Category: Design

Another building with a picture of a building on the outside of it

I was browsing through the photo-archives and I encountered this favourite photo from two years ago:

Makes a nice contrast with this photo recently posted here, and this one of the Royal Albert Hall. The point being, in those two photos, they got pretty much the effect they wanted, whereas with this earlier one, they got something a lot more interesting than they were going for.

Had I done an earlier posting featuring the above photo? That the photo had a name as well as a number in the archives suggested: yes. And so it proved.

Photos like this don’t date. If anything, after what they are of has vanished, they get better. Click on that link, and you’ll also see another photo of the same thing, done with a slightly wider angle, and including the entire crane that you can only seen the bottom of in the above photo.

Camden Highline coming

Glad to see that this project is making progress:

The Camden Highline project, planned to open in phases from 2024, will create a new central London park and linear walking route – inspired by Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s New York High Line – featuring seating areas, cafés, arts and cultural interventions and spaces for charitable activities.

Cultural “interventions”? Does that mean sculpture and stuff? People wearing daft costumes? I guess I’ll have to wait until 2024.

I had already noticed this Camden Highline notion back in August 2017. I even included a map.

Scaffolding as architecture

I’m not the only one who thinks scaffolding is pretty:

That’s not a house that is being worked on by builders. It’s .. a house. It’s finished. Here.

However, when architects start “designing” scaffolding, I think that for me the scaffolding loses a lot of its appeal. A lot of what I relish about how scaffolding looks is that the people who put it up don’t care how it looks. When they start caring, as the designer of this scaffolded house clearly did, scaffolding loses its essential aesthetic purity.

Anther way of putting this is that once architects start designing scaffolding, I fear that it may start falling down.

“This is how people are in London …”

Apparently there have been complaints about this:

I agree with DebApre, replying to an American complainer:

This is not an issue in England. We share culture. We don’t consider this appropriation. You can’t sully something that’s meant to be fun and claim racism. This is not it. I used to wear Saris because one of my best friends was of Indian heritage. This is how people are in London.

Melting Pot London. Love it.

Also from DebApre, this:

Also, i lived in Dubai for 2 years and I dressed like Middle Easterners and Indians. The world is your oyster and experience if you want it to be. I still wear Indian outfits. I have never once been accused of appropriation.

So what’s happening? Well, I just put a comment on Samizdata which says a little of what I think about this stuff:

They aren’t “alarmed”. They are focussing attention on white racism, white racism being what they now want, and have done ever since the working class let them down by not wanting to join their revolution. They want a race war, because they reckon their side might win that.

The way to react is to frame this not as these races versus this race, but as civilisation versus barbarism, with all the socialists, national and international, on the same barbaric side. The recent Republican Convention would appear to have done this splendidly.

What the “alarmed” people were doing there was talking up white racism, in the guise of denouncing it (in connection with a demo about wearing masks). And with this Adele photo, they’re trying to stir it between white people and black people once again.

God forbid people should actually just get along with each other.

Wuppertal had its reasons – as did the rest of Germany

A while back I showed an old black-and-white photo of the magnificently eccentric Wuppertahler Schwebeban, Germany’s famous urban aerial railway.

And I commented rather casually to the effect that “nobody copied it because they thought it was crazy”. But of course this was quite wrong. These are Germans we’re talking about. Wuppertal built its Schwebeban for impeccably logical reasons, and nobody else copied it, for equally logical reasons. Basically, Wuppertal was a unique transport problem, which demanded a unique solution. The Wuppertaler Schwebebahn is eccentric yes, but unreasonable, absolutely not.

The Tim Traveller explains, in a video lasting just over five minutes, which I recommend.

The lights of Piccadilly Circus – and for once I’m impressed

London contains many tourist attractions that are truly attractive, truly impressive. But I have never thought that the lights of Piccadilly Circus are one of those attractions. What a let down. Is that it? Is that all?

Usually they look like this:

I’m guessing that many a tourist, searching out these lights, has walked right past them. I mean, could those be them?

But about a year ago I happened to be in that part of London, and instead of silly bright colours, what I saw was this:

You may have to click on them to work out what is going on there. Some sort of Transformer type computer-trickery, it looks like. Whatever. Again, I’m not that impressed, although that could just be my terrible eyesight, and I don’t like it because I can’t make it out properly, unless I photo it and look at it later. But whatever, I only supply the three photos above as context for what followed:

And that I did like.

There’s been quite a lot of this kind of thing happening in London recently, this kind of thing being pictures of buildings, on buildings. Usually it’s because a building is being worked on and consequently covered in scaffolding, and then on the outside of the scaffolding they stick a picture of the building they’re working on. The above piece of advertising fun reminds me somewhat of that sort of thing, although it is contrived by different means and for a different purpose.

Taxis-with-adverts photos from August 2006

August 31st 2006, to be precise. I was looking through a directory of photos based on an expedition I made to St Paul’s Cathedral on August 31at 2006, and very informative they were too. I encountered several photos taken from the top of St Paul’s of London Big Things, that hadn’t yet been built. It should make a fun posting, Real Soon Now. But for right now, I want to show you a couple of photos I took once I’d got down from the top of the Cathedral, and was outside it.

Starting with this:

I think we can all agree that what I was trying to photo there was the bus, and in particular its rather fetching advert (for this). The taxi (and its advert), travelling very blurrily in the opposite direction and hence out of focus, merely got in the way.

The many other photos I photoed, at that same time, of lots of my fellow photoers tells me that I was similarly preoccupied when I photoed this guy:

This time it’s not so clear where my attention is, and is not. That taxi and its advert are in focus. It seems that there was a Motor Show at the Excel, in 2006, and this taxi was telling the world about this.

I have been wondering recently when the habit began of covering London’s famed Black Cabs with intricate and colourfully pre-printed adverts. I tried Internet searching, but the Internet is keener on telling you how to buy stuff now than it is on telling you the history of the particular stuff in question, and I still do not know. But I now know a bit better than I did before I came upon the above photos in my archives. It was definitely a while before 2006, and judging by how good the second taxi advert looks, it was quite a longish while before 2006. I had also been meaning to search through my photo-archives, for taxis with adverts that I had photoed by mistake, photos exactly like the two above. I have yet to do that, but today I did it by mistake.

Talking of buying this stuff now, London Taxi Advertising has had “a decade of experience” arranging such adverts. But I now know for sure that this has been going on a while longer than that.

Lots of cardboard – no polystyrene

On the left here, my newly acquired Dyson Graven Image …:

… and on the right, a look, in particular, at the packaging it came in.

I note with interest the complete absence of expanded polystyrene. All the packaging was done with cardboard, often manipulated into extraordinarily elaborate shapes.

Why would this be? I tried googling for an answer, and got lots of stuff about how to buy cardboard packaging, but found nothing about why polystyrene is now out of favour. Are there new regulations, caused by the anti-plastic obsession? (The Pacific Ocean with its fifty miles across patch of floating plastic waste, blah blah, etc. etc..) Is it just that a right-on company like Dyson chooses to bow to such notions?

Or, are their real economic reasons to prefer cardboard for a job like this? Have they, for instance, recently managed to contrive machines which can automatically, and hence cheaply, create elaborate cardboard packaging like this, the way they couldn’t only a few years ago? Has polystyrene become more expensive, for some reason? Has cardboard itself got cheaper? Does cardboard mean that the packaging doesn’t have to be quite so big, thus cutting warehouse costs?

Anyone? Comments are very welcome, as they always are, but especially, in this case, if they in any way answer my questions.

Quota photo of a sign about Croydon Spaceport

Whatever that is.

Busy day ahead. That to-do list (see previous posting) is already demanding that I go off and do various things, which leaves little time for blogging now.

So, quota photo time, and it’s very strange:

I already like the building, but I tried internet searching about this Croydon Spaceport stuff, and am not much the wiser. Basically, I can’t tell how serious they’re being. Are they promoting Croydon, which is a place I’ve always loved? Or space exploration, which I also strongly favour? Either way I’m for it, but am still a bit baffled.

No time to do much linking now, but may add some links later.

LATER: I am none the wiser.

Mayfair Tanning & Waxing

You see weird things in London. Well, I do:

For years and years, this sort of car decorating was impossible. Now: everywhere. But not usually as artfully as in the above.

Photoed by me, in Oxford Street, three years ago today.

When you type in the website on that midget car, you discover that this enterprise now calls itself Mayfair Aesthetics & Beauty. Which is not so weird. Which would be why they changed it.