This week is the 30th birthday of EastEnders, the BBC soap set in East London. Its title sequence has since the start been an ariel shot of the east end. And over the last 30 years, this area of London

The American Psycho / Redrow London mashup you’ve all been waiting for. And here is a link to the original film – a quite incredible ad for new luxury apartments that displays all of the psychotic qualities the London housing market suffers

On Tavistock Place there’s a stretch of Victorian terraced housing that is now (mostly) a string of hotels and B&B’s. You might wonder if any of those budget travellers, while trundling their suitcases up from Euston Station look up to

Thanks to Richard Rhys of Pattern Foundry comes this 2 hr lecture on the mathematics of the brick by mathematician John Conway It starts in the lecture theatre with Conway outlining the dimension of the brick, then explaining how various types of bond work

Here is the soundtrack commissioned by The Vinyl Factory and 180 The Strand for the Clockwork Jerusalem party at the Venice Biennale. Mixed by JD Twitch and JG Wilkes aka Optimo the mix brings together such seemingly disparate music sources

To coincide with the summer solstice, here is a little extract from my essay in the Clockwork Jerusalem book published alongside the show I’ve co-curated at the British Pavilion. The book is beautiful – burt sadly only available from the

A round up of writing elsewhere: Over on BD is a guide to the Architecture of Breaking Bad. Here is an excerpt: The Crystal Ship: It’s the image Breaking Bad opens with: an RV careering though the desert and crashing into

Over on Dezeen, I’ve written something about the Etsy-fication of Modernism – the way that big, social projects of the 1960’s like Park Hill and the Trellick Tower have reappeared as modern domestic chintz. And how this perhaps reveals that historical

A quick heads up for a piece I wrote for Domus about Mipim, the annual global property fair titled ‘Where Cities Talk To Money’. Here’s a link, and below are a couple of excerpts. ….. Passing model after model, rendered in

Over on Dezeen I have a two part piece on how digital culture is shaping design – altering its methods and its scope. It talks about the idea of ecology – both the use of the world as a metaphor

There’s something very spooky about this story from the Telegraph with the headline: Town erects blank war memorial ‘for future deaths’. The memorial is in a town called Bradley Stokes, a place planned in the 1970s and whose construction began in 1987.

The dome of St Paul’s is arguably the most important object in London: a lead covered baroque sun around which the the rest of the city revolves. And perhaps its not so strange to think of this hemispherical thing as

Tower Hamlets have stirred up a hornest nest in their proposed sale of Henry Moore’s Old Flo (or as it’s officially titled, Draped Seated Woman). The statue had been essentially gifted by Moore to a post Blitz East End, sold way-below-market rate.

There is a Japanese horror movie called Hausu (1977) that as well as being a completely deranged, psychedelic stylized sweet comedy gore-fest is also the most eloquent description of the dark psychology that lurks in architectures unconscious. Even if it

This is something I was playing with to pass the time on a long flight. Made with a free copy of Esquire and a Samsung Galaxy SIII, I liked the idea re-editing this found piece of glossy lifestyle media simply

Giacomo Magnani brings us a new post in the occasional series ‘Show & Tell’ Our Fancy Fences: An Anthology Of Domestic Kitsch The project was born out of a photographic project to be exhibited during Fotografia Europea Festival 2012 in