fistful of links

Top: the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, shortly before it sunk. Bottom: visualisation showing the resuming of air traffic across Europe in the wake of the Volcano. Airspace Rebooted (related: Flightradar24 where you can see all flights in Europe in real-time).

When it rains it pours: some news.

What seems to be going on in the world? Volcanoes, oil spills, the economic bankruptcy of most of Europe, and now Britain has a hung parliament. It's like we're copping it from all angles (which is exactly what she said). Luckily the Royal Guards are still able to instil some sense of normality. Oh, wait, they're busy marching in Red Square to celebrate conquest of the Nazis...

Related, as a kind of cultural exchange programme: Lenin in London. Same theme: Verso's Marxism conference. It's coming back into fashion again, that old Marxism. Yes sir, Marx my words, it has yet to make its full Marx. Dad jokes. Of course, the popular conception that ex-KGB lurk around every Moscow street corner couldn't be farther from the truth. Possibly related, Orwell on the principles of Newspeak. Back to London, but on a sombre note: Ghost Bikes. I've seen two people die as a result of bike accidents since I arrived in London a year ago, and I see a new ghost bike every few weeks. If you cycle in the city, do take care. Last thing on the capital: "London's Poor now no different from slaves"...

Let's hop on over to the oil rig shindig: a professional engineer in the field explains how monumentally fucked up all that shit is, in a no doubt hastily named article: mother of all gushers. Related, workers describe the methane explosion. Apocalyptic scenario? Who knows. But I'll invoke the imagery of the sky before Katrina as a visual metaphor for the global condition. A political metaphor might be Kanellos, the Greek protest dog.

Let's keep it a bit positive shall we? I'm not bothered by the oil escaping, since we've now got a petrol producing bug. When you factor in declining fuel reserves and Icelandic tectonic activity (not to mention the fact that vacationing is now a human right, according to the UN) then it seems like the future in travel is airships. Ace. Here's MPs proposal.

To technology: the first ever non-latin web addresses have gone live (although it still displays in most browsers as a bunch of x--n, wgbii, characters). The reasoning behind creating non-english URLs was that otherwise the Internet was likely to split into multiple Internets (can you even imagine multiple Internets?), although I would have thought that it makes the web less unified, not more. A convincing ipad rival has been released, which of course now justifies the ipad's right to existence. Nice one, idiots. That said, what if I had bought apple stock instead of an apple product? Still Mac, Steve Jobs' thoughts on flash. My own: phase out that shit - I gots one acronym, one number for you buddy: HTML 5. It can do everything flash can do, and it's native to the browser. Sorry Adobe, but I still love your Creative Suite. Related, obsolete technology.

Few kickshaws for you: a cream designed to grow long lashes can permanently change eye colour (Brooke Shields is the product's figureface); DAYTUM, in case you didn't already have enough information about yourself. Comes from Nicholas Feltron, whose Annual Reports always cause such a stir; BLDGBLOG's theatre for one; radioactive toothpaste; 4,000 year old lentils grown from seeds; National Geographic got a Tumblr; BIG's Shanghai Pavilion (also check out Heatherwick's). Still China: the fantastically multifunctional Chinese army shovel. Those guys, what will they think of next?

They can't tell us though, Millennium People is blocked in China.

Finally,

"deaths"

Via the magnificent Flowing Data.

one new change

As I mentioned some time ago, I arrived in London in February 2009 expecting to work on Jean Nouvel's One New Change project. For reasons that are still too emotional to go into in any depth, I was not employed. It grieves me further that in spite of the absence of my creative input the building is nonetheless approaching completion. My only consolation is that the glass is pretty ugly (more here on Flickr).

The building caused quite a lot of controversy when the valiant Prince of Darkness decided he didn't like it and was going to have it canned. This was shortly after his fiddling with the Rogers re-development over at Chelsea Barracks. Those same Qatari developers have their fingers in every pie and they are also responsible for the Renzo Piano monstrosity currently under construction near London Bridge. The core alone is the width of a 20 storey building.

Dark times lie on the horizon for London (literally, as the massive structure will be able to cast a shadow over all of Borough Market).


Shard (right) under construction.

hermitage mooring

The Hermitage Mooring development is a beautifully executed architectural project. But it is also a proposition for the re-evaluation of the metropolitan citizen’s relationship to landscape. Perhaps most of all, it is a bold political statement – the result of a very personal struggle by its founders to demonstrate the possibility of individual will against established authority.

comestible catastrophes

Images via Yofavo

After getting a tan yesterday I awake to find the world capped under tupperware. And the rain comes down. London in spring I suppose: some Sunday ruminations...

A few months ago Geoff Manaugh (BLDG BLOG) tweeted about a 1919 disaster, the "Boston Molassacre". A large molasses storage tank burst, and a wave of treacle roared through the streets (apparently at over 50km/h) killing 21 and injuring 150. Wiki notes: "The event has entered local folklore, and residents claim that on hot summer days, the area still smells of molasses."

This put me on to the London Beer Flood of 1814. The whole strange tale begins with a party organised by Meux's Brewery (owned by the first Baronet Sir Meux, whose name is inexplicably pronounced 'myooks'), located on the junction between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. The occasion was a grand dinner to celebrate the construction of a giant vat capable of holding 600,000 litres of the popular beer stout porter (now known simply as stout). It was allegedly two storeys high and had a diameter of 20 yards. 200 hundred people dined within it.

Subsequently it was filled to capacity and the full pressure of the porter put upon its 29 iron hoops. Shortly after a workman noticed a small crack in one of the hoops, but seeing as they each weighed more than 200kg, he thought nothing of it. At around 6pm the same day the vat burst, creating an explosion reportedly heard five miles away. The immense pressure from the first vat toppled the second, the weight of which fell through to the floor below. A chain reaction ensued, 1.4 million litres of beer tore through the building's facade.

At that time Tottenham Court Road was the boundary of the St. Giles Rookery, and the building was surrounded by low housing of a poor construction. Several of the buildings could not stand the force of the wall of porter and collapsed. Eight people are recorded to have died, drowning in basements, crushed by debris or subsequent alcohol poisoning.

Rescue efforts were greatly slowed by the drunken masses scooping the beer directly from the cobbles. An apocryphal story has it that as beer-soaked victims were rushed to hospital the smell of beer led patients on other wards to believe beer was being served for all patients except them. Not accepting this apparent injustice they started a riot, which increased the number of wounded.

After an investigation the courts ruled that the event had been an act of God, and that no one was responsible. The beer company continued on that site until the 20's when it was demolished and the Dominion Theatre constructed in its place. I would frankly quite like to see a tsunami of beer crush the home of the Queen Musical.

cheer up (and get on with it), it’s archigram!

Peter Cook, taken by Matt Jones (of Berg London) at that recent Westminster Archigram shindig.

While I was drinking downstairs Matt got right at the action (definitely check out what he has to say about the legacy of archigram).

sign of the times

Two things are coming back: poster design + 80's graphics. Spread the word.

fistful of links

Beach near Trouville, 1865 by Gustave Courbet (via the humm of mystery)

Let me make this quick: some news.

Following up on the Archigram vibe: Cedric Price's Fun Palace at the CAA; Millennium People did a post on the project some time back, linking it with a Barbican exhibit and a pamphlet on forgotten spaces in the Lea Valley. Also architecture: the new Rennie Mackintosh site; a James Bond villain pool in your house (plus its eco-friendly). Still design, for all of you trapped in Milan + the helpful "so you need a typeface" infographic.

NY is all wringing their hands over a doorman strike? Man, we've got volcanoes in Europe, grow some. More evidence of weird stuff going on across the pond: teabaggers get preferential treatment from the police. In case you don't know who these nutjobs are, have a look here, here and here. For those of you a bit out of the loop, you might want to have a look at the other meaning of teabagging (urban dictionary, NSFW). Yep, its an unfortunate name for a political movement.

Still America, "boy stabs mom to stop her drink-driving"; the history of concealed weapons laws (over at Sociological Images). But seriously, The States are not that bad, viz: LA and NY at night; the destruction of Texas Stadium (must see); Lebbeus on the London 8... (related: an archigram-like pavilion for the park). We only needed a re-think of the American Dream.

Enough of them wide open lands. Closer to home, the girl shot in the chicken shop on the corner of Falkirk and Hoxton street has now died. What a pointless crime.

Apes found to suffer self-doubt; also animal, the Scottish Highland Tiger; a city of animals: the Illustrated London News goes digital; related, "Embrace the Endless City" (Owen Hatherley); not related, twin lens pencil sharpener; Venn diagrams about Venn diagrams; amazing images of icebergs. Some blogs out there: Landscape Suicide; circumnavigating a game world in 8 hours; Spillway on a low tunnel entry that catches at least one truck a week; the Shanghai Expo (Heatherwick's is dope); XYM, a temporary archive of artistic work and writing.

Finally (I had wanted to make this a short one), how to translate Cockney (requires knowledge of Jamaican patois):

archigram archives

If you want to talk about being on the pulse, then this has to take the cake: within three hours of the site-launch, Max Rosin-Melser (MP Australia) sent me an e-mail asking if I had seen Westminster's Archigram Archive project. Perhaps being in completely the wrong time zone put him ahead of the wave, but he even beat BLDG BLOG (who detail the contents and importance of the Archive more thoroughly than I intend to).

He also beat the official launch party, which I went to last night (lots of sweet prosecco = headache). All the team were there, with a hook-up to Web and Crompton in NY (something about volcanoes) + London's archi cool dudes. And to my great surprise I also saw an old lecturer of mine, the architectural theorist and historian Charles Rice (of UTS renown, although I know him from the end of his UNSW stint). Small world.

prometheus unbound

Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson in Iceland (via) - compare with my own shot (from last December)

Above me the full glory of the Northern Lights was spread across the night sky, a magnificent slow-moving dance of green haze. “I think this is a life-changing phenomenon,” I said. “It’s the tipping point in my understanding. When I moved from Australia to Europe I had to accustom myself to a completely unfamiliar sky, strange new patterns of celestial and solar arrangements, but it is only now, now! Here! That I really comprehend the full significance of what it means to stand on the surface of a spherical body moving through space!” There was an uncomfortable pause, then Borja looked up from adjusting his tripod “Man, it just looks like a slow Mac screensaver.”