This is a Champion, a project / The Graphing Calculator Story / Le Corbusier's furniture from Chandigarh, 'salvaged from a skip' / create background patterns / The Lives of Space, a site developed to accompany the Irish pavilion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, proceeding 'from the modest proposition that the designed spaces which architects produce play a crucial role in supporting, shaping and framing our lives.'

What will happen to the Dwell Pre-fab, developed in conjunction with Marmol Radziner, one of the few architecture firms making a convincing stab at a factory-built home / Directorio d'Arco brings together built and unbuilt work from architecture blogs around the world / KaChing!, a tumblr / a tribute to Steven Wells, more here.

The Ideas Bazaar, a weblog / One Life Experience offers camper vans for hire / sculptures by Michael Ferris Jr / Q magazine's print deadlines were particularly unfortunate this month / Miglior Acque, a weblog steeped in medievalism.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 00:23 / 0 comments

The New Fauves seem kind of Stuckist. That's not a bad thing / Triangle Triangle is one of those abstract sites that seems to distil whole swathes of contemporary cultural production down into just one or two images / see also Aleatorio, a tumblr (occasionally nsfw) / Niemeyer in Paris / Pulse Laser, 'a blog on interactions and the new world of product'.

A Tissue of Lies: the Stephen R.Glass index is sadly a forest of dead links / Allen Jones-esque work by Walter Raes / pHinnWeb, online since 1996 with its 'origins in the material of Finnish techno scene reports written for the American fanzine Skreem' / Pearltrees, a site that offers a way of mapping your journey on the web (blog) / The Pop-Up City, links and urbanism.

Further to yesterday's mention of iPhone's imitating ancient technology, here's a gallery of old vintage Rockwell calculators (a shameless way of linking one of our eBay auctions).

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 23:27 / 0 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

Other things. What is a magazine? / back in the YAMoPo (yet another most popular architecture sites ranking). Thanks to ArchDaily for acknowledging our architectural mix. From the listings, design sites we didn't know: PSFK, mirage.studio.7, + MOOD, Dezona/ folksonomy, 'clippings' from digital culture / photographs by empalagarme de mar / information design by Max Gadney, via Magical Nihilism (best name for a weblog, ever) / Renter Girl, 'I write about everything to do with renting and the buildings tenants live in.'

Art by Remy Lidereau / Playmakers, something we need to investitage more closely / disk space viewer to explore, Sequoiaview / We Are Bad, a weblog / Raindrop Melody Maker, a flash toy by Lullatone (via The Null Device) / Sensing Architecture, to investigate further / build me a library of lefty kids' books.

Wikipedia's list of nuclear weapons is fun reading / the architecture of Star Wars. From a cynical point of view, this kind of article seems tailor-made to be linked and clicked. It's done rather well though / nice to see that the Barrack business has even merited a metafilter post. Rogers responds. The Telegraph reports.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 21:53 / 0 comments

The dreary physical infrastructure that underpins the web, 'the real world architecture of the internet cloud' (link to an NYT piece by Tom Vanderbilt, author of How We Drive). Related, a map of all Google Data Center locations. Also, from 2006, Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power, the story behind the company's cheap electricity-guzzling data center in The Dalles, Oregon, also covered extensively in Harper's a couple of years later, linked via the rather specifically-targeted site Data Center Knowledge.

The NYT photographs were taken by Simon Norfolk, known for his Iraq photographs as well as his images of supercomputers (both links from BLDGBLOG). The above image is a crop of an IBM BlueGene/L installation, not a data center but a calculating machine with 'ultra-scalability for breakthrough science'.

Naturally, the key issue here is power. "You look at a typical building," Michael Manos, [then Microsoft’s general manager of data-center services] explained, "and the mechanical and electrical infrastructure is probably below 10 percent of the upfront costs. Whereas here it's 82 percent of the costs." And "the cloud, calculates [Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory], consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world's electricity.'

The numbers are huge. Vanderbilt's piece quotes someone saying Microsoft has around 150,000 servers in total, with one Google site containing 45,000 servers. Yet the DCK site quotes an unconfirmed report on an under-construction Chinese data center built beneath a dam and containing in excess of 1 million servers in total.

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Other things. Photographer Michael Wolf's collection of cover illustrations of the French weekly newspaper Le Petit Journal: 'Published between 1863 and 1934, Le Petit Journal had a circulation of over one million in 1890. As Wolf says, 'the moments that the petit journal covers illustrate are a classical photojournalist's wet dream - to be in exactly the right place at the right time to catch the high point of a catastrophe or crime.'

Colossal collection of designer 'tart cards', created for the current issue of wallpaper magazine in collaboration with Type. Tart cards are a British tradition - see the X-Directory, hosted at the wonderful Irdial / Lucky Russian Trolley Ticket Cookies. Nice concept by Art Lebedev, via (Yanko) / Chest of Books hunts down open source tracts and collates them into categories / Prince Charles gets his way: Chelsea Barracks scheme scrapped (AJ, see also BBC), a controversy covered ably by Pearman a few weeks back

HTC Experiments, 'experimental practices in architectural history, theory, and criticism', and rich with interesting thoughts and theories / 50 ridiculous design rules / a short film about the Festival of Britain / The Rumpus, 'an online magazine focused on culture, as opposed to "pop culture"... Basically, we're not opposed to things that are popular, but we have no interest in “art” created by marketing executives'.

The Style Press, or bring on the marketing executives / We Can't Paint, a weblog about photography / beard crumbs, a weblog about stuff and other things / Design Kabinet, stuff blog. If one ever stopped to do a thorough semiotic analysis of the things that got posted on these websites then the list of products would make truly fascinating reading.

Labels: computers, linkage, things

posted by things at 12:05 / 1 comments

Tomorrow's Thoughts Today is running a symposium this weekend, 'Thrilling Wonder Stories', 'a roundtable event on speculative urban futures and the role of science fiction at the Architectural Association in London'. The event invites you to 'embark on a future safari into the brave new worlds that may evolve from our own.'

Bolerama, a site devoted to the Boler Travel Trailer, a sort of plasticky, slightly more 'pop' Airstream. More on Flickr, full of very evocative images / in browser things: ships, a Google-earth derived simulator. Which we haven't tried, but just like the idea of / Doom, and a couple of other games of that ilk. Which we did try.

Art and Architecture (the UK site, not the US magazine) has redesigned / L-13 is a new London gallery space which would like to be known as 'The L-13 Light Industrial Workshop and Private Ladies and Gentlemen's Club for Art, Leisure and the Disruptive Betterment of Culture' / dirtycanvas: the art and photography of ErinTheArtist. See also Ephemerat, a website charting a 'paper obsession' / an extract from The City & The City, the new book by China Miéville (via flavorpill).

Nostalgia, blogs, critique, infinte thought on the Abrahams article. See also Fantastic Journal's riposte, criticism not what it used to be, and The Future is Boring, a quite frenetically focused rant on the sheer drudgery, predictability and ultimately disappointing nature of the 'future'. As always, we're letting the side down by splurging fifty odd links of throwaway banalities and lovingly scanned dog-eared copies of old Expo programmes and graphic design annuals. But we don't care.

We like Schulze and Webb's Here and There project, 'maps of Manhattan look uptown from 3rd and 7th, and downtown from 3rd and 35th [that are] intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward.' Very reminiscent of the Stanford Torus, Ringworld, Halo, etc., etc., or any number of speculative futures defined by a shallow arc, endless horizon and sense of massive scale. Related, the Manhatta Project, 'have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city?'. Also related, a map from the New York World's Fair.

Arthur Erickson has died, one of the last of the late-modern iconists, a small group of post-Wrightian modernists who created buildings that were brash, angular beacons long before it became fashionable - or even de rigeur - to do so. Related, and presumably seen everywhere else, the Frank Lloyd Wright Lego set.

Public Space and its discontents / Junior: celebrating life at the bottom, a 'union for young creatives', based in Australia / Viva Print, tmners on old fashioned bits of stamped and pressed paper that still warms the cockles of their collective hearts / related, the death of print, seen through Wired's eyes in a relatively good humoured forum looking at why print is better than web, or vice versa.

Is this Mies's worst building? / My Cassette's Just Like A Bazooka?, the history of the freebie cassettes doled out by the NME in the 1980s (via haddock).

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 21:25 / 1 comments

Personal curatorial tendencies, an ongoing collation. Cascading pictures collated at Running Dive. A fair bit of nudity / Ace Jet 170's scans of ancient Penrose Annuals have been spotted at me-fi (although the reaction was somewhat underwhelming) / revisiting, photography by Jan Kempenaers / smile and wiggle, a tumblr / objects designed by Bertrand Planes / the work of Dunne and Raby.

The Bob Blog / design by Ivan Mato / art by Michael Clyde Johnson / another backyard roller coaster / works by Qingsong / Monocle opens another store, this time in LA / Car-Free in America? A debate as to whether such a thing is even achievable / how well can Hubble see? / Giambattista Nolli's 1748 map of Rome / creating music using Android.

Microsoft goes inadvertently retro with its Home of the Future prototype. Wait until your kitchen bluescreens / pulled from old text files and happily still extant: the UK TV ad archive / the Crash archive, 'the ultimate Spectrum magazine' / galleries of posters and signs / a gallery of test cards, TV idents and logos, now seems to be resting slightly

St Petersburg then and now, blended historical photographs that are somehow creepier than straight comparison shots (via Rossignol, who also has a very worthwhile guest post over at BLDG BLOG, Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds) / Coromandal on Tintin in America / see also strawdogs / Emily Driskill, a tumblr /

Modern archaeology: What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? (via). Related, Cultural Research Divers. See also the wave motors of California, lost hydroelectric machines chronicled, where else, but over at BLDG BLOG.

nice magazine easter egg from Domus / who will be the next JG Ballard? / Tommy Manuel, a weblog / what are the best books about cryptozoology? / happy that bluishorange still exists, one of the first weblogs we ever found. Via the site, On the Set, an obsessive collection of sitcom sets built out of Lego. Several memes collide.

Mammoth, especially a quick visual tour of the urban prairies of America's heartland / UK Wired 1.2 (OK, 06.09, second time around) reminded us of the Kevin Warwick cover from first time round. The superhuman is an endlessly fascinating project for futurists.

A new materiality. Blogs are turning into books. After the BibliOdyssey collaboration with FUEL and the forthcoming BLDG BLG title, c/o Chronicle Books, now It's Nice That has taken the leap. Details of Issue 1. Creative Review article. MagCulture post. Flickr page.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 00:40 / 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

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

Type Magazine / Make your own Morandi, seems to lose something / Truck and Type, the art of the lorry / Morse code convertor / Rasmus Bronnen's weblog / High Flight, a tumblr / linked via the latter, we like the Sit Com Houses diagram.

The various stream, a weblog / Garage, a Swedish design store / RoryRory's flickr stream / haddock keeps throwing up interesting flickr links, like the historic and old photos pool and the pre-1930 photos pool / flickr collections in the Metro Library.

'The little white lie that grew', Clive James on the Kafka-like tale of a prominent Australian judge who dug himself into a catastrophically deep hole in his attempt to evade a speeding ticket / A guide for Cuntrey men In the famous Cittey of LONDON by the helpe of wich plot they shall be able to know how farr it is to any Street....

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 17:00 / 1 comments

Vanshnookenraggen has put together a couple of unbuilt Robert Moses highway maps using Google (via kottke). Someone should do this for the London Inner Ring Road. The CBRD's Ringways project is well worth your time.

Looking into the Past, a flickr set / the Architectural Review has redesigned / the AR as it once was / some more AR covers / covers from Architectural Design in the 1970s / a set of AJ covers from designers apfel.

The Steelcase Coordinated Office Approach, 'for the man of action'. You don't see many animal skins in modern day office decor. Check the appropriately-named I am a friend of the squirrels' photostream / Tiny Showcase, a gallery of prints for sale.

Vintage DHARMA ads / The Sonic Booms, a project by photographer Carlos Lobo (also on show at Jack) / earth images, 'a small part of the world's largest private collection of highly magnified, scanned images of the "insides" of rocks and minerals.' See also landscape marble / the mystery cat of Peckham.

The 70s Building Project, at the Twentieth Century Society (via The Times) / Signs of American Life, a portfolio by Stephen Tamiesie (who also photographed the Salton Sea).

Fine gallery of small SUVs with their roofs staved in / map of the week, a weblog / Looking for Love in all the statistically wrong places / interesting how the Tata Nano is being pitched as a kind of style object - Ten Things You Should Know About the Nano.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 01:30 / 0 comments

Russian prison deck (hand made), part of a collection of playing cards. See also the playing cards pool / a set of memos from 'Tiger Mike, Edward Mike Davis, owner of the Tiger Oil Company. Reminiscent of Robin Cooper's Timewaster Letters, but from the other side of the desk (via growabrain).

The Secret Passage in Practical Terms, a fine post on the art of concealing spaces for fun, theatrical and frankly sinister purposes. At DC's, Dennis Cooper's admirably information-saturated weblog (via me-fi) / make ping noises with ball droppings, a flash application / one imaginary blog, over analyse cure songs / step back to the muddy lanes of Glastonbury in 1980 / ticket collector, a collection.

Projects 084 and 085, undertaken at around about the same time that Google passed by / the great magazine die-off / Hyperkit visit Vitra, Weil-am-Rhein / an interesting take on half a millennia of apparently misdirected economic policies: Let it Die / Temple Mill, at Leeds Myths and Legends.

Fuzz, a documentary (via me-fi) / mapref41n93w and glowing raw, two highly recommended music blogs / 20 reasons not to fly Ryanair / One Spring Day / Clunkbucket / the 1955 Ideal House, still in splendid condition.

'Pop Music College is a subordinate school of Nanjing Arts Institute. It grows out of Subsidiary Piano Tune Specialized School of Nanjing Arts Institute that was jointly founded by Nanjing Arts Institute and Japan Central Instruments Technology Specialized School in November 1995... It was officially named Pop Music College of Nanjing Arts Institute in November 2005'.

Labels: linkage, music, things

posted by things at 14:35 / 2 comments

We might have been a bit cynical about twitter yesterday, but this is great: Space Shuttle take off - Photos by Twitter users / the architectural abstractions of Felice Varini / Culturehall presents artists' portfolios. We especially like the documentary series by Martin Miller / 'cruel neorealistic every day object' photography by Jochen Braun.

Google phone tracker is fast track to divorce, says writer / From Porch to Patio, a (pdf) essay on the architectural transition from front to rear of house, public to private, a shift exemplified by the design of the American tract house, evolving from open structures to 'snout-first' designs that placed their outdoor social spaces at the rear / via kottke, who also posts this excellent guide to Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace.

A full list of words banned by the Local Government Association. There is a certain rough concrete poetry to the selection:

Fast-Track Actioned Ambassador
Bottom-Up Holistic Improvement levers
Scaled-back Scoping
Provider vehicles Top-down Transparency
Quick hit
Quick win
Lever Iteration
Cascading Flex
Coterminosity

Labels: design, linkage

posted by things at 13:20 / 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

A few things noted here and there. As someone pointed out at haddock, the news of the planet's first major space collision is far more indicative of the modern era, certainly more so than a charred hotel in China / related, 'Imagining the universe as seen by a building used to track orbital debris', an artwork by Leah Beeferman / traffic is probably up at Secret Dubai / we're not sure Dubai was ever 'wallpaper hip', but here's yet another posted farewell to everyone's favourite foregone failed cityscape: Bye Bye Dubai / another take on townscape, the work of the late Gordon Cullen.

Mechanised, urban exploration at its finest. The visual essay on Cane Hill Asylum is absolutely first class in terms of photography, writing and descriptive power / extraordinary Lego creations by Jennifer Clark / cars and architects, a perennial combination, albeit one that has very rarely born fruit / Dezeen posts some photos of a fire-ravaged TVCC.

Suginami, a flickr set of Tokyo / unboxing a Lamborghini / Jak and Jil, a fashion blog / Vehicle Motion Drawings by Tim Knowles / Evolution of the household, a rather straight up presentation at Woman's Day that could have been a lot more clicky (via) / notes from the 'van, a blog about learning to build furniture from a cold caravan in Devon. Early days.

Rem Koolhaas, Tunisia, and Sandcrawlers / related, on the epic imagery of Close Encounters / The mystery of tinnitus, the New Yorker does ringing in the ears. Maybe related, Anvil: The Story of Anvil / Notes on breaking up, a textual tumblr / Fluid 960 Grid System / Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie, a new book by Siaron Hughes. See also the Fried Chicken Pantheon.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 00:40 / 0 comments

Intermittent posts at the moment, for which we apologise / Mozilla Phone / Have Your Say map: Your property plans, mapping people's ongoing property woes / See You See Me, scanning bags and cameras by Evan Roth / shedworking with Le Corbusier / Sirens of Chrome, regardless of the economic climate, motor show models always have a smile. A gallery at tmn / 45 vintage 'Space Age' illustrations / abandoned cars in Dubai, fact or fiction? / Lost in Paris, a house set amid dense vegetation in the heart of Paris / John Citizen and the Law, number four in our incredibly irregular 'Pelican of the Week series.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 01:30 / 1 comments

Signing away your rights is not cute, Conscientious on the new era of content management and the discrete evaporation of rights. In a world where web content is easily repurposed into something more lucrative (ironically usually a book), it's worth noting that 'if you upload a photo to Facebook, they can sell copies of it without paying you a cent. If you write lengthy notes (or import your blog posts!), Facebook can turn them into a book, sell a million copies, and pay you nothing. This deserves careful consideration!' (Legal Andrew, linked from the post. Also at C, a remarkable image showing just how hellbent we are, collectively, on capturing the moment.

Latitude is one of those quiet paradigm shifts that we have anticipated for so long that it comes as no surprise when it actually becomes a viable technology. The idea that we could see instantly where family and friends are on a map is almost as natural as the idea that we could be contacted via phone wherever we are in the world. It's something Dan touched on in his epic post on The Street as Platform (subsequently reprinted in 'Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet' - thank you very much to whoever sent us a copy). There is, of course, this.

Unwanted (?) infrastructure as creative spur: The New Road versus Solsbury Hill / farewell Hans Beck, founder of Playmobil (via me-fi). Check out Collectobil for his back catalogue / London in just four photographs / things, a project by Stefan Ruiz / Lebbeus Woods' sketches for Alien 3 (via archinect) / McMansions are Built With Paper and Staples / nerdy fun with URLs / / largest snake 'as long as a bus' / rich people's rooftops / the Long Car Purchase. We certainly don't hate cars, but agree wholeheartedly with the idea of intense research being far more fun than the actual purchase itself.

Labels: linkage, photography, technology

posted by things at 22:51 / 0 comments

Apologies for the long hiatus. A few links and things collected over the past week or two, with no apologies for the lack of a thread bringing them all together / Charing Cross - the fading world of books (via me-fi) / Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology gets the tmn gallery treatment / I LEGO NY.

Channel Beta, an 'information Channel on Contemporary Architecture' - a sort of portal for aspiring starchitects / The Lost Synagogues of Detroit. Amazing urban archaeology of a building form one doesn't expect to see abandoned / illustration by Lisa Hanawalt / Anna the Red's Bento Factory. The Totoro Snowman is especially spectacular / applying every filter.

Classic Shorts, a short story repository / paintings by Peter Wylie (via architects' journal / who was really responsible for that piece of work? / Fusion Anomaly is stuck in a day-glo timewarp, but no less interesting for that / supercomputer, 1960s style, from the East German film Der Schweigende Stern. More at Veoh, which seems like YouTube's poor relation right now.

Books from Finland, with which things has close affinity with, has a new website. Recommended / the Adam and Joe Back Catalogue / one piece, an art weblog / new design for American taxi is rather disappointing, especially given the conceptual precedents. Even if cabs never fly, the problem seems to be a literal creative bankruptcy, rather than a bankruptcy of ideas; there's just no money to develop a true C21 cab.

Richard Serra on Google Maps, at Greg.org / Craig Stephens' daily paintings / a huge gallery of mid-century fashion photography by John Rawlings of American Vogue (via ffffound) / Top to Toe: fashion for kids, an exhibition at the Museum of Childhood.

A few John Updike obituaries: New York Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune. Related, the blog of death.

Pages from a teenage sketchpad, 1976, at smallritual's photoset, full of fascinating things: e.g. an 'early 1970s publicity brochure for the Soviet supersonic airliner Tupolev Tu-144', the County of London Plan 1946 (explained by no less than E.J.Carter and Erno Goldfinger), and some London Brutalism.

Landshare, 'linking people who want to grow their own food to space where they can grow it' / Even Cleveland, a weblog / Spectaculator / BBC homepage history, 1996 to 2006 at eyedropper's flickr stream / a huge page tracking the expensive diving watches owned by Jacques Cousteau and his aquatic pals / the Pineapple pit, how to grow tropical fruit in an unfriendly climate / paintings by Daniel Rich (via
Wrong Distance, which also posts Landscapes for the Aughts).

Schoolmap.org.uk / ecofont, use less ink. See also Dalton Maag's BT Directory Custom Font, which was designed to 'save around ten lines per page', 'Multiplied over the number of pages in The Phone Book and the number of directories printed each year, the cost of the font development was offset by a single print run'.

The Ruins of Fordlandia in Brazil (many thanks): "In a long history of tropical agriculture, never has such a vast scheme been entered in such a lavish manner, and with so little to show for the money. Mr. Ford's scheme is doomed to failure." There is even a Fordlandia website.

Digital art by Paul Brown / Aesthetic Echo, a web animation. Had this been a flight simulator, say circa 1988, our lives would have been complete (via delicious ghost) / a selection of websites by Jonathan Harris: word count, ten by ten, love lines, phylotaxis, we feel fine, universe and the now closed Time Capsule.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 21:24 / 1 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

Growing stocks of unsold cars around the world. There's nothing like seeing a supposedly desirable object, one that is intended to represent your taste and character, stacked up and racked up to reveal their total lack of distinguishing marks. The above image is of Corby, Northamptonshire, where Gefco keeps unsold new cars before distributing them to dealers. The Guardian's photographs have a snatched, paparazzi-style feeling - as if they were stolen glimpses of something you're not really supposed to be seeing / a series of models by architecture students at Kingston University, deliberately emulating the work of Thomas Demand / a work of Daniel Eatock's, the Prismacolor Pen Print / Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems, 1937-2009.

Picdit suggests a collaborative project of imagery of objects thrown in the air, referencing the beginning of 2001, a Space Odyssey (the flying bone cut into the space station or objects being dropped (Martin Klimas's ceramic sculptures , or Naoya Hatakeyama's Blast Series, or even high speed photography or this set of 25 photographs taken at exactly the right moment (the type of post that gets sneakily 'syndicated' by numerous weblogs, so apologies if that wasn't the original source).

Related. Simon Hoegsberg's vast photograph 'We're All Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence' is cinematic in scale, but defiantly low-key in terms of subject and composition. Shot in Berlin in Summer 2007, the finished piece is 100m long. The (usually) detached subjects float in horizontal space, occasionally engaging with each other across the frame or lost in their own thoughts. Hoegsberg's other work is worth a look as well: Professional Fury, life on the road with Denmark's premier heavy metal band, and The Tower of Babel, an abandoned project on New York.

The Skira Yearbook seems to be a fairly accurate summation of the current state of architecture / another page of links: architexture centrifuge / one to watch, New Architects in Latin America / now voyager, a weblog / Always Looking, a weblog / welcome reddit people. The project page you might be looking for is here: Survival in the City, 1974.

Where can I live?, houses for sale arranged according to commuting distance / photographs by Eric Tabuchi. We, naturally, like the ruins series / photographs by John Wycherley / always looking, a weblog / sunbathing on a crane (via Building magazine).

Also capturing the moment, but in another way.Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet 2008 captures the passing ephemera and text of the weblog world and translates it, effortlessly, into a desirable package (although thanks to its tabloid paper format it's still arguably more ephemeral than an object like tmn's Manual). magCulture has an excellent post on the publication (which is sadly all gone).

Labels: linkage, photography

posted by things at 10:45 / 0 comments

Mostly random links today. 0lll's Blue Plaque map of London is beautifully done / Geoff on the reissue of Bunker Archaeology. In more depth at BLDG BLOG. Virilio on Google books / Please Don't Touch (via Art is Everywhere) / floating podium architecture news / The Young Machine, a tumblr / the trend for titillating pixels goes 3D. See also the work of Adam Connelly / Alvin's Vintage Board games.

Archival images of Switzerland Our German isn't up to much, but these have a nice found image quality / Oil Import Map (via Autoblog) / at about the same time as the oil crisis was hotting up, Nasa's finest minds were holding a seminar about living offworld, one happy consequence of which was this collection of Space Colony Art from the 1970s.

Dave and Jenny, Bollywood style, in which the protagonists of Our Delhi Struggle get themselves immortalised in the distinctive style of the Indian film poster. For a more in-depth analysis of the modes of display and art, see David Blamey and Robert D'Souza's Living Pictures: Perspectives on the Film Poster in India. See also the Indian Cinema and Indian Graphics flickr groups.

And the winner isn't / Top Spinner, a cricket game / the Studio Progetti Espresso museum / go on holiday with Hawkwind / how Porsche bought into VW, explained clearly and concisely / ghost signs set / illustration by Eric Hanson, the author of A Book of Ages, on the 'totemic quality of things' / you'll need several guitars to make the most of these Sonic Youth tabs.

2008: A Year in 15 Photos at Curious Expeditions / photography by Thomas Haywood / Robert Myers, a flickr set at Leifpeng's site, via Today's Inspiration / 'Untitled Landscapes', photography by Sebastian Lemm / photographer David Paul Bayles is 'exploring the tree-human connection' through his projects 'Falling Trees' and 'Urban Forests' (via Analekta) / beehive, a tumblr.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 23:55 / 1 comments

Church removes 'scary crucifix' / Quasimodo, sonneur de cloches, a tour of the bells and chimes of Switzerland, complete with videos / old postcards of Switzerland / the pandas are moshing, a tumblr from Beijing, which sends us back to Amy Bennett's miniature worlds (previously seen at tmn) / linked before, but we like keeping the Emettophilia going: biographical information about Rowland Emett. Hopefully more Festival of Britain stuff to come in the next month or so.

What's the story with the car jump stunt? The full tale, taken from the documentary 'The Devil at Your Heels', is epic in scope / Visual Dyslexia, 'Collection of visuals and experience from all areas of live that visually explain feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing and understanding of a dyslexic mind to a non-dyslexic and vice versa' / Dear Architects, the weblog as conversation.

Could your car survive a nuclear blast?, Wired on 'Four Wheels to Survival', official guidance on how your car can help you keep the hell away from any impending nuclear blasts ('Tests under an actual atomic explosion in Nevada proved that modern cars, especially those with turret top construction, give a degree of protection against blast, heat and radiation.')

Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility (via haddock) / TV Tropes (also via haddock), 'a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction'. Most informative / speculative modeling, model trains for the future-obsessed online community. Actually a Russell Davies driven project (how the man has time for all this, we'll never know): Lyddle End 2050, or how to use Hornby to create an (appeallingly imperfect) view of tomorrow.

Things 1.0 is a things to do list manager that appears massively over-specified. Nicely named, though (although it has killed our google ranking). Found via Caterina. In a nicely circular irony, the things to do list she uses to illustrate the post has just one item uncrossed on the right hand page. It reads: 'Review of Prisoner's Inventions for Things Magazine'. Sadly it stays uncrossed.

Labels: linkage, things

posted by things at 15:11 / 2 comments

Yet another piece on the Burj, this time at the BBC - expect a lot of these in 2009. Not much new here, save this quote about the building's as-yet-unrevealed final height: '"If you put the Empire State Building on top of the Sears Tower then it's reasonable to say you'll be in the neighbourhood," Mr [William] Baker says.'

Dolores on the dotted line, a tumblr / Things I Like Today, another tumblr / Shape and Colour on Advanced Beauty, collection of animations by people who are using computer graphics for pure, unadulterated aesthetic purposes, with no function in mind whatsoever: 'a lush, beautiful, sensory-engrossing work of experimental art... just because'. Gratifying in a way to find this kind of thing still exists - a bit like an extension of the original demo scene.

From our earlier post that touched on Penguin design team, was the Ruthie Rogers featured back in 1972 the very same as the doyenne of new food and New Labour? (whose influence is mentioned briefly but memorably at the start of this Tricia Guild profile by Jason Cowley).

This looks interesting: Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond / Exit Magazine finally has a website / The Flavor, visual source weblog / Paul Goldberger's 10 best buildings of 2008 simply underscores how relatively dry the year was for interesting architecture.

Core77 posts a preview of the Berlin Museum of Letters / Wandering sickness and the gas of peace, a visual essay by Derek Horton on geodesic domes and other futurist architectural devices at the online magazine /seconds / Robin Camille, a weblog / AMC and Rambler stuff.

The very worst special effects of all time, actually a bottomless pit of possibilities which are barely descended into here / proper outsider art: I am the butterfly man / oh this is very good: Let's look back on the year to come, David Mitchell on the ups and mostly downs of 2009.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 00:15 / 0 comments

A small selection of general links. Right now, haddock is the place to go to catch up on all the holiday media splurges, like the BBC Today programme guest editors (who included Zaha Hadid) / 'An animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008' / six-month pinhole camera exposure / R Cubed is an astonishingly bitter newsletter, now defunct, that excoriates the critical community.

The Rat and Mouse has a go at predicting the next shift in the UK property market / Strange Maps on cartocacoethes, 'the compulsion to see maps everywhere' / on the possibility that hauntings exist but ghosts do not / on 60 years of the 7" single. See the flickr 45rpm Group for several thousands fine examples of the art / is the latest Libeskind design little more than 'a crude and unavoidable reminder of the horrors of 9/11'? More images at Curbed; are those 'gashes' or simply openings?

Ben Fry's All Streets project creates a skeletal map of the USA from its tarmac infrastructure (via SuperSpatial). See also James Medcraft's Anatomy of the UK series / Swapatorium moved to flickr / would Curbed's Floorplan porn section work in the UK? The real estate market here isn't as spatially aware as the Americans (or even the French).

*
Pelican of the Week: Digging up the Past. While the back covers of these books rarely match up to the fronts, there are plenty of nuggets to be gleaned from the jackets. Sir Leonard Woolley's classic introduction to the archaeologist's work was an attempt at confirming the profession as a science, not the preserve of treasure hunting gallivants, the fedora-toting hard-men battling through lost civilisations on the covers of countless pulp novels (and later burnished into mass culture through the composite character of Indiana Jones.

Woolley was best known for his 1922 excavations at Ur, the ancient Sumerian city that sits slap bang in the middle of modern Iraq. He was also a close acquaintance of Agatha Christie, who was fascinated with the Middle East and its potential for myth and mystery. Twenties Iraq was quite the hotbed of activity for the bright young, and not so young, things, including Gertrude Bell, founder not just of the lately much beleaguered Baghdad Archaeological Museum but also the very make-up of modern Iraq, soon to become a very strategic location indeed.

Hackney-born, Woolley led an often unconventional life, immersed in his work and ruled by his women. From the Christie link at the fascinating (though highly partisan) Winscan site: 'A man who goes to bed in one room with a length of string leading from his big toe to his hypochondriac wife's wrist in another room, so that she can tug on it at the onset of a headache, might be said to deserve his fate, or perhaps a sainthood'. Such were the preoccupations of the people who created modern archaeology, the modern mystery thriller and the modern mixed-up nation state, each entirely unrelated save for the close proximity of their creators.

Labels: linkage, maps, pelican

posted by things at 00:15 / 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

Detroit ruins: the Motor(less) City (via The Cartoonist) / a great visual essay on Chittagong, Bangladesh (via me-fi) / Cassette from my Ex (via domeuplaneta) / Most coveted Covers, a section of the Readerville Journal / Noir and the North Kent Marshes.

Walking the Berkshires, a weblog / the shapes of things has become Myrtle Street / images of early maps / the American Hydrogen Association is admirably low-fi / the state of architectural research in the UK, an ongoing investigation by the sesquipedalist / via sharpeworld, a Handmade Japanese Motorhome. Beautifully detailed, with an expandable floor operated by an air compressor. 'This camping car is made to small size. Because the road in Japan is narrow.'

This is the story of the Jolley Gang, Victoria Coren exacts her revenge on a shadowy group of memorial service crashers, led by one Terence Jolley, thanks to the fictional Sir William Ormerod. Jolley has been attending memorial services - and the wakes that follow - for many years.
in response to Ray's comment on the (inevitable) me-fi post, we think there's something fascinatingly Dickensian or even Orwellian about Jolley, and the whole article opens up a middle class subculture defined not by poverty of the imagination, but by the kind of threadbare-cardigan-style penury that went apparently out with the 1950s.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 19:19 / 0 comments

Caustic Cover Critic on Odile Redon's enduring popularity amongst book cover designers. They also have a browse through our Pelican Project. We need to do a little bit more to this particular feature - perhaps add a 'Pelican of the Week' or some such feature. Something for 2009, perhaps / did we link this before? Rad Library, inside old books. Where oh where are all the original paintings? / Rubik Cubism, pixel art meets 80s meme, with predictably linkable results / Can You Spot the Chinese Nuclear Sub?, a piece from last summer on the security implications of satellite imagery (now also used to find hitherto unexplored jungles).

An excellent me-fi post on Thomas the Tank Engine, soon to forsake his Hornby-esque model world for an entirely computer generated one, a move which is inevitable but also seems to rather miss the point. The degree of separation between programme and toy will only be increased, leading us to wonder whether the popular wooden Thomas toys are destined to be a thing of the past, utterly dislocated from the slick, reflective, fluid world shown on screen. From the post, the incredible Mapping of Sodor page, a feast of fictional cartography and history (even Beck style). Sadly the curators of the brand aren't fans of accuracy. 'It must be said that validity ceased at the start of TV Series One which obliterated Tidmouth as the main terminus station and replaced it with Knapford.'

Via ask, the LEGO factory is a user-generated resource for displaying downloadable custom models / interview with a bookbinder / The Charlatan's 'Can't Get out of Bed' is being used to advertise Benylin. The cough medicine brand has previously used The Clash / a Twitter enhanced Derive - the new urban experience / BLDG BLOG on Fossil Cities and our ultimate total disappearance, 'the future magnetic presence of urban metals that have been compressed into the thinnest bands of underground strata.' Traces of lost urbanism form a major part of our modern mythology, such as the story of the pyramids beneath Lake Mills, Wisconsin, an apparent source for the pre-historical copper industry. Civilisation might be swiftly scoured from the face of the earth, but what we apparently _want_ most is to find evidence of a recently vanished past.

Sprint's Plug into Now site is like a 1950s imagining of the future, a steam-powered widget that delivers useful information in a mostly useless way / DropBox is very contemporary and looks exceptionally useful. Whether we will commit to the service is another matter / Typographic Practice, 1904 / TypePad for Journalists, be interesting to follow this project / fun with statistics, the 2008 bailout versus Other Large Government Projects, at Voltage Creative.

From the projects (and missed by rss types), the telegraph poles of South London. See also some new galleries: Arctic Survival, Desert Survival, Jungle Survival and Sea Survival, four handy (and badly scanned) booklets to help the 50s and 60s era pilot survive in inhospitable environments.

It's that time of year again, the Johnson Banks team looks back on design and marketing savvy Christmas cards from times past. A happy Christmas to all our readers. Updates will be sporadic at best for the next week or so.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 23:38 / 1 comments

Boing Boing readers predict the next five years and beyond. Some are eccentric - 'More men will decide to opt for obedient robot wives to do cooking, cleaning and other stuff that will appeal to the misogynist, creating a mind shift in the western female' - some are prescient - 'People will own fewer objects, and be more selective about the physical objects they do own' - but most are deeply pessimistic.

Blogs about vocations, mostly snippy / Kiosk, a new way of shopping for small art items and oddities - slightly like a retail version of Industrial Facility's 'Under a Fiver' project (some of which can be seen here). The site's Blog / a viral marketeer gets their comeuppance / announcing the construction of a cooled beach in Dubai. Nice headline grabbing story that probably has way more just beneath the surface.

Death maps, the UK teen murders 2008 by location, and murders across the whole of the UK ('Many victims of murder with a firearm are from wealthier areas, perhaps because it tends to be those with money who have shotguns and similar weapons in their homes.') / A Firework for WG Sebald, one of many works by Jeremy Millar.

The Commons, flickr's epic project to bring public photo collections into better view / the Book Cover Archive, with links to things like this gallery of old science fiction covers / Imitation of Life, a tumblr / the 'Green Void' installation by the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture / N55 are a Danish design group who condense their projects into downloadable manuals, such as the Walking House, a down-sized Archigram.

Song for Someone promises customised mp3s, with the name of your choice slotted in. The age of mass personalisation hasn't really expanded beyond the range of goods offered off the back of photo services like flickr, essentially just an updating of the tacky Snappy Snaps mugs that have existed since the dawn of time. But then again, playing with the fundamentals of an object, adjusting the sliders so that any permutation of words, forms or images is possible, goes far beyond the levels of control that a typical brand needs to apply. For example, would M&M's open themselves up to Nike Sweatshop-style shenanigans? It's unlikely: the disclaimers are relatively extensive ('To avoid any confusion and keep everyone safe, we will not print any reference to drugs or prescription items, especially those that are in pill or capsule form')

The rather pointless Calvin Klein Dollhouse, the conflation of brands, toys and deconstructivism in a holiday season special confused aesthetic / enter the global snowball fight. These Christmas virals seem rather thin on the ground this year / from The Big Picture's Best of the Year, this photograph of bow and arrow wielding Maasai warriors is like Agincourt with casualwear.

Adverts for General Dynamics, back when the military industrial complex had a handle on style and presentation / on a completely different tack. The world of the astrologer isn't usually on our radar, but naturally there are a host of them out there online, many touting celebrity clients (such as Henri Llewelyn Davies. Few, however, are as entertaining and wilfully perverse as Madame Arcati, which seems to combine a heightened awareness of modern media with a fervent belief in a mystical order, and draws in all manner of names into its orbit.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 00:40 / 0 comments

Vinyl, the documentary, the first part of Alan Zweig's entertaining 2000 documentary about vinyl obsessives / Loop are back / 11 Awesome Comic Book Hideouts / This New Ocean: The History of Space Flight / the tallest abandoned structure in Russia / cloth escape maps of Europe at Sean Gillies' blog, via The Map Room / The Donnell Library Center: A Eulogy In Pictures (via BB) / more James Ravilious.

Differences in perception. Russia! magazine has an entertaining feature where the team from Curbed check out the new Russian architecture, the predictably disastrous blend of monumental, moderne lite and brash beyond belief. English Russia regularly throws up galleries of this kind of thing, almost all of it depressing / Yulia Tymoshenko is the current Prime Minister of Ukraine, and exceptionally adept at image-making. Her site's gallery contains over 7000 photos.

Rennart presents 'Spindles - a photo album and diary of silent film actress Irene Rooke's hideaway' in Dungeness, dated 1927 / all about the Fender Jaguar.net / Folding Baguette makes the Magic Light, which sound like it defies physics but is actually a rather more analogue version of the touch interface.

Buy Old Childrens Books.com, with many galleries / Just Like the Movies, 9/11 preimagined after the event through existing movie footage. We are overwhelmed with images of destruction, most of which are taken utterly for granted until cunningly re-cut in such a way / examples of unusual words from The Meaning Of Tingo, a book we foolishly passed up on a charity stall last week / The Onion's Atlas of the World.

Alan Taylor - Kokogiak - runs The Big Picture, a website we adore and which sets a standard for visual presentation on line that few other sites have stepped up just yet. While the image-driven weblog, tumblelog, whatever, has proliferated over the past 18 months, few people are exploiting the true size of the screens we have in front of us.

Tracking politics and economics. Rather than watching hemlines (or anything else) we should be checking the multiplex: 'Apparently politically conservative times coincide with zombie movies and liberal times with vampire movies.' (via me-fi).

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 21:00 / 0 comments

A Second Tulip Mania, do the prices of contemporary art works represent a 'classic investment bubble'? 'In Russia [contemporary art sales] rose 2,365 per cent in five years (2000-05)'. Also, 'In Britain, there was the Banksy market, a kind of contemporary art lite, for people with thousands rather than millions to spend. Images that would once have never made it past a T-shirt, mug or wall, were now bought and sold as limited edition prints and stencils on canvas.' Comments at First Drafts, the Prospect Magazine blog.

Disappearing Places, via me-fi, the cartography of nostalgia / Unusual and Imaginary Maps / Hoogerland National Railways / we can build you, a tumblr / Ninth Letter, a weblog / Ruffly, a very minimalist blog / The Diorama Diaries, or how a contemporary humorous essayist translates their work into something flickrable.

The Dark Lord of Logos meets the Metal Band Name Generator. Any logo generators out there? / CTRL+V, think we linked this one before / CTRL+C, copy and paste a new Taj Mahal. A move that has not been popular in India / Vroman's, a tumblr / Futurgasm, 'future excitements of the world' / Eskissos, an architecture weblog.

Nukephoto.com, 'the comprehensive source for photographs of U.S. nuclear weapons systems' (via me-fi, again) / Stephen Fry seems to be single-handedly keeping every mobile phone company in business right now / an extraordinary set of photographs of fossil hunting in the former Green Sahara. The giraffe petroglyph is incredible.

Spaceship!, a piece of 'Collaborative Interactive Fiction' from The Guardian's Gamesblog Community. Play the demo. Heavy shades of HHGTTG ('This must be a Thursday.') but promising nonetheless / Popular Mechanics, lots of / C.Y.L, an image log with music and video too / Maiike, a weblog / make books at blurb / is Shanghai built with dodgy steel? / The Clothes that got me laid, fashion advice in blog form for sartorially driven metrosexuals.

The Barclay Brothers (poor Wikipedia entry) start closing down their interests on the small island of Sark. On the face of it, this looks very much like the kind of feudal behaviour the newspaper owners are claiming to be striving to remove. Following their failure to win popular support for their 'regime' ('It just shows that turkeys can vote for Christmas', according to a member of the 'Barclay camp'), will the Barclays retreat to their castle on Brecqhou?

Top image from The Little Artists.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 12:33 / 1 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

Random links today / all about the Prandtl Glauert Singularity / books written and illustrated by Barbara Jones (1912-1978) / extracts from the archive of Manuel Raeder / objects by Amplifier / other objects on show at The Estrangement Gallery, all collated, curated from who knows where / amazing photography by Brendan Austin.

Anthropomorphic automobiles, a photo series by Vladimir Nikolic, at booooooom! / take a virtual tour of the recent Hayward Gallery installation by Los Carpentineros / Big Box re-use: What happens to the store when Wal-Mart leaves town?, a Slate feature.

Research Cruiseship, a potentially information-dense wiki / O'Connors O'Pinions, a weblog / Pearman on Seizure, an installation work by Roger Hiorns. More on Seizure at Shape and Colour / The In-Between, a games weblog / The Return of the Previ, revisiting an 'experimental housing project ... and proposals for poor areas of Lima launched in 1969 and partly realized in 1972' / Griffin and Hoxie, a weblog / why the the world's tallest cloud buster, the Burj Dubai, kept on growing and growing.

Architecture and So On, a weblog / all the covers from Wired UK, a brightly coloured set that present a unique snapshot of 90s digital culture in Britain / railway enthusiasts have left behind a rich archive of historical imagery, if you just look beyond the trains. See also Railways at War, part of the Mixed Traffic site / the Arts and Crafts Home.

Capital Wasteland, a map of Fallout 3, the current hot post-apocalyptic game (via haddock) / another map, this time plotting the data from the leaked BNP members' list onto Google Maps / 'Millie The Model' comics in the 1960's at I'm Learning to Share

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 13:20 / 0 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

Friday round-up. Nadav Kander's new series, Yangtze from East to West, featured at Don't Panic magazine / Is Science Fiction Dying? / Boring Magazine, a publication by Scotch and Penicillin (which also has a good links page; fly through snowy mountains, courtesy of Electric Oyster.

'FaceResearch. allows you to participate in short online psychology experiments looking at the traits people find attractive in faces and voices.' / Graham Rawle's Emerald City, created for his book The Wizard of Oz / backstage at a fashion show, 1954, at susi.a / the Paris Exposition of 1900, an image collection (pointed out to us by fotofacade) / Century 21 Expo in Seattle (via).

The Frame, a tumblr without pictures / Processed, a weblog / the concept art of Peter Popken, via ArTect, an architecture weblog / the Clothes Horse, an admirably narcissistic fashion blog / I saw your nanny, voyeuristic weblog / how to make Chili Con Carne, the readership of me-fi speaks.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 16:45 / 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

Making the Unbelievable, Believable: Magical and Fictional Worlds in Visual Art. On the nature of fiction and belief, and how it is the often almost imperceptible details that help us make the leap that lodges a fictional space in our minds. 'In the Victoria and Albert Museum there is a medieval sculpture of an angel, and the tunic dress has slits embroidered around the edges where the wings come out. Now that is a true angel. It's like when snow is painted, it has to embody real snow to be believable.' We think of the snow in Pauline Bayenes' illustrations for CS Lewis's Narnia series, and the way a single slash of black on white implied a deep, crisp coldness. From the link, talking about the Disneyfication of Winnie the Poo: 'The tiniest marks do an enormous amount of work in terms of giving you an emotional and unconditional love for one of those characters in the original drawings.'

The debate also mentions the Magic Pencil exhibition, a British Council initiative from a few years ago to bolster the international presence of the country's children's illustrators. So much of our mental landscape is shaped by illustration, specifically illustration for children's books, spaces that are created when the mind is primed to store imagery.

Below we reproduce a short piece from things 9 on an exhibition held a decade ago at the Prince of Wales' Institute of Architecture, back when it lurked on the edge of Regents' Park. As well as Baynes, the exhibition included work by Tove Jansson and Maurice Sendak.

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Children's books are occasional spaces, exotic locations that do not have the familiarity of our own homes and rooms. But how does children's literature portray the house? Can it simultaneously provide both familiarity and exoticism in that most familiar space? Alan Power's eclectic exhibition at the Prince of Wales' Institute of Architecture is a comprehensive picture of the role of the house in children's books, illustrating many literary locations. From the original artwork for Lewis Carroll's Alice, through the elaborate architecture and world of the Moomins to the post-psychedelic fantasies of today's sophisticated illustrators, there is something from everyone's past on display.

For children, the spaces described in these books have the same physical resonance and psychic presence as those infrequently visited physical spaces which seeped into the consciousness as 'special places' - like grandparent's houses, with their attics, cellars, hidden spaces and history. My own grandparents lived in a small, 1930s house in the suburbs of Bath, traditionally styled but with a strange pebble-dash and concrete finish. Even the house's name, Greenways, had the mysterious aura of, say, the House at Green Knowe, Lucy Boston meets Narnia. Elements of adventure abounded; a dusty, child-sized attic, bare save for boards and mote-filled streams of light from a single tiny window. My grandfather's workshop, a remote eyrie festooned with tools, was circumnavigated by a miniature railway, which whirred around at head height whilst he worked. The garden's rampaging herbaceous borders towered above children, becoming a maze of secret passages and hedgerows. Alongside an overgrown pond thick with snails and buzzing with dragonflies, ran a model railway - hand-built model steam trains chattering through Meccano signals and points made from knitting needles. Buried deep within the front hedge was my mother's childhood Wendy house, the ceiling sagging beneath the foliage above, the floor splintered and torn like a replica ruin.

This space impinged greatly on my consciousness, and merged and melded with the vivid descriptions and pictures that filled the books of my childhood. But the journey into past memories is frequently marred with disappointment, and unsurprisingly, it was a shock to revisit the house in adulthood - and be surprised by the small scale, the harshness of the house's appearance, the newly-built houses that filled the garden and the neatly manicured flower beds. But although revisiting the spaces created within children's books appears to be a similarly risky journey, books retain their personal voice and sense of intimate scale.

In children's literature, the house frequently represents a space outside conventional experience. Through the protagonist, the reader transgresses the rules and conventions established by adults. Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are aptly illustrates this journey. The hero, Max, spirited from the 'safety' of his bed and transported to a strange new world, free from the shackles and conventions of everyday life.

But such transgression is frequently punished, or at least carries the implication of grave consequences; witness Alice's (mis)adventures in Wonderland. Or, for example, take Dr Seuss's mischievous thing one and thing two who run riot in a space placed in the temporary custody of children. The Cat in the Hat, representing the temptation of transgression, ultimately cannot convince the children that these things mean fun. Beatrix Potter's dark morality tales of Peter Rabbit and Tom Kitten focus on the innocent abroad, adrift in a world of serious 'adult' concerns. The message is simple: do as we say or…. In contrast, Catherine Storr's Polly and the Wolf stories neatly inverts this grave message. Despite depicting a traditionally sinister children's book character, Storr's Wolf is a downtrodden loser, forever thwarted by Polly's cunning and his own pitiful stupidity. Even Polly's journey into the clearly transgressive (and messy) space of the Wolf's own house culminates in the child's victory. But for the most part, such stories focus on the invariably negative results of invading a forbidden zone, or inviting an alien, unwelcome presence into your own space.

Naturally, real life is rarely rudely interrupted by anthropomorphic invasions, or wayward journeys into fantasy realms. Sadly, it becomes increasingly apparent that as we grow older, the physical spaces we held dear as children have become integrated with our everyday, mundane existences. Transgressions become limited by laws and rules and spaces become property, with onerous implications of trespass and theft. Perhaps only children's literature provides us with a satisfying journey back into a murky past clouded with the knowledge of subsequent experience, for now we know that rules were not made to be broken.

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Another form of fantasy living space was enacted on America's West Coast in the post-war years, when the Case Study Houses transcended their original brief as low-cost housing prototypes for the masses and evolved into the epitome of aspirational living, perched atop canyons and dunes. Accompanying Taschen's facsimile reprint of Arts and Architecture is this website, also entitled Arts and Architecture, upon which you can find extracts from every issue and details of the houses that were submitted.



Other things. Is Detroit worth saving? versus 'An auto industry bail-out will fail' / houses of the future fail to find buyers. The life-size exhibits at the MoMA show Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling remain unsold, save for Horden Cherry Lee's Micro Compact Home.

Sidebar revisits. Transpontine, rich in South London history, complete with the Transpontine South East London History Map and posts about walking through New Cross and William Morris in South London, as well as this blog on the location of London's Stink Pipes. All recommended.

75 years of the hunt for Nessie, cryptozoology as embedded cultural meme. No concrete evidence whatsoever exists indicating that the Loch Ness Monster is real; it is a phantom trope designed purely to excite the Daily Mail.

Labels: illustration, linkage

posted by things at 16:28 / 0 comments

Other things. The Art of Memory, a weblog / In Search of an Icon: 'The Hunt for a Boeing B-314 Flying Boat Pan American NC18601 - the Honolulu Clipper' / magic marker modesty. Lots more here / Writing Design, a call for papers for a new conference on the 'Object, Process, Discourse, Translation'.

Stadium seating plans / traveller's world, flickr sets / via right place, right time, wrong speed (also known as the Peel Tapes), a few more radio-related links: John Peel.net, the dayGlo world of Mr Obscure, and the sadly abandoned In Session Tonight / Thunderflite, a fabulous contemporary update of the 1950s concept car aesthetic (via autoblog).

A great Lego mini-fig timeline (via tmn) / degrade your images intentionally with Poladroid / Make a MuppetWhatnot / Design, Architecture, Urbanism...and Salt attracts our attention for posting the sad story of Julius Elischer's Rodger's House, now reduced to rubble / old things for sale at Factory20.

photography by Kim Holtermand / under the bonnet of the BBC News website / Fall Food, a compendium / a selection of genuine porn intros (sfw) / primitive nerd takes an evocative journey South by Rail.

There is an insatiable appetite for images of the recent technological past: A History of Microsoft Windows / Yatzer, an online design magazine / trend-spotting courtesy of Josh Spear / Eastern Germany industrial vestiges, a gallery by Yves Marchand and Roman Meffre. See also Forgotten theatres of America / images of storm battered Yemen at the Big Picture.

Origamic Architecture by Masahiro Chatani. More pop up cards / we have a strange fascination with the Sky Factory and their products, most of which are just a click away from the illusory spaces depicted in science fiction, illusory facades that present an alternate, impossible reality. A magical and fictional world, in fact.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 16:35 / 0 comments

How a Tiny Toy Makes Big Bucks: 'Hot Wheels are hot again. Parent company Mattel is now worth more than GM.' Can't imagine Corgi or Dinky were ever an economic rival to Austin Rover, for example. The wrong turns are always interesting. 'To try to get those big boys to put down their game controllers, Hot Wheels came up with ever more elaborate—and complicated—play sets. One, the Slimecano, featured a slime-spewing volcano that cars had to navigate—and parents had to try to assemble'. From the amazon reviews: 'this toy delivered 100% of the nightmare described by the other hideous reviews, with one added and unexpected bonus: the slime caused a fabulous burning sensation on my hands.' See Red Line Protos, the Bruce Pascal Collection of rare, unusual and prototype Hot Wheels, one of many sites devoted to the company (includes the exceptional 'Prototype Gasoline-Powered Hot Wheels', pictured above).

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Other things. The Evolution of the Front Page at Serial Consign (via kottke) / Roadside pictures / the Demarco Digital Archive / Bond architecture / the Swatch 007 villain collection / book (design) stories by Felix Wiedler, over 500 examples of 'modernist book design in germany and switzerland 1925–1965 (and beyond)'.

Labels: linkage, toys

posted by things at 13:49 / 3 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

Glancey on the Westfield mega mall (seen here under construction) and again making the link with Imre Kiralfy's fantastical Edwardian landscape, describing the site as 'the spiritual home of the contemporary shopping mall', concluding that ultimately 'Westfield is just a tiny step towards our collective desire to undermine the life and culture of the traditional city', all wrapped up in the post-high tech/decon stylings of the modern shopping mall

The Shape of Alpha, maps created via flickr picture geographical data (via kottke) / [london] smog, a weblog / the abandoned Hoosac Tunnel, and an account of an exploration / Donald Trump wins permission to build vast golf course on protected sand dunes. Extraordinary / one piece, a weblog / Diane, a shaded view on fashion, a weblog / Label of Love: SST, a piece celebrating 30 years of SST.

The Museum of Antique Dental Instruments, with music and in Hebrew. Recommended / de licht kamer, a fotolog / Urban Austin / the end of the U2 tower, a project saga that seems to have run and run and run. So much for rock and roll and architecture. All we're left with is the Led Zeppelin roller coaster / Inspiration Resource.

Feeding the Five Thousand... feeds / ample sanity, a weblog / Magical Nihilism, wonderful title for a blog, for anything, in fact / Brief Epigrams, a weblog / The Roommate, a set of alternate endings / it's been a long time since we visited Viewfinder (via me-fi) / The Home of Metal, which will ultimately be 'a digital archive of everything heavy metal from the 60s to now' (there's a blog too), via the Capsule Blog.

Last week we wrongly credited SDM with a fine post on Threads at Kino Fist. It was actually written by The Impostume, a blog run by Carl Neville / Architecture Revived, a weblog / Feminist Law Professors, a weblog / install BBC's iPlayer on the Nokia N95. This actually works.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 10:00 / 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

There has been a flurry of weblog interest in MINExpo ('the world's richest deposit of mining technology, services and products'), including this post at Telstar Logistics. Why? The internet serves us well as a repository for the unusual, the gee-whiz aspects of technology that would otherwise remain hidden away, available only to specialists. But now we are all esotericists and fetishists, as TL's post makes clear, unable to tear ourselves away from 'giant dump trucks, esoteric drilling machines, and industrial explosive'. There is no arcana any more, at least not online.

Attending unusual trade shows will become a new leisure activity, as perverse fascinations and hobbies spill out of the world wide web in search of a physical manifestation. Check out the Ultimate Trade Show Directory for some future vacation ideas, like the awkwardly-named FunExpo (funerals), the International Christian Retail Show, the Clinical Symposium on Advances in Skin and Wound Care, Event Expo, Northeast Ohio's premiere exhibition for party planners, and the very self-explanatory The Future of Wipes.

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This Old Toy, neatly packaged parcels of nostalgia / Accuracy and Aesthetics, whose mission 'is building consensus for the construction of semantic space as if it were a series of large scale public building projects.' What does this mean? The site has an interesting, almost sinister, love of diagrams and flowcharts / FormFiftyFive, a ffffound type thing with a more carefully curated approach. Via FFF, Thoughts from E17, the blog of the Build design studio. A blog is as an essential piece of designer kit as a clutch pencil in this modern world / Collected Visuals / I love typography, a weblog.

At Special Presentations at the Library of Congress, John Bull and Uncle Sam, Four Centuries of British American Relations / Peter Nencini, 'Making-looking-thinking of an illustrator-designer-lecturer' / is carefully thought out, beautifully designed, lovingly made, artfully presented and responsibly sold stuff still just _stuff_?

Photography by Ed Panar, via It's Nice That / Everything is Miscellaneous, an ominous-sounding website / The Way Things Go, the classic 1987 film by Fischli and Weiss (YouTube sample) / at first glimpse this is a spectacular mountain viewpoint, but ultimately it's genuinely hard to see what the point is / in the future, we will all have our own personal Biennales.

Cake Wrecks / buy shoes with Modista. Clever / the London Transport Museum photographic collection. Many, many gems, not just for those who get off on photos of vintage traffic (not such a bad thing), e.g. Tower Bridge under construction / How to See with John Ruskin / who would sure have approved of these websites and their avant-garde approach to Ikea's products: Ikea Hacker and Ikea furniture mods.

Rodcorp takes in an art fair: Frieze and Crash / need4speed, a website dedicated to images of speedometer needles reaching the end of their travel / quote from Dieter Zetsche of Mercedes Benz: "There are many studies that say it took 120 years to get to 800 million cars around the globe, and that it will take only another 30 years to double that volume." / Something about Sarah: 'pretty women foil men's ability to assess the future' / Fortress Finland, a nation's unusued bunkers.

We loved Tesugen, but that blog has now evolved into Tesugen Replaced, an experiment whereby past posts are revisited, reprofiled and re-posted, dead links fixed and ideas approached from a different angle. A piece of short-term digital archaeology, akin to flicking through old notebooks, searching for an overall theme to emerge.

Labels: archives, linkage

posted by things at 13:00 / 2 comments

A Continuous Lean, a pretty fine weblog / seen before, but worth seeing again, The Ephemerist / just in time for the 'credit crunch', property snake tracks falling prices in the housing market, as well as the length of time houses have been on the market.

Some HDR photography / Naomi Stead, architecture critic / critical architecture: this proposal for a Peckham cultural centre by Eco-Architecture and Planning is agreeably insane, channelling the spirit of the 60s

We've not dipped into Twitter at all, but kottke rightly points out the entertainment and information to be gleaned from tracking how it's used. Using a site called Twist one can perform instant comparative surveys, like Google Zeitgeist but slanted towards the more tech-savvy user. Sometimes the loser is obvious. More in the comments.

On my desk / the mystery spot collective, new art / art by Michael Rubin / abstract paintings and collages by Josh Smith / paintings by Amy Talluto / Find a Grave / Photoguide, images of Japan / Lead Composition, Dave's Mechanical Pencils on the dark arts of pencil leads (via cult pens).

We've mention Cauty and Son before but hadn't really delved in the contents of the work, 'a provocatively childish and gleeful (if not disingenuous) lampooning of mass-produced cartoon imagery'. Think Itchy and Scratchy for the Abu Ghraib generation / another cutaway, this time of a minifig.

Things Found in Mum's Basement / World of Kane, a weblog / Play with the machine, a weblog / Multicolr Search Lab. See also flickrbits.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 10:14 / 0 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

On creationism, the ego and the sublime. The insertion of self into the historical landscape is helped substantially when that landscape is relatively compact. The concept of a 7,000 year old Earth therefore makes some perverse kind of sense, as it flatters the ego by suggesting that the average 70 year lifespan accounts for a significant 1% of all recorded time, thus enabling everyone to feel they have an impact on the ways of the cosmos. The alternative is far too alienating; a 4.54 billion year old planet turns your existence into a rather insignificant percentage. If significance is what you're after, then the thought of being such a diluted, infinitesimal part of global history that you're almost homeopathic can't be a comforting one.

Perhaps we can draw parallels between the the apparent egotism of this world-view - one that conveniently denigrates all contrary points of view - with the burgeoning culture of micro-celebrity. Is Young Earth Creationism a sort of cosmic Reality TV of the cosmos? Just as everyone's 15 minutes have been stretched out into a diet of thin, self-perpetuating media gruel, maybe the idea of a truly young Earth - the blink-and-you'll-miss-it school of geology - is a surefire way of asserting one's own primacy, a way of trying to literally make the world revolve around you. Throw in the role of the sublime, where landscape and creation are inextricably bound, and a'young' Earth would feel rich with the lingering aura of creation. That must be an addictive thought.

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Other things. Engaging the punters with Cold War Modern; the 7thsyndikate. Ponder a minute or so as to how a genuine Cold War era surveillance society would have treated the internet (at we made this) / nice set of film posters reduced to their placed products, at A2591, via me-fi).

A tribute to Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, and the people who worked there, including a matter-of-fact sounding mp3 of the station's final minutes before shut down / a fine but unsigned review of Glancey's Lost Buildings: 'For those who treasure cities and what gets called our "built heritage", this book will strum on your sense of poignancy with pornographic reliability.'

The Daily Beast, already making its talons felt in the absurdly angry American political scene. Right now the discourse is a little bit like a monologue from the angriest dog in the world / this isn't happiness, a pretty superior tumble log / The Sentences of Sarah Palin, diagrammed. Including: 'This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights... It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.' A bit more about diagramming.

Nothing but Green Lights, mp3s of new British music / see saw, 'a daily dose of sourced images' (when did the phrase 'a daily dose' enter popular currency?) / Simon Norfolk has an exhibition at the Michael Hoppen Gallery. Full Spectrum Dominance, a 'series of photographs of military rocket and missile launches in America' that is allied to a modern landscape sensibility, a new sublime. Something the Iranians haven't quite mastered.

Beautiful brochures for the Citroen 2CV. Related, to Moscow and back by Deux Chevaux / HotWheels, a tumble log / The Royal Art Lodge / 3D software and you, designers reveal their favourite renderers / Speccy, an emulator. See also Spectrum Spoilers / Digital Compositing, a weblog / GraphicDesignBar, a weblog / the Second Solar Spaceship, the ultimate children's play area.

Simon Whatley, a weblog / Shelfari looks interesting / beautiful photography by Luca Gabino / After Corbu, a weblog / Retro and Vintage in Modern Web Design, via Coudal / 'today is a good day... for co-existing with humans' / Analogue Sunday, an idea we can get behind.

A Rule of Thumb, Cabinet of Wonders on the history of fingerprints / Curious Objects on Orson Squire Fowler and his penchant for octagonal architecture. See also Weekend Stubble on Fowler / via the latter, the new Times Archive Blog. The post on the Elephant Man is especially affecting.

Something we only just discovered, the Google Chrome scroll issue. Here's a fix that works / Lemmatica looks suspicious. It rides high in our referrer tables, but asks for a google login before you can proceed. Anyone have any idea what's going on?

Labels: linkage, thinking

posted by things at 00:08 / 3 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

Will Kane retro and film still flickr sets, via automatism / seen everywhere, but interesting as an example of the wunderkammer's logical extreme, Jay Walker's Library, the modern equivalent of the labyrinth in The Name of the Rose, filtered through a search for 'neat modern ephemera' / why should rock stars expect to be rich? / the ultimate modern ruin, via archinect / what do coke and meth look like up close? / a very short lived weblog, haxadecimal, highlighting the automotive oddities of ebay.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 00:10 / 0 comments

Paho Mann's Junk Drawers and Medicine Cabinets series are beautifully executed, the kind of thing we couldn't possibly pass up (via kottke). But each little composition of objects reminded us not just of Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters and even Damien Hirst, but also the plethora of similar projects that abound on flickr. As we're fond of often saying, we are all curators now that the internet has given us keys to an infinite cabinet. Nowhere is this more evident than in the plethora of flickr pages that serve as personal monuments to acquisition.

Some examples: a junk drawer project, kitchen drawers, inside your drawers, my desk drawer, etc. Many of these seem to be inspired by the What's in your Bag? group (and its nemesis, What's REALLY in your bag?), as well as What's in your purse?, handbag contents, in my purse and object collections. Unsurprisingly, there are even groups devoted to bathroom cabinets and genuine wunderkammer.

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Other things. Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, a fabulous film stills weblog. E.g. this image from House of Bamboo / illustrations by Joao Fazenda / strange form of life, a weblog / junk drawers (via the moment) / letters from Salisbury at English Buildings: 1, 2, 3 / peta press, craft and more / all but the dissertation, a weblog / Russell Davies on patina, something the shiny digital world sometimes encourages us to forget, unless it's a deliberate ploy. Flickr's patina group.

Shut(er)eyes, a visual blog focusing on the unseen in the everyday / A cup of Jo, a weblog, which links to Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project / my happy things / the glossiest fashionesque images on flickr at flickrista / Save our Saarinen! The American Embassy in London under threat. Pearman on the inevitable philistinism that's about to go down in Grosvenor Square / gone to croatoan, a weblog.

Labels: linkage, objects, things

posted by things at 20:17 / 1 comments

The Biennale of Perpetual Decay. Nothing is ever demolished, only added to or altered. Just an idea / a boat we missed / photography by Michael Danner / more conjectural space: Japanese space elevators, American solar sails / the 10th anniversary Google page inspired us to drag up the oldest archived version of this site, complete with 2002 weblog. It's a shame that sites like this have evaporated into nothing, leaving only bits and pieces behind.

The Vandercook Press, in praise of the traditional printing press. There was once a wonderful Chicago printshop called the Fireproof Press. See also the Museum at the Briar Press website. It seems to us that the aesthetic of the traditional press has survived, even though the technology has all but disappeared. At the time, the Fireproof web presence seemed like a true bridge between digital and analogue.

Thought for the Week at johnson banks / matching trailer, a flickr group / Morrell, 'Moving Turrell' sculptures, part projection, part object / BrickArms, arm your Lego minifigures to the teeth (via BBgadgets) / all about the Renault Estafette / dirty mice, a design blog / photographer Chris Clunn has many images of a vanished London (via flavorpill).

We can't paint, a weblog / MoMA's architectural drawing collection / Olympus Camera Wallpaper Gallery / weird RVs / combat zone/post-combat zone photography by Christoph Bangert.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 16:35 / 0 comments

Some catching up to do. The photorealist art of Don Eddy / dysturb.net, all about Dutch architecture / core.form-ula, the digital realm blogged / 'New York City, Tear Down These Walls', Ouroussoff on the city's worst examples of 21st century architecture / related, a piece about 190 The Bowery, a photographer's haven in New York. 190 The Bowery is owned by Jay Maisal, and the piece also taps into that great urban myth, the overlooked and undiscovered room: 'The building is still giving up its secrets. About a month ago, Amanda discovered a room she never knew existed. "It's kind of in the mezzanine between the first and second floors," she says. "It's a cool little room. I don’t know why they don’t use it. It is just kind of full of pieces of mirror." This recalls a post we've referenced before, BLDG BLOG's The Undiscovered Bedrooms of Manhattan (via kottke). See also this NY Times piece on the (surely now-long-passed micro) trend for installing secret rooms: 'he had wanted a secret room, he said, "since watching Scooby-Doo way back when."'

Architectures de cartes postales, old images on what some might call Boring Postcards. Not us / from the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the work of Nicolas Grospierre and Kobas Laksa, examining life in Poland's architectural marvels 50 years into the future: The Afterlife of Buildings, intense collages that turn today's shiny new high-tech palaces into repositories for chaos.

The Oxford Project at tmn. Stunning / also via tmn, a set of modernist gas stations. Many people presumably still wish we could build gas stations like this. We recall that Prince Charles once wished for what was effectively a half-timbered fuel pumping palace.

Western nostalgia for the lacklustre progress of the American space programme can be solved by a visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where things seem to be doe the old fashioned way. But why don't the Gulf States do space? Their earthbound realities are now so extraordinary that they will only be topped by extra-terrestrial architecture. Right now, spaceports are the new aesthetic sleight of hand, luminous distractions. Put these things in Dubai, and they'd be built before the end of the year.

Some tabloid madness injected in the calm, rational world of Richard Meier / thanks to Draplin for the link / sometimes we think the internet is best simply for lists of things, e.g. 10 seriously unusual Asian hotels / Mirror Dash, couture by Kim Gordon / Moscow Zoo in 1920.

Netherlands Picture books from 1810 to 1950, via me-fi / the iconic GMC Motorhome, now 30 years old. See also SquobStock, a Flickr group featuring 'the best RV photography on the web' / May tries the offspring of the Caspian Sea Monster. Ekranoplans are internet-nurtured cult objects / we've mentioned this before, the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society.

Referrer round up. Design for Mankind, a weblog / Planetaki is a web page you can configure yourself, probably to look a bit like Alltop / Intensify, a personal weblog / ArtJetSet, rather overwhelming, but art-focused. Related, the 2008 Turner Prize Nominees / unlimited edition, all those projects that live in the blurred zone between design, digital and beyond / ArchFeed, collating architecture weblogs from around the world.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 10:53 / 2 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

Random links / k3n's blog / ffffound as a 'deracinated, uncredited, untraceable image orgy ... the nadir of the eye candy, surface-uber-alles design world', according to gret. Although we do like these floorplan plates / compare and contrast: Cordaid advertisement versus Vogue India fashion shoot / Rolls-Royce now has six showrooms in China, located at Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Hangzhou. Strange that our geographical knowledge of country is only being expanded via the infiltration of ultra high-end Western brands.

A Building-by-Building Survey of New York's Last Great Architecture Boom at NY Mag / Tokyo Architecture, a flickr set by Bruce Nihon / a selection of images from CERN / David Foster Wallace Motivational Posters at The Howling Fantods! (via crazymonk) / the world of virtual property, enduring its own digital credit crunch.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 11:59 / 0 comments

A general collection of links today. An introduction to salvaging, an essay at the sadly defunct Salvager. Related, Fallen Fruit, 'a mapping and manifesto for all the free fruit we can find'. Includes fruit tree maps of West Coast localities, such as this one, from Beverly to Wilshire, Western to Vermont. Via their links, Fritz Haeg and the book Edible Estates.

The Farmers Weekly website has a ghoulish, presumably schadenfreude-driven section of their website dubbed Wrecker's Yard, cataloguing mishaps involving tractors, trailer and other bulky farm machinery. It has a similar vibe to Cargo Shipping Casualties. More here at this Me-fi post.

Vertigo: Collecting and Reading W.G. Sebald / photography by Andrew Freeman / From Here to There, photography and art collective based in LA. Main site. Includes photographers Gilda Davidian and Jeff McLane.

Short Schrift, pop culture and politics, with more of the latter right now / Theme Park Junkies, keeping tabs on the activities, big and small, of UK theme parks / Resonata, a 'machine' for generating waves, by Fergus Ray-Murray, who has a mean way with Plasticine. See also his blog Oolong's Long Oo / Diddy Wah, mp3s and more.

The Tombstone Deep Dish Pizza vending machine, at She Eats. More information at Wired's round up of ingenious new vending machines / FAARQ, design and architecture / All But the Dissertation, a weblog / Crust Station, a weblog / UUIUU!, a tumblr page / Dump Site, ruins and more.

The Outdoor Love Map is a clever idea but is looking pretty bare (pardon the pun) right now. See also the work of Kohei Yoshiyuki and the art of dogging; this Caitlin Moran piece is as close as we're going to get / rock photography by Autumn de Wilde / the Veuve Cliquot Bentley, at Wretch / The Eureka Machine for Composing Hexameter Latin Verses / skynoise, a weblog.

A Watercube-branded mobile phone / Usborne Book of the Future, sci-fi predictions, via CTRL+V / Steve Haslip, design and more / Design Problematique, a French design weblog / Vitrin, European architecture and design / Graphicology, a design weblog.

The above image is a detail from Dad's Wall, a poignant look at the objects that help make up a life. Check the list of things that accompanies it / we're not sure what to make of Spaceegg. This clearly goes beyond flattery.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 23:07 / 2 comments

This weblog used to be called 'newthings', implying that we were only really interested in novelty and invention. In truth, the title was chosen as the world of the internet seemed represented the 'new' when compared to 'oldthings', our printed output. When we started, the idea of the internet as perpetual repository for stuff, as opposed to searchable directory of information that facilitated the finding of real world stuff. We've always known that the object in isolation is not as fascinating as the object within its cultural context. The internet provided not just a new context, but a new way of looking at existing contexts. It took a while to realise it, but the collection, presentation, and curation of objects has become an intrinsically revealing way of tracing the ins and outs of modern culture.

This new curatorial context is also a space of collision. The work of Iris Schieferstein, taxidermist and artist, illustrates one such collision (via Ravishing Beasts, an excellent taxidermy weblog that delights in concepts like Fraudulent Animals, still very much a contemporary concern). RB writes, 'Generally speaking, I am not a fan of taxidermy that makes new - and often woebegone - creatures from the parts of other animals. I think much of such combinatory art uses animals as mere raw materials, manhandled for shock effect or to manifest the dark depths of the human imagination.' Although these hybrid objects are clearly analogue, they are above all digital creations, relying on the rolling wunderkammer of the internet for a place of display.

Also via RB, Curious Expeditions and Morbid Anatomy (from where the above image of an elephant skin being cleaned at the American Museum of Natural History, date unspecified, is taken. Both deal with the vast, relatively uncharted world of pre-digital collectomania.

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Other things. The Double-Breasted Dust Jacket, fine title for a book-centric weblog / London from the air at night, via CTRL+V / Rich and Grace, an art and design weblog / Old Soviet Christmas card collection / photography by Sannah Kvist / A DSLR catechism, neatly summarising the nature of technological upgrades / Mapping Star Wars influence / Jumbo Hostel, cheaper than flying first class in the A380 / make a pinhole camera out of Lego.

Shutting down the Shuttle, NASA's Wayne Hales on the economic impossibility of keeping the craft alive, the role of small scale craft and production in building the machine in the first place and the inevitably bespoke nature of the modern spaceship / a collection of news infographics / peacock moon, product and design weblog / Setagaya-mura, the 'open tech house', an ongoing experiment in architectural design by Osamu Ishiyama. More on the work of this outsider architect.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 15:30 / 0 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

The French do things differently. From 'Paris Match', Maureen Orth's Vanity Fair profile of Carla Bruni's life and loves: 'She says she told Sarkozy, looking at [her] nude photos, "You must know that this is going to come out."
"And what did he say?," I ask.
"He said, 'Oh, I like this one! Can I have a print of it?'"

The Knight Rider sat nav / Core.Form-ula, a weblog rounding up developments in architecture and visualisation / giffin'termeer, a weblog / a series of short films rounding up the scene at various European art colleges, courtesy of wallpaper's Mercedes collaboration. See also the new Wallpaper selects gallery / Bustler magazine has details on the BSI Swiss Architectural Award, or Thirty Under 50 / Cattle shown to align north-south.

Now Boarding, probably Michael O'Leary's favourite game? Via Take 9 / top photography tips / Mary Beard's A Don's Life, via The Observer. See also BLDG BLG's recent two part interview. Another BB post speculated about architecture and games: '$100 hardcover books do absolutely nothing to increase architecture's audience. So what would happen if architects tried videogames?' / related, Second Place Is First to Lose, Todd Levin makes a misstep in the last battle of the console wars.

Bubble-chasing, something to dig your things 13 3D glasses out for (at Swell3D) / Museum of Art for the Arts / The Elrod House, Palm Springs icon and movie star / Scans from the Pyong Yang Times, September 2001, at The Lone Observer / Modernist schools in New Orleans, via Metropolis.

A new project, A Selection of English Cultural Landscapes. Somewhat unsatisfactory, given the strange orientation of most of the aerial photographs - click through to the largest size to get the correctly orientated view. We've matched a few of the scans to their modern day locations on Google Maps: Wembley, Isle of Dogs, Bognor. The rest will hopefully follow.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 08:15 / 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

The Los Angeles Natural History Museum now has authentic-looking puppet dinosaurs stalking its corridors (via cake or death). Created by ERTH Visual and Physical, the dinosaurs are a hybrid of puppet and robot - presumably the human involvement is essential to avoid any chance of a 'robots ate my child' lawsuit. Certainly Minmi the dinosaur looks way more sophisticated than just an upscaled Pleo.

After 'Afterlife', disassembled household appliances, a set of photographs by Brittny Badger (via swiss miss) / related, the death of the cathode ray tube. According to Treehugger, in the past 28 years nearly 705 million CRT televisions were sold in the USA alone. Of these, just over 40% are still in use, with some 20+ million being slung out each year / an architectural Unimog.

T-Sides, an mp3 blog / Manalogue, music and mixes / Stone Cold Pimpin', a weblog / Shiner.Clay, a weblog / Mygazines (via kottke), a place for sharing magazines. A historical version of this would be interesting, as at least the noise would be almost as interesting as the signal / Radio Commercials For Kentucky Fried Chicken / art by Anthony Goicolea.

Quipsologies / Simplistic Art, a weblog / xradiograph, a weblog / The Cartoonist's collection of old Corgi Toys and Dinky Toys catalogues / a huge collection of Public Enemy bootlegs / a bit about Rodan.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 16:41 / 0 comments

KithKin, a creative collective (their blog, which links the Kraftwerk Casio calculation from 1981). The collective has just launched SomeRightsReserved, 'a download shop for the blueprints to design, a future concept for how production and consuming will change with more readily available technology, like rapid prototyping'. Above, 'Afterlife', 'A 1:1 scale drawing of an Epson 1270 Printer's parts with a mars lumograph 5H pencil.'

Sort of related, Your Wall House, an off-the-shelf version of the much-published Wall House project by FAR frohn&rojas / more design work, on screen and off, at renatabarros.

Emmerich (via) versus Tyson (via). We're awaiting the ruin of the former / wallpapers of Old Fiats, part of this Old Motorcycle Wallpaper page / Revisited: The GM Concept Cars. See also Junkyard Dogs, Now Best of Breed, an NYT article on the surviving dream cars and their reunion at this year's Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance / Kanye West discovers Bertone / the Korg DS-10, a studio in your pocket.

Shanghai 2020, via Rich and Creamy. Although it seems like 2030 is the new red-ringed date on city planners' wallcharts the world over (via CoS. Also appreciate this tour of the Lyons House in Sydney by Robin Boyd) / time to revisit new projects at Fake is the New Real, including Skyscrapers over 100m Connected in Height Order and America's First Great / ephemera has an interview with book sculptor Nicholas Jones.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 11:00 / 0 comments

Prss Release: 'Weekly we collect the ten posts of the past week that we think are cool, interesting, thought provoking, funny or which are worth publishing for any other reason we come up with (or not). We put these posts in a clean readable lay-out with the appropriate credits to those of who's content we publish.' / photography by Joakim Eneroth / Bakgard, an architecture weblog / Architectural Scholar, more architecture, from a (mostly) academic viewpoint / Paris, New York, Shanghai, a gallery at tmn.

We've been taken to task by Gunpowder Magazine for our dismissal of the luxury magazine industry, accused of not understanding aspirational living. The point here is not that we don't understand aspiration - far from it - but that it seems that the majority of luxury magazines speak directly to the converted, concerned not with broadening horizons but with reinforcing the existing status quo. They're not aspirational in the traditional sense, because their readers don't need to aspire to anything. We didn't mean to be bitchy, but the contemporary luxury magazine has a finely targeted readership - check out a few rate cards. Unlike newsstand-based consumer magazines, the luxury magazine is rarely bought but stumbled over at the country club, private jet terminal or boutique hotel, a freebie for the largely undeserving. Our lament is therefore that given the presumably limitless funds, broad horizons and charged ambitions of the intended readership, why is the content and aesthetic on offer so relentlessly predictable?

Every credit to Gunpowder for being the only publication to take issue with what we wrote and respond, indicating that they're not simply cutting and pasting from the LVMH press wire. Still, we believe the sector is a missed opportunity. It is sad and ironic that 'luxury publishing' has become an aspirational market sector, the most prestigious genre to be part of. It's certainly understandable, but in a less commodified era, before brands became the cross-cultural titans they are today, art and culture was where it was at for innovative publishing. Consider a magazine like Verve, published from 1937 to 1960. Contributors included Matisse, Braque, Bonnard and Rouault, Giacometti, Joyce, Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Original copies of Verve are now highly sought after, for good reason, and the name has been adopted by an Indian magazine. It's unlikely that such a publication would be allowed to exist today. Verve's relentless, uncompromising emphasis on contemporary arts and their aesthetics was not an easy approach to take, certainly from a practical and economic standpoint. From the NYT: 'The cover of the issue dated ''Summer 1940'' was once again by Henri Matisse, and once again Matisse made color and form dance for him as they danced for no one else. (Twenty-six print runs were needed to get the colors right, by the way.)' Verve was luxury publishing before the term existed, yet it directed its readership towards new experiences, new art and art direction, abstraction and literature, not gilded objects and sybaritic stopovers. Given the amount of money that lubricates the luxury industry, is it too much to hope for a contemporary successor that breaks free of the self-imposed strictures of the genre?

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Breuer before and after, the IKEA-led compromise that saved a chunk of the original building. At NY10536 / the Fantastic Contraption, an online physics-based game. See also Phun, a '2D physics sandbox' and - a thing from the near future - levelHead, a 'spatial memory game' by Julian Oliver (video), Little Computer People meets PixelChix / Procrastineering, more techno toiling and special projects.

The Growlery, a weblog / Just Cool, collating the vapourware and design speculation rampant online / Zero-Waste blog has a more tangible sense of thing-ness to it / the Daily Grail, which currently leads with today's big story in cryptozoology, a Bigfoot corpse (unveiled and instantly debunked) / finally, a skateboarding/slo mo/explosion mash-up at Buck Macabre / i like takes a trip to The Horniman Museum / Slothrop, a weblog.

Camenzind Evolution's office for Google in Zurich is rather old fashioned in its embrace of the dotcom boom workspace aesthetic - all pods, slides, fishtanks and transplanted objects. The architects have a public Picasa gallery of the project, so you can see zoom into the image of the library and see that it has been stocked with ersatz books / more zero authenticity dwellings (ZADs): The Shire of Bend, in Oregon / Building Minnesota, architecture blog.

I am rich, neat. at wrong distance / Heathrow's Terminal 5 fights back / an animated apartment building, analogue version and digital version / remembering The Face magazine, via magCulture / Constructivism - the ism that just keeps giving / The Daily Figure. Oh to have such a command of the line.

Good to see the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony up at The Big Picture, still the widescreen version of the weblog world / the teeming void on the Olympic opening ceremony: 'The other none-too-subtle message of the opening ceremony was about technology, and specifically LEDs' / the new US Embassy complex in Beijing / the freshly glazed CCTV is genuinely remarkable, although the artifice will no doubt increase / as Olympics galleries go, this one seems to have a fairly blatant non-sporting agenda / underground Beijing / Waiting for George, our Beijing story at tmn.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 08:46 / 0 comments

'Dharavi.org is a multimedia wiki website designed to gather information, images, and ideas on Dharavi in Mumbai. Dharavi is one of the largest informal settlement in the world.' / epic _constructed_ photographs that exaggerate and distort the human impact on the landscape by Georg Parthen (both via Atelier A+D). More on Parthen at The Exposure Project and earlier works at Conscientious. The latter - the Multiplex series - demonstrate the human propensity for creating artificial, alien spaces. Landschaften simply takes things a step further, 'painting' with landscape in such a way that the results look real (we were initially taken in, thanks Joerg). A continuation of the romantic landscape tradition, plus a comment on our desire for manufactured environments / 15 Lombard Street, BLDGBLOG on how to rob a bank in London, a speculative artbook by Janice Kerbel.

Architectural Tourism and the Money Shot at Life without Bulidings. Martin Parr had a pop at this particular image as well: soon the new cliche to shoot will be people taking photos of people posing for photos pretending they're holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Updates will be irregular as things is in Beijing.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 10:00 / 0 comments

The Tate extension concept gets another makeover. We think the new design bears more than a passing resemblance to another infamous ziggurat, the Ryugyong Hotel, which will allegedly now be completed. As archinect notes, the last time there was a flurry of online and creative interest in this building (thanks to Domus), it proved rather controversial, not least because any support for the crumbling concrete ziggurat was perceived as support for the crumbling yet still powerful regime in North Korea. Pop the hotel into Google Earth and decide for yourself. Which segues nicely into this post on abandoned cities and towns.

'In truth, the constant return of this Disney fatwa says more about the stagnation of the West's critical imagination than about the cities on the Gulf.' Koolhaas on current work and context / Do burglars read AskMeFi? / Bookendless, a blog about books / the exposure project, a photography blog / Trophy Size Matters, an infographic (dread word) at Good Magazine (via Eduardo Chang) as is this page on Pantone colour predictions / Tastespotting mixes food writing with photography, in a relatively successful way. See also Lunch with Front Studio, and also the long-running airlinemeals.net, which contains nearly 19,000 images of in-air cuisine. Are you still allowed to photograph airline food?

BD on the 'squiggle-driven' Serpentine Pavilion, the first bit of substantial criticism. A nice piece of architectural whimsy or 'poorly executed suburban cosmetics', with a concealed steel frame and no way of keeping the rain off? Archinect links this time-lapse video of the construction. In the flesh, the pavilion was rather underwhelming, not the cascade of complexity one might have expected from the initial model shots. It was also surprisingly Californian-feeling - helped by the glow of late evening sun flooding across the lawns of Hyde Park.

What can you buy for five dollars? See also under five pounds and Sam Hecht of Industrial Facility's Under a Fiver exhibition / manufacturing urban myths for fun and profit, on the faintly ridiculous allure of the Conet Project / correcting the last post. The Surveillance Saver Quad we linked to is a continuation of Michael Zollner's original Surveillance Saver. Sorry for the misattribution.

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Gunpowder Magazine got us thinking about the luxury lifestyle magazine business. Go on, google it. There are, quite frankly, more magazines in this sector than in any other, especially online: MarQ, Rich Guy, Supercar, Lusso Luxury, Vivo Magazine, Black Card, Dolce Vita, Elite Life and Travel, Urban Life, Canary Wharf, Ocean Drive, Atlanta Peach, Quest, Broughtons, etc., etc. This is a woefully incomplete list, and that's before you've got to the in-house magazines produced by the various brands - Ferrari, Bentley, Aston Martin, Patek Philippe, Sunseeker. A marque without a magazine is in danger of knocking copy (although in practice this is relatively rare) and, horror of horrors, no control over their brand image. Around the world, the contract publishing market - companies like FMS, Redwood, John Brown - are creating bespoke publications that represent the idealised essence of a brand.

What's most striking is that the 'luxury' magazines listed above seem to demonstrate a lack of awareness of the world in general, beyond the little orbit of the place or product held in close focus. It's a lack of curiosity, perhaps, maybe created from self-satisfaction, or even fear that the media-bubble each product and reader occupies is in danger of being popped. The imagery is relentless - white sand/blue sky/bikini/convertible/powerboat/wine glass - a cornucopia of high net worth clip art that has the effect of flattening the entire lifestyle into little more than a low rent studio photoshoot.

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Perhaps related, Mike Tyson's abandoned mansion. If nothing else, this shows you that zebra skin does not make a good repeat pattern. These images are properly Ballardian. Sadly the website is a forest of broken links and dead images / also from the seen-everywhere-but-none-the-worse-for-that section. 30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth / Brief Epigrams, an art and photography weblog / 365 days of free games.

A project that promises much but doesn't deliver just yet: TinEye, an image search engine. Their example searches aren't easy to replicate either. Because it purports to match like for like it's a limited tool. What's needed is a 'fuzziness' slider that distorts your uploaded image in real time to find approximate matches. The site is potentially an amazing copyright fighting tool. We'll leave other applications up to your imagination. See also IM2GPS, 'estimating geographic information from a single image', via half bakery / online manufacturing, is it the future? Or just a little diversion for designers? / Heading East, a photography weblog.

Lost in Showbiz, 'where PR howlers come to die', a compilation of the scattergun, opportunist, tenuous and just plain tedious / images from 'Ricas y Famosas', photographer Daniella Rosell's tour of the money-struck and taste befuddled. At Mafia Hunt / The Commodification of Photographic Archives, muse-ings on the selling of imagery online / Theme Magazine, 'contemporary Asian culture' / artifacts from the future, a labour-intensive compilation of Wired's future gazing / The Zombie in Art History, Art Fag City on artistic representations of the undead / Travelling Still, blurred horizons and splashes of colour / correct, yesterday was indeed Flying Ant Day in South London, albeit not quite as anty as previous years.

Labels: linkage, luxury, things

posted by things at 23:55 / 0 comments

These diagrams of the Burj Dubai at Skyscraper Page gradually get larger and larger as it became apparent the building work was not yet over and yet more structure was being added. Check the official Burj website. Unofficial Dubai construction page, with recent construction images. A list of tallest buldings and structures in the world.

There needs to be a word for the thrill of doing a google search on an odd combination of words and getting less than 100 results. Like stumbling on a vast tract of virgin rainforest / celebrity lookalikes are now having to generate stories about their 'famous' doppelgangers in order to keep them both in the public eye, and therefore maintain their own careers.

Julien de Smedt's Project Mermaid versus Vincent Callebaut's Lilypad for Global Warming / Till deaf us do part, on Godflesh and God / things to look at, blogging print design old and new / Casas Minimalistas, pushing modernism for the masses / QBN, 'design industry news'.

The Dominion Part 1, a sound piece by The Shawn Institute, 'a composition that comprises of layered recordings taken from the internal foyer sections, of each of the Toronto Dominion Centre, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.' Part 2.

Philip Cristofor's Lost and Found produces digital artworks, including Surveillance Saver, 'a screensaver for OS X and Windows that shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide. A haunting live soap opera.' Download it here / Linda Peanberg's Sense and Sensibility project is one of several Jane Austen-themed visual projects by the designer / power boats of the 1970s.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 01:45 / 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