Category Archives: Design

At Home With Jimmy Carter and Don DeLillo

I read White Noise recently and noticed by chance that Picador have bizarrely just published a 40th anniversary edition of Don DeLillo’s book, although it was first published in 1985. Perhaps it is the accumulated prescience of the book that … Continue reading

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Living Inside Dead Turtles.

What is happening in this image below, badly captured on my phone? Is it a picture of a man under threat from a natural disaster? Is it a warning? If it is, what is it a warning against? The man … Continue reading

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Interview: Michael Webb

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

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

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

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

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

There is a moment in Superman III

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Anarchy on Wall Street

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

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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