the journal of an architect
‘…The Wizard of Oz has been a classic film, ever since it came out. And Dark Side of the Moon has been a must-have on any album collectors shelf since 1973. Now you can enjoy them together…’
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‘…the brain, on receiving incomplete visual data through the eyes, ‘fills in’ the missing elements as best it can…’ And this is why there’s no such thing as Truth.
We have these 49 search results for “pumpkin”
A new group of [Creative Commons] licences about to be introduced to the UK could offer a more flexible approach to copyright law
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The second trip outdoors only provided more clouds. I never saw the eclipse, unlike Joel and all these smug people.
The next night the Hunter’s Moon was out and as bright as I’ve ever seen it. I took some photos to make myself feel better.
It’s 3am. I was warned that there would be cloud but I chose to get out of bed and see for myself since tonight would be the last total lunar eclipse for two and a half years.
I imagine that even the bubbly Mr Jack Horkheimer (Real Player link) is a little less jovial this morning as technology has let us down as well as nature. None of the webcasts are working. It’s raining on the East Antrim camera. It’s raining on the University of North Dakota. The camera in Iran that I was relying on to be clear? Parssky.net could not be found. Please check the name and try again.
Even NASA is timing out.
White light hits the atmosphere, blue light scatters, the red light of every sunrise and sunset simultaneously strikes October’s Hunter’s Moon. It’s the Blood Moon. Or so I’m told.
All this talk of hunters and moons reminds me of a book I scribbled about on a paper bag. I’m going to take a walk down the street for one last look.
And it revolted me. Because it was a thing that, though you couldn’t understand what it was made of, or perhaps precisely because you couldn’t understand, seemed different from all the things in our life, our good things of plastic, of nylon, of chrome-plated steel, duco, synthetic resins, plexiglass, aluminium, vinyl, formica, zinc, asphalt, asbestos, cement, the old things among which we were born and bred. It was something incompatible, extraneous.
…
It spread out, imposing on our familiar landscape not only its light of an unsuitable colour, but also its volume, its weight, its incongruous substantiality. And then, all over the face of the Earth – the surfaces of the metal plating, iron armatures, rubber pavements, glass domes – over every part of us that was exposed, I felt a shudder pass.
The Soft Moon, TimeAndTheHunter by Italo Calvino
…broadcast on the John Peel show on 3rd September 2002 (click the Kershaw link for more)
‘…Here are some free and legal mp3 downloads of songs that John Peel has featured on his Radio 1 show recently…’
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(some correspondence between Peter and I about Paul Shepheard that seemed worth hyperlinking)
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262691663
Have you read it? It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on it.
Best,
/P.
Dear Peter,
First of all I should start with an apology, since my thoughts on your Fred Brooks entry about software architecture still haven’t made it from my brain into the computer. It inspired me to go back to some of Peter Eisenman’s writing, as it felt as though Brooks’ definition of software architecture seemed to have a similar quality to Eisenman’s ideas about ‘interiority’. Eisenman, however, is rather difficult to read. A few weeks ago the Architect’s Journal printed a quote by Libeskind that said Eisenman was ‘…a hateful person and a terrible academic…’ I can’t comment on whether he is hateful, but I fear that Libeskind may be right about his academic skills. His writing is almost inpenetrable. You bounce off the surface of each sentence with exactly the same momentum as the last, the rhythm never changing. I shall have to try harder to find my way below the surface.
Luckily I was helped along the way by the book on postmodernism that I promised to send you. After digging it out of one of the boxes that I still haven’t unpacked since we moved house nearly two years ago I decided I should read it again before I mail it to you. It proved to be quite timely since the lead figure through most of the book is the infamous Jacques Derrida. He died the week I finished it. I was sat in a Starbucks coffee shop at the time (see attached picture). This seemed quite fitting; the reinvention and re-presentation of a drink that has been with us for centuries, repackaged and delivered as new via the application of some careful branding, skimmed milk and Fair Trade decaffeinated coffee. The postmodern drink. Perhaps this is why I was met with such hostility on the architecture forum at tribe.net when I posted a link to his obituary – people blame Derrida for making all their coffee houses the same.
Perhaps they’re right. I’ll send you the book later today and you can decide for yourself.
I haven’t read any of Shepheard’s work, but from the quotes you posted on your site it looks like fascinating reading. Something about the cover of the book gives me a sense of deja vu; either I’ve looked at in a book shop before, a lecturer has shown it to me or I’m remembering the time I used to live near an airport and would see the Red Arrows perform every year at the air show. Although this is a little odd as there were never any Egyptian burial tombs in the rural East Midlands when I was growing up.
I particularly enjoyed his comment about the ‘…the unimpeachable natural world.’ It reminds me of something we were discussing previously when I said ‘…There are certain immovable forces in architecture, such as the laws of physics and building control inspectors.’ I think Shepheard and I would get along quite well. It has been duly added to my Amazon Wish List.
The problem with blogging is that I keep promising things and then running away. Based on past commitments I still owe my blog (and/or Aq) some words on usability vs. beauty, a write up of Compton Verney, a half baked idea about IT and koans and of course the aforementioned Mr Brooks. The list, like the one at Amazon, gets ever longer.
Hope you are well.
Regards,
Rob
p.s – I enjoyed your webstats assessment. It was infinitely more useful than my bad poetry. The interesting thing about posts like that is that they are iterative, I’ve been wondering whether I should carefully mould the results by reposting occasionally and introducing a new word each time.
set your alarm for Thursday morning 02:23 GMT (via biroco.com) (the link, not the eclipse)
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GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.
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‘…On behalf of the starbucks coffee corporation we would like to invite you in returning faulty paper cups to the ubiquitous coffee chain…’
Thanks to my webstats I’ve just spotted that the original artist of my FAC2 remix has added a list of available versions on his site (scroll to the bottom)
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The drinking habits of the average Brit has been in the media again this week. The finger of blame is pointing towards drinks promotions by bars and breweries; happy hour becomes a great deal unhappier when it meets the pavement at closing time. Here in Birmingham the police have announced the decision to ban all such promotions along Broad Street, the city’s ‘entertainment zone’.
Whilst driving home on Friday I heard a DJ on a local station suggest that the best solution to all the violence in that part of the city would be to stop all the ‘chav’ clientele from drinking there. After whining about the fact that the ban would impact on his personal right to get as drunk as wished, the proposal to repress one half of the public due to their over active interest in Burberry seemed a little flawed.
I once went to a bar that tried it. Some years ago I found myself in a bar called Circo on Smallbrook Queensway. It was an event put on by Dazed and Confused magazine to coincide with the launch of Aphex Twin’s new single/video. If you know the magazine you can probably picture the scene. If iPods had been invented back then everyone would have had one (including me) and they’d have all changed the ear phones to help them ‘…assert their individuality…’ (like Jack). If the word ‘chav’ had been invented back then (or was at least in wider use) then the sign on the door could have been a little more direct, instead it read ‘No Burberry, Rockport or Fred Perry’ and was probably the most specific dress code I’d ever seen. Suitably dazed and confused, I stepped past the bouncers without a problem since non of my attire clashed with the list. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I realised what their goal had been. Perhaps it would have been clearer to me if the semacode project and chavscum.co.uk had been invented back then.
Anyway, there was a point to this entry and this isn’t it. My point is that the blame for all the problems with violence on Broad Street doesn’t necessarily rest with either the chavs or the breweries or any combination of the two; it rests with the urban designers and the town planners. Broad Street is the first victim of Birmingham’s obsession with urban design quarters. I work in the Jewellery Quarter, which is next to the Gun Quarter, which is next to the Education Quarter (where Richard Rogers is due to build us a new library), which is next to the Chinese Quarter, which is next to the Quarter Quarter which takes up about a sixteenth of the city. I made that last one up, but you get the picture.
Broad Street is the spine of the entertainment quarter. Ten to fifteen years of encouragement by the City has resulted in a density of drinking establishments so great that it is now impossible to conceive of any other activity being economically viable. The greatly missed Douglas Adams had, of course, a name for this type of situation, he called it the Shoe Event Horizon.
Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet – people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the number of the shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result – collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into birds who cursed their feet, cursed the ground and vowed that no one should walk on it again.
So it would seem that either the drinkers on Broad Street need to rely on their genetic instability and mutate or the urban designers among us need to relax and let the city look after itself. Somewhere between those two points is the solution. A nudge here and there, turn some of the shoe shops into hang glider shops, put carpet on the pavement.
When I was Googling for a few bits and bobs on this topic I found an article that gave me some hope that the problem had been recognised:
Jacqui Kennedy, the council’s head of trading standards and licensing, said: “We are looking at Broad Street having a special saturation policy as we have an area where we need to improve the mix of leisure and entertainment facilities on offer. We do not want to see the area have one type of bar and no restaurants.
Genius! That’ll fix it overnight! If only there were some restaurants, then we could really call it mixed use. Saturation is an odd choice of phrase, surely dehydration would have been better.
I should sign off by apologising to Jono and Aq who had to put up with this topic of discussion at 1am on a Sunday morning during a walk across the city. There’s a time and a place and that clearly wasn’t it.
eversion posted a photo:
I'm at Alter Rock Climbing Centre! 4sq.com/crPf4T
eversion posted a photo:
