'The Bottom Line - It's all about Data', DDE on the ever-evolving Open Street Map. Thanks to a tireless comparison at RefNum, OSM is found to be far more accurate than Google Maps: 'examining the road network shows 89 "errors" in Google Maps'. As ever, it's the data gathered on the way that's the most fascinating: the flickr set is a treasure trove for lovers of English street sign typography.

After yesterday's post, let this be the 20th use of the word 'papbot' on the internet. Previously associated with this paper automaton / a history of the London Docklands Development Corporation / human tetris. In Japan, of course / Buzzword, meet word perhect.

The end of Electrelane. Sad / My Bloody Valentine restart? / the Halloween Horrors of architecture / On Her Majesty's Postal Service, i like on Bond stamps and Pan paperback covers / related, two James Bond flowcharts, via Isegoria: opening sequence and Overview.

Our Champion, Clay Risen on Herbert Muschamp, occasional lapses in judgement, reflecting badly on all of us and how media works in the late 20th and 21st centuries. 'But in elevating an underwear ad to the plane of great art, Muschamp seemed to be flattening everything cultural into the consumable - morality and society had no place in a worldview that judged everything by its ability to deliver instant, though momentary, gratification.'

Related, the end of Stylus Magazine - Noise into Music explains why sites like Last.fm 'promote mediocrity': 'Why read 600 words about why you might or might not adore a record when you can get given a list of records you almost certainly will quite like for nothing, everyday? And that's the thing about downloading, about free music; everything is worth a listen if it costs you nothing.'

We have similar feelings about the advent of new online technologies as well. things is powered by blogger but every page apart from the weblog is hand-coded in notepad. It takes ages. It's the modern equivalent of using hot lead type and it has its limitations. We got as far as setting up css, but that was a few years ago now. Any advice for how to make this site a little more, well, contemporary?

The internet feels a little overloaded today. First Blogger starting to crumble under its own weight (as noted here, here, here, here, and here), then Yahoo mail buckled and stopped. posted by things at 10:06

If we were in charge of administering black budgets and ultra-secret projects, the current state of the world would offer enormous comfort. Rumour and speculation are rife in the 30 billion dollar world of covert technology, the likes and capacity of which we can only begin to imagine. But our imagination is the problem. Click past the respectable windows into the dark world of covertly funded projects, like the insight offered by the Federation of American Scientists, for example, and it's easy to lose track of what's real, what's imagined, what's proposed, projected or merely the paranoid ramblings of people who believe they're being kept in the dark. The whole black helicopter phenomenon is little more than a manifestation of collective uncertainty, a useful, if nebulous, thing to point the trembling finger at.

So when stories titled 'Are We Being Watched by Flying Robot Insects? enter the public realm (even in the Washington Post), they are received with a tone of scepticism, tinged with a bit of gee-whiz speculation (via Never mind the Black Helicopters, look out for the Dragonflies, where the mood is appalled, unsurprised and generally disdainful). Sure, the technology and the theory exists, but it's the applications that unsettle. A recent issue of Professional Engineering (Vol:20 Issue:16, subscription required) carried the story 'Spy copter debut passes over heads of festival-goers', quietly noting how police trialled the Hicam Microdrone at the V Festival, after earlier trials ('Police force tests airborne spy camera', (Guardian, Tuesday May 22, 2007). It was widely reported at the time, and the coverage has veered from admiring to alarmist. This Wired Gallery neatly summarises the current state and scale of (visible) technology, which ranges from military vehicles down to small(ish) companies like Schiebel and their Camcopter (and their rather elegant factory).

Miniature UAV's (or just MAVs) are high on the agenda at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), as well as places like the University of Florida. It's not hard to imagine why such a thing might be needed, or why governments around the world are champing at the bit to get hold of MAVs, but by the same token one should assume that even if the quasi-legendary robot dragonflies don't exist, then something incredibly similar already exists. The Economist has run a couple of stories - 'Rise of the Machines' and 'The Fly's a Spy' - that posit believable near-future scenarios. 'The bigger worries are to do with privacy: some of these flying machines will be so small that they will be able to fly inside buildings, filming everything they see; heaven knows what paparazzi will do with them.'

Imagine a swarm of quasi-autonomous paparazzibots, programmed to relentlessly home in on Paris Hilton's iPhone or electronically paired with the Bluetooth transmitter in Prince Harry's Range Rover. Tomorrow's celebrities will be permanently accompanied by an unwelcome micro-cloud of buzzing devices, miniature versions of the news choppers that blight the LA skies, mimicking the fly-strewn perimeter of Pigpen from Peanuts. So disposable that they're released in their hundreds, all busy feeding streams of high resolution imagery back to their masters. If cell phones had to have an artificial shutter sound piped in to their cameras to sate privacy concerns, what noise will be regulated on the flying camera fleet?

Labels: conspiracy, future, robots

posted by things at 10:31

At times, the weblog feels like a very transitory format. It is the VHS cassette of media delivery. There came a point where everyone had videos: they were the future, and huge sums were being invested in ensuring the technology was as efficient as possible. The fall-off from ubiquity to obsolescence was precipitous - and video was unceremoniously ejected. And the weblog? What use a steady stream of pointers to new corners of the digital realm when we are slowly but inexorably heading towards an ultimate goal: the digitisation of absolutely everything.

Last week, both The Guardian and its sister paper the Observer announced their digital archives, pay to view sites that 'will eventually contain reproductions of every page, article and advertisement published in The Observer since its birth in 1791 and in our sister paper The Guardian since it started in 1821.' It's not cheap; a monthly pass costs �49.95 (and one wonders how long this data will stay secure in this leaky world of 1s and 0s). But it is a start. Weblogs will lose their status as custodians of the leaky, poorly-catalogued and dusty library that is the internet. Instead, they will be the modern equivalent of Gilbert Bland, map thiefs and bookbreakers for a new era.

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Other things. Those crazy 80s. See also our gallery here / go on, build a Lego model of the Imperial Executor, the 19km long 'personal flagship of Darth Vader'. The instructions are a work of art, and the model only includes 1548 more pieces than Lego's own Imperial Star Destroyer model / Military Planes Collide over East Braintree / BackStory: Casa Da Musica, the Archinect series looks at OMA's faceted masterpiece in Porto.

Good to see that Gillespie, Kidd and Coia have their own website, many years after their demise. There's also an extensive flickr pool for explorers of the modernist ruins of St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, the firm's abandoned masterpiece. It has an extensive web presence: SubmitResponse, Risky Buildings, Glasgow Architecture, Hidden Glasgow, and the Twentieth Century Society. The fashion for building websites for the dead continues - see the Basil Spence Archive.

London's new Olympic stadium unveiled, fresh controversy follows close behind: Bland as a bowl of blancmange. Really? Few building types are more suited to being empty vessels than stadiums. Conversely, the superficiality of applied decoration or elaborate structural conceits also looks most obvious on a stadium, a building of raw functionality (and flexibility, far more so than any number of cultural or creative spaces).

House and Garden shuts up shop, citing excessive operating costs. A million subscribers left bereft / The Fourth Plinth, Thomas Schutte's imaginary Philippe Starck hotel for pigeons. Flickr sets of previous Fourth Plinth projects. The official Fourth Plinth site / Why VHS was better than Betamax.

More Hidden Glasgow, a gem of a site (see 'water towers') / The Piracy Paradox, James Surowiecki in The New Yorker on the role copying plays in progressing planned obsolescence. (via La Petite Claudine). Also via LPC, Bob Truby's Brand Name Pencils. A world of long and oversized ferrules. It is a thing of beauty.

Labels: library, maps, weblog

posted by things at 22:37

Strange Metal Orb found in Texas. We love mystery objects (via) / Walk the Willett Way (pdf). David Rooney on the south London locations associated with William Willett, creator of British Summer Time / a Bang and Olufsen fan page / Gaming Magazines of the Pre-Internet Era (via) / 'This page is dedicated to the history of all things Street Level. Street Level was a recording studio based in west London, it existed in the early 1980's.'

Malaysia is using high altitude M-55 planes to provide country-wide broadband. From Flight International: the aircraft 'would carry communications equipment at the stratospheric level - around 20km (12 miles) - providing broadband services including internet, mobile phone, and broadcast and television coverage throughout Malaysia'. Another variant on the High Altitude Platform concept.

Distorte on ffffound and things: ffffiddlesticks. They've got a point / Radiolarians for Jesus, making science fun / the Peckham Literary Festival, featuring appearances by the likes of Will Hodgkinson / some flickr picks. London Life in the 1970s / 1944 Greater London Plan / old photos of Camberwell / an incredible flickr set of London Pubs.

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Apologies for the time-shifting on the front page. Anyone else experiencing trouble with Blogger posting right now?

Labels: flick, Peckham, suburbs

posted by things at 10:02

We are sliding towards an irreversible obsession with totally visual communication. Text is struggling to keep up. Only dense, layered, information-rich text cuts it in the online world, preferably broken up with images and other information, which might explain why the blog form, in particular the visual blog, is currently so successful. FFFFOUND! makes this dominance explicit, doing away with everything but the barest caption and paring the internet's role down to a purveyor of visual interest and nothing else. Line, pattern and texture can be condensed into a parcel of pixels, creativity contained within 200,000 tiny squares, pasted and posted, as yet another passing comment ('It's Nice That').

The democratisation of creativity has the flip effect of vastly speeding up the amount of time we spend looking at things, appreciating the craft and the process. An image like this is gobbled up and spat out in seconds. A few years ago, there was an art project where every book in a library was arranged according to colour, not title or subject ('There is Nothing Wrong in the Whole Wide World', a piece by Chris Cobb). On reflection, it's a nice metaphor for the dominance of visual searching over content searching, our eyes skimming lightly over huge swathes of deep level content without ever really engaging in it.

So is the quality of digital imagery inversely related to the degradation of quality in the real world? Perhaps. The vast majority of weblogs act like sluice gates, simply helping the flow of culture along without adding to the volume of water in any way. Do we really need any of this stuff? Is it not the digital equivalent of Brooks Stevens' planned obsolesence, imagery for imagery's sake, simply helping visual culture to accelerate its churn rate?



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Virtual worlds threaten values, according to Lord Puttnam (read it in Second Life), sounding off about 'toy-themed virtual worlds'. The story mentions the following: BarbieGirls, UB Funkeys, Stardoll, Tygirlz, and Webkinz. All aimed at girls, strangely. Lego Universe is on its way / the other porn, tracking obsessional commodification and intensive marketing / Back to the Future in Vice City, at digital urban / a Q+A with Lego's CEO, courtesy of Monocle, as well as the Brickshelf, an enormous Lego resource / Trompe L'Oeil, a series by artist Remy Lidereau / Peeron is another amazing Lego resource.

Boyd Homes Group, the 'network for owners and friends of Robin Boyd's projects'. See also City of Sound's recent post touching on Boyd and his writings / dirty beloved, weblog of old imagery / a set of good simple recipes / London Connections delves in to the murk of the political and social processes behind keeping the capital's transport systems going / Undercity.org, goings on beneath Manhattan.

Deleted scenes, forgotten dreams, experimental music weblog (via ask me-fi) / 7 inch punk, more mp3s / even more noise at Strange Reaction / Ezeskankin, a collection of mix tapes from the 90s / 'robot folk tales' at bluebell.fm, a site by Emma Payne of fed by birds / Shake Your Fist, an mp3 blog / Song for Someone, up and running.

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The Pompidou Centre was often likened to an ocean liner adrift in an urban context, Piano's first real ocean liner, the Pacific Dawn, is relatively conventional, almost retro. Corbusier rattled on endlessly about the ocean liner, which he considered to be 'an architecture pure, neat, clear, clean and healthy,' adding, 'Contrast this with our carpets, cushions, canopies, wall-papers, carved and gilt furniture, faded or 'arty' colours: the dismalness of our Western bazaar.' In the decades that followed, designers like Norman Bel Geddes and Luigi Colani both had a crack at the ocean liner, morphing the clean lines so admired by Corb into bulbous expressions of streamlining and futurism. But no-one could decribe contemporary liner design as being even remotely innovative, with whatever heyday that once existed long vanished.



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Color me impressed, colour charts at parenthetically / the weburbanist collates photo-led stories from around the world, like this collection of 7 more underground wonders of the world / Urbanized, photos by Robert Stephens / hisamichi58, image bombardment / photographer Klaus Thymann (some images nsfw) / very small rain, a weblog with photography / AIM 25, archives in London and the M25 area.

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The story of the Ferrari 512 Modulo concept / Hobson Industries, a 'mini Land-Rover factory' with 25 million pounds worth of stock, able to keep old models, especially military ones, on the road almost indefinitely (via this BBC News story) / Stout Books has acquired the architectural library of the late G.E.Kidder Smith. Many gems inside / Phillips de Pury are holding an auction of the work of Guy Bourdin / Modern Movement Architecture in the UK, a small selection of noted buildings compiled by Tom Flynn / Mies Photo Auction Raises Questions, a tale of dubious provenance. posted by things at 00:09

Wealth is like a bubble, a shrink-wrapped world of cliche and slavish imitation. At least, that's what one takes away from this story, The Hogarth of hedge funds offers a glimpse into a hidden world, in which 'Artist [Adam Dant] spent six months documenting the mysterious lives of the wizards of finance'. "Every office must have its spot painting," says Dant, "and perhaps a Cy Twombly and Warhol."

House of the Century, Kostis Velonis on a 70s classic / The London Consortium, worth investigating more closely / how that whizzy H+deM render of the new Tate came about, thanks to Hayes Davidson (via PartIV. See also, 'How to Work "I'm an Architect" into Casual Conversation' / Jonathan Freedland on The Peckham Experiment. See also.

The Early Birds of Aviation / the New World of Electronic Music / Phil Dodds played the synthesizer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind / 25 Photographs Taken at the Exact Right Time, via me-fi / work/space, a weblog / Philiform, a site dedicated to this obscure Lego/Fischer Technik derivative.

The Architecture of Parking, a gallery taken from Simon Henley's new book / the top five architectural pet hates / Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month / Russell Davies on Philippe Halsman's classic 'Jump' / via BLDGBLOG's musings on embedded Alpine architecture, the work of Leo Fabrizio (previously linked), pointed to by muse-ings.

posted by things at 12:26

Loom Studio's 12 Blocks is a brave attempt at creating a tesselating set of construction blocks, a means of creating variety and innovation in the US brick market ('Eighteen million tons of concrete block are created each year in the United States'). The intention is to allow architects and builders to create walls 'with more integrity, efficiency and life; one that might offer a maximum of effect with a minimum of means.'

Their myriad possibilities for pattern bring to mind a collision between the complex prefabricated blockwork employed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the more self-conscious folding, woven surfaces that are fashionable in contemporary architecture and design. See the work of Foreign Office Architects; the studio's principal, Farshid Moussavi, has written of the role of technology in generating contemporary ornament. Consider also the complex constructions of Richard Sweeney or Eric Gjerde (more).



Ultimately, though, 12 blocks represents a step back from computer-generated complexity, a trend towards procedural architecture that is epitomised by works like the Mercedes Benz Museum by UN Studio. This folded, winding structure is an exercise in frenzied computational geometry and intertwined planes: without the computer, these forms would be impossible ('It was also a building where computer modelling allowed the firm to manage the whole design and production process continuously, updating any change throughout the model within minutes,', from Kester Rattenbury's recent review, 'The belief in unfolding possibilities').

FLW allegedly drew inspiration from the Froebel blocks he played with in his nursery, a bit of architectural myth-making alluded to by his biographer Brendan Gill and enthusiastically embraced (see here for example, or this 1995 Froebel blocks exercise). Yet although Wright at his most inventive underpins modernist invention, the role of such fundamental forms in architecture - the triangle, block, the occasional circle - was most apparent in the proto-post-modernism of someone like Aldo Rossi.



Strange that Modernism should stress the importance of the 'essential object' to its visual lexicon when 'classic modernism' doesn't fare well when it's pared right down to fundamentals. If proportion is everything, an I-beam or a concrete block holds very little magic when compared to one of Wright's intensely patterned panels. The artefacts of the glass and steel era tend not to be building fabric but furnishings. Taking the Froebel block as a starting point inevitably leads you down the path of massing and composition, rather than transparency, space and light. Lego, for example, is a poor way to reproduce modernism (I, II, III), but makes for a jaunty, Sullivan-esque skyscraper or two.

posted by things at 07:53

The state of Late Period Modernism. Ed's Shed, the story of a house, a neat box of timber and concrete. Utterly contemporary (designed by David Adjaye, no less), yet also timeless, with a vague sense of drifting from era to era. Or try Camp Bastion, the story of a military base. Recent winner of the Judges Special Award at the British Construction Industry awards, Camp Bastion cost £53m and was completed in 4 months. The site, in Helmland Province, contains barracks for 2,350, a 50-man hospital, helicopter base and 1,000m runway (that £53m cost gets rounded up (?) to £1bn by the Independent). Finally, 'One man's grand ambition gives veneer of bling to an ancient land', the tale of (life) President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and his attempts to build a new Brasilia on the steppes. Pearman wrote fairly eloquently about the aesthetic fiasco that is Foster's 'Pyramid of Peace', but the official site of Astana City is right on the money, a combination of SimCity Societies, Second Life and Ebeneezer Howard, replete with graphs and tables, optimistic announcements with a ring of the Five Year Plan about them.

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Two from Pruned, a post about Ferropolis, the theme-park / graveyard of retired digging machines, and the ensanguinated Trevi fountain / nice to appear on this list of the Top 100 UK blogs, although we're poised right at the bottom of the league table / Normal Bias, 'scanned' audio tapes (via me-fi projects) / a set of images of Arcosanti, looking rather ravaged and forlorn.

DNA Art UK, splash your genetic fingerprint about. Related, the man with the magic box gets his comeuppance / home-made helicopters / Pasta and Vinegar, a weblog focusing on user experience / Glancey on BMW Welt, W* on Welt / a collection of Estonian Schoolbooks, at Fed by Birds / amp power, snappy culture reviews / electronic audio nostalgia at hollow sun / the 10 most fabulous key fobs / violins and starships, a weblog / infinite thought, a weblog / The Midnight Bell, a weblog.

There's not enough online about Rapid Eye Magazine, save the occasional tribute to its maverick and detached take on pop culture in all its more twisted manifestations (an anthology can still be bought through Creation Books. In the pre-internet era, Dwyer's stream-of-consciousness writing, densely layered with references to arcane practices, myths, drugs and general strangeness was like dipping into a mysterious world, a place of the imagination, not Google-induced instant gratification. posted by things at 20:27

The Stray Shopping Cart Project, via the daily jive / The Information Freeway, a free map of the planet / The Return of Baby Hatches, a frankly alarming look at an overlooked urban object by deputy dog / Superstatial, a new architecture/urbanism weblog / pecknam blog, 'adventures in south-east London' / the Los Angeles Homicide Map. We need one of these for south-east London.

The most random piece of simulacra ever? 'Is this Pope John Paul II waving from beyond the grave? Vatican TV director says yes' / Machina Dynamica, a sophisticated way of removing money from your wallet (via audiophile, via me-fi). Our favourite is the 'Teleportation Tweak', an 'an advanced communications technique discovered and developed by Machina Dynamica for upgrading audio systems remotely -- even over very long distances... The Teleportation Tweak is performed over the telephone line and will sound to the listener like a series of mechanical noises. The tweak itself takes about 30 seconds.'. To you, sixty dollars.

Does architecture need prizes? / the late Kisho Kurokawa, as featured in Building Design (especially the 'holiday time capsule') / a fetishistic look at the last day of Routemaster Route 38, at kookymojo's flickr stream / God is in the TV, a music site, with its own singles club / Cooking for Engineers, analytical recipes / hometracked, a site dedicated to bedroom studios, home engineers and indie producers / the where blog enters the world of ffffound. posted by things at 20:24

A sift through a collection of style, design, whatever weblogs, all of which pump a relentless stream of eye-catching imagery into your browser, day in, day out: An Illustrated Treatise on Ammunition and Ordnance, 1880-1960, just another small portion of Steve Johnson's CyberHeritage International / Giavasan, imagery, etc. / "Eyes on the Metropole: Seeing London and Beyond", a paper by Sharon M. Twigg and Theresa M. Kelley.

The Greenwich Phantom, all about the London borough / the Top 100 Architecture Blogs, an in-depth collection of links, compiled by International Listings, a realtor / more link tag, Postmodern revision, Arkitektur juxtaposes two iconic images of destruction from the tail-end of the post-modern era, Zabriskie Point and Pruitt-Igoe.

Western Park Sublime gothic Sculpture (via Blanketfort) / the Elements of Branding, via Coudal / photos by Anne lass, via conscientious / Monoscope, the lure of the object / Dumb Angel, 'the proclamation of Modernist art, pop surf culture and Los Angeles sound design of the 1960s. Offering up pop with a consciousness.'

An epic collection of Hornby Trains goes up for auction . There are some beautiful items / Andy Bosselman, an advertising and design weblog / the selfdivider, a NY-based culture weblog / design for mankind blogs (often superfluous) objects / as does The World's Best Ever / along with Better Living Through Design / when was the first ever book written by someone called Steve?

Yatzer, 'design is to share' / Imedagoze, blogs on interiors, prints and textiles / ADEK Bouwkunde Blog, architecture and more / Brazilian architecture brut, the Casa de Pedra in Paraisopolis (site of this famous juxtaposition), the South American answer to the Palais ideal du Facteur Cheval.

The Girl in the Green Dress, more things. We like the House-off Switch / Luksus, places and objects / What's the Jackanory?, an illuminating weblog by photographer Andrew Hetherington / who links on to the work of Andres Gonzalez / Liberty London Girl has a nice take on the Atlantic divide.

Silent Noise Control, an mp3 blog / whatever happened to Levittown? A NY Times slideshow that illustrates more than a few of the famous suburban archetypes lurching uncontrollably towards McMansionism. Obesity, they tell us, is not our fault. Houses too can let themselves go / all sorts of imagery thanks to Bouphonia.

A review of Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, or rather, the man who invented himself./ A purveyor of 'airport doorstops', Robbins embellished his life with bogus tales of orphanages and soliciting, yet still racked up 750 million book sales. A cover gallery / on the Use of Text in Videogames, an essay at the always engaging Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Ishbadiddle, 'An occasional report on ephemeral things' / is this the package that shapes the architectural future? Maxwell Render / Let's be frank about Spence, or does Basil really deserve all this attention? posted by things at 23:28