I’ve no idea what this piece of video is, where it came from, or what it’s for. But it seems an appropriate eulogy for J.G. Ballard, perhaps the only Briton who really understood modernity.
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Strange Harvest is written and edited by Sam Jacob
sam@strangeharvest.com
Sam is a director at fat.co.uk, experiments at samjacob.com, teaches at the AA in London and UIC in Chicago. He is contributing editor for Icon & columnist for Art Review.
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Archive
- Obscure Design Typologies: Fumigation Tents
- S.P.A.M Office / Pieterjan Ginckels
- Man Made Moon: St Paul’s as Selenosphere
- Old Flo House
- Hausu Of Tomorrow
- Anything to Feel Weightless Again, Again
- Architectural Doppelgängers at the AA
- Substance: Classical Architecture, Precision Engineering, Military Hardware and Dewy Nature
- Show & Tell: Our Fancy Fences: An Anthology of Domestic Kitsch / Giacomo Magnani
- Marginalia #1
- Industrial Light & Magic
- Powerless Replicas & Dud Twins: Thoughts On Placebic Objects
- Nostalgia for the New
- Villa Rotunda Redux & The New Originals
- reCAPTCHA Mansions
- Architecture’s Exquisite Corpse: Another Kind Of Folding In Architecture
- Obscure Design Typologies: Fire Training Towers
- Ground Xerox at the AA
- Events This Week
- Aesthetics / Anesthetics at Storefront
- Ground Xerox at the AA
- Excerpts and Extracts
- ‘Make It Real’ Published by Strelka Press
- Strange Harvest Resurrection
- Show & Tell: ‘My Blogspot’ by Paul Davies
- Obscure Design Typologies: Courtroom Docks
- So Lonely: The Architecture of Hugh Grants Face
- Versioned Chairs at Send To Print
- Helvarial
- Half Timbered Fields
- Untitled Brick Wall
- Those Who Walk Through Walls & Other Hertzian Tales
- Obscure Design Typologies: Gorilla Enclosures
- Obscure Design Typologies: Palindromic Objects
- Events: AD Book Launch, Architectural Doppelgängers Panel & OMA as ‘Educator’
- A Walk In The Ruins Of Modernism
- Bonaventure Adventure
- Radical Post Modernism
- Room Service at KK Outlet
- Reverse Pruitt Igoe
- Riots, The Privatised City, Networked Urbanism and the Pretzel Logic of Looting
- Croydon Slash New York: Networks, Riots & Markets
- Three Films: A Clock, A Cave & A Kiss
- Show & Tell II: Experiments in Freedom / David Knight
- Design as Magic, Magic as Design & Live Levitation!
- Obscure Design Typologies: Show Jumps
- Urban Planning Nostalgia
- Goal / Fence
- On Sketches for Regency Living
- At the ICA & in San Rocco
- Show & Tell: Evicting the Ghost / studioBASAR
- Trailer: Copying & Magic
- Obscure Design Typologies: Cricket Scoreboards
- A Song For Project Europe
- Burying Le Corbusier
- Instant Bin Laden Compound!
- The Massed Gadgets Of Albion/Saxe-Coburg
- Exploding, Inevitably
- Solid Cement
- Cities Destroyed for Cash (Then) Blame The Architect
- Riots, Crisis, Architecture and Cities: Damon Rich & Wouter Vanstiphout at the AA
- Spatial Collapse: The Venetolona Pavilion
- Minimalism, An Obituary
- New Broom
- Trash Can Fantasy
- Versioned Chairs
- Rip It Up & Start Again
- Denise Scott Brown, Queen of the Desert
- About A Minute
- Alphabetti Spaghetti Dinners
- Pruitt-Igoe
- The Terror and Romance of SketchUp
- No Dust Adheres
- What I Found When Searching For Dara Birnbaum
- Design Criminals
- Corporate Mountains
- Adding Confusion to Complexity And Contradiction (in Belgium)
- Deep Copy
- Upside Down & Inside Out Picnic Table
- Airport Chapels
- Drawing Workshop, Venice Biennale
- Steven Meisel: Desire, Fear and Beautiful Stupidity
- Sherlockopolis
- Resurrecting the Dodo: The Death and Life of Urban Planning
- Sex and the City 2: Big Screen Urban Theory
- Pound Shop Baroque
- Boring Video Games: Escaping the Tedium of Digital Fantasy
- Geography Collapsing
- Obscure Design Typologies: Photocopiers
- Brutalist Cottages, Bamboo Rolexes & Other Back-To-Front Speculations
- Obscure Design Typologies: Incident Tents
- Postopolis DF
- Election Aesthetics
- Sign Language
- The Worst Condition Is To Pass Under A Sword Which Is Not One's Own
- Design Will Kill Us All, Horribly, Again & Again
- More Scenes In Cartoon Deserta
- Eiffel X-Rays
- Beyond: Values and Symptoms
- Sub Plan
- Shenzhen: Window of the World
- White Power
- Generic Powerpoint Template: Delivering Bad News
- Duplicate Array
- 24
- The Best New Building In London
- Book Review: The Infrastructural City
- A Balloon in the Pantheon
- Letters From The Pantheon
- Henry Moore in Motion
- 52
- On My Steel Horse I Ride
- The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
- Now Showing: John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt
- Obscure Design Typologies: Life Guard Chairs
- Osama bin Laden Cigarette Lighter: Novelty Products as Congealed Culture
- Absurd Car Crashes: A Eulogy for J.G. Ballard
- Candy Pistol
- Now Showing: Dan Grahams 'Rock My Religion'
- This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
- Church of the Literal Narrative
- Philadelphias Floating Architecture
- Strange Harvest Visits: Archizoom, EPFL, Lausanne
- Strange Harvest Visits: Le Corbusier at the Barbican
- Strange Harvest Visits: TU Berlin
- Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
- Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
- Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
- Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
- Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
- C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
- The Foolish House
- 2 The Lighthouse: Self Storage & Architectural Hallucinations
- Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe: Infrastructure as Architectural Subconcious.
- Viva Sectional Cinematography!
- Now Showing: The Installation of an Irreversible Axis on a Dynamic Timeline
- Plug: Junk Jet
- 79
- Sim Seasons Greetings! The Rise of Neo-Winter
- 81
- Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
- The Ruins of the Future
- High Tech As Steampunk …
- On The Retro Infrastructural
- Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
- David Greene: The Big Nothing
- From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
- Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
- Offshoring Audacity
- Vernacular Spectaculars: On Pop, the Everyday, and Escapology
- Leg Work
- World Architecture Festival
- 94
- Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
- Lubetkin Lecture
- The Architecture of Divorce
- 98
- Flagrant Delit: The Movie
- Landscape as Clothing
- Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
- Wild Thing Interiorism
- Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
- 104
- Event: Koolhaas HouseLife @ The Barbican
- 106
- Event: The Evolution of Plastic in Design
- Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
- Foam City
- 110
- Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
- Replica Victoria Falls
- 114
- The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
- Tarmac Adam, Tarmac Eden
- The Secret Language of Surface
- Some Housekeeping
- Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
- My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
- A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
- Olympic Model Protest
- Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
- Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
- Floating Homes
- Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
- BLDGBLOG'S 4th of July Interview Marathon
- Log 12
- Hayward Petcha Kucha
- Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
- The Fountainhead
- Define Your City: Lessons on the Architectural Characters of London
- Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
- Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
- 60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
- Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
- Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
- The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
- Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
- If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
- 41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
- NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
- Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
- Stadium Seat Mosaics
- The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
- Light Vessel Automata
- Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
- Madison Avenue Modern
- Detroit Sucks: The Motor Shows Last Gasp
- Mies' Grave: Cut Out Model
- All You Can Eat
- Valentine Machine
- The Tools of Re-Geography
- Floating in a New Town Sky
- Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
- Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction
- Haystack House
- A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
- Pseudoccino: Instant Coffee Foam
- Yesterdays Technology, Today
- Blown Up: More Inflatable Military Stuff
- On Christmas Trees, Folk Forests and Staples Office Supplies
- Hampton Courts Shrouded Sculptures
- Named Fabric: 20 Sponsored Pieces of Architecture at the New Museum
- Form Follows Felony: The Secret Home of the Un-Dead Canoeist.
- Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy – More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
- Little Magazines Seen Today
- James Bond Lives Next Door: Suburban Imagery as Industry
- The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
- Petrified War Machine
- Military Deceptions
- Chapters for an Imaginary Book About Architecture
- Shrouded Plinth – Urban Striptease
- In the Night Garden – Surreal Landscape of Nostalgia
- Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
- Pill Box Picturesque
- Un Clear Monument
- Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway
- The Marc Bolan Memorial Crash Barrier.
- Warped Domesticity
- The Nuclear Heritage Coast
- Enjoy The Silence: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones
- The Story of O (2)
- Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
- X100: A Design Exercise
- How to Plan A New Town
- Carpet Bomber
- In Search of Britains Vehicular History
- Scenes in Cartoon Deserta
- Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
- Re-Make Re-Model
- I Like Your Manifesto, Lets Put it to the Test-o
- How to Become a Famous Architect
- Northampton – Sci-fi Pop Planning Promotion
- Advertising Central Milton Keynes
- Baltic Exchanged
- Festival of Nostalgia
- The Clapham Trainwash
- Airports as Music
- Test Card Dummies
- The Velvet Underground at the Glass House
- Duplikate: Kate Moss on the Production Line of Individuality
- The Museum that Ate Itself
- Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials
- Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
- Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
- Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
- London's Ugliest Buildings
- 1.51 Miles Of String
- Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
- Church of the Ascension and Descension
- Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
- Replica Bombs
- The Invisible Bungalow
- House / Boat
- Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
- Mountain Sculpting
- Sint Lucas in BD
- Old Walton Bridge
- Kiruna: The Town That Moved
- Spray On Magnetic Defense
- Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
- The Jubilee Gestalt Vase
- The Most Visited Location in the UK
- 'Its beauty will know no season'
- 2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
- Inside-out Aldwych
- Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
- Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
- Nelsons Cavern
- Foam Gargoyle
- New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
- Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
- Souvenir Empire
- Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
- Imperfect Pitch – Football, Space and Landscape
- Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
- Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
- Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
- Picture of the Week 1
- A Little Light Product Placement
- Some Advice To A Young Designer
- London and on and on
- In the Gallery of Ice Creams
- Useless Proclamations for a Beautiful City
- Mini Mies Chair
- Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
- Harvest III: Buried Things
- The Harvest I
- Estuary Urbanism
- The Royal Families Trees
- Everything Flows: ideological cartography
- How Geostationary Was My Valley?
- The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
- LegoLand London Cluster
- In a Lonely Place – Under Construction
- Design Will Eat Itself
- Marchitecture. Architectural things to do in London this March
- Metallic Jet Powered Cloud
- "When we got married I had no idea he would do something like this, he just said he was going to do some decorating."
- The Electric Cenotaph
- Russian Rok
- Dinner in the Iguanadon
- Trace
- Highways
- Fork Hook
- Rest In Peace
- California Dreamin'
- What happens when you cross a pen with a car?
- Leg Table Leg
- Florentine Building Sites
- Good Morning Britain
- Football Pitch: Best of British
- The Sad Photographer
- The First Cut is the Cheapest – Blenheim Palace: pop architecture that goes for the jugular
- Book Now For Christmas
- Requiem for a Toilet Seat
- Architecture that Destroys
- TomTom Mobile 5 / GO 700
- Winning Design
- Another Croydon
- Holiday Snap II : Giant Glowing French Balls
- Holiday Snap: Canadian War Memorial, Vimy, France
- Pecha Kucha London
- Big Bens
- First Cut – Case Closed
- The Texas Tower
- Its All About the Big Benjamins
- G8 Security Tower
- White Cubed Blues
- Poundbury, unexpectedly, in the rain
- The Exploding Concrete Inevitable. Lou Reed and the Casa da Musica
- Swingball
- Untitled (Plastic Sack and Timber)
- Berlin 1945 – The Obscene Picturesque
- Football, Abstraction and Urbanism
- Pizza Planet
- Goal Sculptures
- Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
- Previewing Cedric Price
- The Mardas Touch
- Building a Lionel Richie Head
- Ornament is Grime 2
- An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
- Flatpack Frenzy at New IKEA
- Langlands & Bell – The House of Osama Bin Laden
- Happy Death Men
- Build to Let
- Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
- Niagara Falls
- Ornament is Grime
- FA(ke) Cup
- Q&A: Wouter Vanstiphout
- X-treme urinals
- Unigate Cowscape
- Spray-on Snow
- Complete the following assignments:
- From the Baffler …
- One in a Taxi
- The Queen Machine
- The Knork
- Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
- Polictical Placards
- The Ketchup Conumdrum
- Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
- It's a Small World
- Images de Parfums
- Soft Carcass
- Christopher Dresser at the V&A
- Blow up Pub
- Municipal Mummification
- The Matt and Ron Show
- Semi – detached
- Half Timbered Van
- Feltham Future
- Favorite Things
- Fugitives and Refugees' – Chuck Palahniuk
- The Pop Vernacular
- Design by Chefs
- Just What is it That Makes Yesterdays Homes So Different, So Appealing?
- Archigrams Pastoral Futurism
- Sorry Mies
- Mac OS X.3
- Thomas Heatherwick Conran Foundation Collection
- Tarmaceden
- MTV Cribs
- Resident Evil – Gothic Architecture Reanimated
- In the Twilight of the Magicians
- The Flaming Lips – Live.
- Goodbye Piccadilly
- Design for Babies
- Silk Cut. The Last Cut is the Deepest.
- Kripsy Kreme
- Everything Counts – The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
- The London Evening Standard.
- General Electric Halogen Candle Light Bulb.
- Aromatherapy Washing Up Liquid
- Carlton Terrace Extension
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[...] Sam Jacob had made of one of my undergraduate artworks: Absurd Car Chases. You can find the link here. Not having read any J.G. Ballard for years, I’ll quietly accept with a grateful [...]