Visiting imaginary places
Our apartment, by Topsy Design, another contemporary exponent of ‘living over the shop‘, or rather, ‘living within the shop.’ Whereas traders once used to shoehorn their living quarters above their working quarters, the evaporation of production and the growth in very specialist retail means that LOTS has evaporated. Instead, LWTS will become more and more commonplace thanks to the combination of curated personal spaces and increased pressure on urban housing.
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London Underground button badges. Wait for the iron grip of LU’s enforcement officers to catch wind of this / this is slightly perverse, Collider’s reimagining of FallingWater for the Ministry of Sound’s Chillout Sessions XII (via Ian Claridge), a mash-up of modernism, the Mad Men aesthetic, tilt-shift photography and the ongoing model-making revival. Related, SCB links to this Architectural Models tumblr / art by Dexter Dalwood.
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Many thanks to Architectural Review for the mention, and for pointing us towards The Day After You Die and Japanese Scientists, two image-heavy sites, doing what tumblrs and their ilk do best; present the visual highlights from what appears to be a life of constant hedonism and aesthetic perfection / designboom’s Venice Architecture Biennale coverage is amongst the most comprehensive there is. Given the cornucopia of quite literally instant online coverage, whereby the key events of each day are tweeted, streamed and blogged as they happen, one starts to question the wisdom of attending the Biennale at all.
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Ugly Vegas Carpets Want You to Keep Playing: ‘casino carpet is known as an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble’ / Western Motel: Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art, an exhibition that ‘concentrates on Hopper’s influence on cinema’ / Imperials, a tumblr / classic hip hop covers in Lego / art by Paul Cummings (detail above).
Digging through the past
An ACME Novelty Toy Gallery, ‘All toys designed by Chris Ware, and assembled by myself‘ / Blissbat, a blog mostly about books / Shakespeare’s Monkey, ‘a two line poem with a random letter generator underneath (random letters that coincide with the real ones are in pink). It will run until the whole poem is randomly generated. All the right letters happening at the same time. If it doesn’t in your lifetime, pass it on to your children.’
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From the comments: ‘Loaded – it’s the SAAB of magazines; 1. Started by geniuses, 2. Bought by enthusiasts, 3. Sold to Vauxhall. The End’ / The Unintentional Artist, a series by photographer Leon Chew / a letter from Albert Camus / art by Carson Ellis / the Islamic influence on facade of Yamasaki’s WTC.
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The evolution of the Toronto skyline. See also landmarks of the future, a pre-crunch look at a speculative London / Wallpaper vs Chapmans / we’ll take a bunch of these warning stickers / what are the next pad? / This Window. Close it, a tumblr / Guitar hero gets real. Tempting / The Frightening Beauty of Bunkers by Paul Virilio, tmn on Bunker Archaeology.
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More archaeology. Bottlebank, ‘the Internet site for Simon Buckingham’s Coca-Cola collection’ / the Museum of Useful Things, which has just had a re-vamp. Their blog is here / Unusual Museums of the Internet, practically a museum piece itself / World Wide Wheelie Bins / Infoshop, ‘kill capitalism before it kills you!’ / sensibly titled blog post: The ever growing ever pervasive records that the Internet produces make me think sometimes about the virtues of forgetting.
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The list of last occurences / buy a little bit of internet history, first issues of .net magazine and Internet Today magazine (which doesn’t even seem to have a web presence any more…) / we like Infinite Garage, which presents itself as a kind of modern (dare we say hipster) Narnia, a dreamworld formed of a near bottomless pit of cool things. As the intro says, ‘I inherited a 3 car garage packed with 35 years of stuff. Sell, trash, or keep forever?’. There’s a store, and sometimes the juxtapositions of old things in new contexts is a little bit too neat (red plaid forever), but this is the Carter expedition or Cheapside Hoard of the noughties.
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The Architectural Review currently has an expansive set of features and photography stories on India / the photographic reference of pin-up artist Gil Elvgreen (nsfw), at Marieaunet / traveling with the ghost [sic] offers up scans of fashion stories (nsfw) / Wig and Pen, a weblog from Amherst / Cars from the Axis of Evil: ‘the best estimate is that there are fewer than 30,000 vehicles on the road—in a country of nearly 24 million people’.
Glitches and banality
Some images of post-war German architectural banality, apparently now a burgeoning issue in a country that has always had a pragmatic attitude towards contemporary architecture. See also Hope and change, perhaps, in Germany, which flags up how the visionary fervour of modernisers was allegedly stoked by wartime destruction (‘One architect was Konstanty Gutschow, of Hamburg, who said of its firebombing in 1943: “This act of destruction will be a blessing.’) Similar things happened in the UK, where post-war planning rose out of the ashes of the bombing raids of the early 1940s, most notably with the Abercrombie Plan.
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A brief history of quicksand. See also Quicksand sucks / Ballardian headline of the day: Traffic Jam enters Ninth Day / work by Anne Holtrop, including temporary museum / The Modernist Residential Buildings of Victoria / Modern San Diego / Stunt Magazine, coming soon, seemingly on an Evel Knievel trip / the alleys, courts and passageways of central London / Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: Did the CIA spread LSD?. See also, Ergotism and the Edgewood Arsenal Experiments (movie) / Wi-fi in Venice / Douglas Coupland’s Pixel Orca.
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In the future, what will ‘library’ mean? Information storage is being expanded to encompass things like motion capture and behaviours. Motives in Movement is a ‘library based on a unique way of categorising behaviour. We use actors to create a comprehensive library of highly complex and subtle behaviours, that can then edit into almost any dramatic sequence. The clips can provide those vital reaction shots; the right kind of look, nod, smile, or even how they sit in a chair. Just as importantly, you can easily find the right clip.’ Via BBC news, which hinted that this particular library was a repository of movements, all mapped and stored in order to be applied to models in the future; one actor’s physical abilities suddenly becoming available to all. See also Carbon Framework, a suite of animation tools that attempts to recreate lifelike movement and effects procedurally, rather than through capture (via RPS).
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Le Mans Classic, photographs by Laurent Nivalle (via Swiss Cheese and Bullets) / Space Colonies versus ‘real-world glitches‘, two sides of the same coin, utopian/dystopian. A perfect illustration of the combination of retro-futurist projection and self-aware techno-deconstructivism that underpins so much modern image creation / Cabinet of Wonders, a weblog / Google Maps without the cartography.
Blur
The blurry, bleached-out pseudo-Polaroid-esque nature of the lead images on this story about aimless 20-somethings is a visual TLDR for the entire piece (via), an example of the self-conscious aesthetic nostalgia that has created a circular mythos of a ‘golden era’, endlessly perpetuated in online imagery and ultimately serving as a means of disengaging from the present / thanks for this link on the selectbutton forums, via which we also get two tumblrs (a key delivery mechanism for the circular mythos), kssk and UUIUU.
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‘What’s next for BBC Genome? In September we will begin the full-scale project of digitising over 80 years’ worth of broadcast records. That’s approximately 400,000 pages of Radio Times, 3 million programmes and 300 million words to recognise through OCR.’ / ’60 percent of the world’s copied artworks come from Dafen, a village in South China‘ (via anArchitecture). Reminded us of a project we wanted to do but never got around to; send a photograph to a Dafen artist to get a painted version, then re-send the painted version to another artist to get a copy, and so on, and so on. It would be interesting to see how ‘degraded’ the imagery becomes, or if such copying is, effectively, lossless.
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He Seems Nice, architecture, art, design and (mostly) men’s fashion / things organised neatly, a tumblr / ephemera scanning at So much pile up / l’autre bande dessinee and Matou en Peluche, two French weblogs on illustration and comics / Michael Wolf’s Streetview project takes Manhattan / Brass Eye-inspired ‘safe cuddling baby suit‘? Via Dezeen / the South London Press pool / enter Reddit Answers, slightly more focused than Ask Reddit / Minton pottery marks / Hatch: the Design Public blog / shortlived things: the New Brighton Tower / Google Slope View / we need to educate British homebuyers about floor areas.
Casual access
You wouldn’t just pick up someone’s telephone and start fiddling with it – just as you wouldn’t pick up a wallet or handbag and start rifling through the compartments or click around somebody’s desktop without their permission. Presumably the same technology etiquette applies to the iPad, creating another layer of difference between the device and the media it is starting to supplant. However, you would feel pretty confident about picking up somebody’s copy of Wired and casually flick through the pages, probably without even asking for permission, as the very act of picking up a magazine, be it in a shop or from someone else’s coffee table, is not an infringement of privacy. Will this make electronic books and magazines more personal and intimate?
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Trailers for books are a genre we’d never really considered before (although Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed (1975) was accompanied by television adverts, ‘with Higgins himself doing the voice-overs‘, and there have no doubt been squillions of others). As the publishing model shifts online, these trailers will become more commonplace, but they surely won’t all be as splendid as Coudal’s creation for You Lost Me There.
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Another branch of conventional publishing. Visual Editions, who believe, ‘put simply… that books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell; with the visual feeding into and adding to the storytelling as much as the words on the page.’ Their new publication, Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer, is ‘quite literally cut into the pages of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.’ Perhaps there should be a new term for the book as object to look at and view, something that can only really be looked at and experienced, rather than read. Not a coffee table book, but a blook perhaps.
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Doppelganger Design (via magCulture) / Paris is Invisible, a weblog / the alphabet truck, photographs / a car themed hotel / the Cartographer’s Guild, for lovers of fictional maps / The Darkside Club, discussion and debate at this year’s Venice Biennale / a self-imposed mystery, decoding scraps of song lyrics / another test: Justin Bieber, PaulStretch, and the Slow Motion Music Quiz.
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Onion-esque: Man leaves his very large message on the world with GPS “pen”. It really does look like a child has scribbled on a globe / The private circulation blog opens itself up to its readers / Things Talking to Things: The Internet of Things: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to link any object directly to a ‘video memory’ or an article of text describing its history or background?’ We still don’t really understand… / production photographs from the sets of Hell Drivers (1957) at Dennis Lowe’s excellent film site, complete with enormous amounts of greebling / this photograph has a beautiful, painterly quality / City Planning, a tumblr.
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Branches and Rain, ‘The web log of a reference librarian’ / Trigger’s Retro Road Tests!’s photostream, a treasure trove / many image blogs linked here, including Scissors, Convoy and The Brick House / Toylander, mini electric Land-Rovers and Jeeps for kids / Trainset Ghetto, photographs by Peter Feigenbaum / Happy Mundane, celebrating the ordinary / Ordinary Lives, a post at The Age of Uncertainty.
Folding cities, spinning things
A few thoughts on Inception, several weeks after the rest of the world. James Benedict Brown’s review in Building Design nailed the aesthetic incongruity of how a group of architects with absolute free will (and no clients, budget issues or planning concerns) could end up with a cityscape that seemed only a few steps removed from a particularly hellish PFI contract. The protagonists’ ‘dream city’, some 50 years in the making, if you will, was particularly uninspiring; a place that mixed up the worst bits of Croydon, the Voisin Plan, Walden 7, wartime Beirut and Sao Paolo, a ‘utopia’ that at times seemed to be designed entirely by Richard Seifert on an off day. As Brown cynically (but probably correctly) noted, ‘Cobb and his wife always lived in a skyscraper city not because their characters believably wanted to, but because it was the most visually arresting landscape for the CGI artists to render as a ruin later in the film.’
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Has anyone rendered the ruins of deconstructivism? Or is the veracity of the modernist ruin dependent on the shiny unblemished perfection of the International Style as a pristine starting point that can be easily corrupted? The film’s production process hinted at a more complex, labyrinthine architectural geometry. This letter from Richard Arminger at Network Modelmakers explains a bit of the creative process behind some of the props, and how classical architecture was considered but eventually eschewed in favour of Business Park Blandness. At one point the protagonist even explains how he and his wife like the style of a corporate lobby and atrium, effectively using such a building as the ‘way in’ to their own, FLW-esque private home. We could easily dig up a few choice blog posts on the film or throw up some striking imagery, but the internet is overrun with them already and, to be honest, it’s well worth seeing for yourselves.
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But once again, the complex nature of subjective aesthetics is revealed. None of the film’s (very rare) bad reviews make the same point that Brown did in BD; namely that the duff architecture of the dreamscape is the film’s major dud note. Imagine, for example, if they’d picked a genius student from the Bartlett, AA, Sci-Arc or any number of schools, rather than the rather prosaic, unnamed Parisian college that the Ariadne character attends.
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If, as some have convincingly argued, the film is an extended metaphor of the nature of modern film production (a product of the ‘dream factory’), then set-builders and production designers are done something of a disservice. Then again, Inception also seemed to us to be an extended commentary on the intersecting worlds of cinema and video games – the reference to ‘levels’, fight sequences, snowy lairs, and an almost procedural cityscape. The fractured narrative structures and expectations of the latter are inevitably changing the way the former are perceived.
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Other things. Egographies, 3D modelling familiar places and things / art by Tilla Manya Chaya Crowne / design sketches for In the Night Garden / BagNews, decoding news photography / Postcards from the Ledge, a blog by Sherilyn Fenn / a selection of infuriating wheelchair ramps / the Exploding Cinema, ultra low budget London filmmaking / Bombas Nucleares Detonadas 1945-1998, swiftly turns the world map into a flickering War Games-style nightmare. See also DEFCON. Via Chaz Hutton.
Things from here and there
Holiday season grab bag / a big tube map round-up post / smallest records ever. The quest for miniaturisation, as seen from a late C20 viewpoint. We’ve probably lamented this before, but we wish we could find the Sunday Times from the 1980s or thereabouts wherein the prospect of ‘music on computer chips’ was mooted, with a Phil Collins solo album chip used an illustration / Tunnel Networks / the Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine / Tumb.la, a tumblr viewer / see also TumView / Paper Scooter models for you to make! / Collect and Archive, fashion and illustration / The Bedbug Registry, ‘a free, public database of bedbug infestations’.
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Brutalism and Ballard, splicing the cold, hard surfaces of a fast-vanishing Brutalism with the technological and social alienation integral to the work of J.G.Ballard. The visual web seems rife with a masochistic dystopianism, an admiration for failed futurism and imploded utopianism. This particular thread – concrete architecture, good or bad? – seems to come round every once in a while (I, II). Crucially, the participants rarely go beyond their gut feelings when explaining why they like or dislike certain architectural styles. Quantifying aesthetics is practically a spectactor sport in the UK, a battleground between old and new, right and wrong, functional and dysfunctional, modern and traditional. Consider the media interest in the Carbuncle Cup; here the rich mix of schadenfreude and techno-pessimism is in full flow.
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Moscow from above, via Worldbuilding at Reddit / knitting meets Japanese pop culture at Mochimochi Land’s photostream / the Bignert Collection, architectural letterheads, via Marginal Revolution / SlushPile Hell, which needs to be spliced with Fiction Bitch / Plastidecore, a tumblr / photographing private jets (via).
A few things
The Shelf Appeal Flickr Stream is worth a visit / re-designing the Orbit / remember when design writing used to be fun? Sex and the City 2 is apparently aware of its double life as an urban design thesis.’ / Future Anterior, ‘the first and only journal in American academia to be devoted to the study and advancement of historic preservation’ / Gateshead, before and after (thanks to Coudal for the reminder).
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Link selection, with some repetition / Unreliably Witnessed, a tumblr / Robert Corr, a weblog / a trip around Miniland Zoo / celebrating The Worst of Perth / Switched, a tumblr / Smoking Cinammon Sticks, another tumblr / Passenger Window, driving across America / work by Sophie Munns / Fortean Times has waded through the UFO files.
A Lost Miniature World
Miniature villages don’t often get demolished. Britain has some of the best model villages and cities in the world, many of them qualifying as fine pieces of folk art, most notably Bekonscot in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire (Google satellite view – a missed opportunity to break out some really high resolution imagery) and the Model Village in Godshill, Isle of Wight (satellite, again, sadly blurry) and Babbacombe in Devon (satellite). There’s a list at Wikipedia of the rest.
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Few had such a short life as Tucktonia. Built in 1974, it was closed in 1986 and the site is now occupied by flats. All the buildings, save for one (according to Wikipedia) were destroyed. There’s a scattering of Tucktonia ephemera online, such as this flickr set of a Super 8 film of a 1978 visit, some snippets from 1976. There’s also a fair bit of information and materials at Remember Tucktonia, part of X Church, Christchurch History Online (with lovely old photos). This page includes two brochures (one and two, the latter with a great tour of the park’s copy of London), extolling the virtues of ‘Seeing Britain in a Day’.
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We’d like to add a set of scans of this undated Tucktonia Souvenir Brochure to the pile. It was clearly a labour of love (and a big investment – ’18,000 tons of hard-core, 2,500 tons of concrete… 164,000 gallons of water, 16,000 metres of electric cable… and nearly a mile of miniature railway). It didn’t last. The site is now retirement flats, sitting atop the freshly re-crushed rubble of a small civilisation. See the site then and now, courtesy of Google Earth.
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Finally, we love this badge from Chris in Plymouth’s UK Holiday Badges set. Other sets of note on that thrillingly obsessive page: numbers; doorlocks; Letterboxes; Emergency Onlys; remote controls; Letter A (and all the way through to Z); Plymouth cafes and abandoned chairs.
There’s a light in the sky
The best magazine articles ever, linked via Me-fi where there is spirited discussion and many additions. See also the comment thread here for more suggestions. One that was missed out, Reyner Banham’s 1955 essay on The New Brutalism from the Architectural Review / the Cocktail Napkin Sketch Contest / the Nieman Journalism Lab, ‘a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age’ / architectural photography by Paul Riddle and Andy Stagg.
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The very fine Smoke is having a re-think. We know how you feel / Abandoned Stations / Romanian photography / Blurb’s Photography Book Now competition reveals that there are almost as many monographs as there were weblogs a decade ago. Some highlights: The Making of a Miniature Firearm; Late 1970s London Counter Culture; On Leave; NIMBY. For the most part, it also demonstrates that photographers are not graphic designers (nor should they be).
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We were unaware of the great DesignbyMe service offered by Lego, with hand-packed bespoke kits available (at a premium) / Red Eye, A visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin (with a layover in London) / Vinyl Engine, turntable information / a history of adventure games / Racer, the physical recreation of a classic video game / Beetroot Blog / a history of the Priddy’s Yard gunpowder store, with lots of old maps / Straw Dogs, a very visual weblog / music gear at 247.com. Not quite a replacement for Music Thing.
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The highly designed life at lox papers, including a library of modern covers. These blogs represent little bubbles of ultra-curated visual lifestyle, where nothing is out of place. See also I like it so what, sweet little photographs, little big magazine and many more / the ‘burbs, a tumblr / Crumbler, a tumblr / work and things by Frank Chimero.
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Lots of great hand-drawn pictures of things with flashing lights at the Newly released UFO files from the from the UK government. What’s remarkable is the quiet patience and courtesy of the MoD responses (‘I am afraid I am unable to offer any explanation or comment in respect of the hypothetical questions in your letter’), especially when the enquiries came from the likes of bufora, the Merseyside Anomalies Research Association, the Truthseeker’s Review, or on writing paper with an alien letterhead. See also Space Invader Couch (via, appropriately enough, Space Invading).
