ships make it look big, and real'. A (Lego) modeller explains: 'We greeble to break up boring areas'. The tecznotes post is interesting, because it posits links between greebling and tiling, each sleights of hand devised in order to deceive us into reading the parcelled up city as one continuous piece of flowing data.

A Layperson's Guide to Graphic Design, a talk by Adrian Shaughnessy / Squob, our new favourite website, looking at mobile architecture 'beyond the white box'. Traditionally the realm of conceptual renders (like the multi-faceted Mehrzeller caravan concept currently doing the rounds), there is still a massive gulf between 'designed' travel travels and the industry's definition of 'designer' products.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 12:44 / 5 comments

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

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

A New Bus for London, the official call for entries that will apparently kick-start Boris Johnson's campaign to oust the allegedly hated Citaros. The thrust is 'Could you create a new iconic bus for London? (our emphasis), with an ideas competition pitched at schoolchildren ('It must be red!') as well as a serious call for entries. The problem will probably lie with that word 'iconic'. No-one sets out to create an icon of mass transit. If there's one thing that the rapidity of contemporary design and media practice has taught us it's that deliberate iconism is short termist thinking.

When Autocar commissioned a modern Routemaster from Capoco the compromises were plain to see; vaguely retro styling (check the Quicktime movie) that says very little about looking forward but everything about our fetish for the past. There are more bus websites than you can possibly imagine (e.g. the London Bus Page in Exile and its predecessor), implying there's a strong collective cultural memory about what a bus is and what it should be. That's all very well, but to imply that any continuation of this tradition must be instantly iconic is to ignore the way affection for inanimate objects ebbs and flows over time

Closely related: the Skylon must be stopped,NBS on the latest attempt at re-writing architectural and social history, reclaiming a lost statement of optimism as an utterly de-contextualised little piece of iconism, a placemaker for a memory. There's even a kitschy little piece of retro-futuristic nonsense from Squint/Opera to accompany a quasi-official Vote for Skylon campaign (from the comments, 'classic baby boomer angst-drivel'). The thrusting form endures in the recently opened Aspire, Ken Shuttleworth's steel lattice sculpture that 'reaches for the sky', naturally. Maybe related, should Piano build at Ronchamp? Choose carefully where you want to place your architectural aspic.



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The Totoro Forest Project, helping preserve a slice of Tokyo's urban forest, inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki's 'My Neighbor Totoro'. Are there any historical examples of cities planned around existing woodland, or is urban forestry purely about re-populating areas with trees after the event? Urban forests always remind us of the Asterix book, Mansion of the Gods / Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction and The Morality of Detail, Sam on those much-circulated images of 'bad' architecture, commenting not just on their 'wrongness', but on the way these ham-fisted details tell us more about a building's ongoing changes of use and aesthetics of necessity.

Frank Gehry gets prickly with Pearman: 'The shapes left on the smoking page could be dancing figures, snowcapped mountains, a line of trees, blossoming flowerbuds, leaping salmon, marching elephants - you know how it is with Frank Gehry buildings. You see in them whatever you want to see. I'm left with no real idea what Bono's stores - profits from which go to provide AIDS-tackling drugs to Africa - are going to look like, but I'm wondering what the squiggles might fetch on eBay, if auctioned for the cause.'

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Other things / Douglas Adams' typewriter (via). Related, typewriters of the literary elite / Flight illustration forums / Glancey on Zaha-bashing / art by David Ostrowski / a history of Mercedes-Benz buses / a papercraft Catbus / Frames Per Second, an animation blog / Infinite Thought, a weblog / art by Pascual Sisto / more fish than man, a weblog / North Sea Airport proposal. More islands / minutae, a weblog / Glimpses of John Chinaman, the lot of the migrant worker in 1870s California / Shao Kelake, a weblog / some suggested cultural and functional reasons for the perpetuation of outdated technology: why do so many lawyers use WordPerfect?.

Labels: architecture, linkage, transport

posted by things at 15:34 / 0 comments

The Caravan Gallery's new book, 'Welcome to Britain: a celebration of real life (amazon) is a fusion of Martin Parr and Derelict London, a charming sneer (if such a combination is possible) that manages to show its bedraggled subject matter with a genuine affection, while still retaining a large slice of ironic detachment. Obviously not all of Britain looks like this, but there's a certain joy in the desolation. Gems like the abandoned husk of Liverpool's International Garden Festival are modern ruins that should present a salutary warning to developers and proponents of festivals and exhibitions as a means of urban regeneration. In its derelict state, the Liverpool gardens are far from Heligan-style Neo-classical romanticism - it's probably the shopping trolleys - and closer to the post-apocalyptic Romantic aesthetic that has gained great popular currency in recent years. Now being restored and redeveloped - as Festival Gardens - the site is one of the subjects of the film and website The Model City (via Art in Liverpool). The site seems to have evolved into an overview of all model cities, past and present, and the optimism and utopianism they present at their peak, and the way abandoned and broken small scale constructions mirror and presage genuine decay.

This new ruin romanticism is especially evident in the Flooded London imagery, rendered up by Squint/Opera (the firm behind the visualisations for the 2012 Olympic Stadium, via Archinect - what could be the emotional motivation behind their fascination with rendered ruins?). The imagined ruin has always existed - they have been a staple artistic subject for centuries. Only the focus used to be on abandoned civilizations, the perceived hubris of the ancients. In contrast, the virtual ruination of the modern era is self-imposed schadenfreude, with all the damage and joy turned inwards. It is a feeling made universal by the internet, where planning catastrophes and architectural missteps are all lovingly chronicled and catalogued. When Al Qaeda 'borrowed' a CGI image of a smoking, post-apocalyptic Washington DC, commentators seized on the idea that the image was meant to indicate an imminent atrocity, designed to cause panic. Yet the realisation that this very image was created for entertainment purposes not only negates the terrorist's motivations (if that's the right word) but also the media interpretation of their strategy. The contemporary fantasy of the world without humans is not so much about a return to a religious and cultural year zero, but a collective dream of detachment, a desire to see accelerated decay. Just because we can.

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A wikimapia overview of Tractorul, a 123-hectare tractor factory in Transylvania. Once of the economic engines of the Soviet Bloc - over a million tractors were built there - the vast factory is now empty and awaiting redevelopment. The factory makes up an eighth of the city of Brasov and forms its own suburb. Now being masterplanned by YRM, it is being touted as a centrally located business and leisure district, the ultimate evaporation of industrialised, socialised agricultural production / yet more pdf magazines. Little doses of intense design and imagery without the guilt of dead trees / the cutting edge in Virtual Worlds, including the relentless focus on spaces for kids / artworks by Sancho Silva.

Oldspeed Mouse Motor, a weblog about an engine rebuild, part of the vast online subculture / a 3D Casa Malaparte / Swiss Car Sightings, 5GB of images of four wheeled transportation on the relatively rarefied roads of Switzerland / Pattern Foundry is another small sign of a sea-change in design culture over the past decade, the gradual reclamation of pattern and decoration as a valid response to culture and context / a pretty peerless piece of industrial design, the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing / An Accepted Gambit, a weblog / the Hardcore Street Photography Pool.

Scale and size in MMORPGs / paintings for sale / the work of Ladislav Sutnar / Brake Burns as Mechanized Folk Art / a piece of astute but unusually rare commentary: the rotating tower block in Dubai is dreadful / the ghostly gaze / garden bunker, the kind of backyard archaelogy we can only dream of (via). See also Unseen Jersey / bring IKEA to your Sims / the art of Bodys Isek Kingelez / foil face-scanning cigarette machines in Japan by holding up a magazine portrait of a middle-aged man / BLDG BLOG links Absence of Water, a photo essay at the Polar Inertia journal on the absurd number of abandoned swimming pools in the UK, an ongoing scandal.

This week's Bad Science is especially good, managing to skewer phone mast gremlins, Aids deniers, teen suicide clusters, bioscience pills, magnetising coasters and the Daily Mirror, all in one column / London life in the 1970s / the The London Shopfront Archive / stunning photographs by Simon Norfolk / Hard Rock Park, a brand moves into theme parks complete with Led Zeppelin branded rollercoaster (seen here being tested) that is apparently synchronised to 'Whole Lotta Love'.

Labels: architecture, linkage, ruins, science

posted by things at 11:00 / 0 comments

A visual history of the TV detector van, via autoblog. Oobject is similar in spirit to Deputy Dog, collating visual lists that present just the right combination of retro stylings and visual eccentricity - Formula 1 user interfaces (or 'steering wheels'), Soviet technology rip-offs, 'unboring' ferris wheels, survival kits, classic Nakamichi cassette decks, etc., etc. These represent a triumph of digital curatorship, but also a new taxonomy of ephemera, one that dovetails contemporary obsessions with the cherry-pickings of history and in the process skews our modern perspective in such a way that whole tranches of visual culture are sidelined for not having enough collective visual punch.

How We Drive is the weblog accompanying Traffic, the new book by Tom Vanderbilt, author of the excellent Survival City / Picture Maps, via Sachs Report, which has crept back online / Navy Ships in Razzle Dazzle Costume / curious objects on display at the Device Gallery, showing Fritz Lang-esque art by the likes of Gregory Brotherton / an interview with Chris Bangle at wallpaper about BMW's latest concept design / a gallery of portraits of Phone Sex Operators at tmn, part of photographer Phillip Toledano's meditation on 'the things in society that are in plain sight, but still remain hidden.' There's also a book, Phone Sex / a clever new '3D in your browser' application from Alterniva Platform.

This is good (news), but also rather depressing / We Will Become, a weblog / the Byrdhouse, 'self-indulgent talk about architecture, design and photography' / Schaukasten, 'A blog dedicated to the aesthetic values of movie art beyond the screen' / Apparatus of Capture - Architecture in Israel-Palestine, 60 Years On', a very comprehensive piece by Owen Hatherley on the connections between colonialism, white-walled architecture, modernity and nation building.

Guerilla Gardening, making small but significant interventions in the urban realm / what are McMansions made of? Not a lot, really / Hatherley again, this time on Derelict London, the book of the website / yet more on Robin Hood Gardens / Mr H, again, on Heritage against History, 'Manufacturing a Past in London's 'Regeneration'', a spirited rant against the developer-led practice of branding new living space with a curious mix of carefully selected history drawing upon artful interpretations of terms like 'modernism' and 'constructivism', blank canvasses that shovel the true life stories of their history under the carpet in their effort to appeal to the most profitable demographic. Hard to explain in a more succinct way than he does, so read the article.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 09:58 / 0 comments

RIP Bo Diddley / Items I didn't win, an eBay set / 44, a tumble log / feeding the 5000 aggregates feeds from various sources / Channel 4 at 25 / the new proletariat, an architecture weblog / the great sale of Margate. 'asset management consultations' never end well / shep.ca, a weblog / some books set in underground locations / forthcoming BMWs promise the apotheosis of in-car electronics, at least for now / all about a Prefabricated Building System developed by artist George Maciunas in the 50s and 60s. Rendered in the modern style, the designs look - unsurprisingly - incredibly contemporary.

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Revisiting an old favourite, 'Blast', by Naoya Hatakeyama. Found via Hippolyte Bayard, an excellent photography blog. Also found via HB, Infinite palaces and buildings, a manipulated set by photographer Fabiano Busdraghi. His Antarctic portfolio is also worth a look. See also Wan.der.lust.ag.ra.phy, more photography, with an emphasis on portraiture.

Labels: architecture, linkage, photography

posted by things at 22:48 / 0 comments

Extracted from some random spam, book530.com, one of the countless 'art factories' in Dafen, a southern Chinese town that produces vast numbers of oil paintings, copied slavishly - and expertly - from Old Masters, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Abstract Impressionists, etc. etc. The work is true mass production: "We divide up the colors among us," said [18-year-old Zeng Xiangying], "By dividing up the work, contrasting colors stay clearest." How do they work? eBay is awash in Chinese galleries: avantoil, chengxiangzhubao521, Paintings-888 and templeofart all pulled from a very quick search. That last store has over 3,000 items for sale. Everything is 24 x 20 inches (must be something to do with standarised shipping rates), although you can supersize your order (everything is painted to order, naturally). The likes of Mark Kostabi and Thomas Kincade must be incandescent with rage that someone else is muscling in on their game. We're seriously tempted to buy a painting and see what the quality is like (although the medium is occasionally over-extended - such as the reproductions of Matisse's Blue Nudes, cut out pieces of coloured paper that might be interesting rendered in oils).

More. Michael Wolf has an excellent set of images of Chinese copy artists, posing proudly with their work, while Shenzhen-based flickr user lila75 has a complete set on the Dafen Artist's Village, a sort of hyper-steroidal version of the Place du Tertre or even the Hyde Park Railings. We like this picture, which seems to illustrate the collision between high culture and commerce quite succinctly. This piece, Workshop of the world, fine arts division, by James Fallows also gives a flavour of the place.

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Other things. Paris in the 50s. See also general sets and scenes from the 60s and 70s, including views of the Olivetti factory, the inner workings of a typewriter workshop. Most of these images appear to pre-date the introduction of Sottsass's Valentine. There are plenty of typewriter museums online, including Chuck and Rich's and Lady Typewriter.

Some publications. Reconstruction, 'studies in contemporary culture'. Here you'll find articles like '"Thank Goodness He-Man Showed Up": Hypermasculine Cultural Posturing and the Token Women of 80s Animated Action Teams', discussing the 'strange sexualized overtones' in cartoons like G.I.Joe. Other issues include a piece on 'The Playing Card's Progress: A Brief History of Cards and Card Games'.

Urbanomic, 'philosophical research and development'. Their new publication, 'Collapse IV, Concept Horror', looks interested. Ordered / Tanks and Tablecloths, 'an ongoing collaborative research project between artists Elizabeth Haven and Lizzie Ridout, identifying common themes between the military and the domestic.' / the work of photographer Bas Princen, via candyland.

Digital Urban on MapTube, a suite of Free Google Map Creating Software developed by University College London's CASA laboratory (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis). A way of importing data into Google Maps, it works a treat for things like the London Underground Map and Post Office locations (compare and contrast with the closures map). We wish there was a way to strip out all the map information entirely, leaving just the data behind. Also, the data contained within maps like London Building Volumes begs to imported into Google Earth so it can be tilted and flown through.

Apocalyptic game rendering crops up on terrorist mood board, apparently. Gamers unamused / the first digital camera, invented by Steve Sasson / Japanese motorway interchanges, the kind of thing that crops up at Follow Found / Aesthetechtonik, a weblog and portfolio by architect Mike Suriano / Vintage Posters / stumbled across this on a bookshelf the other day: The Google Book, by V.C.Vickers, published in 1913. Unsurprisingly it now exists on the Google-devoted Google Blogoscoped.

Labels: architecture, art, linkage

posted by things at 11:57 / 0 comments

In the Realm of Jet Lag, a Pico Iyer piece from 2004 that includes the story of Sarah Krasnoff, a woman who abducted her grandson in a custody dispute, then fled to the only place she thought would be free from the law, the international flight: 'They took about 160 flights in all, one after the other, according to the stage piece ''Jet Lag.'' They saw 22 movies an average of seven times each. They ate lunch again and again and turned their watches six hours forward, then six hours back. The whole fugitive enterprise ended when Krasnoff, 74, finally collapsed and died, the victim, doctors could only suppose, of terminal jet lag.'

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The London Nobody Knows (part two and three). James Mason narrated gem. See also the earlier Colour on the Thames, part of the BFI's YouTube presence / Abandonia, urban exploration / the Noise Mapping England website / Mr and Mrs Wheatley, a weblog / Chislehurst Caves, underground in SE London.

Wonderful installation by Jonathan Schipper, 'Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle', a slow-motion car-crash. Very Burden-esque. YouTube commenters are predictably unhappy / Langlands and Bell's digital installation at wallpaper / Michel Gondry Entertained For Days By New Cardboard Box / the Soviet passion for reverse engineered Sinclair computers.

72 views of the Tower of Babel (via me-fi). See also 'Two-mile high termite nest proposed to counter the population challenge' / a rather pithy summary of the end of the era for the desert Guggenheim: Architect Rem Koolhaas saw what Vegas didn't have, not what it needed. Perhaps this will be the same fate of the Gulf cultural building boom?

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The life of a Lebanese taxicab, including this striking image of downtown Beirut in 1969 / Nick Cave Fixes, an unofficial site / Newly Released UFO files from the UK government (via the BBC). See also the book E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces / art by Josh Keyes.

This isn't happiness, a tumblelog / has potential: potential architecture, unbuilt projects with a focus on Norway / farewell to the The faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, destroyed by fire, along with a large chunk of modernist architectural history (news via archinect). For the faculty, it's a new start, and doubtless some form of architectural opportunity.

Labels: architecture, history, linkage

posted by things at 21:18 / 0 comments

My Kingdom for a horse, in which Jonathan Jones lauds Mark Wallinger's overgrown equine submission to the Ebbsfleet Landmark invited competition (BBC story, plus a gallery of all entries at wallpaper). Is this a return to a new era of literalism, or simply a gleeful satire of our era's addiction to straightforward, uncomplex gestures. Probably a mix of both, a way of giving the 'masses' (notoriously forthright about sculpture, perhaps more so than any other art form) exactly what they want by tapping into a primal association with a landscape long bereft of any 'natural' features, and soon to be transformed once more. See also Project Mars in Poland by Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz.

More sculptural shenanigans. The proposed Martin Luther King National Memorial in Washington, its centrepiece a sculpture by Chinese artist Lei Yixin, is proving hugely controversial, perhaps because of the socialist-style gigantism of the figure itself. From the boards at sculpture.net, 'My problem with Lei Yixin doing the job is not that he's memorialized Mao -- but that he's made MLK look like 'just another semi-divine communist hero' (Centrepiece of King memorial sent back to drawing board). There is a tradition of superscale in American sculpture - Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, etc. - but it tends to go hand in hand with epic landscapes. In comparison, the land around Wallinger's proposal is distinctively uncinematic, cultivated not captivating.

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Stryder Looking Glass is one of those chaotically composed pages that links to everything and everyone, like walking into a promising-looking second hand bookshop. It's a style of site design that seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years / one of our favourite weblogs, The Strange Attractor is seeking authors / Arch / Diaries seems sadly defunct, but some decent projects linger there.

Supersmoker is an electronic cigarette. It seems to come with all the packaging and paraphernalia of a normal cigarette, though. See also the E-Z Quit. A little bit more about the battery-powered 'E-cigarette. There's also a wonderful sales pitch/weblog all about the Ruyan E-cigarette (and cigar) / graphs of camera usage on flickr (via preoccupations / Pockets of Space, a sporadic weblog.

Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, a noir weblog / art by Alex Dodge, via Moon River / the work of Togo Murano / Mentasms, a weblog / stuff I can't remember, a video weblog / Tales of the Decongested, short stories in London / car owners, then and now, photographs by Matteo Ferrari, via kottke.

Simplicissimus magazine, 1896-1944 (via me-fi). Are there any more historic magazines out there? From the Wikipedia page, some more graphics from the magazine / photographs by Lillian Bassman / photography by Michael Itkoff, in particular the series Demolition Derby and Overgrowth.

Faber Books' photostream, via i like. Book design is consumed like never before / 70K beach huts. Something for subscribers of 'Rich Guy' magazine / Born to be Nervous, a weblog with mp3s / baby car logos / Coast is Clear, der Indie-Pop-Blog.

Games like On Mirror's Edge (hi-res trailer) demand that virtual cities be increasingly closer approximations of real ones, with all the detritus and accretions and technological add-ons that cluster on top of real buildings, usually out of sight, out of mind. Compare the plethora of plant with the atmospheric yet rather plastic cityscapes of GTA IV. See also Sightseeing in Liberty City, a comparison between game and real life architecture.

Architectures de Cartes Postales, via Nasty, Brutalist and Short. The art of celebrating buildings using postcards has died out rather. Also a worthwhile musing on London's mayoral upsets / wouldn't we rather have bunkers instead of security-driven abominations? / Eastern Ley Lines, the cartographic traces of 60 demolished East London tower blocks at The Heterotopia.

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Bizarre exchange with call centre:
'David': I'm here to offer a great deal on a mobile phone.
us: I don't have a mobile phone [this is a new tactic]
'David': but we have very good offers on Three mobile phones.
us: but I don't know how to use a mobile phone [maintaining the pretence]
'David': pause. sound of a deep sigh.
'David': Oh my god, I've got dandruff on my shirt
us: [genuinely surprised] Dandruff on your shirt?
'David': Yes. But I shampoo regularly.
us: er, maybe you should wear a lighter coloured shirt?
'David': can you please recommend me any anti-dandruff shampoos?
us: apparently Head and Shoulders is very good.
'David': what about medicated?
us: no, I think it smells a bit too clinical.
'David': OK, Head & Shoulders, I'll try that. Thank you.
us: OK. Bye.
He hangs up.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 09:36 / 0 comments

Fantasy and reality. Architectural detective work. Does the Kingsford Venue look familiar? This 'uniquely designed' concert hall in the Cornish theme park Flambards is actually the 'radical reinvention the accepted idea of a tent or a marquee', courtesy of one Zaha Hadid. ZH's structure (one, two) was the first of the gallery's series of 'mini-icon' commissions, and perhaps the most pavilion-like. The series has become steadily more diaphanous and permeable, culminating in Frank Gehry's deliberately obtuse ode to deconstruction, a building that both harks back to his own earlier work (think woody, exploded fragments, rather than rolling metallic waves) and acknowledges how the Serpentine commissions have strong parallels with the trajectory of contemporary architecture on its journey from shelter to spectacle. Along the way, the avant-garde has been co-opted into becoming an ally of commercial forces, a vessel for sponsorship and branding. More past pavilions, not including MVRDV's entertainingly daffy 'steel mountain'.

Modernism has always walked a fine line between avant-garde swiping and the thrilling reinvention of mass culture. Compare and contrast two recent reviews, 'Modernism and the 'lure of heresy'', versus 'Sufferin' satellites! We've built the future!'. On the one hand, it fits the modernist narrative to describe the emergence of a new cultural force that was dependent on 'the dissolution of a ... 'living relationship to the real life of the people'' in favour of the lure of the heretical (to quote the Peter Gay book reviewed at Sp!ked). But, as Peter Ackroyd's review in the Guardian notes sagely, 'High culture may have excoriated the money-grubbing middle class, but it needed 'conservative consumers'.'

On the other hand, it's also convenient to believe that modernist artists, writers, architects, etc., were infused by the spirit of the populist imagination, in thrall to the more outlandish vectors of the newly minted American pop culture, a rich stew of space age imagery and futuristic Empire building. The Dan Dare exhibition is a case in point: '[Frank Hampson's] imaginings were eagerly lapped up by some of the youngsters who would go on to create Britain's highly regarded school of hi-tech, space-age influenced architecture'.

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Finally, Core77 rounds up the 'awful truth about la tour', trying to establish who believed exactly what in the curious case of the rendered proposal that never was, as well as nail the lid shut on the deluge of increasingly ludicrous concept renders that entered the public realm, largely as a result of design and image-led blogs. The shift to image-driven reportage has created entire careers, perhaps even genres, no doubt about it: 'I was completely, 100% convinced that there was no way in hell that wobbly table came out of what looked like a vat of lard fitted with a laser pointer. But why wouldn't I post it? What did I have to lose?' Thanks, Alissa Walker.

Demolition is one area of visual culture that hasn't been consumed by rendered imagery, yet. Mathieu Pernot's series Implosions takes the classic shot of Pruit Igoe (via High-rise Hell) by contextualising the demolition into the wider surroundings, the trees, roads and low-rise structures that are briefly engulfed by pulverised masonry before settling down to a dustier post-Utopian existence.

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Other things. Infiltrating a pet psychic / 'more than one hundred years of film sizes', especially the '8.75mm film used in the seventies in The People's Republic of China for educational, propagandistic and other purposes' / photography by Jeannie Rusten. We especially like the Automobiles series / portraits by Thorsten Overgaard / On the Horizon, photography by Sze Tsung Leong at tmn / amazing bridge / Dulwich on View, local interviews and information.

Art by Dan Fern / Primitive Machine, a weblog / no words, a picture blog / Details, a French architecture weblog / Stashpocket, an architecture weblog / download and use British motorway fonts / English Buildings, 'meetings with remarkable buildings', a travel around the pleasingly prosaic vernacular of the English roadside structure.

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 09:39 / 0 comments

Pitfalls in paradise: why Palm Jumeirah is struggling to live up to the hype: 'Low-paid workers and villa gripes cast a cloud over 'eighth wonder of the world' in Dubai'. There's a lot of schadenfreude swilling about this part of the world, a relentless and unquenchable fascination with the process, but also the unspoken expectation that this new fantasia will eventually all come crumbling down. Nice comment here on the Ballardian potential of these man-made spaces: 'It can only be a matter of time before the bridge to the mainland is blown and the orgy of sex and pet-eating begins.'

Much of the uneasiness comes from the slow realisation that starchitecture is not necessarily compatible with democracy. See this piece on the Saudi Construction boom, or this slideshow on Design for Despots (via archinect), both exploring how the glittering palaces of 'peace' and 'progress' are propped up by a combination of ill-gotten gains, population upheaval and, above all else, a desire to make a sizeable stamp on posterity using the increasingly dubious criteria of scale and ambition. It's also giving succour to some of the most vocal critics of modern architecture ('Krier attacks 'idiot' architects"'), people who have been effectively marginalised for two decades following the perceived failure of the first wave of (largely classically-inspired) opposition to modernism.

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Semper Eadem, the slow pace of life in Leicester, via Lucy Mangan / yet more referrer trawling. The Spot / Content Flavoured Trousers / The Holy Bible / The Tube, a handy little phone application for Londoners / Triple Canopy, an online magazine / Unflatpack, sorting out your IKEA-sourced lifestyle / 'The vanishing personal site', Zeldman on the fashion for outsourcing personal content (links, photos, etc.), leaving homepages bare and unadorned.

Tech histories. A history of early digital cameras / a history of the VCR player / a history of the Walkman / history of the pocket calculator / all about the Game and Watch / all about Casio digital watches.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 11:01 / 0 comments

A post-war taxonomy. The NATO Codification System is a means of classifying practical any object imaginable, with a view to easing the complex chain of military logistics between the member states of NATO, 'based on a "One Item of Supply, One NATO Stock Number" concept'. The artist Suzanne Treister has used NATO Supply Classification in her work: 'Within the codification system the NATO Supply Classification (NSC) uses a four-digit coding structure. The first two digits of the code number identify the Group, eg. Group 77 - Musical Instruments, Phonographs, and Home-Type Radios, whilst the last two digits of the code number identify the Classes within the Group, eg. 7710 - Musical Instruments (complete).' See samples above: (NSC) 8830 (Boogie Woogie shoes), (NSC) 9915 (St Edward's Crown), and (NSC) 7730 (Volga Russian Tube Electrophone, 1967)). Treister is soon to publish her work in a book from Black Dog Publishers.

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Elsewhere, our fears eventually become our fetishes. See the forthcoming re-print of the 1963 Civil Defence Handbook number 10 by V and A Publications, which turns the potential horrors of post-nuclear Britain into a cosily retro object combining nostaglia with design fetishism. Handbook number 10, 'Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack', at least contained a few crumbs of comfort and optimism, a spirited, plucky response that evoked the Home Guard of WWII. Gradually, the concept of Civil Defence evaporated, and the leaflet that followed, the infamous 'Protect and Survive', in both leaflet and film form, painted a far bleaker picture, as evinced by the cultural reaction. More information at the excellent Protect and Survive Archive of UK Civil Defence Material. See too this essay at Subterranea Britannica, 'Struggle for Survival: Governing Britain after the Bomb, which charts the evolution of the official approach From Civil Defence to Emergency Planning. Survival was the name of the game. The Americans had a similar shift from the naive futility of early films like Duck and Cover to a more gung-ho, survivalist approach, spawning a whole genre which thrives on the internet (e.g. the Best Prices Storable Foods store).

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Beatle Money, an economic history of the Beatles: 'Reliant Shirt Corporation paid $25,000 for the exclusive rights to make and produce Beatle T-shirts in 3 factories that they had purchased just for the purpose of making the shirts. In 3 days they sold 1 million shirts.' / Bon Ton, an mp3 blog / underground Greenwich at the Greenwich Phantom. See also the Greenwich Industrial Society. Related: 'A pensioner who created a labyrinth of tunnels under his house over 40 years has been forced to pay £300,000 for repairs carried out by a council.' We would love to see a survey of those tunnels / Warped Reality, an mp3 blog / Lost City in the Woods, a post at the Architect's Newspaper featuring the photography of Christopher Payne.

'Russia builds luxury Agalarov Estate', a concentrated district of architectural follies and residential extravagances: 'Scottish baronial mansions, grand Mediterranean-style villas and vast, neo-Gothic castles'. The developers are Crocus City, and it doesn't look good. Check the Crocus City Mall ('Shopping as an art form'), sporting as lumpen a pediment as it's possible to create. More at the Guardian. Such developments are handy for feature writers who want to decry the ongoing dominance of authoritarian kitsch, as well as containing the people who demand it within a gated and security-protected space. But little else.

Hauntology, or the confluence of the past with the present through the spectral and ephemeral image of the ghost, is a term coined by Derrida, an idea that 'suggests that the present exists only with respect to the past'. It seemed briefly fashionable, then was rapidly discarded (only 16,600 google hits) as the past ceased to be a phantom but a throbbing, living thing, thrust in our faces every day as 'inspiration'. The original concept probably underestimated visual culture's inexorable extension and ability to shape-shift and insinuate it across all other cultural forms. Influence is everything, and the past is no longer ghostly, but a living, breathing presence. (originally found via the promising but apparently abandoned dismantled king is off the throne).

Labels: architecture, future, history, linkage, things

posted by things at 16:46 / 0 comments

From tea shops to the Olympic Games. Joseph Lyons, perhaps the biggest name in British catering (a company with some 700 subsidiaries, as well as being computing pioneers, but that's another story), organised the catering for the 1891 'Venice in London' exhibition, stage-managed by the master showman Imre Kiralfy (even his mausoleum is impressive). Thanks to Heraclitean Fire for digging out the original programme and flyer for the Venice event from the British Library's collection.

Kiralfy was the man who made Earl's Court the capital's exhibition centre, along with nearby Olympia, before moving to White City in 1907 and creating a purpose-buit showground that formed the backdrop of the 1908 Olympics.

Kiralfy, together with his brothers Arnold and Bolossy, were a cross between David Copperfield, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Frank Gehry and Steve Wynn, a genuinely trans-Atlantic business of spectacle making. Their works included: Gorgeous Durbar at Delhi, Nero, or The Destruction of Rome, Fall of Babylon, Venice, the Bride of the Sea, and The Orient (the accompanying publication for which was subtitled 'A mammoth and original terpsichorian and lyric spectacle and water pageant'). Kiralfy also collaborated with the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. This was to be a formative influence on Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked with Louis Sullivan from 1888 to 1893 (when he was sacked). Sullivan was the creator of the mighty Transportation Building with its 'Golden Doorway', a piece of work that could serve as a symbolic gateway to early American modern architecture in the USA.

Often two productions ran at the same time, incredible given the sheer scale of each event. On 18 May 1895, the New York Times' 'England and Continent' diarist was reporting that 'Imre Kiralfy's stupendous "Empire of India" show, at Earl's Court, to be opened next week by the Duke of Cambridge, bids fair to be the most successful thing of the kind yet attempted here. His brother Bolossy's enterprise of "The Orient" at the Olympia has, meanwhile, been experiencing steady hard luck and threatens to come to grief altogether.

(The same column also notes the veritable menagerie being assembled at the Crystal Palace, then in its final location in Sydenham: '... some seventy Somalis are giving an exhibition of savage life in East Africa. They have a village, with actual native huts, working men at trades, dromedaries, ostriches, and other animals tethered near by. Brigands come and try to steal these; the villagers resist them; European hunters intervene, for all the world like cowboys, and the thing ends in a grand caravan, the procession including a magnificent collection of wild beasts.')



(The 19th century 'Spectacle' is chronicled in Spec-ology of the Circus, Part One at the fantastic Circus Historical Society (check their photography and illustrations archive). The article recalls the contemporary advertising for Imre Kiralfy's London production of Nero: "A Titanic, Imperial, Historical Spectacle of Colossal Dramatic Realism Gladiatorial Combats and Olympian Displays. Indisputably, Immeasurably, Over-whelmingly the Most Majestic, Entrancing, and Surpassingly Splendid and Realistic Spectacle of Any Age.")

(These theatrical spectacles were precursors to the more serious and high-minded international exhibitions that characterised the first decades of the twentieth century, lingering throughout the century as a symbol of modernity and futurism and are increasingly well-documented online (Expo 67 especially so).)

(For a bit more on the kind of people who worked with Kiralfy, we recommend this fabulous piece of amateur historical investigation, 'Finding Our Grandfather in the Attic,' by Arlene Wright-Correll. It builds a vivid picture of the life of an animal tamer at Bostock Circus at the turn of the century, amongst characters like Clyde Beatty, whose name lives on today ('He used to walk into a cage filled with up to 40 wild animals, armed with nothing but a whip, a wooden chair and a gun loaded with blanks').)
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Perhaps Kiralfy's greatest achievement was the The Franco-British Exhibition 1908, held at the same time as the 1908 Olympics at Kiralfy's new 'White City': ' One night I lay awake in bed and, as if by magic, I saw stretched out in my mind’s eye, an imposing city of palaces, domes and towers, set in cool, green spaces and intersected by many bridged canals. But it had one characteristic which made it strangely beautiful. Hitherto I had dealt in colour in the shimmering hues of gold and silver. This city was spotlessly white. I saw it all in an instant, and the next day I had jotted down the scheme of what London was to know as the "White City".' (the exhibition was also the site of early photographic manipulation, as postcard sellers cut and pasted images of visitors to other shows in order to populate sparse images of exhibition grounds taken before they'd opened).

Not everyone was so taken by the plethora of wonders placed before them. Punch noted drily that "Venice in London" was bereft of the Italian city's plagues of mosquitoes ('Could I quiver concealed by yon mimic Rialto, Till I swooped with a warrior's music and swing, Were I only allowed, as I ought, and I shall, to, Be avenged on your barbarous hordes with my sting'). But there was no denying popular taste. The exhibitions shaped the perception of the modern age and its wonders, artist and engineering, as well as presented a largely stereotyped view of the world as seen from the peak of Empire. It's also significant as to how the modern map of London ended up being shaped by these exhibitions, with both 'White City' (named for the sparkling paint finish on the Indian-inspired pavilion buildings) and 'Crystal Palace' becoming London districts.

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The Venice spectacle is especially interesting from a modern perspective. Canals have a troubled relationship with urbanism. In London, they were industrial conduits, now mostly filled in and covered over as the factories and workshops they served moved out. But the canal is also romance, and the floating city of the Adriatic was high in the popular imagination of the time, thanks largely to John Ruskin's Stones of Venice. As Kiralfy noted in his own Reminiscences: 'It was while I was staying at Barnum’s place at Bridgeport, Connecticut, that the idea of "Venice" flashed across my mind, not a "Venice in Italy" but a Venice transported to London. I took out a scrap of paper, an envelope, from my pocket, and then and there schemed out my idea. My mind went back to my studies of Venice thirty years before, the whole thing as it should be rose up before me, and down it went, even the details, on the back of that envelope. When "Venice" attracted its thousands and hundreds of thousands to Olympia in 1892, it had all arisen naturally from my plans on the back of that envelope.'

These were not the chlorinated waterways of Las Vegas's Venetian, all muscled gondoliers and pocket Rialto bridges. Nor was it was the doomed romanticism evident in sources as varied as Thomas Mann, Nicolas Roeg and even David Chipperfield. In fact, it was something in between. The Victorians were not just big on theme parks, but themes in general, and entertainment, romance, death and industry were frequently brought together in comprehensive but rather graceless synergy in objects like the Albert Memorial.

The inversion is that the modern theme park now occupies the grand houses and parks that had their final fling in the Vicotrian era, employing the very people who would have flocked to the popular entertainments at Earl's Court, etc, etc. While there's not enough space in the UK for theme parks to become abandoned (I, II, III, IV), the architectural losses were the fading, crumbling country houses (see Lost Heritage, 'a memorial to the lost country houses of England'), which gives some indication of what was deemed important throughout the twentieth century.

The flooded, sunken city is a popular theme (taken from 'London 'flooded' in disaster film', July 2007) in popular culture and to a more death-centric culture Venice represents a half-way house between the cataclysm of fatal, irreversible immersion and damp, ongoing romantic gloom. The If London Were Like Venice article from 1899, with its marvellous illustrations of a sunken city, followed the Kiralfy show, fusing its imagery with a speculative view of a changed capital. This sort of thing still appeals very much to the meteorologically obsessed British, see Ballard's Drowned World (1962) or BLDG BLOG on British Hydrology, the use of Google Maps to illustrate global Sea Level Rise (via Inkycircus).

As we write, the Olympic torch is preparing to make its way through a freshly snow-covered city. It will probably look spectacular. Kiralfy would have been proud.

Labels: architecture, history

posted by things at 16:54 / 0 comments

The seductive myth of a domestic utopia. Architectural media has a habit of creaming off the most interesting work, a tiny percentage of a percentage, casting an almost wholly skewed and inaccurate portrait of any contemporary scene. The internet has only exacerbated this situation, and there's an almost Pravda-like project underway to position modernism - usually a LEED-led, SoCal inspired, prefab friendly, Case Study-infused aesthetic (via) - as the dominant style of residential building around the world, with tract housing, McMansions and little brick boxes as the new class enemy. Online, architects can revel in an imaginary domestic utopia, a global yet entirely virtual exurb of endless, picture perfect modernism.

Periodically, the design media indulges in rants against the moribund aesthetic of the status quo, yet the 'average style' that makes up the majority of houses built around the world remains almost entirely invisible in media terms. As a result, the 'average home' has taken on an abstract quality, a universal design bogeyman of indeterminate form - although it is always ugly, invariably oversized, and inevitably representing a lapse in taste on behalf of planners, the public (and, whisper it, other architects). There's currently a certain amount of soul-searching going on within the Australian design media. While the long-standing international success of architects like Glen Murcutt and the late Harry Seidler (as well as the increasingly important work of studios like John Wardle and Bates Smart and the younger generation represented by media and web-savvy architects like Andrew Maynard) portray a country forging forwards with a highly evolved form of vernacular modernism, critics still feel that the majority taste represents the Triumph of Ugliness. Philistinism is rife, and it is harming the country's image. '"We haven't engaged with this country and its limitations," [Philip Drew] says. "And we haven't engaged with it visually, in terms of creating an architecture which is sympathetic, which builds on the visual qualities of both the flora, the weather and the land itself.'

It's not enough for architecture to be simply modern and tasteful, but it has to engage on a physical, environmental and spiritual level with its surroundings. Reading 'In Every Dream Home A Heartache: The Great Australian Dream and its architecture, CoS's extended riff on the role of the private Australian house as a laboratory and place of experimentation, the comments by the likes of Drew seem to be a misguided attempt to sustain the pessimistic but high profile arguments first fostered by Robin Boyd ('The Australian Ugliness'). So is Australia a nation completely hamstrung by a relentless and insatiable suburbanism? It's frustrating how easily - and willingly - discourse about modern architecture slips into us-and-them dualisms. But without a fundamental antagonism, modern architecture loses its radical thrust and threatens to become just plain old architecture, and that would never do. The argument at the core of the Australian debate - that building should accommodate landscape, rather than the other way around - seems to be about modernism as a means of assuaging environmental, even post-colonial, guilt about interaction with the land.

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Other things. The oceanic migration of plastic objects. See also Stuart Haygarth's ' chandelier (which seemed to reference 'Cold Dark Matter' (i.e. the exploding shed) of Cornelia Parker), or the more likely source, The Real Toy Story, the photographic series by Michael Wolf / things we have downloaded, which pointed us towards the excellent Launchy / you will need many grey bricks: a Lego model of the Discovery, via tecnologia obsoleta / all about Switzerland's 2000-watt society plan, a long-term goal to reduce individual energy consumption.

Alden B.Dow was an American architect working in the organic modern style made famous by Frank Lloyd Wright. He was also the son of Herbert H.Dow, founder of the Dow Chemical Company, and after studying at Frank Lloyd Wright's quasi-mystical Taliesin, he returned to the 23 acre family estate to build his organic masterpiece. Dow's fortune came from the commercial scale production of bleach. In later years, Dow became known for making napalm, invented by Dr Louis Fieser, silicone breast implants and Agent Orange (which it was 'compelled to produce' by the US Government), all perversely at odds with the organic, adhoc, nature-loving visions created by Dow Jr.

The end of Christiana and architectural idealism / The Pointless Museum, revisited / delving into the AA Diploma Unit 9 for a bit of pure architecture form-making for form's sake. Eleftherios Ambatzis's work is a case in point. 'My aim is to displace the ecclesiastical reality into a new field condition where imagination is the guiding principle structuring everyday life.' This is a new form of sacred architecture based on generational form: '"The Church of the infinite paths" takes Christianity as a starting point to an erratic journey into the future.' Rather than create a structure based on the straight liturgical and theological paths of the faith, Ambatzis offers the worshipper multiple ways of reaching wherever it is they want to go.

Frinton Park Estate, Essex / 5 of these and 3 of those, etc., etc., at the weburbanist / more concrete in peril: an enormous, epic and completist post on the history and future of Robin Hood Gardens over at City of Sound (where the 'architecture' tag is getting out of control, unsurprisingly) / YouTube - Bristol In The 1920s, via Phil Gyford / a feature about the emperiled VDL House by Richard Neutra, at archinect / it's not quite Ian Martin, but this tale of the Bilbao-12 ('The case was made for using architecture to revitalize the economies of postindustrial cities by establishing a brotherhood of "superstar" architects who would generate spectacles bolstered by our reviews, creating "archi­tourism," or what has become known today as the "Bilbao Effect."') made us laugh nonetheless.

Wallpaper has a gallery from the Adventures with Objects show currently on in Turin / our collective recent history, online, kottke puts together a useful round-up of the steady stream of free archives opening up content from major publications, including Time, Harpers and the New York Times, plus an article on the logic behind public access / The Stray Voltage, a weblog by artist Roy van der Ende, who makes fabulous sculptures out of reclaimed timbers / when architectural renders go wrong / a bit more on the unsolicited Eiffel submission, a story that might work either way for its architect (presumably Nakheel have already called).

The Norwegian Collection of Potential Architecture is a promising project, an attempt to create an 'online collection of the half-baked, the promising, the raw and the invisible architecture; Projects that miscarried, went over the top, were turned down by clients or for other reasons never became realised.' A sort of flipside to the fast-expanding MIMOA database. In other news, enter We Heart It, 'visual bookmarking' gets moved on another step. Not wholly convinced by this one yet / ORDOS 100, new architecture in China.

The Gateshead Carpark Demolition Project (via i like). Accompanying flickr pool. Related, a set of images of Luder's late, lamented Tricorn Centre. Taken by us in late 1998 / 'how does Outside actually rate?' / Stashpocket, a weblog / We Are The Lambeth Boys. Have a ferret around Channel 4's documentary archive as well / needs a bit more design clarity, but the automotive family tree is a revealing bit of corporate history / The Dome is Home - South Pole history 1975-90.

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 13:04 / 0 comments

The end of architecture, part 4. Compare these renders of future structures in Dubai to this set of post-apocalyptic concept art. Reality will be somewhere in between. But as Life Without Buildings points out, What's Up With All The Death Stars? Today, the role of modern architecture seems to begin and end with a statement of intent, in this case a terrifyingly literal imposition of science fiction values into the real world. Increasingly, whenever renders are used to whip up a social, cultural or political idyll, detail is subsumed beneath a rosy glow of reflected sunlight on shimmering water and glassy facades, more an indication of advanced rendering techniques than architectural innovation. The easiest way to modulate this light is to focus on experimental, 'innovative' forms. Gulf architecture, with its hard sunlight, flat landscape, seaside plots and apparently insatiable desire novelty, is a renderer's paradise. It is not, as yet, a truly real place.

"Das ist das Haus des Nikolaus". What is the House of Santa Claus?. There are 44 ways to draw the house, as demonstrated by this animation (taken from the German wikipedia page) / the Universal Scale, a flashy piece of animation built for Nikon cameras / works in paper by Holly Ormrod (via Green Chair Press) / Villatype, urban lettering / One Man and His Blog.

Devo - E-Z Listening Muzak Cassettes, Volumes One and Two, at I'm Learning to Share / Apothecary's Drawer sets out a useful number of links and information about Photographic Rights / Entropy, a photographic series about Romania (via grafic). As well as the expected industrial ruins, there are also galleries of cars and houses, the latter being a combination of shabby rural dwellings and Post-Soviet McMansions / the demolition of Pimlico School is underway. A gallery / a set of photoshop disasters / farewell Martin Pawley.

America's new line of division: Wal-Mart versus Starbucks / Gregor Graf's visually purified cityscapes are like the empty worlds from a post-apocalyptic computer game. Not a new idea (even in the real world) but nicely executed / the Roger Vaughan Personal Collection of Victorian and Edwardian Photographs / the Filter, a cultural weblog / flickr places, something we haven't played with yet / Brick City, a celebration of St Louis / rusting Russian hulks / playing with pocket battleships (both via Mr Boat).

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 19:26 / 0 comments

As another archaeologist creaks back into life, Michael Shanks writes that 'we are all archaeologists now...', stressing that 'Archaeologists deal in the life of things.' (good to see that the Jones film includes lots of blowing dust off old carvings). We might all be archaeologists, but we're also the people stacking the holes full of grave goods, a treasure trove of things to be found in the digital afterlife.

Autokadabra is a Russian social network site for motorists. Pretty impenetrable, then. But the design behind the site, by Turbomilk, involved creating a portfolio of 'icons for all the cars in the world.' Nice work / looking for unacknowledged links between global news stories: Map shows toll on world's oceans vs Geneva '08 Preview: Rinspeed sQuba Roadster/Submarine.

To Brooklyn, a gallery / Mellart / the end of Villa NM, a brief but glorious life for a feted modern house / where is the bad part of your town? / kottke's piece on the King of Kong documentary causes us to wonder whether there shouldn't be a dogme 95-style standard of documentary making, with film shown in strict chronological order and the limitations of a one-camera set-up not disguised using cuts.

Architecture. An indication that small-scale iconism doesn't always fare well, as the Architecture Foundation cancels its proposed HQ, a faceted structure by Zaha Hadid that increasingly gave the impression it was being pared down, slice by slice, simplified from an explosion of form into a relatively straightforward wedge. The cancellation is not a huge surprise to most commentators, although Rowan Moore, while stating plainly that the AF 'will not proceed with our project to create a new building in Bankside, London,' is rather unfairly billed as the man who lost a legacy'.

Disney have the right idea. Their new House of the Future ditches the curvy walls and wipe-clean bubble aesthetic in favour of standard American vernacular, choosing instead to stuff the interior with touch screens and all manner of modern conveniences. We can't help but link the Daily Mail's crowing excoriation of the Smithsons' 1956 House of the Future (which they sponsored, but never mind): 'Folding front doors and blow-dry showers: How a 1956 vision of today's homes got it wrong').

BLDG BLOG on the Air Disaster Simulation photography of Richard Mosse. As the photographer says, 'The results end up looking like something approaching early war photography from the 19th century (Roger Fenton, Matthew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, etc.).' The photography of genuine air disasters also has its practitioners. Witness Douglas Coupland's 'Worst-Case Scenario', published almost ten years ago now.

The work of J.J. Grandville, a French cartoonist from the 19th century. See also Syrian stamps / another form of signature architecture: 770's of the World, global replicas of 770 Eastern Parkway / photography by Jo Longhurst / the 1960 Citroen DS brochure / 3 girls in Paris, design and culture / play Quake on your phone / Flexplore, a new way of sifting through flickr sets.

Heraclitean Fire, including interesting diversions along the Thames Path / the Dartford Tunnel Cycle Service bus, sadly lost to history / the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks / Ultimate Wurlde, the legacy of a small games company / old flash experiments at www.ertdfgcvb.ch / there are professional paintballers?

Labels: architecture, linkage

posted by things at 22:41 / 0 comments

New Movement in Cities, by the late Brian Richards, was intended as a book for 'cities that want to plan and design for new underground and elevated systems, minirails, buses, automated roads, people movers and pavements, escalators and heliports.' A key document of 60s-era aspirations, it included the work of Archigram, the Japanese Metabolists, Victoria futurists and American industrialists, all striving to make sense of role of traffic in towns.

Amongst other things, New Movement in Cities contains a history of the many attempts at shifting large volumes of pedestrians, either via moving pavements, travelators or ultra-light transit systems. Enthusiasm for such concepts was high throughout the 1960s, from the 'carveyor' proposed for the Atlanta Transit System, an 'elevated air conditioned tube' that snaked above the existing streets, to the so-called 'dual mode' systems that retro-fitted conventional cars so that it could latch onto a guidance rail when needed..

Another serious suggestion of the era was to engineer cars so that they could be set up to follow each other, thus cramming more vehicles onto each highway with a correspondingly higher average speed. Back in the 1960s this required some serious number crunching (pdf), as in this piece of GM-sponsored research into 'car-following theory' ('the study of stimulus-response type interactions in a single lane of traffic caused by various acceleration and deceleration patterns induced in vehicles').

Others thought it better to concentrate on autonomous Personal Rapid Transportation systems that were slotted into existing urban situations without complex equations for human interaction, using a combination of new bus systems and small 'Personalised capsules' for just two people. PRT had its origins in the 'never-stop' trains originally suggested for London Underground - one simply stepped on or off, a bit like a paternoster lift (althouth there was a successful never-stop railway at the 1924 Empire Exhibition in Wembley). The city of tomorrow was envisioned as being awash in moving pavements and stairs, a place of perpetual, trundling mechanical movement.

It didn't quite sit well with the autonomy of automobile, and as well as the 'dual-mode' system suggested above, the car companies kept up a steady stream of concepts that stressed individual freedom and the ability to consume - GM's 1965 runabout, with its integral shopping basket, for example. There was even the much-vaunted electronic highway, developed by the Russian TV pioneer Vladimir Zworykin (more history here). Zworykin also created a television-guided bomb, used at the end of WWII. The perils of automated highways still ring true. From 'Driving Without Drivers,' Time, 3 August 1953: 'The drivers will have nothing to do; they can sleep or play cards or stare at the flowing road. Then some irregularity—an electronic failure or a blown front tire—pokes a mischievous finger into the smooth system. The dreaming drivers awake only when their cars are already piling in great, mangled heaps.'

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Other things. Building the world's new eco-cities: enough theory, time for action, Pearman on sustainable urbanism / incredible set of images taken in the Roosevelt Warehouse, the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository. Via me-fi, via making light. More information courtesy of Sweet Juniper / new website for photographer Andreas Gehrke / huge repository of articles on World's Fairs and Expos.

SpaceCollective, 'living the lives of science fiction today' / a smattering of flickr pools: Atomic Ranch, Midcentury Neighbourhoods, 1960s interior design, mid-century illustrated, Retro Kid / more stepping back into the past, the Intercut wood typeface project / Print Club London, reviving the art of screen printing. A Weblog / 120 years of electronic music at obsolete.com / online guitar tuner / architecture photos by aqui-ali / the NASA Thesaurus, every acronym under the sun.

Virtual London in Crysis; video game engines take another leap forward in sophistication, allowing them to take huge chunks of complex real-world data and render them in real time. Via Rock Paper Shotgun / we remember reading Patrick Lynch in a recent issue of the AJ (not the linked article) sounding off about the quality of architectural education in the UK. One of the schools he rated was Bath. Browse Tand's Photos on flickr to see samples of work. We especially like the Monochord. A bit more about Monochords: I, II, III.

Labels: architecture, linkage, transport

posted by things at 12:26 / 0 comments

Our collective longing for lost technology is getting more and more vocal and heartfelt: Please Spool to End of Tape Before Playing Other Side, Giles Turnbull at tmn. 'The Top 40 show was our source of musical entertainment for the entire week. By taping it, we had a compilation of hits at our fingertips. This was our generation’s iPod, podcast, and torrent all rolled into a two-hour-long musical indulgence.'

More Chaff on 'ffffound and attribution' and the problems therein. A site geared up to visual quotes, a tumble of style over substance, isn't ideal for tracing the route of where an image actually came from (via haddock). Removed from its context, imagery becomes so self-important that context matters less and less. So when one considers this parade of undeniably interesting urban ffffinds, pulled from the site, their geographical detachment turns the (mostly) real world into a digital one, a series of spaces without centre or heart.

Ian Martin has defected from BD to the Architect's Journal. Happily he's still on about exactly the same kind of things but suffers from the AJ's infuriating habit of highlighting key words in a sentence. Why does it do this? A piece of satirical writing contains, by its very nature, no key phrases, so the highlights serve only to distract the eye and the mind. And in an effort not to unbalance the feel of the page, the designer has to ensure they're distributed evenly across the three column layout. Confusingly, BD replaces the Martin slot with a self-conscious parody by Jonathan Glancey.

Zaha's modern ruins, via Kosmograd / also linked and missed by us earlier, Daniel Libeskind is the Les Dawson of architecture, a master at 'crashing the high brow into the low brow' and all the entertaining emotional manipulation that ensues / an archive of covers of the Radio Times / Vwork has better methods of attribution.

Labels: architecture, ffffound, media

posted by things at 15:10 / 0 comments

Architectural fantasies have a habit of manifesting themselves as a rather humdrum reality. Noting that the utopian dream of the megastructure somehow evolved into the elitist, ultra-gated landscape or cultural quarter, it's also worth considering how another staple of the utopian movement - the garden city - has become synonymous with holidays, escapes and retreats, rather than the new form of everyday urbanism that would bring light, space and greenery to all.

Center Parcs are a Europe-wide chain of holiday villages, groupings of well-spaced bungalows set amongst verdant landscapes and advertised as a place for family outdoor activity. Founded by the Dutch Businessman Piet Derksen in the 1960s, the Parcs have their origins in that decade's newly-found environmental idealism, eventually including that all-important symbol of futuristic development, the dome, re-branded as the 'Subtropical Swimming Paradise'.

The original architect of Derksen's first village, De Lommerbergen, in 1968, was none other than Jaap Bakema, a central figure in Team 10, a designer who 'summarized his urban and architectural ideas under the notion of 'architecturbanism' and 'Total Space', an idealistic, almost cosmological outlook on the human habitat and existence.' Bakema died in 1981, but his legacy lives on in the firm of Architectenbureau Van den Broek en Bakema.

Along with Bakema, the core members of Team 10 were the architects Georges Candilis, Giancarlo De Carlo, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson and Shadrach Woods. Their approach was deliberately incoherent, post-modernist in chronology, if not in terms of their actual approach. Existing in the relatively nebulous space after the great heyday of international modernism - the organisation was originally conceived out of CIAM (the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne - Team 10 attempted to splice the thrill of new materials and technologies with the random, drifting cityscape celebrated by the Situationists. CIAM imploded in 1956 after its strictly dogmatic approach was increasingly rejected by its members, although its legacy of zoned, industrially-manufactured cities lingered in the minds of less imaginative architects for another decade or so, even longer in the once creatively fertile lands of the Soviet Bloc.

The CIAMified city had little or no place for the ephemeral, whereas Team 10 placed the creation of place at the top of their agenda, acknowledging from the outset the importance of the everyday in space generation, activities that were inherently unplanned and, paradoxically, outside the remit of the architect. In this sense, Team 10 were doing themselves out of a job - 'risking failure and putting their own standpoints and convictions on the line', as the Team 10 Online site puts it.

The unplanned remains a contentious subject in design, and yet there's a long history of the carefully contrived in art and architecture, be it a romantic landscape or tousled, shabby chic interior, or even the fractured computer-driven architecture of deconstruction. Chances are that these examples of apparent spontaneity have to be carefully planned. But what Team 10 understood - to the extent that their built legacy is woefully small - is that one can't plan for genuine chance.

Today, the key spontaneous urban gesture is one of hostility, often provoked by the very art and objects that were intended to inspire. Yet affection for one's environment - something the Smithsons sought to embed within their schemes - be it urban or rural - is based on recognition, familiarity and lack of change. The novelty of chance only serves to undermine familiarity; Team 10's vision for the modern city is fatally undermined by optimism.

So where does that leave Bakema's Center Parcs? With their neo-vernacular log cabins, acres of 'unspoilt' woodland criss-crossed by mountain bike trails, and futuristic dome form, Center Parcs are a world apart from the stained, streaked and undeniably challenging concrete of monumental modernism. A futurist ideal has become a space of nostalgic longings for a bucolic past, Constable clad in Converse All-Stars.

The ideal of the perfect landscape remains strong in the collective memory, and Center Parcs strive to fuse modern concerns - loss of the green belt, sustainable design - with their creation of ersatz woodland villages. This colossal planning statement for a proposed new park at Warren Wood in Bedfordshire is stuffed with sustainable buzzwords in order to counter the inherent contradiction of the company's business model: it needs to build in woodland, which is often ancient and protected. Warren Wood is a somewhat controversial development, to say the least, and the report's plaintive breakdowns of the 2 1/2 hour drive isochrones around the UK's little pockets of ancient woodland is certainly poignant (see page 124). Spontaneity needs meticulous documentation, and even then there is no guarantee the vision will come to fruition.

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Other things. The 1960 Pasadena Tournament of Roses / like an unfiltered ffffound, a stream of internet imagery at Herbert Groot's website. See also Typeish, which is more structured (and also frequently nsfw) / Instructables is a website of multiple how-tos, from baking to technology / Musgle, a music search engine / Release Odysseus, a weblog / demolishing Buckminster Fuller.

Ken Garland's website is a treasure trove of his austere, highly influential graphic style, dating back to the 1960s / Material Systems, an organic architecture studio. See also the work of The Very Many / Tatra literature. The company also branched into snowmobiles, with the V855, seen here amongst these Soviet Snowmobiles collected by Dark Roasted Blend. Check DRB's Snowmobiles flickr set for more.

The Death of High Fidelity? (via) It's not hard to disagree. An earlier IHT piece stated that The Web is awash in anti-MP3 audiophiles, dividing the world into those who relish the insanely technical details recounted at places like The Lossless Audio Blog, or obsess about insanely overpriced audio components, and those who feel happy with a 128kb mp3 tearing through the tiny, tinny speakers of a mobile phone.

Acres of metal links at Brutalism.com / the ten best music videos of 2007 / Bara, a weblog / Strictly No Photography, sneaking imagery out of places it is expressly forbidden / Paleo-Future, a loving, heartfelt sigh at the future wonders of a once optimistic past / Uberkuul, a Finnish weblog / art by Allan Sekula / a textbook example of schadenfreude / The Great War in Colo(u)r.

Tony B's DJ machine, fun / Grassroads, image curat