architecture

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 all

I 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 city

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 Rogers

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 keyboard