So, @cinemashoebox on the twitter says: a Soviet Bus Stops/Yugoslav Memorials-style coffee table book of shitty Millennium municipal features in British towns and villages — Ben (@cinemashoebox) May 2, 2020 Well, I’m sure we all know the feeling. Staines decided to replicate Saddam Hussein’s Victory Arch, not once but twice. The other one is at…
Read More The millennium crap book would be funny but that’s allI took these photos of Berlin’s forever-delayed airport terminal this summer. It’s just turned out a few days before the latest attempt to announce an opening date that the thing is still nowhere near ready after 2000 days of delay and twelve years of construction. Meanwhile, the executives bicker, the stakeholders wrestle for power, and…
Read More What if reality was more like software? Visit to a failed smart citySo I read the Indivisible Guide, which was drafted by a group of ex-Obama staffers as a HOWTO for people interested in protesting Donald Trump. The core idea is that the ‘baggers were very successful as a protest movement and their strategy can be replicated. Basically, don’t bother with shopping lists of nice stuff, do…
Read More The design values of todayHere’s a really good post about public transport and design. I would add to their account of the genesis of the Boris-bus that it’s not enough to say that Johnson started out by saying he wanted a new Routemaster, rather than saying he wanted a new bus for London and deciding what would be best.…
Read More In which I whine about Boris buses againSo, it’s well known that I’m an obsessive about Create Streets, the flaky Tory wanktank that wants a whole succession of gimmes for developers who are in no sense their mates, except when they are. Single Aspect notes that the Urban Design Group is having a thing on Wednesday the 23rd of April, i.e next…
Read More Your chance to meet Create Streets.So I went to the Royal Academy’s Richard Rogers exhibition. Pretty interesting, but bloody hell, the privilege and self-satisfaction, it is to laugh. All the way round, there’s a belt of little personal quotes, photos, artefacts and the like that constantly remind you that his parents’ flat in Florence overlooked Brunelleschi’s Dome (I count three…
Read More Occupying RogersSo, I was out at #OpenHouseLondon this weekend. It turned out to be a quick case study about all the “rebirth of industrial policy” stuff set out in Duncan Weldon’s piece in Renewal. The building in question is the Mildmay Community Centre in Dalston. It’s a Passivhaus, designed to a standard developed in Germany to…
Read More Some serious blogging? why not.OK, so there was a way of making buildings called modernism and it was great and then it wasn’t, and in fact it was Hitler! and Stalin! and bureaucracy! and groundnuts! and the fundamental illegitimacy of the state! and there was that block of flats they blew up! and let’s all laugh along with James…
Read More Space that can be defended, but against who?So I was thinking about user-experience design, specifically watching my partner squinting at the web-based paper-marking interface built into the British universities’ joint monster Turnitin plagiarist killer. And I’d said to Oliver Rivers that few things fascinate me more than human-computer interaction, but then again most things seem to fascinate me in the end. OK,…
Read More A short homage to the ThinkPad keyboardSo, Create Streets. Inside Housing has the story, pointing out that the thing campaigning for knocking down high-rise social housing in south London is basically a group of Tories. But there’s a bit more, or less, to it than that. Their wesbite won’t tell you whether they are a company, a charity, a lobby, or…
Read More A slightly less simple plan.