Charles Jencks will join Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland, and Sam Jacob of FAT on Monday, October 31st, at the Architectural Association, celebrating Halloween with a discussion of "radical postmodernism" and launching their new, co-edited issue of AD. That issue "marks the resurgence of a critical...
Dye-Tracing Archaeology
Toxic chemicals leaking from an old wastewater treatment plant in Alabama have unexpectedly led to the discovery of a 1,700-year old "pre-historic village" buried in the ground nearby. Chemicals "have seeped into the ground surrounding the old plant," according to a local news station, so "the soil...
El Resplandor
[Image: "Meelas Yadee" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash]. Nettle's newest album, El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai, released last month by Sub Rosa, comes with an awesome premise: it is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining, set in a mothballed luxury hotel...
Thrilling Wonder Stories 3
Since 2009, an annual Thrilling Wonder Stories event has taken place at the Architectural Association in London, bringing people together from multiple disciplines to explore the spaces between fiction, science, and design. On one hand, these events take the form of an extended look into the role of...
Eye Roller
[Image: The GroundBot system by Rotundus]. The GroundBot system by Swedish firm Rotundus is a remote-controlled, all-weather polycarbonate sphere that "can trundle through snow, mud and sand as it supplies a live feed via a pair of cameras," Wired UK explains. "Its operator sees the image in 3D on a...
Film Grenade
[Image: The "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera" by Jonas Pfeil]. The "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera," designed by Jonas Pfeil as part of his thesis project at the Technical University of Berlin, creates spherical panoramas after being thrown into the air. The camera "captures an image at the highest...
Do Black Swans Dream of Electric Sheep?
In just a few hours here at Studio-X NYC—an off-campus event space and urban futures think tank run by Columbia's GSAPP—we'll be hosting a live interview with Ilona Gaynor. Gaynor is a London-based concept artist, filmmaker, and multimedia designer, as well as the most recent recipient of the Ridley...
Literary Climatology
[Image: The Blue Angels create their own cloud systems over the San Francisco Bay; view larger]. My week in San Francisco, now at an end, coincided with Fleet Week—and, thus, the arrival of the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy's "Flight Demonstration Squad." While the often overwhelming noise of the Blue...
Foamed Infrastructure
[Image: The weird artificial geology of "soil equivalent" landfill foam; image courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency]. On the way over to the west coast last week, I read Universal Foam: Exploring the Science of Nature's Most Mysterious Substance by Sidney Perkowitz. Amongst references to...
Carry That Weight
From the annals of moving large objects come two stories, one of a rock, the other a bridge. [Image: Photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the The New York Times]. A very large boulder is on its way to Los Angeles, we read in the New York Times this morning: a 340-ton rock on a journey moving "through...
