the journal of an architect
‘…the use of blueprint paper as an alternative to film and photographic paper…’ (via MAKE)
delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.
related: Entry number 42 over at angermann.com: Maps made by hand.
Continuing in the now well established tradition of lazily posting images scanned from books at my disposal, I give you the beautifully usable restaurant chairs by Ward and Austin used for the 1951 Festival of Britain.
Take off your hat, stow away your tray and tuck in.
Taken from Designers in Britain
Wanted: pointers and advice about making an RGB/scart video cable.
I have the cable, the RGB connectors for one end and the scart plug for the other – I just need a HOWTO and a diagram to help me wire it up.
Anybody know any good links?
Alternatively, if you have to skills to do it for me, you’re more than welcome to come and work for food/drinks.
‘…Koolhaas takes architecture out for a walk and then hides behind a tree and watches it panic…’
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number 3 on the google search for ‘imageability’ – I’m so jealous
more on the author of Little Nemo (via Drawn! – again!)
‘…Steve paints in multiples, producing walls full of work every day. For him, every painting is part of a single on-going work of art that is now many miles long…’
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Two Stories for the Avant-garde (via del.icio.us/tag/architecture)
by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (via How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons)
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Weblogging continues to work for me. My last moblog post delivered a Larkin poem in the comments from Phoenix.
The Trees
Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Walking through the square a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about the snippets of information/fabrications that you overhear as you walk through a city. Sounds approaching, passing and receding as you flâneurificate about town.
What’s a flâneur? Webster defines it simply as “an idle man-about-town,” one of those fin-de-siècle dandies who ambled through the crowds of European cities in search of bustle, gossip, and beauty.
In the tradition of literary flâneurs—Walt Whitman, Fran Lebowitz, Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, the Beastie Boys—Flâneurr seeks to scrutinize the city, to evoke the essence of the street. And to encourage flaneurial behavior, whether detached observation or decadent gadding about.
(from the flanifesto)
Over lunch I caught a few sounds as they passed with the butterfly net of my mobile phone. Relationships, stories of consumption, waste, car insurance costs. Tiny, tiny cogs in a big, big machine. An idea began to form.
Last night I was reading up on podcasting and enclosure tags.
And then this morning, rummaging through Anne Galloway’s del.icio.us inbox I found this site by Brian House:
__placing voices__
Voices of strangers heard in passing are key threads in the fabric of urban experience, subconsciously coloring our perception of a place. Yet such features are inherently unrepeatable, unique to every individual’s listening experience, and, unlike a photograph, the location of a recording is difficult to recognize. ‘Placing Voices’ is a mobile-sound-blog software which uses the built-in sound recording feature of mobile phones (which is optimized for voice) and MMS messaging to place these fragments on a web-accessible map of the city as they occur. The objective is to express a map in terms of these experiences, to restore some claim to my memory of physical spaces over the transient voices heard within them.
Note to self: move quicker.
The important move here that I – if left to my own devices to progress a similar project – might have missed, is the use of the map. Crucially, a hand-drawn map. I’m reminded of the cognitive mapping research by Moar.
This requires subjects to either produce a sketch map of the area of interest or estimate distances between key points, which the researcher can then use to build up a map representing their image of their area. This technique was used, for example, by Moar1 to show that housewives in Glasgow and in Cambridge had very different mental maps of the British Isles.
(from Applying Psychology in the Environment – apologies for the dodgy image, only had my phonecam to hand, click on it for the flickr notes)
Tha map of Manhattan on the placing voices site looks fairly accurate though and I’d be interested to know if Brian drew it from memory or traced/copied it. However, this assessment is based on my memory of Manhattan and I was only there once in 1994 for twelve hours, six of which I slept through, so who knows where the truth lies? I’m too lazy to Google for it let alone reach for the atlas on the shelf. Truth is the very last thing on the agenda here.
Eavesdropping on someone else’s links seem to be a perfectly fitting way to have discovered this site. I use the inbox option on del.icio.us and subscribe to a few peoples linklogs, subsequently/lazily subscribing to the net results myself with bloglines.com. I noticed recently that someone else is subscribed to my inbox too; gathering the links that I gather from others. This is both the height of laziness and super smart efficiency, but then that’s a pretty good definition of RSS as a whole.
notes:
1. Moar, I. (1978) Mental triangulation and the nature of internal representations of space.
a photoset on Flickr
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eversion posted a photo:
I'm at Alter Rock Climbing Centre! 4sq.com/crPf4T
eversion posted a photo:
