Category Archives: Design

Interview: Michael Webb

Posted on October 28, 2011 by

Michael Webb was born in Henley-on-Thames in England. Along with his fellow members of the Archigram Group, Webb has contributed more than any other British architect to the wholesale revolution in architectural drawing that took place in the 1960s. Co-opting techniques and … Continue reading →

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Interview: Cecil Balmond

Posted on October 21, 2011 by

Cecil Balmond is a Sri Lankan born, British designer, engineer, artist, architect, and writer. Known for his close collaborations with architects, such as Toyo Ito on the Serpentine Pavilion and Rem Koolhaas on the Casa da Musica in Porto and … Continue reading →

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Postmodernism: It’s History

Posted on October 11, 2011 by

It is entirely possible to love the current exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion at the V&A and find in it a sign of why Post-Modernism is at a dead end.

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Open Source Design

Posted on August 30, 2011 by

London’s design scene has been dominated by designers working with craft techniques such as knitting. This has led to a kind of fetishisation of the handmade, a strange pre-reccession moment when the market for one-off handmade design bizarrely fed into a … Continue reading →

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You’re Worse Than Crystal Palace

Posted on July 28, 2011 by

The strange British genius for turning media production into a prolonged spectacle, which we have seen during the hackgate scandal, dates back at least to the Great Exhibition of 1851 I would say. Reading through the huge profusion of books … Continue reading →

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Souvenirs For Buildings That Don’t Exist

Posted on July 27, 2011 by

There is a moment in Superman III

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Anarchy on Wall Street

Posted on July 21, 2011 by

On 16 September 1920, a wagonload containing 45 kilos of explosives and 230 kilos of lead weights placed outside the JP Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street in New York was detonated, killing 38 people and injuring many more. The … Continue reading →

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A History of the Olympic Torch Relay: Part III, Race Resurfaces

Posted on June 23, 2011 by

As we have previously discussed, the Olympic Torch Relay was founded by the Nazi party in the 1936 to communicate an idea of racial hegemony . We have also seen that the Torch itself slowly became a means of showing … Continue reading →

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A History of the Olympic Torch Relay: Part II, The Torch as Technology

Posted on May 20, 2011 by

In the original series of Star Trek, there is an episode called ‘Who Mourns For Adonais’, in which Captain Kirk meets Apollo, who by the time of stardate 3468.1 is the last of the Greek Gods. He sports a glittering … Continue reading →

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Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Posted on June 28, 2009 by

Yet another horrendous piece of graphic design plops through the mat of the poor benighted inhabitants of London’s Olympics boroughs and yet again they as one recoil at the hideosness of the logo. (A hideousness which I want to explain … Continue reading →

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