Kosmograd

Wireframe London

I picked up a CD at Tate Modern recently, featuring a wireframe representation of central London, animated by Cian Plumbe, with various landmarks highlighted, the river the only solid. By rendering the wireframe lines as 3-dimensional tubes, it turns the crude wireframe into a stylised graphic representation, whilst still symbolising something nascent, not yet fully formed.

These kind of wireframe animations offer a powerful antidote to the bland, polished photo-realistic computer graphics that abound in most architectural representation, caught in a fallacious trap of trying to mimic reality. A wireframe makes no such claims, and as such, allows us to project our own realities onto it.

Flood London

A new film, The Flood, offers an apocalyptic vision of Britain's capital city under a huge surge of water coming along the Thames.

In what appears, from the trailer, to be a fairly typical example of the British disaster movie genre, the surge overwhelms the Thames Barrier, and causes mass flooding to central London. Westminister is turned into a huge lake, the Millennium Eye becomes a giant water wheel.

All good hokum, of course, and according to this BBC article, with little truth to it. A storm surge, tsunami or tidal wave big enough to overtop the Thames Barrier, as the film sugggests, would also be enough to flood large parts of Kent and Essex, and go around the barrier.

Indeed, it is the Thames Estuary, further downstream from the Thames Barrier (at Woolwich Reach), to the east of Central London, that would be the most likely victim of any rising water levels or flood events. The real devastation would not be around the City of London, but the towns of Gillingham and Chatham, Dartford, Gravesend, Canvey Island, Southend, the Isle of Sheppey, and the proposed Thames Gateway development.

It was the floods of 1953, which cost the lives of 300 people, with extensive flooding to the east of London, such as Canvey Island, that was the impetus for building of the Thames Barrier, though ironically the Thames Barrier is only designed to save central London. Now, plans are being made to construct a flood defence mechanism that might serve the whole of the Thames Estuary.

More, inevitably, to follow.

The gorgeous garages of Murmansk

From the BBC website, we learn that the men of Murmansk, the Russian Arctic city, have a passion for building garages, often far away from the apartments that they live.

In conversation with one of 'Murmansk's many mystified women', Jorn Madslien treats us to tidbits such as:

"The garages are often furnished with old furniture, so after bad rows with their wives the men can come here to stay for a few days."

and

"It is strange that behind all these doors, inside all these garages without windows, there is so much going on, like it's a secret society."

(The soundtrack to this post comes from the Weezer song 'In The Garage', and Arab Strap's song 'The Beautiful Barmaids of Dundee 'from the Girls of Summer EP.)