2009-04-19
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remanence : variance from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.
via kasei; see also. It’s almost enough to make me get up at 6am and go down to Docklands.
2009-04-17
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An animation of the images of Las Vegas taken by the Landsat satellite over twenty five years.
2009-04-08
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John Norquist, interviewed at Streetsblog: “Back to the Grid, Part 2: on Reclaiming American Cities”
via Anil Dash: Getting What You Design For
2009-03-18
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Doors of Perception: Dreaming of a Paris as a sponge
Further to last week’s post on Richard Rogers and Greater Paris, here’s John Thackara on the other architects proposals for the city, including extending it right out to the coast and “hard nosed number crunching”:
I can’t help thinking that the Dutch team’s visual metaphor of a massive mainframe computer landing on Paris is unlikley to win them the popular vote.
2009-03-12
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“excerpts from a small booklet explaining the ideas behind the official County of London Plan”, posted by smallritual to Flickr.
The plans for the Thames and South Bank are particularly mindboggling to me - pushing all the railways underground seems incredibly ambitious.
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After the Pompidou, can Rogers transform the secret, shabby, divided side of Paris?
An article in the Guardian about Greater Paris.
the Greater Paris project to reunite Paris’s centre with its neglected outskirts is steeped in controversy as local and national politicians fight over its boundaries, budget, population and new identity before the architectural debate has begun.
Funnily enough, I’m reading The Future Of London, a 1960 Pelican covering the progress (and failure) of the three great post World War II plans for the London area, and it’s had to spend a chapter or three defining what London even is.
It turns out that the current Greater London is a compromise between sticking with the pre-1960s London County Council (which seems absurdly small to the sensibilities of someone who’s always known a city that, basically, fills the M25) and expanding it further, to take in the parts of the south-east of England that London dominates culturally and economically, which expands for a good 60 miles or more from the city centre (and takes in towns such as Haverhill, which took “London overspill” in the 1960s).
That final compromise now seems natural, but I’m sure it didn’t seem that way in the 1960s (just as it’s evident that drawing the lines for Paris is proving difficult, especially given how long-standing the boundaries of the current city are).
In an exclusive preview of their strategy, Richard Rogers’s group told the Guardian yesterday that the biggest challenge was Paris’s “enormous disparity” and the “staggering psychological barrier” between the core of the city and the world beyond the ring-road.
2009-02-08
Four Links, Vaguely Connected
How The City Hurts Your Brain, The Boston Globe
“We’ve constructed a world that’s always drawing down from the same mental account,” Kuo says. “And then we’re surprised when [after spending time in the city] we can’t focus at home.”
The End Of Alone, The Boston Globe:
At our desk, on the road, or on a remote beach, the world is a tap away. It’s so cool. And yet it’s not. What we lose with our constant connectedness
Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains, Wired Science
This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. That makes sense. When you’re scattered and diffuse, you’re less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it’s hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking.
Twitter, Communication, and My Intermittent Inner Luddite
What does that have to do with Twitter, one might ask? Well, while the main means by which Newspeak was implemented was simplifying and subtly changing the inference of words, another element was the extreme condensation of communication
