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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: linkage, maps, pelican

posted by things at 00:15 / 1 comments

Epic images from NASA's Cassini Probe / be careful what you wish for. Back in August 2007, icon magazine included a feature called Why design needs a recession / paintings by Dane Lovett / Have you ever thrown a book across a room? And which books? / Radio La, a weblog / Grevytrain, a weblog / Schematic Map of UK Postcode areas and the United States.

Thanks to Fantastic Journal for the recognition. It's pretty rare for architects to maintain weblogs, and it must be even rarer for two out of three key partners in a major practice to run sites that neatly cross boundaries between architecture and culture and totally dispel the myth that architects are closeted in ivory towers, utterly unaware of things like instant decorative snow (strange harvest) - an undeniably architectural object - and submerged buildings (fantastic journal)

The Language of Things, a rather scathing review of the new Deyan Sudjic book, which laments the abscence of a 'theoretical agenda', stating that the 'design community' needs to be 'as comfortable as the art world with the idea of questioning itself'. What theoretical tools are there to be unpacked? It seems to us that the role of design spectator has become the defining position of the age; we consume design not through use, but through observation. Sudjic's book would seem to confirm this, with its focus on the emerging (and receding?) luxury industry, characterised by Selfridge's Wonder Room and countless hideous objects.

Abandoned London, photos by Ianvisits. See also the Derelict London group, inspired by the website of the same name / Saskatchewan Ghost Towns. You have to dig about a bit to get to the photographs / Squashed writers / thanks to Slaw for the mention / Ruffly, a weblog / Life at HOK, an example of the new breed of corporate blog. The Whole Buffalo one is also a 'corporate' blog, in that it's run by members of the St Luke's agency in London / The Endsheet, a weblog devoted to book design.

Jonathan Beller's project 'Fans' is a collection of obsessives. See also James Mollison's gallery of disciples / we have a new project, 'Touring', 'the famous automobile card game' published by George, Charles and Edward Parker in 1926.

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Pelican of the Week, an occasional series. Learning to Philosophize, by E.R.Emmet, with a cover by Robert Hollingsworth. Not a lot to find out about the designer, apart from this Design article from October 1972, when the publisher's design department was overseen by David Pelham. Pelham was given carte blanche to revitalise the aesthetic approach of the series - the visual mish-mash of the mid to late 1960s is very evident. Learning to Philosophize isn't perhaps the greatest thing to come out of the era, with its self-conscious 'computer-style' typeface and awkward patterns.

We're indebted to the transcript of Pelham's 2007 talk at the V and A on the Creative Review blog, which reveals how he drew on work by artists like Eduardo Paolozzi and Allen Jones, who would not only provide original works but also their magpie-like eyes for the ephemera of the late Pop era: 'Every now and again [Paolozzi would] give me a rather fat file of visually interesting little cuttings that he habitually clipped out of magazines: technological magazines such as Scientific American and wonderful science-fiction magazines and so forth'. From Design: 'Other writers are simply dogmatic: Nabokov insists on his own design [although the Design article contradicts this], which means that nearly every cover looks different; Salinger insists on the same plain silver backs being written into every contract; Gunter Grass does the covers, like everything else, himself.' Many other insights on that page.

There are also some contemporary covers reproduced at this Designer Daily post on Pelican/Penguin cover art. Also related, Scientific American Cover Art, with particular emphasis on the artwork of the 1950s and 1960s. The Penguin Collectors Society.

As for the book itself, Learning to Philosophize was described as a ''think-it-yourself' handbook for the application of logic and philosophy in daily life', a sort of proto-de Bono or de Botton, with the 'digital' design tapping into then contemporary thoughts on the emergence of artifical intelligence and the relationship between the brain and the computer. Next time we do this we'll try and include an actual extract from the book in question. Promise.

Labels: architecture, linkage, pelican

posted by things at 18:30 / 0 comments

Currently unable to post, apparently. Something to do with a java error? posted by things at 22:23 / 1 comments

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

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

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

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 19:19 / 0 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 23:38 / 1 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 00:40 / 0 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 21:00 / 0 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top image from The Little Artists.

Labels: linkage

posted by things at 12:33 / 1 comments

The Beaford Archive, 'established in the early 1970s to document the land, its people, and their traditional way of life in rural North Devon.' The archive contains 80,000 images by the late James Ravilious (son of Eric, more images at Rennart) / Magazines now archived on Google Book Search. Thus far there doesn't appear to be any way of finding out which magazines have been filleted for the purposes of scanning (e.g. New York Magazine, for example). This is one way to do it, but is surely not very comprehensive. From Popular Science, April 1948, '10 Easy Ways to 'get that Extra Room''.

Aviation in Rio de Janeiro, a host of imagery from the era of seaplanes and Zeppelins (via Continuity in Architecture) / Jonathan Jones (or a sub-editor) asks, 'Is the Sagrada Familia being banalised in the name of tourism?' The old maxim applies - if an article is being posed as a question, the answer is inevitably 'no': 'Far from betraying Gaudi's spirit, the belief that the Sagrada Familia should be finished is in accord with a religious sensibility in which the architect is a worker, not a star.'

UseLess objects by JVLT. Although the designer claims to be making a comment about Design/Art culture ('The works of "UseLess is More" represent the essential difference existing between Design and Art. Industrial design produces useful objects with good taste. Art produces useless "things" from a functional point of view, but with meaning as its essential prerequisite.'), these seem to work better as a critique of image-led design culture. They are highly crafted objects constructed, photographed and then distributed in such a way as to make widespread reproduction inevitable.

Photographs by Matthew Porter. Lovely / photography by Leon Chew / art by Michael Clyde Johnson. We especially like the 'room for forced perspective' / the London Architecture Diary / me-fi has the requisite round-up of Oliver Postgate links / live stats from BBC News / ask me-fi has some fine death metal recommendations / try out the radio / need a random number?

Our initial thoughts (since excised) that the merging of the editorial teams for the Architects' Journal with the Architectural Review implied a 'less than rosy future' for the titles. On reflection, this could be read as a slight against those working on the titles. Far from it - the Architects' Journal is probably the best architecture publication in the UK right now (although we will greatly miss Patrick Lynch's column). We were simply worried that the move was a first step on the road to closing the AR altogether. We'd be very happy to be wrong - few magazines have such inherent potential (and such a glorious legacy - check Eversion's AR-related sets) as the AR. The 'outrage' column (which might nowadays fill a whole section), the spirited campaigns for a more human urbanism, the sheer depth and quality of the design.

As our sidebar attests, the signal to noise ratio in the contemporary architecture scene is high. The architecture blogs crackle with static as the image - both real and rendered - achieves a kind of primacy that even the most enthusiastic advocates of architectural photography could not possibly have predicted. In other words, it's hard to write about architecture when the popular hunger - mostly amongst other architects, it seems - is not for text, but pictures. As a result, we have a whole generation of designers who have learned to take advantage of this literary blight by diagramming their work, reducing structure, program, planning and theory to a set of criticism-deflecting visual codes.

Labels: architecture, linkage, media

posted by things at 14:20 / 0 comments

Victory City, Orville Simpson's epic attempt at creating a private utopia (via me-fi). This example of amateur urban planning is defiantly high rise (in exceptional detail), a rarity, as the fantasy conurbations of fiction and the imagination are rarely vertical. In the real world, going up remains the definitive statement of modernity (although the passion for tall buildings may well wane considerably). Related, a gallery of the Burj Dubai at IconEye featuring photographs by David Hobcote (who has contributed to BurjDubaiSkyscraper.com, a site that appears perpetually astounded by the relentlessly upwards progression of this building).

However, unveil an unlimited landscape of infinite possibility, and what is the architectural response? Nostalgic homages to a lost modernism. In Original Sim ('For the architects of Second Life, reality bites') a tour around the virtual spaces created by real world designers, the real and the surreal abut each other. For architects, the attractions of 'building' in Second Life are obvious: 'There are no planners, no building regulations, no thermal loss calculations, no value engineering by developers.' Yet this is a quote from a designer who 'also maintains [Second Life's recreation of the] Farnsworth House', surely the most iconic example of architectural arrogance ever created. When left completely to their own devices, architects either create chromatically extravagant, structurally improbable buildings or attempt to develop and finesse the more rigorous aspects of modernism.

Perhaps amateurism should be given free reign. The traditionalists are attempting to strike back, with limited success. 'I'll show you a real carbuncle, Charles,' Poundbury takes a pounding (excellent photographs by Paul Russell, demonstrating that so-called 'bad' architecture often makes a far more interesting subject than 'good' architecture, perhaps due to the accommodation of context). Two more things that relate to adhocism and individuality: all about The Story of High Street, a new book from the Mainstone Press about the retail variety of 1938. I want to get on with my life but the market won't let me, a photo-essay at infinite thought, a journey along the Piccadilly Line to the wretched Westfield ('the new home of luxury', the Gherkin looming out of the website in a deliberate perversion of the city's geography to lure the unwary) and on to the miserable (and doomed) Trocadero.

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What are some great lost albums? / Slow Painting, a weblog / architecture photos by flickr user rucativava / the Gibson Dark Fire, a 'robot guitar' that looks intriguingly stuffed with all manner of sound-tweaking technology. Something for a future edition of music thing to obsess over.

Farewell to Oliver Postgate / at the other end of the creative spectrum (although linked, perhaps, via the Clangers, 'Sci-fi 'creator' Forrest Ackerman dies' / Strawberry and Cream, craft and art / 25 times a second, a tumblelog / The brilliance of creative chaos / Istanbul (Not Constantinople, a weblog.

Atelier Malkovich, a collection of half scale idealised artist's ateliers / revisiting the Taos Hum, 'a low-pitched sound heard in numerous places worldwide ... usually heard only in quiet environments, and often described as sounding like a distant diesel engine' / the demons of Building 280 / Iain's C64 homepage / paintings by Laura Moreton-Griffiths / buy stuff off the police with Bumblebee Auctions.

'The New Examined Life: Why more people are spilling the statistics of their lives on the Web' / thanks to David for the following digging at the New York Public Library's portal, including a selection of NYC Atlases, a huge image library, including the work of Bernice Abbott. Related, an Austeresque venture: a photo of every single street corner in Manhattan, by Richard Howe (via kottke).

Labels: architecture, future, linkage

posted by things at 12:45 / 2 comments