I've just had an idea for a regular series (although I promise nothing) of postings here. I love those Twin Towers, and I want to start writing about movies more often than I have so far here, so here's the plan. Every time I spot the Twin Towers in a DVD, I will pause it, photo it, and shove it up here.
Two things may happen. One, as I say, this may kick start me into writing about movies more than I have. But two, maybe a picture will start to form of how movie makers used to use those towers. What else happens when we see them? What do they seem to mean? And so on.
Click on these two clictures (a word I'm hoping you first read here) to get the full pictures.
On the left, forty seconds into Sidewalks of New York, is the Twin Towers bit of the first sighting of the character played by Edward Burns (who also auteured the entire movie). He is being interviewed by an offscreen voice about his sex life. The Twin Towers are kept in shot, or very nearly, although out of focus, throughout this interview, bits of which, alongside interviews with the other main characters, intersperse the entire movie.
Which I enjoyed. The characters are pretty enough to be pretty, but real enough to be real. Perhaps the most telling plot point concerning Burns' rather gloomy view of life in New York is that only one child features in the entire thing, namely the child that the Rosario Dawson character conceives, by mistake and without telling him, with the Edward Burns character. Rosario Dawson then leaves New York, or at any rate says that she will. New York, Burns seems to be saying, is not a place that makes children. Too expensive. Everyone too fussed about their careers. Two many New Yorkers just don’t want kids.
Stanley Tucci plays a character for whom, in both appearance and behaviour, the phrase "love rat" might have been invented. Dennis Farina plays a man whose advice about cologne proves unsound. Cologne on the balls proves you care, says he. It proves he's weird, says the lady confronted with it. Penis size also gets an airing. In general, this is a movie with a lot to say about male insecurities and confusions, as well as female resentments at what swine men are.
If you love Woody Allen's New York movies, there's a good chance you'll like this, and for the time being Mr Burns seems able to choose his romantic partners in a manner that leaves his dignity in place.
Well-known actors love being in movies of this sort, for they queue up to be in them, half a dozen at a time. They get to talk and act and create character, instead of being upstaged by special effects or having to act opposite mysterious computer animations that only get put in afterwards. They don't have to kill people, or to die, or spend any time hanging from ceilings..
On the other hand, if you find semi-realistic movies about Relationships tedious, what with today's people having it so easy and being so cosseted that they can sit around all night long discussing their Relationships, unlike their grandparents who had depressions to survive and world wars to fight, well, one of the characters says that.
And, on the right is the very first frame of New Jack City, the rest of which I have yet to see, because, having just watched Sidewalks of New York and noted the Twin Towers, this was when I got the idea for this series (although I promise nothing) of postings. I should imagine that the people in this movie get to do lots of killing of one another and have little time to think about Relationships, although I could be quite wrong.
I think that these clutches of photos arranged in lots of little squares to click on work rather well. The basic post seems to load quite quickly, which means that it does not cause too much inconvenience to the non-photographically inclined, and if you are interested, from then on it's one click shopping. I like the format anyway. Even though it is rather laborious.
So, why do the photos have to be mine? They don't. I have friends who take photos, but can't be doing with all the bother of putting them up on the Internet. So, why don't I do it for them? It's a great plan. If you are a friend of mine, and you have a few Billion Monkey snaps to get off your chest and share with whatever bit of the world wants to share them, but (like me) don't want to nag the basically uninterested, get in touch?
What's the worst that could happen? I'd say no they're crap, and we'd never speak to each other again. I suppose that is a consideration to be considered. But I actually don't think this is very likely. Given the nature of Billion Monkey cameras, there's pretty much bound to be a few of your pictures that I like and consider worthy of world-wide mini-fame. Most of mine are crap, after all.
So anyway, this little rectangle of clictures (ha!) is the work of my Samizdatista colleague and fellow Londoner Johnathan Pearce. They were taken when he was on holiday in New York last September. I have quite a few more nice pictures by Johnathan, but this lot makes a convenient set. All were taken from the top of the Empires State Building, with the exception of the very first, which I am guessing was taken in the lobby at the bottom of the Empire State Building. The day was a little cloudy, and I slightly beefed up the brightness and contrast of some of them, but there was no cropping. I really like them, and I particularly like that there are lots of them, and they add up to a real portrait from on high of Manhattan.
The star of these pictures is the Chrysler Building. Note also the far distant Statue of Liberty. But what is that one with the gold, octagonal spike on the top?
Native New Yorkers, as I think I have said here before, like to photo little street scenes and shop fronts, and they forget their skyscrapers because they see them every day. But for the rest of us, the skyscrapers are definitely the thing. And yes, we non New Yorkers all miss those Twin Towers, even though we gave them scant attention until they got knocked down. Well, my kind of non New Yorker, anyway.
So, thank you Johnathan, and my apologies for taking so long to get any of these up. I promise nothing (as I always say when promising anything on a blog), but I hope that another clutch of Johnathan's America pictures will follow soon.
Busy day, so just a quick architecture photo I took today on my travels:
The combination of the fading light and my cheap camera makes these buildings look bluer and weirder than they really are, but I find the effect rather pleasing. I don't know what they are, in particular the tall one at the back, but they on the opposite side of the big interchange at the bottom of it from Euston Tower. Go to the top end of Tottenham Court Road, turn right along the south of Euston Road, and there you are. This is not a place I usually visit, and I knew nothing of this building until I saw it today. I now realise I should have taken the time to find out a little more of what it is and what is inside it. Sorry about that. I was just too tired after a day wandering about doing stuff.
It's the tall bit at the back that I like. There's something about the curve of the wall, and those sticking out right angles at the top, that just manages to raise it above the level of mundane modern vernacular. I think I detect in this design the continuing influence of this man.
My thanks to he-knows-who, for this link, to an American Spectator article about Asian skycrapers.
I'm glad to see that this North Korean abomination gets a mention, in among references to the better stuff.
Instapundit links to a bunch of New York Billion Monkeys, these photos being my favourites of the ones I looked at, because I finally got to see some skyscrapers. I suppose locals get blasé about those towers, and want to do things like close-ups of peculiar signs or shops or hair or dogs or whatever. But I love those towers.
Dark grey at the front, lighter grey behind. Never fails.
And here's some excellent graffiti, …
… which always gives me a dose of mixed feelings. One: excellent graffiti. Clearlyl this is one of the defining art forms of our era. But two: graffiti suggests to me that the official owners of the place have lost some of their control of it, to a new and nastier sort of owner, and I don't like to see that. Saw some very witty graffiti-graphics yesterday evening at Vauxhall station last night, and I tried to photo it, but it was too dark and it didn't come out right.
Skyscrapers and graffiti have in common that both can be seen as male pissing contests. Discuss.
And also, discuss this. When I saved those pictures from the MetroPlus blog posting (which I assume he doesn't mind), they at first came up as just two of those annoying little red crosses in a little square, in a big blank square where the picture was supposed to be. But then, because I thought it might work and because I recall something like this having worked before, I looked at the "Format Options" in Photoshop when you save pictures (which are: "Baseline ("Standard")", "Baseline Optimized", and "Progressive") and switched them from Progressive to Baseline ("Standard"). Bingo. First I didn't see them, now you do. What's that all about?
So much of computer use seems to mean doing splig and remembering not to do splog, without knowing what the hell splig and splog really mean. So, what do splig and splog mean in this case?
Last night I concocted a Samizdata posting on the identical subject, the closing of a play at the Birmingham Rep that was alleged insulting to Sikhs, to one that Perry de Havilland posted about while I was doing mine. So I scrapped mine. He linked to this story, I linked to this BBC report, to this review (which was written before thing got violent), and to this further comment (when the violence had happened and the production had been cancelled).
I ended what would have been my Samizdata bit by speculating (and hoping) that we had not heard the last of this row. Nevertheless, I rambled over much the same ground as Perry had traversed more concisely, so I refrained from posting mine.
But now, it seems that indeed we have not heard the last of this row, and that Birmingham may not even have seen the last of the play itself being performed:
The manager of a Birmingham theatre company is considering staging a play cancelled after a violent demonstration by members of the Sikh community.Mr Foster told BBC Radio 4's PM: "I think it's one of the blackest days for the arts in this country that I've ever experienced.
"If I'm really honest, I think the people who have made the decision ... have actually been cowards and I don't think we should be cowards in this country.
"We can't allow violence to dictate what we produce in this country in artistic forms."
Well said mate.
However, I cannot help wondering if the contrasting attitudes of the boss of the new Birmingham Rep, where the play was cancelled, and of Mr Foster, who now wants to stage the play at the old Rep, might have something to do with the fact that the old Rep looks like a far easier place to defend against a violent mob.
Here's the New Theatre:
I couldn't find a picture of the old Rep, but I did manage to dig up this map, here.
I know which one I'd rather try to stop rioters trying to get into. The new edifice seems to be surrounded only by open country, and to be pretty much made of glass, a hopeless combination. Definitely not a building to be throwing stones from, even if only metaphorically. The old Rep, on the other hand, seems to be stuck in a small street, defended by being flanked by buildings on either side, like the one's in London's West End, and I'm guessing it's much more solidly constructed and less vulnerable to missiles than the new place.
Ah, and now I have found a picture of what I think must be the old Rep building. It's only a tiny little picture, but it makes my point well, I think.
With only a bit of skill, the Police could probably stop rioters getting anywhere near the old Rep, and if rioters did get near it they'd do far less damage. Plus, if anybody bent on doing damage contrived to sneak in before showing their violent hand, they'd have a far harder time escaping.
Michael Jennings Skypes with the link to this:
RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) – An unusual apartment building was inaugurated in Brazil, each of whose 11 storeys turns independently, giving lucky residents 360-degree views of the eco-friendly city of Curitiba.The building is located in a residential neighborhood called Ecoville, in the capital of the southern state of Parana.
It was billed as "the world's only completely revolving tower."
The tower was the latest addition to Curitiba's cutting-edge urban planning, which includes a much-copied bus transit system.
Canada and the United States boast revolving restaurants mounted on skyscrapers, but fall short of Curitiba's newest building.
"It is a great civil construction work of art in modern times," said Alcir Moro, director of the Moro contractor group.
Each 300,000-dollar apartment occupies an entire floor of 287 square meters (3,000 square feet).
Lights, air conditioning and the revolving of the apartment can be turned on and off with a remote control or an oral command.
The owner may also change the direction and speed of the revolutions. At low speed, each floor takes an hour to revolve.
The Modern Movement has finally come full circle.
Taller than the Eiffel Tower and longer than the Champs Elysee, the Millau viaduct was today unveiled by President Jacques Chirac to acclaim as a marvel of art and architecture.Its seven slender pillars, the tallest rising to 1,122ft (340 metres), were likened to needles supporting a taut thread in one the many poetic newspaper front pages marking the elegant structure's unveiling to the nation.
That's how Times Online reports its opening, and these Times Online photos were the best I could find of it.
This picture of the bridge under construction, from above, is also very good.
Economically it looks crazy to me. A few more curves on the road and they could surely have saved themselves billions. But what the hell, it looks very fine. And a British architect! Although, I'm not sure it's exactly what you'd call architecture.
This evening I walked home from a meeting past this building, which I've always been rather fond of, in a fascist kind of way.
It's 55 Broadway, the headquarters of London Underground, and it doubles up as St James Park tube station. Click to get it bigger.
Here are some more pictures of this building (and frankly rather better ones), and of others by the same designer, Charles Holden.
When 55 Broadway was built, it was the tallest office building in London. So I guess that means that in those days, cathedrals were bigger than office blocks.
I've been busy all day, partly because I've been preparing a monster rectangle of thumbnails celebrating … well, wait 'til it's up.
So here's a quota photo, of a Houston Texas church, which I found here:
… and Jesus looks like he's done really well for himself if he can afford to have that in his back yard.
Le Corbusier was an odd fish. When I was an architecture student I, like most of my contemporaries, worshipped him dutifully, yet I never really worked him out. On the one hand he dreamed fascist dreams like this:
Yet he was also capable of contriving wonderful places like this:
… which truly is wonderful, but the way. I crossed north eastern France on a bicycle in my teens, entirely to visit this place, and I was not disappointed in the slightest.
I found that picture of this amazing building at this site, which has a www address that starts"alovelyworld" dot com. No way would that hideous pseudo city in the top picture (the "Ville Radieuse"!! – "Radiant City") ever find its way into such a collection of cute tourist type photos.
One should not use words like "fascist" lightly, but Le Corbusier really was pretty much a fascist. And like a lot of other pretty-much fascists he had a thoroughly two-faced attitude towards being modern. Sometimes he was modern in the worst possible sense of that word. At other times he was defiantly ancient, as if recoiling from the horrors he found in the other part of his fevered brain. Sometimes, that is to say, he used modern techniques to do modern, and sometimes he used modern techniques to revive ancientness.
And the irony is that his revived ancientness now looks like it could be as influential in the long run as his brutal modernism has been so balefully influential in the short run.
I think that the truth about Le Corbusier is that he was a compulsively first class architectural talent who just wanted to stick up buildings, and he covered all the bases. Like Picasso, he was fantastically prolific, his ideas to final buildings ratio being positively Darwinian. (The Ville Radieuse, for example, never got built, thank God, or at least not by Le Corbusier!) Like Picasso, Le Corbusier was fiercely ambitious to have an impact. Like Picasso, he had a hell of a lot more than two faces. To get this impact Le Corbusier did whatever would make an impact, given the very peculiar times he lived in. In a different century, Le Corbusier's output would have been totally different. He was a fascist because a fascist is what one was in the times he happened to live in.
That is the best plucking out of the heart of Le Corbusier's mystery I can now manage for you, given that, today, I am in rather of a hurry to finish my bloggings and get stuck into other things.
This is the stage that Cardinal Place, the progress of which I last reported here, has now reached:
The light was fading fast and there is only so much that Photoshop can do.
Of course if this building were to be filled entirely with trendy restaurants, those pipes would remain visible when the building is finished. But it won't be and they won't.
I remain optimistic about this thing, and I can't wait to get all the shops at the bottom back, and in greatly increased numbers. (There was a stationary supplies shop the absence of which has been a real inconvenience to me.)
The view of this thing from Victoria station (as per the publicity fake-up), looking straight at its bonnet, so to speak, looks as if it will be quite something. But, as always with big buildings, you never really know for sure.
My latest CNE Intellectual Property piece is up. It was triggered by the student who is suing Ground Zero architect David Childs for allegedly nicking one of his student designs to use for the big tower at the heart of the scheme. I then talked about academic idea-stealing in other fields, especially science.
This article, linked to today by A&LD, discusses how the expansion of science may have lowered its ethical standards, a matter also touched on by Michael Jennings (recent picture of him there), in the following email which he sent me in response to my CNE piece:
Whilst academia is indeed full of asymmetric relationships in which more senior academics gain credit for the work of younger people, most scientific fields are small enough, and the participants meet each other at conferences and talk to one another often enough, that in the case of any important work everybody knows who actually did it, regardless of whose name is on the paper. In practice, it is usually a case of figuring out which of the multiple people whose names are on the paper actually did the work. Maybe this is changing as academia gets bigger and more corporate, but I am not so sure. For one thing, scientific research responds to this by breaking up into more and more fields with a relatively small number of individuals in them, and I think this is unlike architecture. It varies from field to field though. Some fields consist of large laboratories with hundreds of people, but most are as I describe.
And the most asymmetric relationship that exists in scientific academia is that between a supervisor/adviser and a PhD student. In most circumstances a supervisor has a de facto veto over whether a student gets a PhD. This can lead to abuses of various kinds, and also to somewhat weird human relationships. Nothing bad happened to me personally in this regard, but I have seen one or two slightly dubious things happen to other people.
Rather amusingly if you have done a PhD, science fiction writer Vernor Vinge – a former mathematics professor himself – wrote a story a year or so back about a professor who has a virtual reality simulation of one of his students created and told that he has to get so much work done in the next year, or he will not be allowed to get his PhD and runs it over and over again to get this hypermotivated student to do near infinite amounts of work for him.
And as for your final comment about someone suing Nobel Laureates, the interesting issue is that in the sciences the Nobel Prize committees have credibility, and scientific Nobel Prizes are considered such a great honour at least partly because they are seen to have almost invariably been given to the right people, and that means the committee goes to great trouble to see that they are given to the people who actually did the work. In particularly controversial circumstances, there have been a number of incidents where people have not received the Nobel prize until decades after they did the original work, and where the prize was awarded within a year or two of the death of the more senior academic who laid claim to the work. More senior academics are usually older, so waiting for the
wrong person to die before giving the award to the right person is a workable strategy.
One thing that comes into play here is that there is no limit on the number of authors that may appear on a paper published in most journals, whereas a Nobel prize in the sciences is never shared by more than three people, which means that if the wrong people are awarded a Nobel prize, the right ones usually miss out. Even within this constraint, though, simply giving the prize to the three people whose names are on the paper is never done. In such circumstances the prize tends to be shared between people doing work in the same or closely related fields for different universities/laboratories rather than by people who worked together.
You can actually tell certain things about who did what by the way in which the prize money is split in a three way award. If the three recipients each get a third of the money, this means either that the three of them did related but separate pieces of work, or that the three of them were involved in doing the same piece of work (either as collaborators or (more often) by coming up with the same results independently). If one of the recipients gets 50% of the money and the others 25% each, then this means that the one who got 50% did a separate but related piece of work to the other two, who were involved in doing the same work, either together or independently.
Busy day, so expect not a lot from me here today, other than this.
On my blog travels I stumbled upon the pictures being emitted in connection with the London Olympic bid.
If this was a Samizdata posting, I would now sneer for a paragraph at the London Olympic bid. But this is not Samizdata, so I will merely say I'm not sure about these edifices. Plus, as a London council tax payer in a part of London that the Labour Party has it in for, I am very nervous about what it will cost me.
I can see these objects working quite well during the Olympics, but then what? What, for instance, will happen to all those huge walkways? The phrase "herd of white elephants" suggests itself.
See a bigger version of this aerial view …
… here. Note that you can see that other white elephant, the Dome, in the distance.
I like this photo, which I found here.
Skyscrapers. A reflection in a puddle. Brian's Culture Blog bliss.
The Guardian is making a Shanghai week of it. With luck there will be more photos, though if there are I doubt if most of them will be this good.
Today I was wandering around in the general area of Samizdata HQ in Chelsea, and came across this house - 50 Glebe Place, London SW3. That's a pretty bad photo at the other end of that link, but it gives you an idea. Mine is better focussed but only shows half of it.
I did a proper view from further back, but it came out blurry. Write out fifty times: I will always keep the camera still.
I googled, but all I could find about 50 Glebe Place was "vimero" describing it as "the most beautiful house in London", but saying nothing else about it.
I'll have to try looking in a book, which I don't have time to do now.
And I will also go back and try to do a better photo.
Meanwhile here is another photo of a very different sort of London exterior facade, of the generally rather dull but occasionally, as here, amusing lights in Piccadilly Circus, which I was driven through last night on my way back from doing some radio.
When you photo lights like these, you often get effects of a sort you could never actually see, as in this case. The same thing can happen, but in a less good way, when you photo TV, as I like to do from time to time.
The journey to the BBC last night was a nightmare of diversionary panic, and I only got there with about two minutes to spare. I could have walked quicker. The diversions were because they were putting up the Christmas lights in Oxford Street, which (on the way back) looked really rather good. I snapped away from inside the car, but none of those snaps came out properly either. Funny, on the way, it was nothing but bloody red lights. But when I wanted red lights, so I could snap the Christmas lights from a stationary car instead of a blurrily moving one, it was bloody green greeen green all the way.
I'll be back, on foot.
Michael Jennings has another of his big set piece postings up at Samizdata, about his recent trip to Spain and Portugal. He is a container spotter, it turns out. He includes a most useful map.
Two things caught my eye. First was this observation about recent architectural trends:
(Yes, okay, I realise I am in a minority in that I go to look at industrial sights when I travel, but the most interesting architectural trend in the world is what is being done with decaying industrial structures, and how they are being rebuilt with modern materials and modern design to become commercial and residential centres. The result has a tendency to look like monsters with spider webs growing on them. Bilbao as a whole is maybe the best and most fascinating example of this kind of thing in the world. The Guggenheim museum in Bilbao works architecturally because it understands this and complements the rather brutal architecture around it - not because it is some gem surrounded by a sea of effluent (as most guidebooks seem to suggest). Don't tell me you have missed this trend entirely? Yes. You have missed it entirely).
And the other thing I emjoyed was an aerial photo of the city of Porto, featuring a couple of huge bridges. Porto was nothing but a football club to me, until today.
Porto is a city with a chasm through the middle of it, through which flows the magnificent Douro river crossed by wonderful bridges built during the 20th century.
Here is a river level close up of one of them, which I found here:
What the aerial view does not show, but what this close-up does show, is the way that this bridge (and the other similar one?) doubles up as a high level arch bridge that the trains use, and as a low level suspension bridge that you can drive or walk across. Clever. I've not seen this sort of arrangement anywhere else. But then, I've not been to many places. Certainly not to Porto.
It was about time I had another bridge here.
Don't try to say that too fast.
From last weekend's Sunday Times:
THE tactic is more redolent of Stalinist Russia than the rarefied air of an architect’s office. A "team photo" of employees of Lord Foster, who has designed some of the world’s most famous buildings, has been "airbrushed", downgrading the importance of the architect’s former right-hand man.In the original photograph Ken Shuttleworth, a former senior partner, is in pride of place beside Foster. Shuttleworth is credited by many with being one of the creative forces behind Foster's "gherkin" tower in the City of London.
In the published version, however, included in a new book of Foster's work, Shuttleworth has been shunted sideways and back one row into the crowd of some 350 workers.
Graham Phillips, a senior partner who was away when the main photograph was taken, has been pasted into the prime slot at Foster's right hand.
News of the picture doctoring will add to a dispute in the world of architecture over whether Shuttleworth – nicknamed "Ken the Pen" for his rapid, immaculate draughtsmanship – has been given credit for his role in the gherkin.
Shuttleworth, 52, left Foster’s firm in December after almost 30 years to start a rival practice, Make. He employs 18 former Foster staff.
It will be absolutely fascinating to see what Shuttleworth manages to do on his own.
Adam Tinworth has been kind enough to send me copies of Grid, the magazine about property development which he edits, and there is a spread in the latest one he has just sent me about Shuttleworth's plan to build, somewhere in London, the Vortex. But the Vortex picture in Gris seems to be very similar to the one I used in these two postings, so the plan doesn't seem to have advanced very far since June of this year. But maybe there have been developments and I missed them.
Adam's Vortex commenters make the point that a city can only have so many iconic buildings, Gherkin style. I reckon about another dozen such icons should be erected (such as this one), and the Vortex, and a few more memorable edifices, and then London can get back to piling high and selling cheap, i.e. building towers which are collectively impressive but individually less so, like
these ones.
I took another trip up to the top of Peter Jones, in different and sunnier light, but I'm afraid that the nice part of the view that I already photoed was silhouetted, again, i.e. no change except that the sky was duller, and only the drearier part of the view was differently and better lit.
But I did take this remarkable photo of Venice:
Click on it to get the bigger and real picture. Ha.
Also, you can have a lot of fun pointing cameras upwards. This is the Peter Jones stairwell:
See also this photo. And while you're there, scroll down to this amusing image, also snapped by Adam Tinworth in Budapest.
Peter Jones is a big (by London standards) department store in Sloane Square. Yesterday afternoon I went there with my friend Elena (who I hope may one day become a blogger – she'd be an excellent one, I think). We like to meet for coffee from time to time, and I wanted to see the view from the café at the top of Peter Jones. Peter Jones has recently been closed for refurbishment, but I was seeing the inside of the place for the first time. The view did not disappoint.
Click to see these photos bigger. The first three are mine, but since mine of Elena is a little unflattering, I have added one taken a while ago of Elena by my friend Bruce The Real Photographer, which Elena uses for all her various attempts to become an Award Winning Actress. His is by far the best photo, I think you will agree.
The interior of Peter Jones is also very fine, but I took no photos of that yesterday. I definitely intend to go back there soon on my own and go Billion Monkey mad, both inside and looking outwards.
Does anyone know what all the various pointed towers are? The ones with the horizontal bits at the top are, I think, the Science Museum. Certainly, they are in that part of London. And could the one that looks like a crown, featured in the thumbnail photo above, perhaps be the Victorian and Albert Museum? Yes.
By the way, does anyone know of other high-up places with good views out over London from which members of the public such as I can take photos? Elena says that the Oxo Tower, just downstream from the National Theatre, is another such good vantage point. Anyone know of any more? Anyone work in a skyscraper and like to invite me to lunch? Just asking.
Profuse thanks to Adriana, for the link, to this report:
A Hungarian architect has combined the world’s most popular building material with optical fiber to create LiTraCon a new type of concrete that transmits light. The results are stunning.
Indeed.
Where does she find these things?
Well, I can tell you where that picture at the top with the trees came from. It came from this guy. Go there. Worth a scroll. I like this. More games with light. A bit too seventiesish to live with though.
My TV system doesn't record digitally, and the analogue reception is garbage. Eventually I'll have some kind of Tivo/hard disc gismo. Meanwhile, life's too short to lash up an answer that will be obsolete soon anyway. So I generally now either watch stuff when it's on, or not at all
This evening I watched the first of four shows on BBC3 about guerrilla homes, which means little boxes craned onto the top of bigger buildings, or just lashed up without planning permission buit prettily enough then to be tolerated, from a kit of parts. Said presenter Charlie Luxton: "Planning permission sucks." Go Charlie. Now tell us what you think of property rights. Maybe you think they suck too? But without them, it's anarchy, and not in a good way.
Then I watched a Channel 4 documentary about the design of the new tower they're building in New York to replace the Twin Towers. I seem to recall hailing the idea of teaming Libeskind with SOM's David Childs as a good one. This show made it look like a complete mess. The Childs design would have been pretty good. The Libeskind design would have been pretty good. The Childs/Libeskind/Governor of New York design looks like it's going to be pretty bad, with a stupid, pointless point stuck on the top, in a way that has damn all to do with what is underneath it. Scroll down here for more about this show.
And then I switched to hearing the last bit of Messiaen's Éclairs sur l'Au-delà…, on BBC4. Very fine, by the sound of it, as supplied in their customary fine sound by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Rattle.
Here is a link to the CD they've recently done of this piece. I think this will sell very well, and that in three months it will be havable in HMV Oxford Street for way less than full price.
I have been trying to like Messiaen's piano music recently, but have yet to succeed. The Turangulila Symphony sounds just that tiny bit too slushy and Mantovani-ish for my taste. This sounded rather better. On the strength of what I heard, I want the CD of all of it. When it's come down a bit.
Well, it's business as usual now, with me having no time to expand profoundly and fobbing you off with my favourite recent picture:
It's of the Towers of Docklands, as seen from the north end of Blackheath Common, with Greenwich Palace in the relative foreground.
And here's another version of the same view. There were lots of Billion Monkeys there, of course, but this great looking girl had a definitely non-Monkey camera.
My friends Alastair and Katy took me to this spot the weekend before last. I never knew it existed.
Have nice weekend.
Kind words from the Relaxed Homeskooler about my Education Blog, referring to this posting there.
So, kind words from me to her, about her photos. I especially liked these two.
The first is just a fun shadow. The second is not only a fun photo but a fun photo of two other things that are fun too – not that little girls in bathing costumes aren't fun, but you get my drift.
Fun thing number one is the mighty Towers of Chicago Illinois, the Birthplace of the Skyscraper.
Fun thing number two is that the mighty Towers of Chicago Illinois are not photoed direct, but rather are reflected in something called by its creator "Cloud Gate", but apparently known to all in Chicago as The Bean. I (by which I mean London) want(s) one too. It wouldn't necessarily have to be bean shaped, as per Chicago. It could be more elaborate than that. But the super-mirroredness idea is definitely one to copy. And it should be big. Like the artist says, you should be able to see the clouds in it.
You know how I feel about reflections. They are a fantastic source of fun photos, especially on a summer day, because they keep the scene with all its contrasts but moderate the strength of the light, which (like the artist says – reprise) is especially great for getting the complexities of clouds. This object gets that process a little bit organised. And think how many Billion Monkeys I could snap in one Bean photo, me included of course.
This is a perfect example of how very, very much public sculpture has improved since the meaningless lump phase of a few decades ago.
Here's another picture of The Bean. Relaxed Homeskooler concentrated on what you could see bouncing off The Bean. This photo shows you the overall shape of the thing.
I am also going to check out this photoblogging contest, and probably enter one of mine, maybe several if that's allowed. Are you also a Billion Monkey? Which are your favourites of the ones you've taken? Post at your place, and link to hers. She decides.
Today I was in Oxford Street and spotted – and hastily snapped – one of my favourite things, this back of bus advert:
It's one of my favourite things because it combines three of my favourite things: Johnny Vaughan, London double decker buses, and the Erotic Gherkin. This is an advert for Johnny Vaughan's Capital Radio breakfast show, as you can see if you look carefully.
I'm trying to think of a new building in London which has been such an instant hit. The only other one I can think of which has been comparably successful is what began life as the Post Office Tower, and is now, presumably, called the BT Tower, although by now it could be something else again.
I can't help comparing these two popular hits with that lump out in Docklands, the Canary Wharf Tower, which impresses mostly because it is so big, but otherwise hardly at all. I've recently taken a couple of trips to Docklands. More about that when I've the time, and have mulled over the wording some more.
For another fine use of a bus, see the last of these pictures.
I didn't clock this new London building, by Daniel Libeskind, until today I found it while scratching through an old Guardian education section.
I will suspend any serious judgement until I've seen it in the flesh. Or in the steel.
Provisional prejudice: don't like the bad-mannered way I suspect it of joining the pavement. But that could be quite wrong. Maybe the pavement outside is nice, and bigger than usual, in a good way.
With buildings like this, a lot depends on the detailing, whether it looks as slick as the model did - if the model looked slick - and whether the detailing lasts, or instead self-inflicts all kinds of horrible stains, etc. I will photo it myself soon, and if I am still doing this in a couple of years time someone should jog my memory about it and make me go and photo it again.
I agree with the commenter that it looks like it's fallen over. But as other commenters say, the rest of the area is pretty dreary, and at least this livens things up. Yes, I rather think that will be my considered opinion. But I'll wait to see it.
No time for much today. But this rather bad tempered Guardian piece did at least tell me a name to google for, "Elizabeth House", which is to be erected just outside Waterloo Station.
Unfortunately, this is the only picture of what they have in mind that I have so far come across.
What a shitty piece of graphics! They could do better than that, surely. Maybe they have. Can anyone supply news of a better picture of this propose edifice?
Elizabeth House is the dark sticking up thing in the middle, and I do rather agree with grumpy Graham Morrison that this particular would-be icon looks like it will be a n ugly lump, but as I always insist here, appearances could well deceive. You never really know how it will turn out. And when you consider that Elizabeth House will replace this … well, at least there's a chance that things will end up looking better. This being one of those vile lumps that dates from the days when the last thing architects gave any thought to was getting the public to like their buildings and call them icons.
Meanwhile, anything they can do to sort out the mess of trying to walk from Waterloo Station to the South Bank will be steps in the right direction. At the moment you go through the (I think) vile Shell Building, past the vile sculpture in the middle of it, across an aerial walkway, which now, since they took the next bit of it down, just stops in mid air and you have to climb down off it.
As for Morrison's piece, which is an excerpt from a speech he gave to a bunch of other architects, frankly, it reads to me like one mediocre architect who is jealous of the architects who are better at making a splash than he is, and seeking support from a bunch of other mediocre architects. But that's just an impression. Anyone who knows more about this man, and knows that this impression of mine is wrong is welcome to correct it.
Architecture is difficult. I keep saying that. And I keep saying it because it is true.
You produce really cool pictures of how it will look, but you never really know how it will turn out.
Take the London Assembly building. The Man Behind the Gherkin was also the man behind this, and you all here know that I worship the Gherkin more than life itself.
The London Assembly building, on the other hand, seems to me to display a definite diminution from vision to result, from imagination to execution.
On the left is a 1999 publicity concoction, which I found here and I think it looks really great. Like a really expensive headlight on a really expensive car. And notice that at this stage it sticks out over the river, rather than just parked down beside it.
The picture on the right is attached to a January 2003 Guardian story (where the whole Ken Shuttleworth really did this thing is gone into. Can that be the thing itself? No, I think that's another projection of how it's going to look rather than how it really does look. And whereas it doesn't look as cool as the first picture, but it still looks moderately ool. It's not a really cool car headlight. More like an alien egg. But still, as I say, cool. Ish.
And then we have the thing itself, photoed by me a week or two ago.
To me, this looks ever so slightly like a lump of clay on a wheel, slapped down, and not yet straight. Worse, when you are actually there, the curvedness of the floors makes you think it's all leaning over. And something very bad has happened to the ground floor. It ought to curve into the ground continuously. This thing just sits of a plinth that is too small for it. And unlike the bottom of the Gherkin, lots of people get to see the bottom floor of this thing.
Got it. I think I know the big thing wrong with this, looking at it some more. The problem is that it doesn't start out at the bottom by curving outwards enough. At the back, it still goes out a bit, but this is the big difference between the early pictures and the final object, and that is what makes the final object look so comparatively uncool, or, in English, more earthbound.
Plus, I think maybe this is an object that looks its worst when you look up at it from ground level, as I did with my camera, and as the first two pictures above do not. The first looks down on it, and the second looks at it sideways, but not up.
And what's that ziggy zaggy thing about, with the windows at the front. The original headlight effect was far better, I think.
That's how it looks to me, anyway. Of course, if you like it, I'm happy for you, and I'm only judging this thing by the highest possible standards. What I'm saying is: the Gherkin it's not. (For starters it isn't nearly big enough for the curvey style to really work well.) But what, apart from the Gherkin, is the Gherkin? The London Assembly building is still a fun addition to the riverside. Politically … well, that's another argument.
I mean, at least it isn't this Palestra thing, which seems to me to have given up even trying to be interesting. The website is as cool as it's ever going to get, I'd say. Although, the fact that the early pictures can be wrong could be good, with the final object turning out much better than the pictures. But if that happens here, I will … be surprised. Either way, I'll show photos of it here when they finish it.
This building, as previously noted here is now growing steadily:
This one could be a stunner, or it could be rather mundane. Can't wait to see.
I love this picture, which I found here, via this, while composing this.
Point your camera at the sun and let the light refract in the air on its way to you, dusting the distant objects with light that you see but which never did anything to them (if you get my meaning). It never fails.
I have a piece about the Vortex up at Samizdata, the original newspaper story that I'm linking to having been in last Saturday's Guardian.
Already there is the inevitable comment to the effect that this is an ugly building and that "classical London" could do better. I disagree. I think that if it gets built it will look fine. But, the picture that "Make", the name of the new practice set up by former Foster (and Gherkin) man Ken Shuttleworth, have issued does make the thing look rather ugly, as another Samzidata commenter has pointed out. But it is the picture that is ugly rather than the thing itself, in my opinion. The colours will surely look good on the final building, but only because they won't look a bit like that for real.