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, mak