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

Ffffound!, sign up and point to pictures you like, and other members will do the same. At least, we think that's what's going on. Straight off the bat, our welcome screen was splashed with eerily familiar imagery, whether it be wireframed objects, old catalogue scans, speculative futures, strange architecture, design ephemera, the nocturnal aerial photography of Jason Hawkes, etc. etc. Worth tracking. Thanks to Rob for the invite. A good description at plasticbag: 'like del.icio.us divided by Flickr only with no tags and more designers'. In a similar vein, there's something undefinably contemporary about arhiva7, the aesthetic, the contents, the layout. All familiar, yet all strangely new.

Ironically, the same day our ffffound invite arrived, so did an advance copy of the BibliOdyssey book, the slickest website-to-book concept we've yet seen. Published by Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell's FUEL, BibliOdyssey is a handsome but inevitably old-fashioned tome, a physical encapsulation of all that the internet obsesses over and emphasises. With the BLDGBLOG book on its way, and even a new issue of things arriving some time this decade, the slow but inexorable transfer of information out of the digital and back to the physical realm is starting to gather pace.

*
Future London from the past, a top ten circa 1999. Numbers 3, 4, 8 and 10 never came to pass, but the rest has been (and some of it already gone) / a Funeral Coach Brochure, at Sharpeworld's flickr set / Martin L'Allier's weblog / Emak Mafu, a weblog by web designers / Walking the Berkshires, a 'traditional' weblog, if there is such a thing / 'The Mystery of Love, Courtship and Marriage Explained', written in 1890 (via projects). It describes a highly complex but ultimately rather miserable world.

Absurd object of the day: Swami Conversational Robot, for sale at Neiman Marcus (whose Christmas catalogue is a sight to behold, for all the wrong reasons). According to the blurb, 'the OMG factor on this dude is off the charts.' / the Guardian's architecture in detail series / Foxtons! No! Bang goes the neighbourhood, a piece about gentrification, inheritance tax, free coffee and inverse snobbery / 'Krugel... claims that his technique is able to locate a missing person anywhere in the world using only a single strand of hair': we thought the claim was somewhat suspicious as well - good to see that it's been given a thorough going-over by Bad Science.

What happened next? / Show (Off) and Tell, a flickr set of the visually intriguing / Citygraphy on urban photography in the 19th century. Exhibitions include 'Changes on a Focal Point' / the Jan Van Eyck Academie / Realfakewatches, the wristwatch as pure adornment (via thinglink, track objects online) / Margate Architecture. A place that was desperately short of lovability when we visited over the summer, and that's before the buildings at risk have been bulldozed.

Flickr's Le Corbusier pool / a good Jonathan Meades post at me-fi, including this YouTube Meades Shrine. The official site. We think we know who posted this / fact of the day: in Switzerland, if you sell a jigsaw second hand or donate one to a thrift store, you have to complete a sworn affadavit stating that no pieces are missing. You can face prosecution if the puzzle is found to be incomplete.

Ben Hanbury, a weblog / interactive architecture, a weblog / Thinking Games, on game culture, art and development / they'll need a lot of grout for that / Endless Forms Most Beautiful, some nice ffffinds / Future House Now (now!) / Toni Child's weblog.

All images in this post lifted from the wonderful Le Corbusier Polychromie Architecturale: the Salubra Colours from 1931 and 1959, an 'exquisite three-volume boxed set [which] contains chromatically perfect samples of the wallpapers, colour illustrations, sketches, and slide bands, all produced by a high-quality printing process, and then assembled and bound by hand.'

Labels: ffffound, future, meades

posted by things at 10:23 / 0 comments