Reading Time: < 1 minuteAfter a massive and mysterious death, Strange Harvest has been rebooted from its digital grave. Everything should be here still … though perhaps not in exactly the right places. Old links, for example, no longer work (unless someone out there is a WordPress expert and can get some kind of redirect going), a few images […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’m in Lausanne, where tonight I’ll be chairing a discussion with David Keshavjee & Julien Tavelli (Lausanne), Rafael Koch & Urs Hofer (Bern), and Jeremy Schorderet & Cem Sever (Lausanne). We’ll be talking about tools and automation processes in graphic design, and what architecture might learn. (My guess is that architecture has a lot to […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’ll be giving a talk at the Le Corbusier show at the Barbican on Thursday 5th March at 6.30pm More details here ]]>
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA short note to say that I’ll be giving a short talk at the TU Berlin this coming Monday. So if you are lucky enough to be in Berlin with a free half an hour, it would be great to see you there. Details: March 2nd, 15.30pm TU Berlin, Raum A053, Architekturgebaude, Strasse des 17. […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteStrangeharvest is a respoitory, an archive, a test bed, and a storage unit is a res
Reading Time: 3 minutesAnother tournament, another ridiculous table. A bunch of clapped out old pros sitting around in studios attempting to drum up interest in a tournament that England couldn’t qualify for … The BBCs Euro 2008 studio is a glass box overlooking the rooftops of Vienna – You can see the construction process on this Flickr feed. […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesCurrenly looking down the back of the sofa trying to scape together enough to bid on this Titan 1 missile base . Which is probably the perfect HQ for the new breed of internet architecture critic. The kind whose quasi conspiracy theory logics, insatiable appetite for quirkiness, love of the marginal, and distain for sunlight […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesSearch Search Strangeharvest Cosmology Map What is Strangeharvest The Strangeharvest method Contact The Strangeharvest Method Objects are evidence. Everyday objects and places reveal – in material, form, arrangement and the feelings and sensations they produce – hidden infrastructures of culture, economics, power, value. In other words ‘architecture’ in its fullest, most indescribable sense. Strange Harvest […]
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Reading Time: 9 minutesThis essay is one from the archives … it must have been a casualty in the great Strange Harvest meltdown of earlier this year, so I thought I’d post it up again. Originally it was a contribution to the book “Making the Impossible Possible: The Dream of Flying. The Dream of Paradise” It’s what you might […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesIn the face of the current quietness on Strange Harvest, here is round up of some links / excerpts of stuff I’ve been doing elsewhere. A few links: This to piece on So-Il’s new Kukje Gallery in Seoul for Domus A love letter to tarmac and the infrastructual botox of London’s pre-Olympic roadwork frenzy in Building Design […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIt’s been pretty quiet here at Strange Harvest for a while – other stuff has been getting in the way. I’ve had a drawing in Max Frasers ‘Joy of Living’ show at Somerset House – a benefit for Maggies Centre’s (which closes tomorrow, so get down there and snap something up, if there’s anything left). Meanwhile, I have […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteRegular visitors may have noticed a slight revamp to Strange Harvest. Comments – after a long hiatus – are back. So … comment away! There’s a logo, which is a clip of a old science fiction book called Strange Harvest which seemed kind of appropriate to appropriate. The jacket describes Strange Harvest as follows: “This […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesIt’s that nagging sensation that pervades what we vaguely call ‘modern life’. It’s there, somewhere in the background like a dull distracting hum or sheathing us with an imperceptible film separating us from the world. It’s that feeling that somehow something is lacking, strangely hollow. That feeling of that we’re dislocated and failing to really […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSearch Search Strangeharvest Cosmology Map What is Strangeharvest The Strangeharvest method Contact Contact Strangehavest (well, Sam Jacob) is based in London (and sometimes in Vienna). And is available for design projects, talks, exhibitions, collaborations and other projects. email [email protected] Address:1-5 Clerkenwell RoadLondon EC1M 5PAUnited Kingdom Bio Sam Jacob is the director of Sam Jacob Studio […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesSearch Search Strangeharvest Cosmology Map What is Strangeharvest The Strangeharvest method Contact What is Strangeharvest? Strangeharvest is a blog/archive/hoard of (mainly but not only) writing by Sam Jacob. It began as a hand coded html web page with very tiny reviews of everyday things. It evolved (technically) into a slightly more sophisticated CMS, has migrated […]
Reading Time: 12 minutesAs details of the American National Security Agency’s Prism programme emerge, alongside concerns about democracy, freedom, state surveillance and the complicity of corporations, something also seems to be revealed about the ways in which digital technologies are fundamentally reformulating the ways in which design – a new kind of design born out of digital culture – […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes went viral, and I liked it. I posted a picture on Twitter of a man taking a pair of ducks for a walk along Rye Lane, Peckham. The ducks were on leads and totally unflustered as they waddled past a KFC. Equally unruffled were the good people of South London. Maybe, now that the area […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesWalking through London, it’s easy to forget that a city is just a particular arrangement of stuff – hundreds and billions of things – some static, some in motion, others loosely assembled into a London-shaped superthing. Cataloguing every object would mean counting every chair, plate and book, every shoe and shoelace, every single item in […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesSam Jacob forays into marijuana grow houses and the landscapes of drug use You can’t tell a grow house from the outside. It’s only through the registers of the invisible spectrum that its internal weirdness becomes visible: massive red blobs on heat-sensitive cameras, bizarre spikes in electricity use and so on. These are houses that […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesFor Denise Scott Brown, photography was a way of isolating an idea, a moment, and a way of learning from everyday landscapes. Sam Jacob on Venturi Scott Brown’s Las Vegas photography collection Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Edited by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli. Chicago University […]
Reading Time: 6 minutesHere’s some background for the 1st exercise of the Desktop Design Academy … Hope its useful! Here is the brief if you are interested! Exit, as they say, through gift shop. Through, in other words, the souvenir laden trap laid for any tourist that must – if you are anything like me – be negotiated while herding […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesAdolf Loos’ entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower might never have been built but its massive dark image weighs heavy on the architectural imagination. A giant black marble, 21 story Doric column, standing on a cyclopean base and scaled up to skyscraper size is at once the dumb and provocative. Especially coming from the same […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesIts taken a long time, but finally in 100% cotton, with edge to edge, seam to seam printing, our Half Timbered T Shirt is here! You can order from our online store through this link. Here, though, is part of the long back story of our fasciantion with Half Timbering. Told in this essay/story titled 2000 […]
Reading Time: 6 minutesThink of this as a draft manifesto for architectural representation in the post digital age. Or if not a manifesto, at least an idea about how we can (and why we should) rethink the act and purpose of drawing now that our relationship with digital production has matured. Its an idea about contemporary architectural drawing, […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA bit of info on three dates coming up for talks on and around A Clockwork Jerusalem. First up on Thursday 9th October at 7pm at the Milton Keynes Art Gallery I’ll be with co-curator Wouter Vanstiphout talking with Kieran Long Details here Then on Sunday 12th at 12pm we’ll all be doing the same […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe strange phenomenon of hotel abstract art illustrated here is key to Will Wiles’ new book The Way Inn. Without giving anything away plot-wise, the book makes us look closely at the strange interior worlds of chain hotels, their arrangements, protocols, furniture and the art that is hung on their walls. What are these things that […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe following is the sketch brief for my forthcoming studio at UIC SoA that kicks off next week. The project is an extension of the research conducted as part of A Clockwork Jerusalem for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, extending the same ideas and trajectories into the utopian experiments of New World settlements and communities […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesA piece I wrote for the Gwangju Folly project, curated by Nikolaus Hirsch, Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun featuring Ai Weiwei, Do Ho Suh, Eyal Weizman, Raqs Media Collective, David Adjaye, Rem Koolhaas and more. The catalogue is available here Off-season, the Scheveningen boardwalk is a very lonely place. All of its seaside resort jollity is blasted […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesOn 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 see the blue plaque on no. 36. It reads “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin 1870-1921, Founder of […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesHere is a glimpse into the world that makes the world: A selection of brick making machines gleaned from the global B2B marketplace Alibaba, that Aladdin’s Cave of mysteriously exotic banality. These are the machines that manufacture the things we manufacture the world out of, devices that are interfaces between the raw material of geology […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteJust a quick note about an event for Art Review this coming Thursday evening, part of their Art Review Live programme in their basement space in Honduras Street. I’m talking about A Clockwork Jerusalem, the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, people walking ducks in Peckham, and showing videos … and there will be specially themed cocktails […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesHere 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 as Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, Mark Stewart’s dubbed-out remix of William Blake’s […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesTo 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 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale right now, We’re hoping to have a little wider […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesA 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 a ditch. A wild eyed man in underpants and a gas mask emerges and frantically […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesI’m in New York the weekend of the 21st Sept as part of Log’s In Pursuit of Architecture conference at MoMA. In Pursuit of Architecture: A conference on buildings and ideasSaturday, September 21, 2013, 10AM–5PMThe Museum of Modern ArtNew York, New York To mark its 10th anniversary and 29th issue, Log presents In Pursuit of […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteOver 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 ideological battles have become contemporary pillow fights … “There’s something strange going on here. All […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesA 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 glowing Perspex on floating islands of live-edge or hyperreal model railway fantasies, everything begins to […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesOver 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 for systems of hardware and software and as a re-making of an idea of nature […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThere’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. As the Telegraph writes “The town did not exist in the first and second World […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteJust a quick note: I’m in conversation with Pieterjan Ginckels (of Speedism fame amongst other amazing things) as part of his S.P.A.M OFFICE show at ANDOR this week. Expect to hear about the design lessons contained in the Viking Office Supplies Catalogue, the idea of just-enough, genericness and, of course, Spam … blurb below: Wednesday 23 January 2013, […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe 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 some kind of celestial body. After all Christopher Wren was as much an astronomer as […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteTower 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. Now valued around £20 million the council are eying the funds from the sale as […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteJust a quick note about a talk at the AA, Monday 29 October, 6pmLecture Hall. Currently exhibited at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, The Museum of Copying is the first public presentation by the Architectural Doppelgängers Research Cluster. The Museum explores the idea of the copy in architecture as an important, active and often surreal phenomenon. […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesGiacomo 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 Reggio Emilia (Italy), whose yearly theme was “Living together – pictures for the community”: the […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesAs you walk through a European city, you’ll often find yourself entering a strange zone, a place where time seems to both fast forward and rewind and the same time. You can feel it underfoot as tarmac and concrete slabs give way to cobbled granite. Maybe you’ll pass through a set of bollards that pedestrianise […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesI’m taking part in a show called Image for a Title : Placebo Effects In The Cultural Landscape curated by Workshop for Potential Design in the Brompton Design District of the London Design Festival that opens on the 14th Sept. Curators Tetsuo Mukai and Bernadette Deddens write: The point of departure for the exhibition is the idea of placebo […]
Reading Time: 6 minutesNigel: And then we looked at each other and says well we might as well join up you know and uh….David: So we became The Originals.Nigel: Right.David: And we had to change our name actually….Nigel: Well there was, there was another group in the east end called The Originals and we had to rename ourselves.David: […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesWhen did reCAPTCHA start using photographs of house numbers?
Reading Time: 3 minutesA while ago at Studio X in NYC, I ran a what was billed as a “An Evening of Psychometric Drawing Experiments, Architectural Non Sequiturs, and Free Association”. Over the course of the evening we tried a series of drawings games. We played an invention called Architectural Consequences, a game that works just like picture consequences (or […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesFire training towers are the structures that the fire service use to practice firefighting. They mimic a range of architectural conditions that firefighters will most likely encounter: height, stairs, doors, rooms and so on resulting in constructions that almost look like buildings. We could think of them as heavily edited versions of architecture, familiar kinds […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA few images of Inter 12’s exhibition as part of AA projects review. It features a beautiful milled blue foam replica of a completely average wall, plug sockets, radiator, shonky pipework and all. It sits as a physical reflection of the adjacent wall, a kind of reflected apparition of its context. The show is open […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesA heads up for three events I’m involved in this week. On Tuesday 3rd July I’m in conversation with Jimenez Lai at the Architecture Foundation where we’ll be talking about his installation, his book ‘Citizens of No Place’, Bureau Spectacular’s work … and what we might be working on together in Chicago this autumn. More info here On […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesDelighted to say I’m contributing to Storefront’s Aesthetics/Anesthetics, an exhibition of 30 newly commissioned architectural drawings by 30 emerging and established architects. Each of the 30 commissioned architectural drawings will be auctioned at the end of the exhibition. Proceeds will support Storefront for Art and Architecture’s exhibitions and programs. Opening June 26th 7-9pm at Storefront, 97 […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe AA projects review opens tonight, and I’m delighted to be showing our units work as part of the exhibition. We’ve been working under the title ‘Ground Xerox’ and spent the year thinking through the idea of the architectural re-enactment as a design strategy. This has led us in a number of directions, some surreal, […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’m currently in Moscow where we are launching the Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute Directed by Justin McGuirk, the Strelka Press is a publishing house for original writing on architecture, design and the city. It’s format is, currently, digitally focussed , commissioning long-form writing in the shape of short e-books. I’m excited to […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesAt the same time I grabbed my first Le Corbusier drawing off the postman, I was fitting a special postbox to the right of the front door to make his life easier. He seems very pleased anybody gives a damn, we are quite the buzz of the sorting office, and also, over the following week, […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesA short trailer for the So Lonely Valentines Day special at the AA. Here is Hugh Grants face in the throws of turning down Julia Roberts in the classic Rom Com Notting Hill. Slow mo-ed and zoomed in, we can see how his face is the ne pas ultra vehicle of the British romantic comedy. Now, I have to […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesI’m showing Versioned Chairs at the Aram Gallery as part of their Send To Print show on 3D printing. Versioned Chairs explores five canonical chairs through acts of translation. Starting with a photograph of the original chair, this was first translated into a textual description. The text was then translated into sketches, drawn by a group who […]
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Reading Time: 2 minutesA few images of a piece I contributed to a show last month at FFAR in Stockholm as part of a show curated by San Rocco ‘The Even Covering of the Field’ along with Matilde Cassani and Ignacio Uriarte. The piece is a wall drawing of bricks, drawn at 1:1. It is a life size drawing of an […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesDouble Ended Bath This coming Friday will see a beautiful full blown palindromic moment. The 11th of November at 11 minutes and 11 seconds after 11 in the morning will be 11.11.11.11.11. To mark this meaningless numerical accident, I’ve put together a few what we might call palindromic objects – things which read the same […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesA quick note on some up coming events I’m involved in next week: On Monday, 31 Oct we’re having a launch of the Radical Post Modernism issue of AD that we co-edited and to celebrate FAT will be in conversation with Charles Jencks, after which, we are promised, drinks. Radical Post-Modernism, edited by Charles Jencks and FAT […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesThese are photographs taken from a recent trip to Pruitt Igoe in St Louis. Except of course that Pruitt Igoe, the giant housing scheme designed by Minoru Yamasaki and completed in 1956, isn’t there. Beginning with a spectacular implosion in 1972, it had been completly demolished by 1976. Famously, that first implosion was dubbed the ‘Death of […]
Reading Time: 6 minutesI’m please to announce that the issue of AD that I’ve edited with fellow FAT directors Sean Griffiths and Charles Holland alongside Charles Jencks is now out. Titled ‘Radical Post Modernism’, it has three real aims. The first is to posit a re-reading of ‘high’ Post Modern architecture (a section that could be titled ‘How I Learned […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteJust a quick note. I have contributed to Object Abuse at KK Outlet (itself a FAT interior project for KesselsKramer‘s London incarnation). Titled ‘Room Service’ we’re showing the ‘Chop’ (a chair / mop) and the ‘Bright’ (a broom / light), pictured above. These and all the other contributions by a great group of designers (including Dominic Wilcox, Max […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesNot to force a point here, but the strange juxtaposition on Sky News last night that set in split-screen live coverage of the NYSE closing bell against helicopter shots of Croydon in flames after arson and looting seems more than an accident of conflicting and overlapping news agendas. No, this is an image that operates […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes“Somehow, everything must be watched; nothing must be allowed to be commonplace in the way that things just are commonplace: each project must be weighed, and planned, and approved, and only then built, and only after that discovered to be commonplace after all.” Banham, Barker, Hall, Price, ‘NON-PLAN: An Experiment in Freedom’. New Society 20.03.1969 […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesVersioned Chairs explores the effect of translations acted out on a series of canonical chairs. The original design was first translated into a textual description that attempts to describe the physical characteristics of the chair as accurately as possible. These texts were then translated back into images through sketches drawn by a group working without knowing […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSo, to end 2010, an amazing, touching, poignant dustbin. Out with the old, in with the new and all that. And where better to get rid of the old than in this accidental freak? Part Cornetto, part trashcan, it’s both fantastical and utilitarian – like a hybrid mythical creature (in the manner of centaurs, mermaids […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAnd for 2011, a new broom. I could tell you how this conflation of two orders of domestic objects challenges notions of use and decoration. I could argue that its reworking of domestic utility is somehow a post-feminist reworking of the idea of domestic cleanliness. I might even go on about the culture of convergence […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesHere is one of my contributions to the Obituaries issue of the New City Reader, edited by MOS. If you can’t get to the New Museum to pick up a copy, download the whole thing here. The Death of Nothing Architectural Minimalism rose again from the ground this week. Still not dead, it is 38. Of course, the […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesWithin a few hours of the new reports of Osama Bin Laden’s death, these models appeared on Googles 3D Warehouse. Sketchup ready, these 3D models are composed from who-knows-what source material and are made for who-knows-what-ends. Downloading by Sky News for some hot fly-through action perhaps? (see also a project by Langlands and Bell that modeled […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesThis is the first in a new series titled Show & Tell authored by guest contributors. The idea is to present an idea, a project, a collection, research or subject in a manner that is part blog post, part curation and part photo essay. Exactly what that means, we’ll have to see as it develops. […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA quick note: I have a series of drawings in the new issue of San Rocco (issue 02/ The Even Covering Of The Field) accompanied with a text by Simon de Dreuille. It’s out now and you can get a copy here. Also, tonight I’m giving gallery talk at the ICA in London in response to Pablo Bronstein’s […]
Reading Time: 6 minutesThere’s one particular moment in Pablo Bronstein’s great show at the ICA Sketches for Regency Living where the idea of architecture, style, ideology come together, where his ping ponging of reference shudders to a strange conclusion. First we find it as an overscaled hulking piece of furniture that reminding us of a Chippendale case. Sited within the […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis is the accidental work of the City of York Council who have built a new fence right through an existing set of goalposts. Not only wonderfully surreal, it provides a beautiful enactment of the relationship between municipal bureaucracy and physical space. The overlap of different types of public space – playground, football pitch, park […]
Reading Time: < 1 minute Quick note to say I’m taking part in the first issue of Format tomorrow, Tuesday 28th June at the AA , 6.30pm, on the subject of magic, design and architecture with artist Jonathan Allen and hosted by Shumon Basar. We’ll be talking about magic’s role within power structures, architectures use of magic and setting David Copperfields magic spectaculars within modernist […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSearch Search Strangeharvest Cosmology Map What is Strangeharvest The Strangeharvest method Contact
Reading Time: 2 minutesSuper excited to be part of Postopolis DF – the Mexican edition of Storefronts Postopolis, this time in partnership with Museo Experimental El Eco, Tomo and Domus Magazine. Previously you’ve seen groups of celebrated (if that’s the right word) architecture/landscape/urban/art/design bloggers converge in NYC and LA, inviting the great, the good and the obscure to […]
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Reading Time: 2 minutesThe most fascinating show about design in London this year (and we’ve had a lot of design shows) is not a design show. Michael Rakowitz‘s ‘The Worst Condition Is To Pass Under A Sword Which Is Not One’s Own’ at the Tate (on till 3 May) is the most revealing study of how design, fiction, […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhen you find yourself in times of trouble, historically speaking, its quite likely you’ll find yourself in a desert. For Satan in Paradise Lost, for the Israelites fleeing Egypt, for Mark Thatcher on the Paris Dakar rally, deserts are places we become lost in or are exiled to. Equally, they are places where beyond-normal things […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesFrom the medical records of St George’s Hospital Medical School: “A 3 year old boy presented to our accident and emergency department with an obvious penetrating head injury. He had tripped and fallen onto a metal model of the Eiffel Tower which then became rigidly lodged into his skull. On arrival he had a Glasgow […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesExcited that Beyond issue 2 is out. Alongside luminaries both literary and architectural including Douglas Coupland and Francois Roche, I have contributed a short story titled “Everything Dale Myres Could And Couldn’t See”. The story chronicles a digital animators increasing obsession with the assassination of JFK which leads to ever more byzantine recreations of Dealey […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesSub Plan is a research project developed by an AA summer school unit led by Finn Williams of Common Office, David Knight and graphic designers Europa. It’s a guide to what’s known in the UK as Permitted Development. Permitted development is a subset of planning legislation which attempts to define the point where you no […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesBack from Shenzhen, where amongst the super-speed urbanism is the model village Window of the World. Along side the kinds of thing you might expect (Big Ben, a giant sized miniature Eiffel Tower and so on) are some less likely candidates: Brazilias National Congress, Lenins Mausoleum, Niagra Falls and Mont Blanc. Oh, and Gaudis Park […]
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Reading Time: 2 minutesJust back from Lausanne, where FATs show “Duplicate Array’ opened at Galerie Lucy Mackintosh. “Duplicate Array: Objects/Buildings/Plans presents a series of architecture, design and art projects by London based practice FAT ranging in scale from objects to buildings and masterplans. The projects explore an idea of architecture as narrative, media and communication engaging directly with […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThis, I love. It’s on Commercial Street, on the southern side of Bishopsgate Goods Yard. An assemblage of totally ordinary elements (billboard, hoarding, fencing) and totally ordinary programmes (newsagent, advertising site, mini cab office). But the realtionship between these elements makes it something amazing. A certain kind of symbiotic relationship which forms – out of […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes“I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original’ quipped Reyner Banham with deadly seriousness. For Banham, LA was a culmination of his own reading of Modernism – a trajectory of machines, of gadgets and gizmos that stretched from early 20th century Futurism to the Freeways of Southern California. In his […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes“You can’t type letters in the Pantheon,” says Phillip Johnson in an archive interview recently posted to the Guggenheims website. It’s the last line in a comparison he is making between two big architectural spaces. First, the monumental, hyper-geometric space of the Pantheon and secondly, the beautiful, beaurocratic space of Frank Lloyd Wrights Johnson Wax […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesFollowing up on this post, a series documenting Henry Moores in motion. There is something about the obvious problem of handling these giant pieces of sculpture that is both comic and touching: a little like Laurel and Hardy moving a piano, but in a way that suggests the sheer difficulty of a certain type of […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteJohn Yettaws improvised flippers used to swim across Inya Lake to Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu KyiSuu Kyi’s home. ]]>
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSome photos a giant bronze statue of Edward VII on its way to the National Conservation Centre. Wouldn’t it be an idea to make more public monuments mobile? A fleet of Henry Moores circling the M25 for example, or complex choreography of military generals performed by flat-bed trucks in the traffic system of Milton Keynes? […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThrilled to be on the jury for Archinects Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition. They write: “Michael Jackson lived one of the most extravagant, magnificent, and crafted lives in centuries. What act of design could possibly outshine the combined effect of the star’s own intricate life? While the music and images Michael left us will seal […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesAnother in an occasional series exploring design typologies. (Previously: a survey of Lightships here) ]]>
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWhat can you say about a cigarette lighter that projects an image of Osama bin Laden? Except, that it provides more evidence that novelty products are the place where the most frightening conceptions of culture coalesce. Forget Milan and its multiple takes on what we would like to be. It’s objects from the periphery where […]
Reading Time: < 1 minutePerhaps the most disquieting development in the candy novelty world is the ‘Candy Pistol’. You place the barrel between your lips and pull the trigger to fire a candy bullet into your mouth. (These photos show a spontaneous quasi-performance piece that could have been titled ‘Candy Darling’ at the Lisson Gallery.) ]]>
Reading Time: 3 minutesPainting of Junction 7 of the M25 / M23 by Michael HirshVia What Florence was to the Renaissance, what Paris was to Modernism, so was the hinterland of the M25 to a particular generation. For a fleeting moment this non-place became the ephemeral capital of a brief moment in time. The big outdoor raves of […]
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Reading Time: 2 minutesFloating Church of the Redeemer, Philadelphia, 1847 Lieb House, 13th March 2009 Ok, so the Lieb House was in New Jersey, but at least its conception was Philly-centric. Today, the Venturi and Rauch designed house sailed under the Brooklyn Bridge on its journey to Long Island, waved on from South Street Seaport in the early […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe wrote about the condition of Objectum Sexual in previous posts, here and here (with the amazing story about the woman married to the Berlin Wall: “The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!”). Now via Art Fag City, we’ve found the documentary. Watch Married To The Eiffel Tower [Part 1]??|??View More Free Videos Online at […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes“100 Years to Lenin”, made 1970, Siberia Google maps “60 Years to USSR”, made 1977. Google maps “100 years to Lenin”, made 1970 Google maps “Lenin”, date unknown Google maps “Lenin”, date unknown Google maps “Glory of Communist Party”, date unknown Google maps “USSR 50 Years”, 1967 Google maps “USSR 50 Years”, 1967 Google maps […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThese pictures (from the ever fascinating English Russia) show an abandoned fortress that was used by the Russian army to test an alternative to napalm. The super high temperature of the napalm-substitute melted the bricks, which formed into icicles creating these incredible and somewhat terrifying grottos. via Neatorama ]]>
Reading Time: < 1 minute‘Unfriendly Skies’ is a beautiful project by C-Lab which surveys the skies of disaster movies. It’s part of the ‘Bootleg’ issue of Volume produced for the New Museum exhibition “Urban China: Informal Cities” (February 11-March 29). It seems to recall Constables exercises in cloud painting shot through with an apocalyptic bent. Though here of course […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteFoolish House, Ontario Beach Park in 1910 via Flickr ]]>
Reading Time: 3 minutesAt first it seemed like it must be an architectural hallucination. A lighthouse, deep in Feltham, about 75 miles from the nearest piece of coastline. But here, in the leftover piece of ground next to the A316 flyover that’s been half heartedly converted into a low grade retail park, behind Wicks builders merchants, as real […]
Reading Time: 9 minutesThis morning Russia turned the taps back on resuming gas supplies to Ukraine and Europe. Millions of Europeans have been without heat since the failure to renew the old contract, which expired on 1 January, as the BBC reports. I thought it an opportune moment to post a piece I wrote for the catalogue of […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesI have a couple of pieces in the second issue of Junk Jet (link to suitably mid nineties animated gif-tastic website). One on the Popemobile, and the other on bad, really bad construction. Its great to see such a messy, un-resolved and obscure publication – one that would sit well amongst the archi-fanzines that make […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteJosh Azzarella. Untitled #23 (”Lynndied”) Next Nature ]]>
Reading Time: 3 minutesBill Owens, Reagan on TV via Denise Scott Brown recalls her childhood bemusement at being asked to make Christmas cards depicting snowy scenes of Surrey in the summer of colonial South Africa. The idealized cultural image, dislocated and juxtaposed by Imperialism: Downs against veldt; winter against summer; Europe against Africa. But equally, snowy Christmas card […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesOne of the conceits of our globalised word is that we feel able to duplicate places. It is a sensation that perhaps arises out of easy and frequent travel, out of instant communication, out of the inescapable torrents of images that passes for contemporary culture. It’s an idea that a place might be franchisable – […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesActually, taking the last couple of posts, plus something that comes out of Owens post here, I think I’m heading towards a idea that ‘high’ High Tech architecture (the Pompidou, and especially Lloyds – with its moments of historicism such as the Lutine Bell and surreally transposed classical Italianate wood-panelled Adam Room – as well […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn a reversal of Lloyds futurist-gothic-industrialism, we might wonder what if – for some unexplained reason -industry took on the aesthetics of historical architecture. This image of a historicist oil rig explores this particular notion. In a perverse move – given the current carnage in the construction industry – we’re hiring at FAT right now. […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesHistory suggests that the construction of the most ambitious architectural projects immediately precedes the deepest economic slumps. The Lloyds building, for example – the grand edifice of the Citys 80s big bang boom – rapidly became the home of crippling financial crisis. And in this swift reversal of fortune we can read a relationship between […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesI’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time in Lancashire allotments on a research trip sponsored by Livesey/Wilson associates – the regeneration consultants set up by the late Tony Wilson and his partner Yvette. Yes, that Tony Wilson: Factory records, the Hacienda, Joy Division et al. This boggy, scrubby, almost abandoned allotment overlooking Accrington seems […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesArchitectural culture has less to do with buildings, and a whole lot more to do with the reproduction of its own image. It significance is communicated through media – from super-fast blogs, news driven magazines, to books and the journals of academia. Each of these media sites allows a particular view of architecture – but […]
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Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’m packing up my powerpoint and heading off to Barcelona for the World Architecture Festival – “a unique event celebrating the world’s finest work from the world’s greatest architects”. I’ll be presenting FATs Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet project, which has been shortlisted in the Civic category. I’ll be on stage sometime between 10 and 12 on Wednesday […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteFrom National Geographic: “Massive beams of selenite dwarf human explorers in Mexico’s Cave of Crystals, deep below the Chihuahuan Desert. Formed over millennia, these crystals are among the largest yet discovered on Earth.” ]]>
Reading Time: 4 minutesSeeing the Farnsworth House up to its neck in floodwater is enough to bring out OCD symptoms in even the most relaxed of us. Just imagining the whiteness of its frame, its transparent walls, and its reduced abstraction lapped by the muddy waters of the Fox River makes me itchy, uncomfortable and agitated. The anxiousness […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA Cambodian couple have – in a move apparently inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark – found a novel solution to the probems of property and divorce. Moeun Rim and his wife, Nhanh, who have been married nearly 40 years, have sawn their house in half in order to avoid Cambodias costly and convoluted divorce process. According […]
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Reading Time: 3 minutesWe’ve looked at tactics of camouflage before – the disguise of machine gun turrets as neo-gothic extension of the Houses of Parliament, the inflatable architecture of hallucinatory military equipment and so on. But this is new to us. Ghillie suits are an intersection of landscape and clothing that allow soldiers to become their background – […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAt long last, we’ve managed to source the full, unexpurgated version of the classic ‘Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham’. For more in the same genre see ‘Advertising Central Milton Keynes’ & ‘Energy in Northampton’, and Milton Keynes’ famous ‘Red Balloon’ commercial. Post war urban planning techniques and strategies are explained in this 1948 Government information […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteHis mother called him “Wild Thing!” and Max said “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything. That very night in Max’s room a forest grew And grew. And grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around. ]]>
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Reading Time: < 1 minuteOn Monday 22nd September I’m taking part in a discussion titled The Evolution of Plastic in Design from 7-8 pm as part of the London Design Festival, VIP Room Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX. I’ll be with Tom Dixon, Dr Susan Mossman, Clare Page & Harry Richardson from Committee and Marcus Fairs of Dezeen The talk […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe names that paint manufactures use to describe colours are an apex of very particular kind of language. They read like pared down minimalist poetry mixed with an essence of marketing-speak as phrased by a spam bot text generator: Total nonsense which conjure an incredibly rich, yet non-specific image. Here are some examples: From Dulux: […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteLong time readers will have picked up on my fascination with foam from posts like this. This clip on the making of Sonys ‘Foam City’ commercial is a foam-o-philes dream. More here ]]>
Reading Time: < 1 minuteBatcave Section via via ]]>
Reading Time: 3 minutesThere’s something about Stonehenge which seems to send plans for its new visitor centre around the bend. Recent plans by Denton Corker Marshal have been scrapped, and a fresh OJEU is out for those brave or foolish enough to take on the challenge. I’m not suggesting that the project suffers any kind of supernatural curse. […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesFROM THE OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK, NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR, 1939, THIRD EDITION The mammoth replica of Victoria Falls measures 186 feet long by 22 feet high, and, over its man-made precipice, a torrent of 60,000 gallons of water per minute roars with a voice of thunder. Natives in Africa named these mighty falls, “Mosiotunya” (“Smoke […]
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Reading Time: 4 minutesThe Popemobile is not so much as vehicle as a form of mechanised robeing – a vehicular extension of the Papal robes, which is probably why – with a few exceptions – the Popemobile is always white. The Popemobile is also a motorised version of the Popes throne – a motor-throne if you’ll will. And […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesImages via The most interesting stories about design are not design stories. They are the ones that allow us to think about the nature of design outside of the constraints of professions, clients, budgets and so on. And one of those if the story of the origins of the tarmac road. At its heart is […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesImage via The super smoothness of contemporary architecture often makes it feel frictionless – as though you are skimming across its slippery surface. When you try to look at it, it simply confronts you with a reflection of something else – your own reflection peering back at you. Shininess is a quality applied to a […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesHere’s a picture of a new crop-circle advert for Papa Johns pizza somewhere in Colorado. I’m a sucker for these things. It’s partly the scale, partly the fact its nature made un-natural. It’s also the way these things seem to splice aspects of the crop circle fad of the late 1980s and early 90s which […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesI feel like a tourist visiting my own youth. I’m at the Roundhouse in Camden to see My Bloody Valentines comeback performances and I’m surrounded by various versions of what I could have become: balder, hairier, thinner, richer, or those that refused to grow up. And we’re all on edge, about to relive part of […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesSummer pavilions appear like a heat rash over London between May and September. The subtext of these temporary structures goes something like this: Architecture might be different! Architecture might somehow be free! They are models of alternatives: vague architectural utopias. There is something naive (in a good way), but something patronising about pavilions. There is […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe IHT reports: “Beijing will permit public protests inside three designated city parks during next month’s Olympic Games, but demonstrators must first obtain permits from the local police and also abide by Chinese laws that usually make it nearly impossible to legally picket over politically charged issues. The arrangement announced Wednesday marks a break from […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesI recently introduced the classic movie, the Fountainhead which was being screened as part of the London Festival of Architecture in the strangely appropriate setting of Canary Wharf. The Fountainhead is the best Hollywood movie about architecture, but that’s not saying much. Unlike lawyers and doctors, architects don’t get much screen time. And if they […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesSo bad its good: the perversity of windows cut into window frames suggests a different order of architectural composition, as well as a weird tension between the old and new. Why should bad building be quite so fascinating? This selection, from a collection on darkroastedblend document some of the most bizarre freaks of construction-gone-wrong – […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAfter Homes on Wheels, comes an even more unsettling set of videos showing Floating Homes. ]]>
Reading Time: 2 minutes1976 – A tree from sausages was the main attraction at the combined Turkish stand A selection of archive photos from Berlins “International Grune Woche” exhibition, which is, apparently “the internationally leading public exhibition for the food, agriculture, and gardening industry”. These displays suggest the inherently artificial nature of agriculture and food production – the […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Eiffel Tower is often a symbol of romance, a site of romance, or a backdrop to romance. But in this case it becomes the object of romance itself. Channel 5 brings us a documentary on the woman who has married the Efiffel Tower. Erika La Tour Eiffel, like Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer – the woman who […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Crazy Horse Memorial, South Dakota, is such a great thing that I shouldn’t need an excuse to post it here again. Today marks sixty years since the sculpting of the mountain began back on June 3, 1948. So, in honour of this remarkable project, here are those mountain sculpting photo sequence again. ]]>
Reading Time: 3 minutes“I needed a strong support in my life… _and I found YOU – my beloved Berlin Wall!” The Telegraph reports: ” A woman with a bizarre fetish for inaninimate objects has revealed she has been married to the Berlin Wall for 29 years. “Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, 54, whose surname means Berlin Wall in German, wed the […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesIs it really possible to trademark a natural phenomenon? Well, water-toy firm Aviva seem to have done it anyway. Here’s some of their blurb: “Since the Iceberg™ was introduced, it has proven to be the most exciting and innovative commercial water activity to come along in years. Three sides, each of different difficulty, can be […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesI used to ride home from work past Harrods, London’s most ridiculous shop. At night it is lit with a strings of bulbs trace the elevation like a dot-to-dot drawing. After working late to some deadline or other I happened to be scooting past when, out of the corner of my smeared visor it looked […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesFrom Harmsworth’s Magazine, February 1902 “Note: For the purposes of this article the gentle reader of the “London Magazine” will kindly consider himself or herself living in the year of grace 1907. The American invaders, having captured the tobacco trade, the railways, the boot and shoe market, the match factories and most other industries worth […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSuper Colossal posts some CCTV footage of a man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. As Marcus writes, it’s ‘a little like watching a bug in a jar’. I’d like to see the unedited footage to experience the ful extent of architectures horrifying, motionless boredom. Maybe it’s the kind of detail you […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesDan alerted me to these images which have been released by NASA. Strangely, there seems to be no accompanying explanation. I guess sports fields are being used a vernacular unit of measurement to suggest the scale of exploration carried out on the surface on the Moon by Apollo 11 crew members Armstrong and Aldrin. Sports […]
Reading Time: 7 minutesDesign as a functional activity ended with Philippe Starks Juicy Salif. This iconic lemon squeezer thrust its sharp tripod legs into the heart of Modernism. From this point on, designers would never be able to escape the inherent useless-ness of their activities. As bitter juice trickled down the sculpted chromed surface it dripped anywhere but […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesIt’s a big year for stadiums. Olympic year means a series of spectacularly good and spectaculary bad stadiums are almost complete for this summers games. Meanwhile designs for Londons 2012 stadiums are caught in a loop of revision, press release and public vilification. The problem for stadium designers is to work out where the design […]
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Reading Time: 4 minutesAnyone who has heard the strange phrase ‘Channel Light Vessel Automatic’ as part of that mysterious daily national ritualistic chant of the Shipping Forecast will have wondered at its meaning. Perhaps it is the multiple possibilities of meaning of ‘light vessel’ or the strange addition of ‘automatic’ at then end that makes it such a […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesCrufts 2008 has just concluded. Though it calls itself a dog show is actually a design contest in disguise. Dogs are perhaps Britains most sophisticated design product. Just look at some of the contenders for Crufts ‘Best in Show’ to see the incredible result of hundreds of years of breeding, of genetic manipulations over generations […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesAmerican modernism, as has been noted, is very different from difficult, perverse, maniacal European Modernism (I’m using big and small ‘m’s as way of denoting the difference here). Nowhere can this be better seen that in the advertising illustrations of Charles Schridde. These images produced for a Motorola campaign – intended to demonstrate the lastest […]
Reading Time: 6 minutesI’m more a road man myself: tarmac, verges, signs, road markings, bridges, roundabouts, and the timeless joy of the Little Chef on the lonely highway – all that kind of stuff. But cars never really got me. From Toad of Toad Hall to Clarkson (and endless architects who will bore you with classic car enthusiasms […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesAs I’m in Chicago, I thought I’d dredge this out of the archives. It’s part of a series of cut out models that I made some time ago. download the pdf here Free with the model comes this link to piece called ‘Sorry Mies’ I wrote (but never quite finished) on Mies, John Dillinger, the […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteChicagos super-cool Marina Towers in early morning fog. I’m on a mini-tour of the US right now. I’ll be lecturing at the University of Illinois at Chicago on Monday 18th Feb. If you fancy coming along, I’ll be in Room 1100, Art+Architecture Building at 6 PM with a laptop, a powerpoint and some stories about […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesImage via Flowers are symbolic of all that is beautiful, natural and normal – and that Valentines bouquet that you just received is a symbol of the natural love felt for you by your partner. But of course, nothing is either natural or normal – but it can be beautiful. It’s more than likely that […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesPerhaps a significant way to track the incredible scale and speed of the current global construction boom is to take a measure of the number of tools produced. The Evening Standard reports that “Earthmoving equipment maufacturer JCB has delivered record results on the back of growth in emerging markets. Latest accounts show that after-tax profit […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn advance of the Architecture Foundations ‘New New Town’ Symposium – which is on the 20th-21st Feb – I thought i’d post the famous Milton Keynes ‘Red Balloon’ advert. Amazingly, in a world where it feels like every piece of media ever made should be instantly accessible, its only just been uploaded to YouTube. Amongst […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe English Premier League is proposing an extra 39th game per season. After each team has played each other home and away, the extra game would be played in random pairings in stadia around the world. The rights to host this game would be auctioned. It’s an idea that’s both an inevitable conclusion of the […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesDuring the 14th and 15th centuries, today would have been the day of the big match. Shrove Tuesday was the day that games of freeform Folk Football were played. They were tumultuous affairs in which village competed against village (or, it seems other arbitrarily oppositional groups such as married men against bachelors), in teams of […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesAnother story about a haystack and a house. This involves farmer Robert Fidler who, as the Daily Mail report ‘managed to secretly – and unlawfully – build the imposing mock Tudor structure in one of his fields, shielded behind a 40ft stack of hay bales covered by a huge tarpaulins. Once it was finished, he […]
Reading Time: < 1 minutePhone Boxes, quite understandably, are facing an uncertain future as this BBC story explains. It reminded me that a good few years ago, I’d made a quick project for Time magazine about this very issue. If we’re all walking around with mobile phones, then is there anything more useful we could do with these points […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAn addition to the foam hall of fame, spotted on site in Hoogvliet, Holland. It’s Cappuccino froth in a can. You can read more on the rise of foaminess in an earlier StrangeHarvest post > here
Reading Time: < 1 minute Back to the fabulous Modern Mechanix magazine, or rather the superb online archive maintained here (“Yesterdays technology, today”). Its pages are like a 1940s version of Dezeen, with a dash of Neaorama, a dollop of WMMNA and a sprinkle of BldgBlog – like looking at a satire of our own obsessions through the lens […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesThis scheme in a 1950 issue of Mechanix Illustrated – archived here – proposed a series of “rubber bubbles, housing radar sentries, hidden in the icy peaks of America’s northernmost mountains” which, it was claimed “could be our first line of defense against any A-bomb attack.” The article explains further: “To obtain maximum radar range […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe most surreal part of Christmas is the migratory forest that pops up all around us for three weeks. It’s a long forgotten middle European folk-rite that has become buried deep in our seasonal behaviour. Now, thousands of years later, we re-enact this midwinter over and over again in a thoroughly contemporary manner. Christmas trees […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteFrost Protected Sculptures at Hampton Court ]]>
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Reading Time: 3 minutesAnything to do with death, geography, space, houses, money and lies is bound to be architectural if you look hard enough. And the story of the back-from-the-dead canoeist that has played out over the last week or so has revealed a piece of ingenious and deceptive DIY on a family home. For those who don’t […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesIt’s hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of nostalgia surrounded by the covers of the so called ‘Little Magazines’ on display at at the Clip/Stamp/Fold exhibition in the AA gallery. But, I realise it’s a nostalgia for a time I never knew. It’s what you might call a pseudo-Proustian rush at the sight of […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteNext Tuesday (the 27th), I’ll be at the AA gallery discussing the ‘Clip/Stamp/Fold‘ show. The blurb: “The event brings together some of today’s most interesting editors, publishers and critics to reflect upon the legacy and influence of 60s and 70s print culture, the nostalgia it sometimes induces as well as our contemporary magazine scene. Includes […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesPinewood Studios has announced plans for a huge development which combines – in a move of either supreme logic or inspired surrealism – movie making and sustainable development. The 200 million GBP Project Pinewood will centre on a 100-acre site next to the existing studios in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire. The “Project Pinewood” website tells us […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThere are still pumpkins in the streets in the town of New Haven (as Jim Morrison might put it). But step into Starbucks opposite the Yale Center for British Art, and you’ll fast forward a season. Yes, it’s Christmas time already. That means Starbucks usual signs – including my favourite ‘Geography is a Flavour’ – […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThere is a remarkable memorial to WWI at Hyde Park Corner in London – the Royal Artillery Memorial, designed by Charles Sargent Jagger, dedicated in 1925. It’s a strange monument that sits between two traditions. On the one hand, its material and form is neo-classical. On the other, the Portland stone has been sculpted into […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesAs promised, some pictures from a great book called ‘Masquerade, The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II’ by Seymour Reit. Here, an stylistically accurate addition to the boudary wall of the Houses of Parliament disguses a machine gun emplacement. A US army HQ disguised as a rubbish pile. Along side these great photos (and […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIt’s often a struggle to frame my terms of reference for thinking about architecture – or to articulate what it is that drives my interest. Sometimes clarity comes from unlikely sources. As I took a look at the top search terms for StrangeHarvest, a certain kind of clarity seemed to emerge. Foam Party, Gummy Bear, […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesI was passing through Trafalgar Square this morning and caught the unveiling ceremony of Thomas Schuttes 4th Plinth sculpture – Model for a Hotel 2007. The sculpture itself is ok, but I was really taken with the billowing shroud suspended from a crane that wreathed the plinth before the unveiling. It’s a device for a […]
Reading Time: 7 minutesThe stars seem to blister like burning film as they open into pink flowers. The night sky segways into the blossom on a cherry tree, and we follow the falling petals and see a group of characters hopping and waving in a bandstand surrounded by woods. This is the psychedelic opening sequence of In the […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis WWII pill box bunker is on the banks of the Thames, somewhere near Goring. The bunkers are apparently too difficult to demolish – which I guess is their point. The owners of this one seem to have decided to incorporate the left-over military installation into some landscape design. Note how the dry stone walling […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes‘The iconic white dome of the Dounreay nuclear plant could be turned into a hotel under proposals put forward by the UK Atomic Energy Authority’ writes the BBC “The golf ball, as it is known locally, faces being demolished as part of the ???2.9bn decommissioning project at the Caithness site. However, the UKAEA said it […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteTo the Building Centre, where Finn Williams has a show on called “Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway”. And if you do get down there, be sure to pick up one of the ‘heritage brown’ booklets, featuring a discussion between myself and Finn as well as contributions from Peter Murray, English Heritage and […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesIt’s the 30th anniversary of Marc Bolans death today. Down in Barnes, just over the crest of the bridge, there’s a day-long fan tribute centred around the tree his Mini crashed into. This is an old post, that somehow got lost in the archives here at Strangeharvest, which seems appropriate to dust down today. It’s […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSome great pictures of a stretch rubber ceiling warped by flooding. It is as though the ordinary domestic interior has been overwhelmed by some sci-fi ‘problem’ (monster? fungus? melting ray?). It is reminicent of Mufs ‘Purity and Tolerance‘ – an installation at the archtecture foundation which they described as “An immersive environment as critique of […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesAs promised, some more holiday snaps. This time of the building neighbouring our campsite. It was certainly kept as a surprise – Sizewell loomed up right at the last minute. And strangely, in all the research I’d done on Suffolk ‘Heritage Coast’, I’d found no reference to a massive nuclear facility. Which either says something […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesNothing-ness is the ultimate product of modernity. It is the culmination of a cultural vector, sharpened to a point where the mechanisms that enable it appear to vanish. This point is where the focus of modern day magic: technology and organization becomes alchemic- substance dissolves into air, mass turns to light, accumulated wealth turns into […]
Reading Time: 7 minutesIn the flesh, Prince is a lot funnier than his reputation might suggest. He kick-starts his show at the O2 arena – the new incarnation of the Millennium Dome – with ‘1999’ as if reminding everyone of the venues traumatic birth. His eighties-MTV-existentialism might have been an epitaph for the lacklustre state-sponsored millennium show: two […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteMore urban planning video nostalgia. This time the hard to believe juxtaposition of Telly ‘Kojak’ Savalas and an appreciation of Birminghams motorways. “You feel as if you’ve been projected into the 21st Century, … Yes, it’s my kinda town. So long, Birmingham. Here’s looking at ya.” You’ll have to click here to watch the video. […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA former FAT intern, Katharina Wahl, sent us a link to her final project. It’s really great – a Stuka bomber made out of carpet -so I thought I’d share it with you. ]]>
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAs is customary here on Strangeharvest, it’s time to share some pictures of this years summer holiday. Maybe its a primary school hangover … Anyway. Above is a photo of Sutton Hoo. It’s the site of Britains most important archiological find: an Anglo Saxon burial ground with two ship burials. Amazing stuff. But another nugget […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesPerhaps the greatest design company that never existed is ACME, that make-anything, deliver-anywhere parody of consumerisms seemingly limitless offer. ACME brand-stretched before brands even recognized themselves as brands. ACMEs speedy delivery of anything to anywhere – even to the sparsely populated desert, home to serial ACME customer Wyle E. Coyote reminds me of Reyner Banhams […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesI glimpsed this, half asleep, half watching an old X Files. It’s from a 1993 episode called “The Post-Modern Prometheus”. IMDB precis the plot: “A letter to Mulder from a woman who has become twice pregnant through strange circumstances, brings the agents to her small town. There, Mulder and Scully discover a mad scientist who […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesThe stucco fa???ade of a 12 million GBP house in Kensington, London is to be rebuilt – with the cracks and chips of the original. The redevelopment by Swedish property magnate Gerard Versteegh planned to preserve the fa???ade in the classic gut-and-fill manner. He was then granted permission to knock it down on condition that […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe fresh-off-the-press issue of Icon magazine is dedicated to manifestos. Of course, a manifesto is a ridiculous historical form. Nowadays, manifestos have merged with mission statements. Their revolutionary heart has furred up like a 40-a-day, heavy-lunching PR executives. The great and the good brought together in Icons pages have mostly understood this – instead they […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesLondon’s old Baltic Exchange building is probably best known for being blown up by the IRA in 1992 by a fertilser bomb in a large white truck. This bad piece of luck has precipitated a strange story whose resolution sees the old building heading for an unusual retirement. The Baltic Exchange is being rebuilt on […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesI’ve been trying to get a good shot of this building every morning from the window of my train. And failing. Here are my best efforts: blurred, over or under exposed and so on. The building is a train-wash between Clapham Junction and Queenstown Road. What gets me is its ordinary industrial shed exterior contrasting […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesI was listening to “A Telephone and a Rubber Band” about Simon Jeffes, founder of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, while driving west through England last week. In the programme artist Emily Young recalled ‘hot dates’ with Jeffes when they would visit Heathrow in the middle of the night to listen to all kinds of noises […]
Reading Time: 7 minutesThis summer the Phillip Johnson Glass House opens to the public, and to celebrate this there’s a Gala opening on Saturday June 23. Amy Grabowski, the Glass House’s director of external affairs describes what’s planned: “We are specifically restaging a performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from a 1967 benefit at the Glass House […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI came across this old snippet of information on the V&As >>research and conservation websitePhilippe Rahm>“Polarized Kunsthaus”
Reading Time: 7 minutesTen years ago, if you’d ordered a coffee anywhere in Britain, you would have found yourself looking down at a circle of watery brown liquid with a smattering of bubbles scattered over the surface. It looked as though someone had added a dash of detergent to dish water and then blown into it absent-mindedly through […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe pope is about to abolish the notion of limbo, the halfway house between heaven and hell, or as Dante had it, the fist circle of hell. The >>BBC
Reading Time: 5 minutesA woman in a Robin Cousins tuxedo dances with a dog wearing a flashing LED collar to a James Bond medley. They’ve got moves that combine Saturday Night Fever with police dog about to take down a suspect. Spotlights spin around with a heady visual reel. The crowd gets into it. The camera swoops around […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe food chain is a concept that was probably never intended to carry irony. Nevertheless, I’m on a plane tucking into poached salmon 30 thousand feet above the spawning pools where this very fish may very well have been born. The salmon is a cast member of a ‘restaurant-quality gourmet meal’ – a set piece […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesLondon isn’t a beautiful city in the classical sense. It’s more an agglomeration of unorganised stuff. It’s more a two thousand year draft of a city, with rewrites to plot, characters and events scrawled all over its terrain. It’s a city where your state of mind is as important as the physical fabric. For example […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesSome shots of the installtion of a FAT project currently on show at Selfridges in London, titled ‘1.51 Miles Of String’ This is not a shop, or rather it’s not quite a shop. It reworks Marcel Duchamps ‘Mile of String’ exhibition design for the 1942 ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ exhibition in New York. Here, the […]
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Reading Time: < 1 minuteMilitary forces install a shrine, created by the Serbian Orthodox Church, on the disputed border between Serbia and Montenegro. Photograph by Savo Kovacevic, 2005. This great image is from >>a site promoting
Reading Time: 2 minutes“Video footage of scientists demonstrating the potential explosive power of devices used in the alleged 21 July attacks has been seen in court. Woolwich Crown Court heard evidence from explosives expert Clifford Todd, whose team carried out the mock blasts. He said they blew up replicas of the devices alleged to have been used by […]
Reading Time: < 1 minute“A farmer who built a bungalow inside his barn to bypass planning laws has been ordered to demolish the structure” reports the >> BBC Archigrams Pastoral Futurism > this > this
Reading Time: < 1 minute‘House Washed Out to Sea by Tsunami: Schooner rides at her mooring after towing a house back into harbour. The house had been washed out to sea during the Burin Tsunami of 1929. The tsunami caused 28 deaths in Newfoundland and was the worst earthquake-related disaster in Canadian history.’ The text is taken from ‘The […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesMore product placement: I’ve contributed to photographer Steve Harries new book ‘Reading Lines’. The book is a collection of photos of London skateboarders and the public spaces they explore, exploit and interact with. Here is my contribution: We are surrounded by manufactured landscapes, by environments created out of ideas, culture and – even occasionally – […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesAn amazing set of photographs documenting the construction of the >>Crazy Horse Memorialthings
Reading Time: < 1 minuteHere’s a link to >>Kester Rattenburys BD review
Reading Time: < 1 minuteDesigned by William Etheridge and built 1748-50, The Walton Bridge was much admired for its ‘strength, contrivance and remarkable great arch,’ and was even described as ‘the most beautiful wooden arch in the world ‘ – beautiful enough for Canaletto to paint it twice – the image above is a crop of one of these […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesThis January, Sweden’s northernmost town of Kiruna, 145 kilometres into the Artic Circle has decided to move itself 4km in order to save itself from sinking into cracks created by the worlds largest iron ore mine. Kiruna grew thanks to the mine but the industry that created the town threatened to eventually consume it. Most […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesMarshall McLuhan explored the relationship of the body to global communication describing television as an extension of the optic nerve, radio an extension of your ear and so on. Electricity, he claimed, extended our central nervous system. Now however, we are sometimes more nervous of our bodies proximity to the apparatus of the global village. […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesRapid prototyping is usually associated with blobular pseudo-futuristic design. This kind of design is yawnsome, derivative and usually presented in a hysterically blinkered manner … but perhaps worst of all, what it tells us about the future is a lie. In truth, the future is something much more complicated. This piece is part of a […]
Reading Time: < 1 minutePerhaps the strangest of the many products made to commemorate the Queens Silver Jubilee in 1977 was this vase. It borrows from the Rubin Vase Illusion, devised by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in which we are not sure if we are looking at a vase or at two faces staring at each other. Here […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteUnsubstantiated Factoid of the Week: The most visited location in the UK is, apparently, IKEA in Warrington. ]]>
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAstroturfing The Central Reservation of a Texan Highway: Apparently the cover image of a January 1971 issue of a magazine called ‘Texas Highways’ (which I would love a subscription to). The feature article is also scanned and available here . It describes experiments in astroturfing highway medians and traffic islands with a special landscaping surface […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe relationship of inside and outside is always fascinating to architects. And this sight – which I get a great view of each morning from the top of a 243 bus – is particularly striking. The entire building has been demolished, leaving only a historical facade, propped up by gutsy pragmatic steelwork and a big […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis graphic in the Times today shows what is described as a ‘monstrous hole in the ground that is Britain’s biggest pothole’. Starting 65 ft below ground, the cave descends downwards for 464 ft. It was discovered by three potholers who dug though a passageway that had been blocked by a rockfall. They had been […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis, staring out of a Grosvenor Street shop window: A lump of expanding foam characterised with marker pen and cigarette butt. ]]>
Reading Time: 4 minutesWatching a political party try to reassemble itself is a fascinating spectacle. And over the last year we’ve been watching the Tory party attempting to recast itself as something approaching electabiliy after three poll-spankings at the hand of New Labour. Their first project has been the creation of a single personality: Dave. Big faced, swept […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesSome thought it too dangerous to attempt under a helium filled balloon. Nevertheless, like a summit between the forces of good and the forces of evil (though which is which isn’t entirely clear), Rem Koolhaas and Jeff Koons appeared together as the jewel in the crown of Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrists Serpentine Pavilion lecture […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWarhols ‘Empire’ is showing at Coskun from 9 – 15 October. Which is excuse enough for me to post links to some StrangeHarvest remakes: Souvenir Empires: These are scaled recreations of Andy Warhols ‘Empire’, shot using souvenirs of the Empire State Building. The length of each film is scaled to the height of the souvenir. […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesI’m wading through marketing blurb that reads as though Heat magazine has been MagiMixed with a compendium of Victorian poetry. Which I suppose is entirely appropriate because these blurbs concern the modern reinvention of the gentle art of perfumery. The blending of oils, spices, herbs in delicate balance has, over recent years become an alchemy […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesA wonderful series of photographs by Hans Van Der Meer documenting amateur football pitches in a book called ‘European Fields: The Landscape of Lower League Football’ As it turns out, Hans was the photographer of KesselsKramers ‘Other Final‘ – an inverted world cup final between FIFAs lowest ranked teams, for which I designed the trophy. […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesAnother plug for a book that I’ve contributed an essay to: Making the Impossible Possible The book documents a unique accumulation of superlatives. Light is shed on two business strategies attempting to realise mankind’s primordial dreams. The scene is the world’s largest self-supporting hall in a small village close to Berlin. At the end of […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis project from artist Matthew Moores website ‘Urban Plough‘ titled ‘Rotations: Moore Estates. Planned Area Development’. It’s what he calls a ‘crop map’ made out of 35 acres of Sorghum and wheat, and marks out the homes and roads of the future development of the first planned community that will be erected on his family’s […]
Reading Time: < 1 minute40000 square feet of antiques : http://www.strydhagen.com/ ]]>
Reading Time: 2 minutesA quick plug for a few recent publications that I have contributed to, available from all good incredibly obscure and highly specialised bookstores right now! ‘5 Codes: Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror’ with other contibutions from Noam Chomsky, Beatriz Colomina, Shumon Basar, and Eyal Weizman amongst others. Perspecta 37: Famous Perspecta 38: […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesIf your French is as ropey as mine, you too might get confused. The “Gallery Des Glaces” at Versailles should translate as the “Hall of Mirrors”. But it comes out as the “Gallery of Ice Creams” if you are hazy with your accents. Which I am. Other bad habits involve fixating on the cheap and […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesThe London Architecture biennale is underway, and it’s already managed to set a depressing new low. ‘Proclamations for a Beautiful City’ is an ‘installation’ by Alain de Botton. Apparently it is ‘questioning the role of the architect in creating beauty in the city. The series of proclamations are posted on the outside of the Yard […]
Reading Time: < 1 minute“Honey I Shrunk the Modernist”. Want one? ]]>
Reading Time: 2 minutesA couple of highlights (perhaps the only ones) of a small presentation I did at the RCA this week on the Thames Gateway. The basic premise was arguing for some kind of vision which could make sense of the bureaucratic demand for 30 ?????? 500 000 new houses in the area. And that this vision […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesIt??????s Queen Elizabeth??????s 80th birthday today. So a royal theme to this post. A while ago, I was watching a news report about the Queens tour of Australia. She was planting a ceremonial tree in the grounds of some institution. It was next to a tree that she??????d planted many years ago. It struck me […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes??????Tory, Tory, Tory?????? was a great three part documentary on the rise and fall of Thatcherism. You might still be able to grab it from uknova.com with any luck. These stills are taken from a moody reconstruction of a diagram drawn by John Hoskins ?????? at the time a computer systems analyst. He applied a […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesDriving back from Portmeirion through the Snowdonia, with valleys rising up around us, curving almost impossibly towards the sky, I was wondering what exactly it was that I was reminded of. Amongst this wonder of natural beauty, there was something most un-natural that came to mind: those brilliant 70s illustrations of space stations. Remeber those […]
Reading Time: 12 minutesWhen I??????m watching TV, I hear my daughters crying in the canned laughter track. It??????s just one of the sublimated, mundane horrors that shadow our everyday lives. They are lucid, alternate versions of our everyday actions that begin as physic tremors deep within us. These wordless soliloquies mesh with the stories, myths and images of […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesLike some kind of satire-free Gulliver, I’m striding across a concrete landscape inside a large white tent. It looks like a desert marked out with spray paints. Stretched over a large geometric canyon is a Lego model of Tower Bridge. It looks as though a terrible toy town disaster has decimated London leaving a solitary […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesHere is a preview of a Fat exhibition opening tomorrow at the RIBA in London. It’s called ‘In a Lonely Place’ and features a giant blow-up ball. You enter the structure through a half timbered structure, up a staircase and into interior of the ball. The ball is punctured with dots that seem to form […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteFinally found a copy of this photo – first published in the Evening Standard in early Jan, taken by photographer Alisdair Macdonald. It’s a digital composite photo taken over 1 hour of the sky over a housing block in Hounslow, next to Heathrow airport. An amazing view of a huge metallic jet powered cloud, constantly […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteFrom – embarrasingly enough – the Daily Mail website. “With Its ceiling frescos, gilded cherubs, marble pillars and chandelier, it has drawn admiring comparisons with the Palace of Versailles. Only the widescreen TV in the corner betrays the fact that this is no stately home or museum, but Dennis and Norma Nelems’s two-bedroom retirement flat. […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesIn Times Square, stranded between 7th Avenue and Broadway, there is a modern folly. Actually a recruiting station for the US Army, it looks like a lot more. A glazed box, either side of which displays a giant glowing American flag – made out of coloured fluorescent tubes. It??????s as though someone at the Pentagon […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesIt’s a bluetooth enabled, data transmitting rock – as used by British spies in Moscow. The recently uncovered spy ring had placed this hollowed out rock in a park. Apparently they communicated with it via their PDAs or mobile phones. Its a classic in the bizzare world of espionage design – as so brilliantly fictionalised […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteFrom the Radio 4 website: “On New Year’s Eve 1854, 21 leading scientists sat down to a sumptuous seven course banquet – served in the plastercast mould of a prehistoric beast! They were there to celebrate the creation of 33 life-size dinosaurs in the new Crystal Palace Park – a place where those same monsters […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’ve just installed these pieces are part of a show Fat are in at MOT, Bethnal Green. Details follow: INTIMATE SPACE January 7th – February 11th 2006, Anish Kapoor, Yuko Shiraishi, FAT. curated by Rajesh Punj Open Fri, Sat, Sun 12-5 or by appointment MOT Unit 54/5th floor Regents Studios 8 Andrews Road London E8 […]
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Reading Time: 2 minutesBuild Your Own Fork Hook In 22 Easy Steps! 1. Visit a large generic DIY Store. 2. It should ideally be a large industrial shed, filled with a bewildering range of products. 3. Walk past the aisles of paint, miniature candyfloss makers, bags of cement, fireworks and Victorian shower cubicles. Ignore them, however competitively priced, […]
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Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe novelty section of the toy shop – rather than the Conran shop, 100% design, or other such self procliamed designer havens – is the bleeding edge of contemporary design. It’s here, in the pocketmoney marketplace, that a car has seemingly swallowed a pen – or perhaps its the other way around. It is a […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSpotted in a Key Cutters/Cobblers in East Sheen. It’s a ledge to help you lace or unlace your shoe without sitting down. A very particular kind of furniture – remarkable in its specific-ness – and strangified by its personified legs. Which actually are legs. Are they table legs? or is it a leg table? ]]>
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Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Times are doing a round up of the best of British Design. My nomination is the Football Pitch. This is what I said: “The design of the football pitch is elegantly simple. A giant sized graphic that distils footballs origin as a village vs. village free for all, played over a landscape of fields, […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesOver the last couple of weeks, I’ve been Googling long and Googling hard. I’ve been looking for the location where Rod Stewarts video for ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’ was shot. The whole video consists of a dandified Rod walking up a staircase in a Baroque garden. The stairs have a water channel running […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn the spirit of Hello magazine, let me invite you into my lovely toilet. Well, actually, you’re too late, but just in time for the requiem. I’ve got the builders in right now, and amongst the stuff they’ve slung onto the skip was this: a white polyester toilet seat with the lid sculpted to look […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI, Sam Jacob, being of sound mind and body do hereby … Hold On: More accurately – being of slightly skewed mind and body do here by publish some pictures of a nifty little shop at East Croydon station. Along side key cutting, shoe repairs and pet tags, they also offer Memorials. Here is their […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAs you approach the tool booths on the French motorways, standard road etiquette collapses into road race anarchy. Cars scoot across the tarmac looking for the shortest queue. Once through the barrier, there’s a thrilling burst of acceleration over unmarked road. Maybe to help contain this freeform driving, there are some giant red plastic balls, […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI remember reading a quote that suggested the First World War was a reinvention of landscape – though the quote was better, and I can’t currently place it. This photo shows the no-mans land at Vimy Ridge. It looks, even after so many years, very alien and un-natural. Pounded by shells, pitted with huge bunkers […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesIcon magazine have franchised Klein Dythams Petcha Kucha format ?????? loads of speakers, 20 slides, 6 seconds per slide. It was Icons second go last night at the ICA in London. As a veteran of the Apple Store Petcha Kucha, I was first up. My 7 minutes mainly relied on the cheap Pantomime trick of […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesHere are some of the models that students at the AA summer school have made – reimagining Big Ben … its at an interim stage in the project, and they should be finished by friday for a presentation to a high powered jury. This from Charlie Tims / Demos about the relationship of the project […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesOver the last couple of weeks, I’ve been Googling long and hard. Ive been looking for the place that Rod Stewarts video for ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’ was shot. If you ever see it, its got a great dandified version of Rod walking up a staircase. The song lasts as long as it […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe “Texas Tower” was an Air Force radar station that collapsed in a storm in 1961, wiping out the entire crew. This was the United States first line of strategic defense using these early warning radar picket link ]]>
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAn image swiped from Indymedia.org.uk of part of the G8 security perimeters up at Gleneagles. ]]>
Reading Time: 2 minutesI went to Poundbury yesterday, unexpectedly, and in the rain. Poundbury is Prince Charles’ new town – his personal architectural utopia. I thought I’d find a verbatim verncular, a remake of the Dorset towns that surround it. But actually it’s something far more difficult to pin down. Part historical fantasy, part business park – its […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI was watching ‘For your Eyes Only’ this weekend. Early on, Bond goes to spy on the baddies hang out. He’s hiding in a bush, peering through his binocular/mini camera at some kind of Mediterranean country club. There is a pool, there are girls, there are baddies in Speedos and towelling robes. And what are […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIt’s a few rubble sacks lined up in a road with a white painted piece of 2X4 balanced on top. But there was something striking which I’m sure wasn’t at the forefront of my neighbours mind when they were saving a space to park a skip outside their house. Maybe its the formless-ness of a […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAn all new project: Strangeharvests Goal Sculptures ]]>
Reading Time: 7 minutes‘In theory, the patio would have been a nice place, the size of a barbecue and a chair, but instead there were bags of beer cans and booze bottles piled up so high that we’d have to hold back the trash to keep it from spilling into the house every time we opened the door. […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesIt’s Langlands and Bell like you’ve never seen them before! Those cerebral Turner Prize contenders in an action packed adventure. ‘The House of Osama Bin Laden’ is a diary of Langlands and Bells two week trip to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Pages of video grabs, documentary photographs, a diary. There’s some art […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesIt’s as simple as a cartoon landscape. The river flows over the the edge of the Niagara escarpment, jagged like a snapped cookie. The water forms a smooth radius like polished jade as it turns from horizontal to vertical. Its a large piece of scenery in constant collapse. Staring into it feels like looking at […]
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Reading Time: < 1 minuteAn amateurish reproduction of the FA Cup, fashioned imperfectly out of clay. Produced for Icon Magazines table football tournament by these fair hands. ]]>
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAs the M3 leaps out of London over Hanworth, the roof of the Unigate dairy provides a strange flat landscape populated by miniature but anatomically correct models of cows (in this photo, they are those grey blobs on the horizon). Grazing on asphalt 4 stories up. Maybe it is meant as some kind of city/rural […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’ve always loved spray snow. Call it instant-seasonalness, or climate in a can. Here it is sprayed onto a pub windows in a way that simultaneously conjours the ghosts of Dickensian christmas’ and low grade graffiti (perhaps the decorative equivalent of Run DMCs ‘Christmas in Hollis’ – heres a sample lyric: ‘The rhymes you hear […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA fanzine on wheels: The rear window plastered with fading pictures of Freddie, the boot covered with stick-on lettering. The Queen Mobile spotted brightening up a traffic jam around Shepherds Bush. EDIT: more pics turned up a few months later on popbitch: ]]>
Reading Time: 4 minutesWilliam Shatner acts and sings. Sting sings and acts. Sometimes one medium just isn’t enough. Sometimes an artist, swelling with creativity, bursts the walls of their discipline. Coinciding with the UK publication of his new novel ‘Eleanor Rigby’, Douglas Coupland has an exhibition at Canada House in London entitled ‘Canada House’. Originally trained as a […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes‘It’s a Small World’ is a ride at Disneyland. But because the world isn’t really that small, it’s really four identical rides in California, Florida, Disneyland Paris and Tokyo. And they are all a copy of a ride developed by Disney in 1964 as a Pepsi sponsored exhibit at the World Fair in New York. […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteClova Estate, Aberdeenshire ]]>
Reading Time: 4 minutesUnless you’re a junkie, an aristocrat (or both), what you sentimentally think of as your home is furnished with products of complex industrial production. Before the Industrial Revolution objects were either roughly moulded out of mud or beautiful, bejewelled glittering and almost priceless. Though consumer products seem as natural to us as sunsets, they were […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesImagine sitting at home when suddenly the sky goes white. Not that shadowless white-without-limit where cloud meets mist on a winter morning. But a whiteness with a grid of reinforcements and repeating logos which stops a few yards from the front of your face. And arrives heralded by the whistling of scaffolders. It’s no surprise […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesHi. I’ve just read Matt and Rons book. Here’s the plot, nicely documented in a photo story running through the book: top art critic Matt Collings goes to Chalk Farm, shakes 80s design superstar Ron Arads hand, sits down, chats, has a cup of coffee, stands up to look at something. Ron gets up and […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA scrap of of something for Intersection magazine : My parents had a Morris Traveller in the early 1970s. I have vague dreamlike memories of sitting in the back driving through the English countryside with a large clay Cider jug rolling around as the car twisted down leafy lanes. The Morris Traveller is such a […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesCities are strange things. Sometimes evolved over thousands of years, sometimes appearing fully formed in an instant. Gigantic densities of hard stuff packed together, propped up on concrete bases, ringed with beards of countryside. Forget art, literature, music, or architecture – dwarfed as, stilted, artificial, hermetic. Urbanism is the teeming crucible of civilisation, the apex […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesYou know that Phillpe Stark lemon squeezer, a fixture on any Yuppy wedding list from the mid eighties. Even all these years later, the Juicy Salif remains a really strange object. A high water mark of unrestrained design. It placed domesticity and design in a relationship that was both beautifully resolved and mysteriously dislocated. It […]
Reading Time: 9 minutesThe first time I saw them was in the Duty Free shop at Brussels Airport: A display of kitch mini-buildings set against a backdrop of Belgian chocolate and cigars. They are the visual equivalent of eating, drinking and smoking the entire contents of a duty free shop. Not being one for health food or abstinence, […]
Reading Time: 13 minutesDid you see the Queens Golden Jubilee last summer? The thing which began with Brian May astride the palace roof playing God Save the Queen. A lightweight alloy of rooftop Beatles, good natured bolshevik, arch-royalist Scarlet Pimpernel and Woodstock Hendrix. Next, the camera pans down to a mini rock festival that’s getting underway amongst the […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesUsually, a review of an operating system would tell you all kinds of technical qualifications, specifications, and a performance related run down. This one won’t. What it will tell you is something much less useful. The kind of things that technical reviews overlook. I wanted to describe the scene I look at more than anything […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesThis is a designers story about non-design. The origins of the tarmac road are as clumsy as a smash at the crossroads of geology, chemistry, economics, and city planning. In fact, its origins are literally in an everyday low grade road accident. A British county surveyor, Edgar Hooley travelling the bumpy roads of Derbyshire came […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesMissys Crib in amazing Planometric Vision! Like Jackass’ “Human Omelette” – where Dave England munches, swallows and regurgitates the raw ingredients into a sizzlin’ pan – MTV is simultaneously the laziest and most creative channel on your digibox. Guilty after bingeing on R’n’B videos, MTV bolemicaly sticks its fingers down its throat and throws up […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesAutomated crossbow traps, giant balls of rock rolling down tunnels, statues with lasers for eyes: There are certain kinds of things that are only ever seen on the covers of sci-fi books, in the plastic models on shelves of fantasy stores, in the complex bureaucracy of Dungeons and Dragons, and on Hollywood sound stages. Despite […]
Reading Time: 7 minutesItsa Kinda Magic. Or more likely, these days it’s not. Magic is back, but this time it’s different. Magic is no longer a lounge show. Satin top hats, frilly shirts, velvet jackets, red drapes, sequinned outfits, feathers, and big boobs have vanished in a puff of sickly hairspray. Entertainment, or at least being seen to […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesIt ends with White Christmas, sung through a megaphone. It sounds a hundred years away, from the loneliest place on earth. It looks like a Muppet Velvet Underground singing the hits of Bing Crosby splattered with blood and punching the air while clutching a flapping mechanical bird. And that cheesy seasonal standard has never sounded […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesPiccadilly Circus has had an upgrade. A giant, curved, superbright and supersmooth TV screen has just been turned on. Wider than widescreen, it curves around the Regency architecture and disappears up Shaftesbury Avenue. Its bright and it moves and its really big. It looks as thin as paper and just as light. It suddenly makes […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesSqueezed into the world a big purple lump of screaming, wet biology. Scooped up, weighed, hosed with oxygen. Then, a weird calm, blinking and breathing, fresh to the world. Tiny crumpled hands unfolding on the 510,072,200 sq. km of our planets surface. The wide world rolls out from under the transparent NHS cot to the […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesEarlier this year the UK government decided to ban tobacco advertisements. The impending ad ban precipitated a puff of self congratulatory farewells from the fat old ad men who had grown rich peddling ill health. My own brand, Silk Cut, had some torturous gag about a piece of purple silk looking like a fat lady […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesDriving west on my scooter through London’s evening traffic. Over my shoulder looms the outline of Harrods, picked out in bright dots like a department store shaped constellation against the dark Knightsbridge sky. Something solid turned to air. In front of me, its outline slips like liquid over the curved piano-polished skin of a Taxi. […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesHow Londoners can stay calm as the days Evening Standard begins to appear each day is a mystery. Who could ignore the thrill as a giant system swings into action: as the battle-worn orange and white chevroned vans begin circling the city, side door wide open, bundles of papers tossed out full of fresh news. […]
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAmongst Marshal Mcluhans more stunning observations is that a light bulb is information. He said we don’t recognise it because its pure information. And its true, we don’t recognise it. But on the other hand, is it entirely pure?. A trip to the local electrical store might have set him straight. A bulb is information […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesDirty dishes are like a hangover you can look at. A pile in the sink thats last night pleasure congealed into todays misery. Bythe morning its too much for the robot washer tucked under your worktop. A job that only brute force and chemistry are going to deal with. But don’t worry, just reach for […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesCarlton Terrace runs along the back of the Mall, and if you’re ever there on a weekend you might see actors dressed in 19th century costume looking bored and drinking Nescafe. That’s because if you stand in the right place, and look in the right direction, blank out that parking meter with a Hansom Cab […]