things magazine

Bits and bobs from here and there

2009-11-05T00:40:00.002Z

Home Movie Reconstructions 1974 / 2004, a project by Elliot Malkin / photography by Youngsuk Suh / skate photography at they call me osde / My Playground, a new firm about Parkour and Freerunning / Wild Particle, a weblog / 50 3D milestones in gaming / A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families. Superb evocation of domestic taxonomies / also at tmn, The Babysitter / m. gerwing architects notebook, a weblog.

Gimme Shiny pumps in 'popular images from Flickr and deviantART' (blog) / see also Dear Computer's image ripper / a demonstration of Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland (via quiero tiempo y dinero / Jeff still likes buildings / the artblog / the tim brown, a weblog.

The acme of brand architecture, Ferrari World Abu Dhabi. The architectural precedent here appears to be the big top / the Last Days of Gourmet. See also empty offices / cardboard office at CR Blog / offices and interiors photographed by Mep'Yuk / Merrell's new website is pretty much an archetypal representation of the modern blog template - big type, largish images, patterned background.

Art by Molly Crabapple, which is as bawdy as her name suggests / Platial News and Neogeography / spacesick, retro video games / an ambitious project collapsing, a weblog / Tisbuts, a weblog by photographer Robin Mellor.

Snippets

2009-11-03T08:00:00.002Z

A beautiful little animation exploring the world of scale / a timeline for Primer, the low-budget time travel film / Cloudy Weather, English Russia drags up some urban exploring images of Moscow's emerging new skyscraper cluster / A Million Years of Isolation: An Interview with Abraham Van Luik, BLDG BLOG on the challenges of architecture and design that will endure for all eternity. It beats archival cockroaches.

Leonardo Finotti's architectural photography blog celebrates its one year anniversary / Bank Notes, 'a collection of bank robbery notes' (via) / 2001: A Spiritualized Odyssey, a project by The Almighty Sound. Please dig out the torrent and speed things along a bit, because it is currently s.l.o.w.

Archiving the past and fulfilling the future

2009-10-28T22:30:00.001Z

This collection of Chernikov imagery - the famous Architectural Fantasies from 1925 - can be found at the Iakov Chernikov International Foundation (via Coudal). Even in the 1920s, just before the Five Year Plans kicked in, the forms proposed bore little relation to the real needs of culture, industry or society in general, being simply extravagant, elaborate, quasi-abstract compositions that delighted in visual drama and form. Architecture as Cubist or Futurist painting. What's perverse is how influential these images have become, to the point where architectural culture has allowed itself to be twisted and turned so that the aesthetic first described by Chernikov could actually come to pass in physical form.

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Art by Stephen Floyd / kenfrederick, a tumblr / Architectural iPhoneography, a rather grittier take on shooting buildings at Fotofacade / the economic perils of a globalised menu: McDonald's pulls out of Iceland: '"It just makes no sense. For a kilo of onion, imported from Germany, I'm paying the equivalent of a bottle of good whisky," added [owner Jon Gardar Ogmundsson].' / Pan Am in the garage / long piece on Mad Men / matte paintings by Rich Mahon.

Iconic Photos, good use of the weblog format / at the other extreme we have The Daily Motor, which offers an interesting slant on how media outlets could start to look in the near future. Developed by 29GPS, the site distills (mostly) freely available content into a relatively compelling widescreen, HD 'broadband' experience. There is original content, but the nature of the motor industry means its often hard to distinguish from in-house promotional pieces, and obviously the site is not about to bite the hand that feeds it. Whereas big brands like Audi have their own TV channels, that medium looks increasingly outmoded when compared to a big, slick web experience. However, the sheer expense of doing things like video and high-end 3D animation will keep the relationship between 'pure' editorial sites and the PR machine a relatively cozy one.

Architizer looks elegant. Describing itself as a 'free tool with an open platform that transcends its peers to empower architecture in the current economic recession', it's sort of a more image- and PR-conscious version of Mimoa (which restricts itself to built work, rather than include speculative schemes), with dashes of imdb, in that links go deeper that the big names: 'A single project may have dozens of contributors and Architizer links them all, from the intern to the construction manager.'

Southsouthwest, the blog of a design studio / Unequal design, a tumblr / Small Worlds, a rather charming little platform game (via RPS) / eyecurious on Michael Wolf's Paris Street View / London's new folly? / revisiting the Secret Apartment in the Mall.

We feel like a pebble skipping across the surface, bouncing once, twice, maybe three times if we're lucky, before sinking swiftly and inevitably into the mire of data. Is nostalgia a symptom or the disease? / Conscientious has started to tumble / following the yellow brick road, a tumblr / KORUTime, a tumblr / Frugal Krueger, scaring on a budget / eyecurious, a photography weblog / Movies in frames pretty much summarises capsule culture. Can someone do games in frames? Or books in a page, key sentences sliced and diced into a competent summary? Everything has an abstract.

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This week saw the end of GeoCities, bought for �2.17bn just a decade ago. The site's closure has led to the Internet Archive's GeoCities project (Yahoo! is not archiving the pages itself), an object lesson in how to be a digital conservationist and also an illustration of how easily things can slip away into the ether and remain forever unchronicled. From the excellent Archive Team page: 'While the natural urge by some would be to let Geocities sink into obscurity and death, leaving nothing in its wake but bad memories and shudders of recognition at endless "under construction" GIFs, the fact remains that Geocities was for millions of people the first experience dealing with the low-cost, full-color, world-accessible website and all the possibilities this contained. To not at least have the option of browsing these old sites would be a loss of the very history of the web from the side of the people who came to know it, not the designers who descended upon it. For that reason, Archive Team thinks Geocities is worth saving.' See also Textfiles, the digital equivalent of scanning shopping lists.

Also related, Facebook 'memorialises' profiles. As the number of dead people online increases, this is the logical next step, the construction of an alternative 'internet necropolis', a virtual land of the dead that exists in parallel with the ever expanding realm of the living. Perhaps there will eventually emerge an online equivalent of the Necropolis Railway, a google of the dead that is the online equivalent of London Necropolis (a gazeteer of the capital's cemeteries), allowing the option to search only the works of the dead.

Books, objects, magazines, all in varying states of health

2009-10-23T23:00:00.002+01:00

It's been a while since we visited the Guidebook, 'a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces, as well as various materials related to them.' Almost obsessive compulsive in its comprehensiveness / Creative Voyage, a weblog / descend deep into the uncanny valley with the 'Plush Alive Elvis and Plush Alive Chimpanzee / Bad at Sports picks up on our recent death of the object post from last week / Jimmy Wales asks 'is the the magazine dead?

Untiny, get original URLs from tiny ones / atmospheric photography by Megan Baker / very honoured to be nominated as one of the top 25 UK arts and culture blogs by Creative Tourist / Little London, tilt shift photos of London by Toby Allen (via Stuff) / Making a Mark, a weblog / Plazm blog and Plazm Magazine / Endless Day, via Set up like a deck of cards, a tumblr.

Beer and Loathing, Conor Dillon on the Frankfurt Book Fair: 'The Frankfurt Book Fair is a bibliophile�s reverie. There are more than 400,000 books. The stalls overflow with literary fiction, coming-of-age, bildungsroman, children�s books, young adult, romance, chick-lit, mystery, fantasy, crime, science fiction. There are mash-ups of genres, and mash-ups of the mash-ups.' The sheer overwhelming scale of Frankfurt is an unwelcome insight into publishing as industrial process. Related, an angry thread on theBookseller.com about general incompetence at the top of the UK book trade.

'Happy Farms' Game Destroys Chinese Jobs, Relationships: 'I like Happy Farms. I enjoy cultivating, irrigating, spraying, and harvesting. My high-pressure work, and cold tall buildings makes me feel like I cannot breathe. I have to turn to virtual nature, have my own house and farm. I wish I could have a real house and farm, but it seems so far away.' (via haddock). Hard to find a site for the game itself, apart from a deluge of posts about 'stealing crops and ruining relationships'

A new film Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman looks at the work of the late architectural photographer. However, this LA Times piece, entitled What the new Julius Shulman documentary leaves out, makes the unfashionable point that Shulman's work 'helped promote the idea that the finest architecture of the period was a vessel for personal rather than collective ambition and had little if anything to do with the messiness of cities or urban planning.' It's reiterated in the piece by Kazys Varnelis, who notes 'that modernism in Southern Californa became more and more "associated with the idea of lifestyle." The idea is dropped, though, before it gains a foothold in the movie's crowded visual landscape.' See also the film Coast Modern (blog).

A Million Keys, a music focused weblog / The H Line, a weblog / Square Door, a tumblr / Design for Mankind, a weblog / Safety in the use of Compressed Gas Cylinders (with special reference to oxy-acetylene processes) / Estupipedia, a weblog,

London RIP, 'you liked it... it's gone', angry capital nostalgia / Cartolleria, a tumblr / The Samba, VW fan site / Say no to Grampa Joe, the capitalist subtext of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (via me-fi). See also Breaking Free, the anarcho-socialist samizdat Tintin comic published in the 70s.

The modern flaneur, abandoned infrastructure and digital melts into solids

2009-10-22T13:00:00.005+01:00

Romania Shrugs Off Reminder of Its Past: 'sycophants kept a virtual army of state-approved artists busy painting portraits of Ceausescu and his wife, thousands of them..... As it happened, the National Museum of Contemporary Art here had some of them on view the other day. Mihai Oroveanu, the museum's director, hung them in one gallery - diagonally, to make clear that the show was not actually a tribute.'

Phil Gyford on the psychological transition of the digital object into a physical entity: The �10,000 playlist. 'It wasn�t long ago that buying a purely digital piece of music � downloading a file rather than paying for a piece of holdable plastic � seemed terribly modern. But already I feel like an old fool when I visit Amazon or 7Digital to pay for an MP3. These days, a several-megabyte file on my computer is starting to feel as much of a burden, as much of a physical thing to cart around for the rest of my life, as a CD or a cassette or a record.'

Sevensevennine, a weblog on photography / Shouting to Communicate, an art blog / House of Cars, 'innovation and the parking garage' (via Design Observer): 'The parking garage may have a reputation as an eyesore, but House of Cars challenges this notion using examples of well-designed garages that add a creative tapestry to our streetscapes.' Interesting that this notion should come relatively late to American urbanism.

Photopia and Architecture, a blog by Lauren Fenton / we have a top 5 at The Silver Lining / The Pop Fop, 'The Aristocracy of Mass Modernism' / work by Simon Hollington of Hollington and Kyp, especially The Outward Urge, a series of dark drawings of space chimps / Relics of the Cold War, images by Martin Roemers.

Michael Wolf on his Paris Street View project: 'The problem is that compared to Asia, Paris is a stagnant city - very little has changed architecturally since Atget's times, and the cliches are a nightmare to get out from under of. Strangely enough, it was Google Street View which enabled me to take any photos at all of Paris. I spend weeks going through the city on my monitor, street by street, looking into windows, discovering reflections, searching out interesting juxtapositions, topologies, trying various crops/styles (Frank, Doisneau, Ruscha, and so on). The lack of a third dimension wore me down at times, but it was quite an interesting journey.'

We absolutely love 'then and now' posts, even when the original landscape has been as scoured as Scouting NY's exploration of the locations of Taxi Driver. See also: Manhattan Street Corners (via) / Unrealart: 'All artworks have been created using data from the game "Unreal Tournament". Each image represents about 30 mins of gameplay in which the computers AI plays against itself.' (via rps, which also has a post on speculative large-format touch screen games of the future, with video).

Blue Tea has gathered a collection of links to several dreamy, highly art directed online games / Bureaux, a weblog / Independent Collectors, for small-scale Saatchis / Pilot School contains pdfs of show pilot scripts / Van der Leun, a weblog / Awkward Yearbook Signatures (via me-fi projects) / Leiris, a tumblr.

The death of the object

2009-10-18T11:00:00.008+01:00

A relentless focus on the ephemeral is a useful way of garnering an appreciation of the everyday, the prosaic and the humble. Yet while one gets a strong sense of the 'drift' through clicking from one site to another (or even undertaken virtual derives, such as the one Michael Wolf did using Google Street View in Paris) the levels of editing, unconscious or otherwise, shape our apparently random vision of the virtual world. We're just as guilty of this as everyone else - the web of 'things' that so often occupies these posts, fills the sidebar or our project list is not simply a record of everything but a very careful edit of something.

By the same token, a recognisable genre of weblogs has emerged (see this question: Is there a name or term for the aesthetic these blogs contain?), the seemingly random streams of 'good work', quirky images, striking photography, cool objects, strange concepts, old scans, etc. etc. etc. We can drift though these - and we do - yet we shouldn't kid ourselves that we are flaneuring our way to anything but a highly selected cultural overview. This genre of presentation is both persuasive and pervasive, the digital equivalent of Wired's 'Fetish' pages (which have obviously a far more natural existence on screen than on paper). Take the AJ's new Notebook site, wherein 'inspiration' is 'curated', an explicit acknowledgement of the dominance of image-driven culture.

These visual essays, together with animated stings and very short films, have become the primary modes of communication; objects are strung together rather than taken in isolation. There is no space for contemplation, just clicking, scrolling and flicking. This leaves the solitary object somewhat adrift, only embodying meaning when it is juxtaposed or collated or slotted into a larger collection. Although a glance at any tumblr or curated weblog might suggest otherwise, the 'thing' is in danger of imminent extinction.

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Other things. Jim Coudal talks ten years of Coudal Partners at Design Glut / Victoria Etcetera, a short film by Penguin cover designer Germano Facetti and Paolo Gori, hosted at LUX / a little bit of web history: animated gifs / Will 'Hotel of Doom' ever be finished? We hadn't realised that work had re-started on the Ryugyong Hotel, threatening to end its position as architectural bogeyman/online object of fascination / HandBin, 'A Blog of Artistic and Architectural investigations'.

Into the Loop, a weblog / La Arquitectura es Aburrida, a weblog / Design with Intent, on behaviour and design / videos of the 2009 Stirling Prize shortlist / a comprehensive set of images and information on Pauline Baynes at Brian Sibley's Weblog / All Things Amazing, frequently nsfw / Share Some Candy, design as pick and mix.

Photographs by Andrea Posada, via The Purest of Treats, occasionally nsfw / How to write badly well, via me-fi projects / something to investigate, Thounds, a collaborative music experiment ('a home for your Music Thoughts. Share them with your friends and let them grow'). More information at the Thounds Blog / contemporary music at FL Spectro / Letterology, a design weblog.

Quick round up

2009-10-14T10:45:00.008+01:00

A few quick things today. Concrete Toronto versus Celluloid Toronto / Berners-Lee 'sorry' for slashes / future city, London from now until 2031 in The London Plan, a relatively dry document that (probably sensibly) doesn't stick its neck out with any grand designs or visions / related, a hexagonal map of London. See also city of signs.

'In this latest video Bioware talk about the making of the city-planet of Coruscant in The Old Republic'. At RPS / Teemu Manninen asks What's so great about paper? at Books from Finland / cosecosi, a tumblr / LTWP, a blog by Lukas / swift notes on James Wines' recent lecture at the Barbican, An Economy of Means.

On archives

2009-10-13T17:21:00.001+01:00

The news that St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital in DC is to become the HQ for the US Department of Homeland Security adds another layer of mystique to the monumental structure. Whereas old asylums are almost a cliche of the Urbex movement, the new multi-million dollar DHS HQ will effectively turn the building into an enormous no-go area (or as the Washington Post headline, 'As the Feds Take Over, St. E's Moves Further Into Shadow'). Fine photograph (if real) of the former staff members at Unremitting Failure. It's obviously a tough place for urban exploration (although some shots taken on official tours are around), but the shuttered exterior is epically grim, and pretty much perfect for a Homeland Security HQ without a single architectural intervention.

London Brownfield Sites, an interactive map. Apart from providing a high-res Ordnance Survey overview of London - always useful - it's pretty hit and miss, featuring plenty of sites in our locality that have recently been developed / the title of this image-driven weblog, More Ways to Waste Time encapsulates our growing feeling about the 'ghastly good taste' of the visual internet (where instead of Betjeman's preference for architecture from 'all centuries to my own' we have no point of contemporary reference, just a mad collage of 'good work' from past decades.

A recent event that looks fabulous: the surviving members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop played a gig at London's Roundhouse. Plenty of RW info online, from the wikipedia page, a brief history at Sound on Sound, an engineering perspective at The White Files, which also has an image gallery), samples at myspace, the great page devoted to Workshop guru Delia Derbyshire, etc.

Modernism and the little magazines, the world of the small literary publication in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on the Modernist Magazines Project, an index of 40 or so modernist magazines from the period 1880-1945 (the 'so-called 'little magazines''). See also the Modernist Journals Project which contains scans of magazines, including the seminal Blast and its successor The Tyro, Robert Graves' The Owl (owl) and Le Petit Journal des R�fus�es.

The Design Council image archive goes online (via CR Blog): it can be found here: Design Council Slide Collection. A fascinating collection of fragments from Britain's largely vanished industrial age, a swathe of long bankrupted industries and forgotten names, their abandoned aesthetic standards superseded by outsourced manufacturing and a pervasive global standard of 'good design' that is strangely characterless, despite the initial seductive thrill generated by visual aggregation. The toys are especially pleasing - Four toy guns in stained wood, made by Tall Tree Toys Ltd., 1969; Noah's Ark made from kit of printed cardboard (?) pieces, designed by Maureen Roffey, 1969 - and the technology typically nostalgia inducing / Police Notebooks of Charles Booth, part of the LSE's massive Charles Booth Archive.

A couple of lesser-known magazines in the Great Google cupboard: The Rotarian (which had some spectacular cover art in the early 30s, before descending into post-war whimsy) and Kiplinger's Personal Finance (via magCulture) / Star Wars Collectors' Archive / welcome to mobile Photoshop, the swift death of the idea that images from cellphone cameras could have a greater veracity than 'real' news photography.

Popshot Magazine, poetry and more / augmented reality starts to pop up (excuse the pun) in advertising material, as in this new Citroen spot / No Pattern Required, retro things / We Are Independently Wealthy, a weblog / move over Richard Scarry, the Snaeffel (via me-fi) / matt has a tumblr.

Fortune magazine covers by Antonio Petruccelli / contemporary photo-realism by Diego Gravinese (on flickr) / Pasa la Vida, a weblog / Love is a Prelude to Sorrow / Deputy Dog has shut up shop; instead, visit Letters of Note, photographs and images (occasionally nsfw).

Hidden moutscaping

2009-10-12T16:00:00.001+01:00

The hidden world of MOUT and FIBUA cityscapes (MOUT = military operations on urban terrain and FIBUA = fighting in built-up areas). Although the Nato Urban Operations Working Group site is rather scant, there's plenty of information at Secret Bases (which also has a hefty amount of information on Project Lennox, the new US Embassy in London), including this map of the Mock Township in Sennybridge, once the small village of Mynydd Epynt (last link at Abandoned Communities). From SB: 'A rather more politically correct term is OBUA � Operations in Built-up Areas � although army wags have been known to refer to it all as FISH & CHIPS � Fighting in Someone's House and Causing Havoc in People's Streets!'

See also our gallery of Imber on Salisbury Plain, home to the above FIBUA village at Copehill Down (great big image at Barnard Micro Systems' website in reference to the 2008 MoD Grand Challenge, a UK version of the DARPA events. Copehill Down - which even has a 'slum/shanty town' section - was the venue for invited suppliers to 'produce an autonomous or semi autonomous system designed to detect, identify, monitor and report the position of a wide range of threats within a complex military urban environment, including within individual buildings'.

The work of photographer Spencer Murphy captures many of these places (see image below). Murphy's 'Architects of War' series illustrates the blank, empty facades and murderous cul-de-sacs of these masochistic villages. His work is featured in 'Cities Gone Wild', Geoff Manaugh's contribution to Architectures of the Near Future, the new issue of Architectural Design.

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Other things. The Decibel Tolls, an mp3 blog / Eye Magazine is now available on issuu (via magCulture). Well, bits of it / The Impostume, a weblog / The Can and String, a weblog / aerial photography by Alex MacLean / and it all comes full circle, as Jones returns to battlesuits and cityscapes, stressing the city's role in how we 'survive the future' aspect of the initial post, rather than any inadvertent military-industrial overtones. More later, we're sure.

The West Riding: Two-thousand and Nine, Owen Hatherley on the 'bleaker version of normality' of Wakefield, Halifax, etc. etc. 'Quite honestly, anyone who knows and/or comes from the industrial towns of the south - say, Southampton, Portsmouth, Colchester, Reading, Slough, Swindon, Luton - can't help being jealous of the sheer strangeness of their Northern equivalents, their hills, their scale, the closeness of open country, the amount of extraordinarily serious, world-class architecture, the lack of '80s-90s tat...' And yet, 'There's no sense here that city air is free air, but instead an almost all-pervasive air of latent violence that could explode at any moment'.

Forever and Always

2009-10-09T10:11:00.014+01:00

Cryonics, what's it all about? Dubious practices, if this recent story is to be believed: Former Alcor Employee Makes Harsh Allegations Against Cryonics Foundation (via me-fi). From the piece: 'When a body is brought into Alcor's facility, the patient's blood is pumped out and replaced with a chemical concoction to minimize freezing damage. In many cases, the head is separated from the body with the member's prior consent. Johnson said he began to grow uneasy about his new employer once he saw what went on in Alcor's operating room, where he witnessed three suspensions. "It was barbaric ... the third suspension that I witnessed, they actually used a hammer and a chisel," he said. "I actually witnessed them remove her head with a chisel and a hammer."'

Such strangeness is to be expected. A few years ago we had the pleasure of visiting Alcor, where we found a friendly workplace utterly devoted to what they were doing but also, how to put this, somewhat deluded about how they were going about it. This must have been about the same time the disillusioned employee was able to witness chiselling operations at first hand. When we were there, nothing was happening at all, save for a bit of clearing up. The big metal tanks hummed away to themselves, filled with dismembered sports personalities and immortality enthusiasts.

For the staff, their major problem in life was the inevitability and finality of death, an injustice that had to be conquered. Staff member Dr Mike Perry had written a hefty book, Forever for All (which we still have, somewhere), considering 'the problems of death and the hereafter and how these ages-old problems ought to be addressed in light of our continuing progress.... The immortalization of humans and other life-forms is seen as a great moral project and labor of love that will unite us in a common cause and provide a meaningful destiny.' It's a goal that is eccentric at least, a trait shared by many of the staff (some of whom wear their futurism proudly, like Regina M. Pancake, Alcor's 'Readiness Coordinator', former 'Nuclear Pharmacy Technician' and sci-fi prop handler).

The scope of ambition is illustrated by the Timeship concept, 'the "Fort Knox" of biological materials. DNA, tissue samples and cryopreserved patients will be housed in Timeship, and their safety and security against all threats, both natural and human-made, will have to be maintained for hundreds of years.' Designed by Stephen Valentine, this piece of epic Neo-Classicism is architecture for the long game (see the recent Design Observer link as well), its location secret, defended against intruders, bulky enough to withstand rain, disaster and the threat of ruin.

While the actual science of cryonics remains elusive beyond the relatively simple act of freezing something - resuscitation is still an entirely speculative process - the culture of cryonics is underpinned by the desire for immortality and the fear of death. The American Cryonics Society stresses there is no political or social undercurrent to their activities ('The American Cryonics Society is not a "utopian" organization.... We are a cryonics society: PERIOD. Our program is simple: freeze-wait-reanimate.). Indeed, a large amount of the debate surrounding cryonics is fiscal, looking at ways to sustain large, power-consuming organisations that require total financial and physical stability for a totally unknown amount of time. Nonetheless, the sense of impending apocalypse hangs over the entire movement, the conflation of disaster, survivalism, futurism and utopianism that has grown out of pop science, the same alternate reality that sustains other pseudo-scientific ventures, all of which are sadly gaining traction in our distracted world.

But we're repeating ourselves - Alcor is a thing of eternal fascination, as they (presumably) intended. There's more information in these earlier posts from December 10, 2003 and August 15, 2008.

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Other, more transient, things. Photographs taken within a theme park at the Heterotopia. The location is Blackgang Chine, allegedly the oldest theme park in the UK, perched on the crumbling chalk cliffs on the south coast of the Isle of Wight / Data Liberation, striving to make it easy to extract everything you own from Google at your own convenience, not theirs / Meanwhile in Stoke, what would Cedric do?

His Old Haunts, an interview with writer (and one-time things contributor) Tobias Seamon / Mouette7, a tumblr / the Bloomframe is a neat piece of design, a window that doubles up as a balcony. Formerly just a concept, the design, by Hofman Dujardin Architects, has now entered production / One year after Hurricaine Ike.

Soft Cities

2009-10-08T11:39:00.007+01:00

DSLR Shooter illustrates the revolution in image gathering using next generation digital cameras (via me-fi). Particularly taken by site editor Dan Chung's short film of China�s 60th anniversary parade (Vimeo link). We suddenly seem on the cusp of a period when data creation threatens to outstrip storage. From the me-fi comments: 'One observation I made the other day when I bought 2 TB of spinning disks to store the video coming out of my camera is that every second it records more data than I created in my first five years of computing (50 mbps!), and a good day's film shoot will generate a few hundred GB. That's more than my first twenty years! To top it all off, two 1 TB drives cost less than my first 5 MB drive.'

Jason Kottke clearly has a container fetish. Commenting recently on
America's Quiet Ports he noted how the gridlocked, stacked dockside is a literal reminder of static world trade: 'The strengthening of the dollar abroad means that American made goods aren't selling and the ships hauling them are unable to leave the port. Nothing is selling anywhere so everything sits in the now-constipated port.' A more recent post, Stacked Cans, illustrates this new landscape of unwanted consumer products. The BBC are currently running a project called The Box, 'following a container around world for a year to tell stories of globalisation and the world economy'. You can track the container's current location, although in recent weeks this has proved tricky. More fields of unsold Mercedes and tracts of Toyotas.

Food Stories, a weblog by Helen Graves / on the need for an Architecture of Necessity / Mail Me Art, via Daily Dose Pick / Magazine Legends, did 'Time magazine intentionally place "devil horns" on Billy Graham and/or Bill Clinton as some sort of commentary'? / Deconstructivism in Lego / a short history of petrol stations (via haddock).

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More battle suit musing at varnelis.net, taking issue, amongst other things, with the idea that Archigram's futurology was quite so prophetic and influential. Also, the idea of a 'battle suit' is all too militarist and gung-ho. The ongoing emergence of urbanism - our reactions, responses and interactions with the contemporary city - as a key part of the discussion on the impact of new technology is also apparent in Ben Hammersley's idea-shaped meanderings around the new issue of Wired (UK edition 17-11) and its focus on cities, out of which he extrapolates the idea that it is layers that form the foundations of the contemporary city, endless stratas of meaning: 'You don�t need to be Umberto Eco to riff off it for hours: it's turtlenecks all the way down.' Ultimately, he concludes that it's the 'cushioning effect of history upon reference upon metaphor upon inter-mixed system is the thing that makes it the most human place to live in.... Instead our cities are made of, and our lives build up, layers and layers of soft actions.'

Epic link collection

2009-10-06T23:00:00.003+01:00

Millennium People has posted a long response to our earlier post about data cities and the future, 'Data City + Jules Verne, with a postscript on the rediscovered Verne novel 'Paris in the Twentieth Century' (see also 'In the Year 2889' by Verne and his son Michel Verne, published in the late 1880s).

Sacred facts, a weblog / Bakgard, a weblog with a design and architecture focus / read and listen to Kerri's Diary (via Rumblings, a tumblr), a project by Kerri Sohn / David Archer on David Hockney's iPhone drawings, which seem to be finding their niche in Second Life, a 'place' that we had largely forgotten about. Even Second Life Cartography has a faded, archaic feel.

Well linked, but deservedly so: My Parents Were Awesome / more on Michael Heizer's City / MetroShip, a modern houseboat, splicing the fab pre-fab aesthetic with the Bouroullecs' Maison Flottante / Uppercase Journal, looks interesting / Strange Undisciplined Dreams of Great Things is rather steam-punky, but has musings on retro-futurism, slow technology, etc.

Life on Mars #duststorm, City of Sound on Sydney's freak dust storm last month / cosmopolitan scum, architecture and more / fun children's furniture / Joie de Vivre, a piece of deco-era animation (1934) at the Animation Archive (via Buck Macabre). The AA has a great post on Tibor Gergely's early children's books, including the fabulous '"Watch Me" said the Jeep', surely a US companion to Blossom the Brave Balloon. More on Joie de Vivre here.

The work of David Blamey / the work of Sam Messenger / Still-unsurpassed box store architecture: SITE at Ouno Design (via Pop Vernacular) / The Silver Lining, a visual weblog / The Age of the Marvellous, a new exhibition at All Visual Arts, 'inspired by the Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities, popular in the late Renaissance through the Baroque period.... the sum of all of man's knowledge could be represented in rooms filled with natural wonders, artificial exotica and relics or art works concerned with the supernatural.'

Apothecary's Drawer on the truth behind fossil squid ink / For Sale/TVs From Craigslist, a project by Penelope Umbrico (via anArchitecture) / also via aA, Dagmar Schmidt's Plattenbau sculpture / related, Social Housing after the Soviets, 'a comparative study of the oppurtunities and the urgencies of public and private use of the Microrayon, the large-scale social housing projects developed throughout the entire former Soviet Union.'

Adam Curtis is compiling an epic 'history of the West's relationship to Afghanistan over the past 200 years', Kabul: City Number One (continued), featuring his usual collage of timeline, fact, events and key players.

House of Travel, travelling, via Architecture in Berlin, a weblog / architectural arteries, Anti-Mega on making maps with CloudMade. See also the Typography Map by James Bridle at Short Term Memory Loss (reminiscent of NB Studio's London's Kerning). Bridle also blogs at booktwo.org, a site exploring the evolution of the book into handheld devices.

A collection of graffiti in Tenerife / Pieces of Me, Pink Iguana's musings on objects and memory / a long, lyrical look at the early days of the American auto industry (via kottke) / a collection of local spooky legends / Historic Pages, Phil Barber's historic newspaper collecting page / Sarah France's weblog / Together in Disharmony, a tumblr.

Bits and bobs

2009-10-04T22:00:00.002+01:00

Some art and illustration. Fine prints at St Jude's Gallery (which runs the fine blog All Things Considered) / The Curwen Gallery also has a blog / The Rowley Gallery doesn't / nor does the Travelling Art Gallery / flickr cutaways pool, via haddock (image at bottom of page, 'Step Up To A 'Step Down' Hudson').

'Sited upon small volcanic cone in the high desert midway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, this 60-acre retreat seems to cap the mountain top with its dome-like roof' / the connection between Saarinen and Star Trek / Internet Archaeology, via haddock / Douglas Coupland's Vancouver [Second] Home / We Were Modern, 'archaeological/anthropological writing on the remains of the modern' / The Northern Light, a weblog by Sean Dodson.

It's Full of Stars, an astronomy tumblr / the wikipedia entry on the film Primer is almost as hard to follow as the film itself: 'He has also replaced it with a duplicate failsafe that he brought with him. Thus, when Abe uses what he thinks is the failsafe, he is in fact using this duplicate, and therefore can't undo what Aaron has done using the real failsafe.'

Eating Bark, 'landscape, architecture, urbanism' and football / Enter 99 / Slawkenbergius, a weblog / Ephemeralism / the Radical Activism Visual Archive / Design Probes, future product speculation / The Hive Design, inspiration and links / Monster Brains, 'a never ending celebration of monsters'.

Museum of the Phantom City, 'uses personal digital devices to transform the city into a living museum', a concept that ties in slightly with our last post 'lamenting the loss of the unknown landscape' and the physical object, and our hunger for simulacra of ephemeral cast-offs. Only here the cast-offs are the 'phantom' projects that never made it out of their software packages, a museology of speculation. It's also an iPhone app.

Matthew Houlding makes architectural models of imaginary places, which use the visual language of Sixties modernism (Archigram again) and the verbal language of the speculative developer and time share salesman ('Secluded Tented Camp in the Western Corridor', 'The Best Bit is the Black Cement Pool on the Beach Which is The Perfect Spot to Watch the Sun Set', 'Exclusive Waterfront Development Opportunity' ).

Ten artists working with folded paper / This is the Green Room, a weblog with an economic focus / MagCloud, a site that reignites the world of zines through digital printing and distribution. Featured magazines include Fray, the 'quarterly of true stories' / Christmas is coming: the Throbbing Gristle Palm-Sized Loop Playback Machine /

David Harvey, cultural critic, and his website / Ai Weiwei hospitalised / work by Rafael Rozendal (and blog) / Five Dials is a literary magazine published by Hamish Hamilton / The Intrepid Art Collector, 'adventures in the art market' / RIP Monica Pidgeon, creator of the Pigeon Digital architecture interview archive (currently free as a tribute) / A book of blogs, in which magCulture rather takes the concept to task.

On battlesuits, the collage city, seeking and remembering

2009-10-01T14:55:00.001+01:00

Apologies for a few weeks of downtime. This piece is getting some linkage, 'The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future', on the legacy of Archigram, the media image of architectural innovation and the ongoing evaporation of urban interaction into non-physical form - a form that paradoxically is enhancing how we interact with physical spaces and one another. The one issue that is integral but always somehow unspoken with these treatises is contemporary information density, the ongoing aestheticisation of data that was very much a characteristic of Archigram's work and has steadily increased in day to day life.

The modern city is the data city. Architectural renderings and monographs present case studies in the context of information, with statistics and graphs supplementing the traditional projected view. The utopia of tomorrow will be saturated with information, and it is how we navigate this space that is the focus of so much contemporary speculation on technology and the city.

However, the idea of the 'information city' has created a very fine line between utopia and dystopia. So many of the qualities beloved by bloggers (this magazine included), designers, architects, designers and commentators seem to exist in a fluid state between good and bad. For example, how to reconcile the idea that 2000AD's Mega-City 1 is one of the great inspirational sci-fi cities with the 'reality' of the comic's metropolis as a crime-ridden, fear-saturated, consumption-crazed urban nightmare?

One suggestion is that we are mistaking complexity for cultural engagement. Just as the dense jumble of links and images that characterises the contemporary website gives an impression of a rich cultural experience, it also recalls imagery of the chaotic, layered city. One example is the ongoing fascination with ruins of the recent past, a means of instantly conveying historic context and patina, a seductive visual shorthand for two hundred years of industrial and economic data.

The web is not a city. Data space is not a place. But the analogies are persistent. By committing our memory to Google or the 'cloud' we have inadvertently created a great hunger for the intangible and ephemeral, the scraps and minutae of everyday life that get sucked into the circuitry and instantly forgotten. Already we are lamenting the loss of the unknown landscape as a result of global satellite imagery, gps and mapping. Physical space and the raw quality of still air immobilised by a structure cannot by duplicated or imitated. The 'infrastructural city' is not the labyrinth of chance encounters so celebrated by the Situationists. Our interactions are manufactured and governed.

Yet imitation remains our focus. The way virtual interfaces mimic physical spaces - desktops, pinboards, tables and surfaces you can post, pin, pinch and scatter content across - acknowledges our hunger for the tangible. 'The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future' acknowledges architecture's debt to fictional cityscapes and how the most ambitious masterplans aim at creating spaces where 'the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal - people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said.'

Visualisation is at the heart of these new utopias. Once, the imaginary city was merely shaped and re-shaped in the corners of our mind - the rolling roofs of Peake's Gormenghast would have been impossible to create except in the imagination ('Blackstone Quarter, Stone Dogshead, Angel's Buttress, the Coup�e (described as 'the high knife edge'); the North Headstones 'beyond Gory and the Silver Mines'; and the Twin Fingers, 'where Little Sark begins and the Bluff narrows'.) Today, we expect constant visual challenge, not the mental gymnastics of linking spaces and names and building cities from text on the page.

How do we reconcile the real city, with its messy unpredictability, with the visionary dreams of the utopians, where everything is connected and complete interaction is taken for granted? The internet does its best to connect the two, but it feels as though the scraps of reality, once processed, scanned and catalogued, lose the very qualities that endear them in the first place. Example: the literal billions of images on flickr are a snapshot of people, places and things defined by a finite number of tags, not the myriad, impossible to reproduce connections that denote reality.

Perhaps this gap will close, and visual search systems, tags and metadata will evolve to supersede the connections we make instinctively. But ultimately the city is not about searching, but about memory, and how cultural collages trigger, accentuate and erase our rememberance of the past and our perception of the future. The data city of the future will be unnavigable without technology, granted, but as a species we seem to be crying out for help remembering, unable to find things with the arsenal of digital tools and reliant, instead, on other people's recollections. This is why, we'd suggest, that the idea of archives, museums, drawers, corridors, boxes, cellars, warehouses and vaults, modern ruins and scanned ephemera, still hold such fascination, without ever really satisfying our innate desire for things.

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As if to confirm the above, a collection of 'other things'. The security implications of hypergraphics / Fernando Feijoo, illustrator / @random, a tumblr / All Things Considered, a weblog / James Wines of SITE on the art of architectural drawing / a couple of flickr groups focusing on architectural drawing: I and II.

Crash test, old versus new: '2009 Chevy Malibu versus 1959 Chevy Bel Air at Autoblog. See also old family car versus new car / retro design seems to be emerging as one of the core qualities of electric cars: Honda's EV-N is a good case in point / we're taking another run at Hunch, which has quietly been pushing out consumer advice for the past year or so.

Archive and Conquer brings together some interesting topics, including the most over-photographed parts of Detroit (think ruins, although the 100 houses in that last link offer a spread of architectural variety and intrigue sadly lacking in almost any contemporary housing development) and a link to a set of famous vandalized paintings, a collection by Lance Wakeling. See also Ice House Detroit, a literal freezing of one such ruin as a comment about the glacial economy and the domestic wastelands that have been generated as a result.

The work of Gerrit van Bakel, collected over at The Silver Lining / see also the world of KidZania, a chain of small scale townscapes aimed at children. Found via this Guardian piece: 'Its buildings, vehicles and other features are scaled down to two-thirds real size to accommodate its young inhabitants, who have more than 50 jobs to choose from during a typical five- or six-hour shift, with each job lasting about 30 minutes.'

A pictorial history of Grey Gardens, the house made famous by the 1975 documentary (and a recent film) and the subject of a fan sites and other online reliquaries. The house, now owned by Ben Bradlee, can be found here, amongst a generous scattering of beachside mansions.

Things of Interest. We've watched the 'things' brand be chipped away in recent years, most notably by the Mac application Things, which swept in and stole our Google search thunder (quite justifiably) / Wallpaper.com guest editors: Paul Petrunia of Archinect, Jeff Carvalho of Selectism and Josh Rubin of Cool Hunting / Google Crop Circles, a hoary old publicity trick / programme for the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale.

Books of Laughter and Lorgnetting

2009-09-15T23:17:00.022+01:00

Some more thoughts on augmentation. Michael Lascarides directs us towards Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond weblog, which devotes extensive space to augmented reality, tracking product and project announcements. Check the French company Total Immersion and their new announcement of a partnership with Microsoft, for example. The company specialises in creating an 'interactive experience where virtual components are dynamically merged into a live video stream in real time' - trade fairs quake with anticipation. Sure, there'll be a market for animated baseball cards, or even Franklin Mint produced Star Wars HoloChess and Battleships (tm), along with a myriad of other quasi-virtual family games that will be the yard sale detritus of the near future and our grandchildren's kitsch collectables.

But as Sterling usually concludes, the more interesting applications of AR appear to be mobile, where the layering of information atop of a small user-controlled section of reality - as opposed to media that envelopes you entirely - is practical, desirable, and here right now. The future dreams are still of people plucking dreamily at thin air, but little apps like Layar (which we've finally tracked down thanks to some Android ROM-flashing shenanigans) make a case for genuine usefulness. For example, the Archinform Layar promises to merge an international architecture database with your phone as the portal, bringing up information about the world around you. Throw in Pevsner and things start to get interesting.

The idea of a portal is key, be it a phone or personal projector, rather than the suggestion of data saturated landscapes generated by special glasses or headsets or whatever. We'll pitch in with a suggestion for a name. The history of technology is also the history of linguistic reappropriation - things get new meanings in the digital realm, loosely based on their function and appearance in the real world: tabs, layers, skins, windows, panes, palettes, panels, buttons, boxes, forms, paths, etc. etc. The lorgnette seems like a good match, something you hold up to your eyes to make something a little clearer.

See also, The Lorgnette, or Studies of the Town, by an Opera Goer (1854) / the Optical Heritage Museum.

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More archives continue to drip out of the world's media repositories: Tomorrow's World, which we're partly being invited to laugh at and point at the fashions and the goggle-eyed optimism and hopelessly backwards, unoptimistic or great but wide of the mark predictions (as Maggie Philbin recalled). A shame, as always, that the whole programmes aren't just indexed and uploaded.

There's a bit more from the late Rex Malik, featured in that last TW clip, here. Prescient stuff (it's undated, but the show 'The Computer Programme' went out in 1982): 'Does this mean there's a kind of electronic Big Brother waiting out there in the future? Well, yes, I'm afraid there probably is. For the technology is now beginning to place awful temptations in front of administrators..... we need to be able to control what is held on computers, who has access to it and how they can use it.' On the future office and the role of technology: 'So you have problems with the office next door? Well just wait. I can see you having similar problems in the Eighties but with offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, London and Melbourne. As I say, welcome to the electronic village.'

The British Library Sound Archive are mostly free to peruse. The blog is good for actually tracking down sounds you can play (which, infuriatingly, isn't many of them).

Random selection of almost everything

2009-09-15T11:00:00.000+01:00

Fantastic Journal's post on Raise the Titanic pointed us to the Encyclopedia Titanica / also referenced by Earth Capitol, a weblog / Nice Stuf, a tumblr / C-monster, a weblog / Into the Loop, a weblog / Ludic Interface, a weblog.

Glen Mullaly's image-strewn photostream / The Realist, an archive of the American counter-cultural magazine / After a Frantic Pace for Building, a Nervous Pause, contemplating the sudden glut of starchitect real estate available in Chelsea (NY) / a year has passed since the resurgent textism plunged back into inactivity / i feel it too, a weblog by artist Isabel Samaras (via scrubbles).

Tom's North American Trolley Bus Pictures / Emphemeral New York, a fine urban history weblog / the architectural photography of Maynard Parker (via me-fi). Rich pickings here for aficionados of hyper-stylised mid-century interiors.

Penguin Science Fiction - wow! Pretty impressive stuff / related, Cover Browser / Pension Office, 1918 at Shorpy, via Martin Hayes. The building in Washington DC is now the National Building Museum.

How Scribblenaut recognises 10,000 different words: 'The company had five employees who spent six months reading everything they could get their hands on. Their daily job was to comb through various dictionaries, encyclopedias and Wikipedia to find words to add to the game'.

Folding is a distributed computing project / Bill Guffey paints quasi-naive views of places he's visited on Google (via me-fi) / UK Freecycle breaks free. Seems like classic mismanagement to us - we've used the service several times to offload items and will happily pursue other options like RealCycle. Fighting for Freecycling has more information. As timely compound words go, 'freecycling' is a pretty good one. In a brand-obsessed world, it's hard to disagree with the idea that it has 'value', and that someone somewhere wants to be paid.

Gin and Crumpets, a food blog / Mustard Plaster, more food / Old Chum, a Curtis-esque tumblr / the V&A has expanded its online collection (via fed by birds) / svpply is a blend of tumblr and shopping site, picking eye candy from virtual shelves and stacking it up as a clickable rack of things to buy /

Mockitecture has an eye for the architecturally absurd (and there's a lot of it about), with a link to the 'freakiest building on Earth' and a musing on trends in architectural visualisation: 'a refreshing departure from the technologically dominated field of realistic night time renderings that have us all wondering if buildings are simply being designed for that "one view" or for specific night time lighting conditions.'

Glad to see someone's keeping track of this: The (New) Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project (via Liz Male) / Why Can't She Walk to School? Related, How children lost the right to roam in four generations, with an interesting, if not entirely scientific map of curtailed freedoms.

A Rare Important Photograph / new Bugatti concept. Old school / the Sketchbook Project / Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense, a form of augmented reality that projects information (via a little self-mounted projector) onto things like walls and rolls of kitchen paper and frontispieces. Intriguing; no-one has coined an all-purpose term to describe augmented reality just yet - anything 'aug'd' feels a bit too Scientologist.

A collection of everything

2009-09-11T12:57:00.001+01:00

We've written before about the single-pixel depth of online culture, but perhaps we should also stress the infinite length and width of that one-pixel-deep image, a vast jpg that envelops the earth. Imagine the world scanned and mapped at 1:1 scale, with no surface left unimaged. Part of the problem of writing about 'things' in a virtual place is that so much of the physical world is left unchronicled. For us, if something isn't online, it doesn't exist.

Throw in the things that don't exist anywhere but online, and you have a world of confusion, a place where the only time you get to dive beneath the pixel-deep surface is when you are entering a virtual world. A case in point: the Infocom Collection, text adventures of legendary depth and complexity (via metafilter). Here are places to get lost without even moving. 'Congragulations on your fine dental hygiene'.

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Hermann Zschiegner's thirty-four parking lots of Google Earth (posted at reference library) inspired him to 'collect Ruscha-inspired book and have found close to 50 different Ruscha-esque books... [including] Jeff Brouws' "26 Abandoned Gasoline Stations" and "Macintosh Road Test" by artists Corinne Carlson, Karen Henderson and Marla Hlady.'

Monopoly City Streets, supposedly the world's largest game of Monopoly? Interesting to see how this one plays out. How about a global version of Risk? Or War Games? (although apparently DEFCON: everybody dies does a good imitation). The Google Maps API could be hacked about to allow any number of games to take place around the world.

Related, high resolution photos of the moon, taken from Earth (via kottke) / photography and mash, aggregating London photography exhibitions and a gallery / Tumblr round-up. Schumtzig presents illustration / lqdx blgr, 'scrapbook of infogasmic charts and interesting links' / Jen Benkman, gallerist and curator / are2, old artwork and posters.

Parenthetically wonders 'how many middle aged advertising and fashion executives of the '60s fetishized the look or music of their youth: the 1920s.' / Stork Bites Man, a weblog / bunker chic, the Nixie Concrete Clock (via Yanko Design) / Allee Willis has a Museum of Kitsch, a sort of Stuckist anti-museum / Escapees, an RV discussion forum.

Archive and Conquer, which points us to the site of artist Rosamond Purcell, 'keeper of an incredible wunderkammer', 'a full-size recreation of 17th Century naturalist Olaus Worm's Wunderkammer', the original etching of which can be seen here, with more selections from Museum Wormianum seu Historia Rerum Rariorum (1655).

Technology histories: Edison National Historic Site / Transdiffusion Broadcasting System, comprehensive television archives / the Soviet Digital Electronics Museum / the Fading Ad Blog / mag and cover art linked here / slightly circular, via this greeble piece at Creativity Online (picked up via our referrer logs), an essay, 'John Scalzi's Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design'.

'The British public, and more especially naval circles, are very much amused over an amazing hoax perpetrated last week on Admiral Sir William May, Commander in Chief of the Home Fleet, and the officers of the flagship Dreadnought at Portland by a young woman and five young men.' More about the Dreadnought Hoax, perpetrated by Horace de Vere Cole ('The prankster at one point gave theater tickets to each of his bald friends, strategically placing them so that their heads spelled out an expletive when viewed from the balcony'), with friends including Virginia Woolf and Duncan Grant. Simpler times...

A Post about a Book about Blogs

2009-09-10T11:30:00.004+01:00

A couple of months ago we received a book, Blogs: Mad about Design (that link is to a comprehensive post on the book with many pictures by David Airey). Published by Maomao Publications in Barcelona, it's an is a rather curious publication. We say curious, but things is in it, as are a fair few other sites from our sidebar, so obviously our perception is skewed. But it is a funny concept - a book about weblogs, snapshots of (hopefully) ever-changing pages fixed at one point in time, typos and all, as a set of near-illegible screen grabs and then set against hundreds and hundreds of other sites, all of which are loosely concerned with the ever-growing amorphous entity that is 'design'. All that said, paper is a surprisingly pleasing way of browsing through large collections of sites - with a laptop to hand, of course.

The contents can be neatly summarised into two categories. The first is sites we are already aware of: +KN / 1+1=3 / 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle / 30gms / Ace Jet 170 / Book By Its Cover / Brand New / City of Sound (hooray) / Core77 / Coroflot / Creative Review Blog / designboom / dataisnature.com / the great Design Observer (pretty much the gold standard for a collaborative, creative blog) / Design*Sponge / DesignNotes / dezain.net / eBoy / Efimera / grain edit / I like / It's Nice That / Jean Snow / Josh Spear / Just Creative Design / Less Rain Blog (Red Bull Soapbox Racer) / Lost At E Minor (sample post: The Pool at The Joule, a Dallas hotel by Tihany Design that appears to be channelling the pool at The Adelphi in Melbourne (by Denton Corker Marshall)) / magCulture (always worthwhile).

And there's more, including NiceFuckingGraphics! / Noisy Decent Graphics (essential) / NOTCOT.ORG (likewise) / PingMag (which closed its doors at the end of last year) / printfetish (with a post on The September Issue) / Scrapatorium / Smashing Magazine / Speak Up (which closed in April 2009: weblogs are vessels for nostaglia too, 'I get terribly nostalgic writing this and reading all the great goodbyes our friends have sent in. It all makes me question the decision but, ultimately, nostalgia never carried anything forward. And we must move forward. Always.')

And a few more. Swissmiss / The Style Press / TheDieLine.com / the great Typographica / UnBeige (peeling wallpaper*) / UPPERCASE journal / The Skinny /VVORK / We Made This / we make money not art.

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The other category is sites, rather embarassingly, we were not in the least bit aware of: re-nourish (soon to be part of rethink design) / track 6 designs / fresh tee guide / [LSD] / {non}TYPE / 40 fakes / a best truth / origen / abduzeedo / AiBURN / AisleOne / Akinori Oishi / All Graphic Design News / Alquimistas del Diseno / Amkashop / Andy Jacobson / Anepco Blog Packaging / Anna-Lisa Backlund / Another Limited Rebellion (sample post: DIY artist) / Another Company, now known as Another Something (sample link: photographer Geert Goiris) / Art Backwash / As Found (great - see 'every image on scientology.org' - perplexing) / Asi se fundo Carnaby Street / au secours j'ai un blog!!.

Be A Design Group / bees knees ('a little visual notebook', clearly happy with its copy) / Behance / BIT-101, which does fun things for iPhones / Bittbox, which pushes out little parcels of free (or low cost) creative work / BladBlog / Woumpah / Thomas Frenzel / Blogpocket / Bold / Brand Flakes for Breakfast / Brand Infection / Buenos Aires de Diseno / Caligrafia en Peru (also pleased) / Camilla Engman (sample post, photographs of the Alpes Maritimes) / Catalizado / Changethethought (sample link, photographs by Vincent Fournier) / COLOURlovers / Computerlove / Creative and Live / Creative Curio / Criterion / Social Fiction (previously known as Crystalpunk, and worth a look) / Cuarto derecha / cuatro cosas / CuatroTipos / cubik.

And still it goes on. Dailytype / Dan Germain / Dansk Dynamit / Stara Datasky / David Airey / Design Digest / Design Meltdown / Design Tagebuch / Design Trotter / Andy Rutledge's Design View / Design You Trust / designUp from Brazil, which might have once been the now dead http://www.design.com.br/blog / Design Altruism Project / designdiary / Designers who Blog / detalles / Digilicious / Disenistica / the invite-only Diseno Wolko / DissenyArt / Dlounge / Dorian Moore (book receipt post) / Draplin Design Co. / Duopixel (nicely done).

El Diseno no se Mancha (book receipt post) / El Utilitario / el50 / Elmanco / Etienne Mineur archives / evasee / exljbris font foundry / Stash DVD magazine (formerly FEED) / FormFiftyFive (sleek and nicely curated) / Freelance Folder / Freshcut.it / Fubiz / Generator.x / Graphic Design Blog (US) / Graficante / Graphic Design Blog (UK) / GraphicDesignBar / Graphic-ExchanGE / Guerilla Innovation.

Hard Format / Heavy Backpack / Heuserkampf / i heart photograph / I Love Typography / iA Notebook / iBLOG / ideasonideas / Illustration Friday / IllustrationClass / IPF / Inconciente Colectivo / InDesignSecrets.com / information aesthetics / Intenta / Isopixel.

Jbarahona.com / Journale (Asgeir Hoem / Jules Vernacular / Kanardo // Blog / Laughing Lion Design ('8 alternative versions of the London Tube Map') / Letritas / LifeClever / Linzie Hunter at Drawger / live from bklyn (which has moved to tumblr / Logo Design Love / Logolog.

Manystuff (in love with the process of print) / Maquetadores / Mariana Coan, now closed, moved to flickr / Mark Simonson Studio Notebook (sample post, on the launch of Typedia, 'a shared encyclopedia of typefaces') / Miau! Mao Mao Publications' Blog / Nina Klausen (site being updated) / NowNow / O.K.BLOG, a grid of things / On My Desk / Papel Continuo / Perpenduum (sample post: Recycled Houses) / Plixweb (now password protected?) / Print and Pattern.

Quipsologies (links to How 20 popular websites looked when they launched, a Daily Telegraph online department list special, but interesting in spite of this) / randform / Reconstructing Ideas / Repeatafterme, partly compiled by architectural illustrator Guillaume Ninove / Rob Goodlatte / Roger C.Parker's Design to Sell Blog (business book turned website, by the looks of things) / rohdesign / Round Pixel / Seccion Aurea / Selector, another grid of stuff / SELEKKT (on hiatus?) / Sequ3nce (down?) / Shaun Inman /.Skull-A-Day / Slanted / SocialDesignZine / SpiekerBlog / subconscious tonic / Subtraction.com / suffix.abuse / Superficiel in depth / Swiss Legacy.

The Design Conspiracy Blog / The Last Blog / John Maeda's unsurprisingly sporadic The Laws of Simplicity ('Life�s been quite busy for me since I became the President of the Rhode Island School of Design') / theyedropper / Things of Random Coolness / Wieden + Kennedy's now dead Think Global, Act Stupid / Your DIY Mustache (lovely link to these muscle car drawings / Tinselman (underwater churches) / Tiny Gigantic / TOCA ME (which died in April) / Treats and Treasures / Trend Insights / TT Crew / TutorialBlog (Photoshop focused) / see also Tutoriales Photoshop / Type for you.

United Visual Artists' blog / Valentina Tanni ('The Tree') / Vaquelita / Veerle's blog / ventilate.ca / VIEWERSLIKEU.COM / visual evasion / visualcomplexity.com / VisualMente / visuelle / Industrial Brand / Web Designer Wall / why not? / yewknee.com / You The Designer / Your Brain on Design.

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The latter list is enormous and favours Spanish-speaking countries as a welcome break from the usual UK-US focus. Certain things surface again and again - key buzz words like 'creative', 'brand', 'design', 'graphic' - and we question the wisdom of 'freezing' web pages in print. There are also a few surprising omissions (Coudal, for example, or dezeen), as well as a couple of dead links, abandoned sites and switched directions (Artes Visuales and Serial Flasher, to name but two).

But overall, the tone is rather flat, a reflection of the relatively small circle of things, stuff, content and eyecandy that gets passed through the blogosphere (dread word). The book captures none of the esoteric splendour one might find in, say, the BLDGBLOG book or the BibliOdyssey publication, or their websites, or in Subtopia's architecture fetish or Curious Expedition's wanderlust, not to mention the worlds conjured up by Apothecary's Drawer, Cabinet of Wonders, the Atlas Obscura, The Map Room, Mrs Deane, efimera, ephemera, etc., etc.

The bulk of the sites in the book are about going forward, charting new work, new works, emerging sympathies, styles and movements, all framed by the technology that shapes the internet as a whole. Yet as a museological exercise, the contents of Mad About Design don't really succeeed; what's chronicled within is not a series of obsessions but rather the drive to be most visible. It's a book about creation, not curation. The catalogue raisonne of the web has yet to be compiled.

Future of Magazines

2009-09-08T15:26:00.025+01:00

Our jackdaw tendency is not getting any better. Swooping in and pulling out links, vainly trying to contextualise them, but usually failing. Perhaps each link needs a little more exposition? A lesson in how to do things: Kottke conveniently cuts and pastes the new Gladwell book / how to celebrate a strange life: Live Forever, 'The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition', organised by Archinect. Our illustration down below shows Michael Takko's '50 steps'.

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We've been wondering about the ongoing relevance of issuu, a site that compiles magazines in a format that mimics archived paper copies but all too often seems to be mostly stocked with purely digital productions. The outlaw days of people bootlegging magazines seems to have vanished (although sites like fashion scans, The Black Pit and Pink Pistol will sort you out). Instead, there's a strange array of zines, catalogues, brochures and specialist press, all wedded to a delivery mechanism that's slick but utterly unsuited to the physicality of magazines. Of course, there's always the odd gem, like the Urban Sketchers' car magazine.

What the site actually does is contort things that might not otherwise be suited to print into a magazine-inspired format, forcing their reappraisal on a series of predetermined aesthetic grounds. Have a new clothing label? Create something that implies a history, a backstory, a continuity. This can only work for so long. Ten, maybe twenty years from now, when flat panel readers will finally kill the tropes and habits of traditional print design, the only emotion associated with the Issuu shopfront will be nostalgia. Perversely, it will be only the sketchbook, the last immediate link between hand, eye and page, that will endure. The lavish, ad-fat newsstand behemoth will cease to be a model to imitate.

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Related (and rather implying that day is not here yet), What are you reading on the subway? (via daily discoveries) / on Eichlers / PLSJ, a tumblr / Honey is Funny is a fine weblog / Miniature Brides / nineteenpoint, a designer's weblog / design and music come together at Beautiful Sounds (both last links via diskant).

Michael Jantzen is the ultimate virtual architect, something he is well aware of: 'You know, I design these things, and get them out on the Internet and hope someone will come back to me wanting to build. So far, all I seem to get is more press. [Laughs.] Which just leads to more press.' We've often featured his work on things, and his self-awareness is relatively rare within the industry. Here is the contemporary design dilemma in a nutshell; virtual architecture begets more virtual architecture, a spiral of imaginary forms.

Circa, an art magazine from Ireland / thirty-four parking lots, a 'remake of Ed Ruscha's project using Google Maps' (via we will become / Polis, 'a collaborative blog on urbanism with a global focus' / 1194km, a weblog / A design a day / hooray, we qualify as being slow web / Freddie Robins is a curator.

Billy bookcases ahoy

2009-09-07T22:00:00.002+01:00

We've only just caught up with the IKEA font controversy (via the New York Times and also referenced in this expansive question 'What do the Makers like?', giving examples of art forms that are abhorred by the masses by held in high esteem by the (self-described?) elite). Back to IKEA - it seems the adoption of Verdana is a delayed, mass-market version of 'the new ugly,' epitomised by relatively low circulation, high concept magazines like 032c, where an apparently casual and spontaneous approach appears - to the uninitiated - to be deliberately anti-design.

Nothing is ever as simple as that. IKEA's adoption of a font designed for screen reading has been predictably savaged by designers ('This is a disastrous move by a company that's supposed to be design-led! The use of Verdana has the unfortunate effect of making any design look as if it's been quickly knocked out on a home computer with no thought or effort, just because it's (usually) the default typeface on any Windows machine. Pages from IKEA's catalogue now look like rubbish flyers for a backyard sale.').

Ultimately, the company's claim to be purveyors - nay, torch-holders - of modernism no longer stands up to scrutiny. Ignore the type issue, what's most interesting about the IKEA 2010 catalog(ue) is the lack of stylistic cohesion of the catalogue as a whole, no longer a definition of 'modern design' but rather a visual shorthand for the contemporary understanding of what 'good taste' means, as filtered through a thousand style magazines, put through the wringer of consumer choice and then scattered with the visual pluralism of modern times. It's chaotic.

Related, IKEA 1965, and the company's own history pages.

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VW is mooting mini domestic scale power plants (we think). See also Honda's Home Energy Station. It's not too much of a stretch to see more car manufacturers muscle in to this sector of the market in the next decade: micro-generation that doubles up as fuel source for their products. Without an industry standard to work to, the idea of locking in consumers to several decades of vehicle 'upgrades' that are compatible with the (presumably hefty) capital outlay of a piece of domestic-scaled energy-generating plant is a very attractive one.

Other things. The animated gif continues to haunt the internet, the closest the medium will ever come to the stilted movement of the silent slapstick movie: Three Frames (via Regular VIPs (both occasionally nsfw)) / Ugly House Photos, including the World's Largest Louis Vuitton Purse / Plan 59. Retro illustrations that seem to have been polished. We're always losing this link so here to remind us. Also links to Shorpy / What We Do is Secret, architecture and design / Colonize the Borderland, a tumblr / Raspera, 'Super Real Animal's Paper Craft. Rasterized Peramodel from Japan.'

Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons / as yet unfamiliar with The Awl / The London Review of Breakfasts / FWA, favourite website awards. This is where all the intense flash sites went / Etherpad, an online collaborative word processor / 9000's photostream is filled with interesting things.

Inevitably, Poundbury, Spillway weighs in on the design blog subject of the week, Dorset's most famous model village and the debate about its merits, 'psychedelic urban experience' or otherwise / a fine weblog, Nutty, Dry and a Hint of Vanilla (thanks for the Pelican link) / A collection of sounds from the sea, including the mysterious Bloop (more info) / Aeron chairs for seats / Could the UK drive on the right? Why?

Splendid Urbanism

2009-09-03T20:13:00.019+01:00

What is new? The above image comes from the promotional website for Belgia, an idealised 'Belgian-style' community near Moscow, complete with Dutch gables and windmills. We hadn't considered the suburbs of Belgium to represent a suburban domestic idyll, but clearly a Russian developer thinks otherwise. The site is exceptionally heavy on flash (found via The FWA), stuffed full of movies of sunbathing 'desperate housewives' and dense brickwork patterns. As the montage suggests, this is a piece of instant utopia, a place where there are no unexpected architectural juxtapositions, just choices made in an attempt to emulate an ideal, a sense of atmosphere that is, in itself, largely a fiction.

How much does this obvious fiction relate to 'genuine' best urban places and spaces, a flickr group-into-book project, organised by Dan at City of Sound, Russell Davies and James Goggins as a sort of user manual of the intangible, the spaces and places that give delight but that aren't consciously designed. Related, Hong Kong, then and now, thanks to Hong Kong Man. See also Normandy 1944, then and now and Ardennes, then and now. Also, Manhattan Island, then and now, with much more at the Manhatta Project.

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Recycle LACMA: 'On January 14th, 2009 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that it was deaccessioning more than 100 items from its costumes and textiles collection. Once carefully collected, catalogued, and cared for, these items have now been cast back out in to the world. What will happen to them? Like any other useless item, they will need to be recycled or disposed of. Recycle LACMA is a project of Los Angeles-based artist Robert Fontenot. At three separate auctions he purchased over 50 items deaccessioned by LACMA and is now trying to find new uses for these otherwise unwanted items.' (many thanks to Sarah)

La Premiere Rue, dedicated to modern architectural heritage / the Zundapp Janus 750, a microcar / Painted Bride Quarterly, a literary magazine / Ranya Chantal's weblog / nomenus quarterly, an art quarterly / 44, a tumblr / The Ragbag, a tumblr / turn anywhere into a place of abandoned splendour with the tourist remover / Cabinet of Signs, photography by Alan Thomas / Sftrajan's Photostream.

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, seemingly still pertinent / Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan Rocket, a novice car designer maximises global publicity for his debut project / aesthetically related, the Mohs Safarikar, a post at Ectomo.

Photography by Philippe Munda (via 2 or 3 things) / art installations at Evoldaily's flickr stream, especially the miniature ruins / David Pearson's flickr stream is filled with Penguin design imagery / the Carbuncle Cup has a winner. Bad British Architecture would concur.

Field recordings at freesound, a couple of thousand of them. See (hear) also the brown noise and soundscape tags, as well as dark-ambient and dissonant. There's also a field recordings section at Epitonic, a website we haven't frequented for years. This may have been the first place we ever found an mp3.

Down to a sunless sea is an obscure piece of apocalyptic literature from the early 80s, the final peak of Cold War paranoia with the establishment of Greenham Common Peace Camp, a couple of years before Threads, and the 'evil empire' soon to be prominent in everyone's minds. We read this book in around 1986 and most of the Amazon commenters - the vast majority of whom give it five stars - seem to be returning to it. Wikipedia has a plot summary, revealing how the book neatly conflates techno-obsession, nuclear paranoia, and survivalism into a bizarrely satisfying whole (related, a catalogue of nuclear accidents).

Thanks for the link, Australian PC Authority.

Here we go again

2009-09-01T23:30:00.002+01:00

A fine set of renders of the Shard, marking the start of a highly cinematic phase of architectural presentation. Gaming is also getting more cinematic, yet paradoxically, the visions created by game designers are more architectural, experimental and extravagant. Procedural Destruction and the Algorithmic Fiction of the City, a guest post by Jim Rossignol at BLDGBLOG, on procedurally generated landscapes in games. Related, Cananbalt, a random scrolling urban landscape via RPS

Does Beijing's CCTV building contain hidden allusions to architectural pornography? See the images in question (nsfw) / The Immaculate Consumption, bringing together old magazine ads - weblogs like this are always entertaining / Saint Verde Digest, a weblog / scans of the 1965 Ikea Catalogue / Gallic road-planning, tail-end of silly season.

Informative and somewhat pertinent: the curious appeal of miscellanea - 'Why do we turn to Britain for useless information? Britain is the parents� house that American culture moved out of. It has so much more storage space than our place, and we can always rummage through the bookshelves and the attic when we visit.... Or they�re more comfortable amid the picturesque ruins of the old informational empire. The broken brickwork of authoritative knowledge - Bartlett's, Hoyle, Debrett's, Guinness, the Boy Scout Handbook - has become the deftly juggled informational bits of Schott's. Cool Britannica.'

Related, all about the Musgrave Collection in Eastbourne / The Littlejohn Collection's photostream / Container List, 'the blog of the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives, featuring weekly graphics and ephemera from the design archives at the School of Visual Arts.' / Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries at Curious Expeditions, a baroque cascade of bibliomania so rich that the smell of musty volumes practically seeps out of the screen. The literal stacking of knowledge in the ancient library is poorly served by the internet. A couple of modern libraries, the self-consciously iconistic proposal for National Library of Kazakhstan and the complex and controversial Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico.

Art by Max Ducos / art by Denise Kupferschmidt / art by Malcolm Liepke. More at Sexuality in Art (nsfw) / photography by Dan Holdsworth / accused of card-carrying neophilia, Will Wiles pens a retort to the conservationist impulse to recreate the Euston Arch. We're in two minds about this. On the one hand, the demolition of the Arch was bureaucratic philistinism at its most infuriating.

Fig.8 is a beautiful flash game (via RPS / there's something rather hermetic about Starck's much-heralded Motor Yacht A / The Zinc Roof, an architecture weblog / explore Google Moon / the ephemera assemblyman / the Dieter Rams flickr group.

Mad Men channels Huxtable, referencing the ill-considered decision to knock down Penn Station / Los Angeles in (500) days of Summer, a google map / 'This blog charts the ins and outs (and ups and downs) of researching and writing my new book, The Chinese Typewriter.' / Translinguistic Other, a weblog / Marydebat's weblog.

'Explore Murray Hill through Images and Maps' / Minor Mania, all about the Morris Minor / a blueprint of Soyuz, one of many high resolution images available at Vincent Meens's Space Model Web Page / the Cliff House Project, 'The goal of this website is to preserve the visual imagery of Adolph Sutro�s Victorian Cliff House. It was neither the first structure nor the last to carry the name of Cliff House, but it was certainly the most grand. Sadly, its existence was short-lived. It was constructed in 1896 and, like so many wooden structures of that era, burned completely to the ground in September of 1907.' The postcards make today's most ambitiously cinematic architectural renders look positive realistic.

Augment Me

2009-08-24T22:02:00.015+01:00

Bye-Bye, Dubai, in which the former centre of goggle-eyed attention swiftly evolves into a gigantic piece of architectural schadenfreude. The suggested construction cost of $600bn is mighty impressive (especially when pared with a romantic image of skeletal, half-finished towers of dubious quality, set amidst open expanses of desert), but is so arbitary, so abstract, that it is shorn of all meaning. What can be gleaned from this rise and fall? That Dubai is now first and foremost shorthand for an idea, rather than a place, just as the name Poundbury is - for a certain generation of British architects - a red rag.

That's why this recent story, Cracks appearing in Prince Charles's dream village in Poundbury (via Owen Hatherley) is the parochial equivalent of tall tales about sand-blown abandonment in the deserts of the Gulf. 'Maurice Allen, the chairman of the Poundbury Residents' Association, said he felt that some of the people who are complaining about their homes were "nitpicking". He said: "Clearly people pay a premium to live in Poundbury and their expectations are unrealistically high. Things aren't made as they used to be."'

Our expectations of the past should be reappraised, just as the new 'Dubai' is about recalibrating our dreams of the future. The chilled beaches, the rotating skyscrapers, the underwater hotels are were little more than crazed extrapolations of what we thought should be possible, with technology and ambition (only could you please build them somewhere out of the way, exotic and strange like Dubai because we're not quite ready for them to be truly 'real'). The accompanying gallery (and article itself) is by Lauren Greenfield, who has some images online.

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We're at the early stages of augmented reality, a technology long imagined but now in clumsy first generation iterations on handsets like the Nokia N97, iPhone and G1. Amongst other things, this suggests the emergence of a 'tagged world', a secondary space of multiple layers of information, shared and unshared, seen and unseen depending on your connections, your collaborations and your interests. It's not our field, but is there a standard language for augmented tags? An XML of the invisible.

Right now, apps like Wikitude and Layar (apparently available in the Android Market, although impossible to actually track down using a phone) are a bit clunky and slow. Tags sit on objects many kilometres away, simply conventions like highlights and outlines are years away from being seamlessly integrated with a camera view. For a suggestion as to how this information density is going to play out, Lee Maguire's recent post Guided by the Whispers of Angels suggests that discretion will ultimately triumph as a means of conveying these new layers of information to us. Otherwise, chaos will ensue: 'A recent Microsoft concept video ("2019") suggests that, if nothing else, the future is going to be full of infomatic detritus you�re going to have to tune out or go mad.'

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The social history of the mp3, well-structured piece on the evaporation of music from object into thing, from commodity into pure artform and how the inherent contradictions and legacies of a century of a 'music industry' are making this transition complex and heavily loaded (cue nostalgia and criticism) / related, Psychotic Leisure Music, a splendid mp3 blog / Scroll Britannia, 'the UK's First Road Map', or an early outline of the future M3 / the Visual Dumpster, a tumblr / Station Wagon Living, scanned booklet from the past.

A Complete List of England's Lost Country Houses / Unpacking my Library: 'architects and their books'. A missed opportunity - imagine if this had been built in Library Thing, and then all the other architects in the world could rush to put up their Corb covers in sympathy / prints by Matt Dye / prints and things by General Pattern / Notes and Links on Art / The Video Game Museum.

Life As A Woman, Hedy Lamarr and 'frequency-switching devices', torpedo technology and more. From the comments: 'There is also an interesting detail about the image of her that appears just above the German text here � that was done as a submission to a line art contest by Corel, a graphic software company. It won and was made the box cover and startup screen for the software. Unfortunately nobody checked whether Hedy was still alive; she was, living in Florida. She sued and collected some money that made her more comfortable in her declining years.' (via the author of this book, Blow to Bits: Your Life, Liberty and Happiness after the Digital Explosion.

The Craziest Literary Magazine in the World / art by Ross Racine / Millennium People pulls up some images and information on Cedric Price's unbuilt Fun Palace / a distinct absence of fun palaces, save for party favourites: Satellites Uncover North Korea. The unravelling of the world's hidden places through satellite imagery continues.

Drawings by Jochen Gerner / sometimes flickr streams are just fun to follow: Frankie Roberto / buy College Art Online (blog), a slightly more focused Saatchi Online (less fiendishly focused than Stuckism, however) / every now and again we check into Factory20 to marvel at the pure fetishisation of late industrial equipment, furniture and machinery / paintings by Tyson Anthony Roberts / Book Design cover gallery / Caustic Cover Critic on Various Approaches to the Problem of Sherlock Holmes.

Random things

2009-08-19T20:10:00.000+01:00

Things has been lying rather dormant for the past few weeks - our apologies. Pet Sounds Acapella / step back to the 70s at My Beat Club / see also Galactic Ramble, 'the fullest ever study of the 60s and 70s UK music scene' / a review of Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music.

The World Trade Center: A building project like no other. Related, Shifting Shorelines #2: NY, at Millennium People: 'For 4 years the Twins fronted the Hudson directly, until the backfilling was complete' / The Functionality, small scale but intriguing architectural works / all about the The Independent Group, a labour of love for a deserving cause.

'The mouse universe', an experiment by John B.Calhoun. 'The conclusions drawn from this experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.' / The Wonder of Whiffling 'and other extraordinary words in the English Language.

'The following scene shows how the high-grade titanium wedding ring saves Bud's life' / Stranded II, via ask me-fi / The Entropy Tango / previously bookmarked before but worth revisiting, Airminded, 'air power and British Society 1908-1941 (mostly) / collecting airline passenger certificates (found via dark roasted blend.

What's for School Lunch?, a weblog / B of the Bang, launched, dismantled / an art-centric weblog by James Wagner / a pedal-powered monorail / HearWhere, 'find live music anywhere'.

Tiny snippets

2009-08-12T10:27:00.000+01:00

Shelf Appeal, a blog about things. Especially the post about Goldfinger's toyshop, a store designed for Paul and Marjorie Abbatt in Wimpole Street. More about the Abbatt's later life, on the farm that became the Turville Folk Club, and our scans of the Abbatt's Animal Families game (which was how we found Shelf Appeal in the first place - very circular). The Abbatt's store was overseen by Edward Newmark who later went on to work with James Galt and Co., a company with over 150 years of history, not to mention a wonderful collaboration with Ken Garland and which now appears in desperate need of some creative direction.

Why the Saab inspires strong feelings, a story by Sam Knight. 'After studying 1.2 million postings on "Motor Talk", �Germany's �largest motoring web forum, R�diger Hossiep, a psychologist at the �University of Ruhr in Bochum, concluded this summer that Saab drivers have the highest levels of "psychological involvement" with their cars: more than 10 times the passion of the average Volkswagen driver.'

Discovering Will Wiles' review of Man on Wire coincided with the film being shown on UK TV. It is a film out of time, a film about new architecture that now exists only in the imagination, and about the lost ability to take extravagant but essentially harmless liberties: 'Man on Wire will provoke a cold sweat from the professional paranoiacs who assemble counter-terrorism strategies for Western governments. Petit would come unstuck long before setting foot on the wire in this new world of ID cards, blanket CCTV, motion sensors and face-recognition software.'