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05
Jan 10

City parking

Multi-storey car parks aren’t commonly beautiful places. They usually sit as ostracised blocks in the city, rough and slitted concrete walls facing the outside like the those of a gaol; an ugly and barely tolerated necessity of urban life.

How to redefine the multi-storey car park? If you’re stern Swiss architect Herzog & de Meuron, you try to invite the city into its structure, rather than close it off. 1111 Lincoln Road is a newly opened car park in Miami, situated on the border of its social downtown heart and its suburban sprawl.

Its angled concrete columns support floors uncharacteristically open to the balmy climate; inside lie parking spaces and an enclosed shop, with retail units layering the ground level, and condos at its side. If you’re inside, the structure’s geometry ascribes inclusive views of the city, according to Financial Times architecture writer Edwin Heathcote. And he says that it works the other way, too:

“The idea is to create a series of layers that extend the public realm up into the building, to attract events, parties and life into the structure. Both architects and developer see the structure as an experiment in a new kind of downtown transport architecture, a building as exciting to enter as to emerge from, blinking into the Miami sun. This may be optimistic, but it’s a good story.”

Not that this ideal hasn’t been attempted before. Gateshead’s Trinity Square was built with a restaurant on its top. Now it seems an incredible – and doomed – gesture of pride at the ideal of harmony between the motorist and the city. Its top levels have been closed since 1995, a decline that’s due in part to changing car access in the city centre. But the seed of its demise was surely more deeply planted – it was featured at the end of Get Carter in a scene in which it was implicated in the activities of a corrupt local businessman. That’s the usual image of the multi-storey – an embodiment of the unethical and sinister side of the city.

1111 Lincoln Road presents a different reading of the role of a multi-storey car park, even though it’s an idealistic if not fantastical one for most urban realities. It requires additional height to accommodate the numbers of spaces most car parks require and desirable shops to act as conduits between itself and the social, cultural and economic life of the city. But then, it’s also good to see a celebration of something otherwise so shunned.

Links — 1 comment
03
Jan 10

Link roundup – squid edition

  • An affectionate octopus – This sight will warm the cockles of any heart – even the three hearts of a cephalopod – though the huge welts from its gentle octopus sucker-love look a bit of a mood-dampener on the part of the human.
  • Squid at play – So squid indulge in mating dances which appear to be similar to lekking, a behaviour some birds employ in which males gather together and display in order for females to pick out the best. The term ‘lek’ comes from the Swedish terms for rule-less play (‘att leka’ means ‘to play’). This can only mean that squid either have a sense of style or fun. Biologist PZ Myers says that males gather to swim in large circles above the mating ground at dawn. The females arrive and they all dance together before pairing off and mating over and over again until after sunset.
  • Squidblog – Profoundly sadly, this blog has been mothballed since 2006, but it’s a delightful repository of old cephalopod news, including a 15-17m bull sperm whale with scars indicating tussles with 200-300kg squid all over its snout, research that squid inherit personalities from their parents, documentation of squid orgies and a cat wearing a squid hat.
  • Humboldt squid: Soft, gentle kittens of the briny deep? – Clive Thompson on how a biologist is refuting general horror at the six-foot Diablo Rojo, with its ‘fleshreaping beak’, saying that they kinda like attacking his equipment, but they’re frightened by his light.
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01
Jan 10

Sci-fi poster

Oh my, do I want this. Spotted: the Warthog, the spherical robot from The Incredibles, that bounty hunter out of Star Wars, and isn’t that a grunt out of Robotron?

149 Sci-Fi Icons on One Poster | Design You Trust (via n0wak)

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29
Dec 09

Infographic art

Beautiful in their organic, subjective and muddled attempts to represent the world and his own life with objective information, Simon Evans’ works explore, as Frieze excellently puts it, “that wonderful gap between the words and life itself”.

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28
Dec 09

Link roundup

  • Harris returns to the Capitol Wasteland – Armed with a gaggle of mods and tweaks to Fallout 3, chum Duncan Harris has gone to town taking pictures. This one, his character posing before the Washington Monument, is probably my favourite, but every one’s a winner.
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27
Dec 09

Last House On The Left

We saw the original Last House On The Left last night, a Lovefilm delivery which we’ve been putting off for a while, what with all the warnings of it being horrible.

And it was. For those unaware, it’s a horror film, the directorial debut of Nightmare On Elm Street/Scream creator Wes Craven, about the abduction, rape and murder of two girls by a cadre of sadistic criminals and the subsequent revenge taken out on them by the parents of one of the girls. It was famously banned from general cinema release in the UK and Australia in 1974, and when it was mooted for DVD release in 2002, UK censors wanted to make 16 seconds of cuts. The distributor appealed the decision, calling film critic Mark Kermode forth to present an argument for the film being left unsullied, but the case failed – in fact, the appeal committee doubled the cuts to 31 seconds. Oops.

Frankly, it’s a total mess – the acting is mostly abysmal, the script is wobbly and the editing is all over the place. The narrative jumps ahead several times with no attempt to explain what happened in between, and some juxtapositions of scenes are eye-watering, swerving directly from rape to excruciating attempts at comedy with a bungling pair of cops. It was, after all, the first film most of the production team and actors had made.

And yet it’s also brutally effective. Over all these failings, and after all this time, Last House On The Left remains nail-biting, its depictions of violence and cruelty unblinking. Craven’s intention was to show violence and its repercussions without shying away – a reaction to the bloodless violence of such films as A Fistful Of Dollars, in which audiences would witness the deaths of many characters but not see the true horror of each act – torn flesh and bloody retribution.

His attempt to explore the horror of savagery, from its immediate effects to how it inspires equally barbaric revenge by the the ‘civilised’ middle class parents, isn’t quite so effective, though, struggling to make itself distinct from the mess. Let’s just say that Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring probably did it better – it did, after all, inspire LHOTL, with its story (which actually originates from a 13th century ballad) all but identical.

I think its visceral potency is down to Craven’s essential talent as a director. There are many great touches, including a lingering shot of the rapists awkwardly brushing grass off their hands after the act and some powerful jump shocks, in particular when one of the fleeing girls suddenly meets with the machete of one of her pursuers. And for all the fact that the team originally planned the film to be pornographic, and for all the weird lasciviousness of the opening section, it ultimately does not sexually objectify the girls. The scene in which they are forced to strip is about showing their total vulnerability rather than providing salacious thrills.

Lovefilm encourages users to grade films using five stars. But I found it pretty much impossible to rate Last House On The Left. It’d be easy to dwell on all its many failings, but it has a raw energy which makes it impossible to ignore. Despite its own tagline, ‘It’s only a movie,’ I rather think it’s both more and less than that.

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26
Dec 09

Comments in the cloud

From Iain Tait’s Trend Predictions For 2010. Spot on, I say, and a good thing, too.

Commentary is and should be disparate – to attempt to contain all relevant discussion in the tidy comments list below the original article is just pissing in the wind. And the good stuff is so often dislocated from the source, anyway – I rarely comment on posts, but often talk about them elsewhere.

Besides, the sooner good material is stopped from getting polluted by crappy comments the better. It breaks my heart to see another carefully written piece immediately followed by a thoughtless line of crap spat out in an instant.

All we need, then, are commentary aggregators, pulling stuff from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and all that jazz. Separate yet inclusive, embracing plurality.

Death, therefore, to comments. Long live discussion.

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24
Dec 09

Link roundup

  • A short history of Team Fortress 2 updates – Smart Tom Francis looks at how Valve has built on its Team Fortress multiplayer shooter since release in 2007 with a raft of character abilities which have fundamentally changed the way the game plays (two of which Francis came up with himself, more or less).
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21
Dec 09

Link roundup

  • Troy Gilbert deconstructs Zelda movement mechanics – Superbly techy, this. Game developer Troy Gilbert looks at the pixel-by-pixel technique The Legend Of Zelda uses to stop Link getting caught on the scenery. It reveals Miyamoto’s lovely bit of clever trickery to, as Gilbert says, ensure “the player’s desire is successfully expressed in the gameworld, regardless of the potentially pedantic ways of the computer.”
Ruminations — 1 comment
17
Dec 09

Mag+ tablet magazine prototype

magplus

London design agency Berg has released a video presenting its fascinating proposal, made for magazine publisher Bonnier, for a tablet interface for magazines. Everyone’s doing it these days – Time Inc. released a video showing a prototype for Sports Illustrated, while a video of Conde Nast’s Wired tablet app appeared at Wired promotional event last month. All in preparation for the rumoured appearance of Apple’s 10-inch tablet in January.

It’s all at once fascinating, exciting and scary for paper magazine producers like me.

I think Berg’s design is the smartest of the lot, because it demonstrates the greatest knowledge of magazines’ strengths rather than attempt to simply bring video and connected information into a kind-of magazine layout. Designer Matt Webb knows them deeply, grasping in particular their quality of finality – that you have a finite amount of edited content to enjoy, a property which I think makes magazines more approachable and allows them to feel more complete, paradoxically, and therefore satisfying to consume than the ever-swelling nature of RSS readers and websites.

Sure, in a broad sense, the proposal takes iPhone interaction design and applies it to a larger screen. And it does rather emphasise the bounded nature of the screen – to see a spread you must turn the tablet to landscape and zoom out; to read a column it’s best to turn it to portrait and zoom in. And though swiping left and right quickly allows you to browse adjacent pages, and there’s a neat visual trick which gives a sense of how far through the publication you are, the concept needs work in leading and teasing readers through the pages in order to provide an analogue for your ability to flick though a magazine in order to read it.

I do, however, love the way the tablet senses the reader picking it up, switching from displaying the cover to the inside pages. And, crucially, the the project does point to an ‘e-magazine’ enabled future which absolutely takes the strengths of magazine design and editorial principles and builds on them. It rather emphasises the ‘excited’ bit of the feelings I have for the coming revolution to my trade.

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