Kosmograd

Tower Bawher

I know it's been around for a while now, but I couldn't mention Tatlin's tower without referencing the amazing animation Tower Bawher by Theodore Ushev. In a hyperkinetic homage to Soviet Constructivism, a tower is built, set to the strident score of "Time, Forward', by Georgy Sviridov.

While there are clips of the animation available on YouTube, the best quality version can be found on the Canadian National Film Board Animation Day site.

There's also a great interview with Ushev here.

The Island: London Series

On show in the atmospheric Crypt of St. Pancras church at the moment (until 2nd March) is an exhibition of the remarkable drawings of Stephen Walter. Called The Island: London Series, it presents a dense layered symbolic map of London, represented as an island.

While geographically accurate, it replaces the austere, regimented symbolism of an Ordnance Survey map with a rich semiotic cartography, tracing Walter's personal pre-occupations as well as historical references, landmarks, and scattered throughout with the symbols and logos that infest the urban landscape.

It's a kind of proto Google Maps, rendered in crude pencil rather than crisp pixels. But it's a heroic attempt at a individual reading of the city, overlaying much more than the simple geography of roads and buildings. It's an exploration that has obvious touchpoints with the writings of Iain Sinclair, and also Phyllis Pearsall's A-Z of London.

You can see all of The Island here.

Re-presenting Hadid

Here are a few recent paintings by Zaha Hadid, from a show at the Galerie Buchmann. (see Flickr set here). There were also some of these silver prints on display at the recent Zaha retrospective at the Design Museum.

While visually stunning, they are little more than a striking way of re-presenting computer renderings, rather than design explorations. Does the act of producing these images change the design approach?

The place of design is now within the computer, not the drawing.

These paintings are pure surface.

"The Silver Paintings are executed on a polyester skin treated with chrome and gelatine then mounted on to an aluminium DI-BOND to resemble polished metal.

Different media are used depending on the desired effect. Stained glass paint offers transparency while acrylic and Chinese lacquer generate opaqueness. UV-resistant ink combined with vinyl gives the highest degrees of reflectivity. These techniques combine to suggest a gradual intersection between reflectivity and opacity, from one architectural feature to the next."

City of Signs 3

Closer investigation of Stephen Gill's website reveals an intriguing portfolio of projects, including the Billboards project, contrasting the aspirational messages on the front with the quotidian reality that lies behind.

"The billboard can often be seen with its back to the railway tracks or car park, a construction site or an area of wasteland. The basic and most common type is a wooden hoarding structure fixed into the ground with vertical supports to resist strong winds. The range of items promoted is seemingly endless, although adverts for consumer goods far outnumber civic or community announcements. Whatever the product, we read the visual signs in a flash and absorb the meaning in spite of ourselves. As well as relaying their message, billboards naturally become a curtain for whatever lies behind."

L'Oreal Paris. Because you're worth it.

Free texts when you join Orange. Pay as you go.

Turn the key. Start a revolution - (Mazda)

Why wait? - (Murphy's Fast Flow) Dior Addict

Previously:
City of Signs
City of Signs 2
The Bastard Countryside

341 images of Hugh Ferriss

For your viewing pleasure, I have created a Flickr set of 341 images of drawings by Hugh Ferriss.

They are taken from the collection available online at the Avery Libary of Columbia University, where you can also download scalable high-resolution .SID files.

What this Flickr collection does is allow you to easily view the stunning work that Ferris churned out during a career spanning 40 years as the foremost architectural delineator or perspectivist in the USA.

If this doesn't inspire you to dig out the pencils this Christmas and start drawing, then nothing will. Happy Holidays from Kosmograd!

Buildings, not homes

Buildings not homes is a zine put together by illustrator Alexander Egger.

In his own words:

"Interventions in public architecture. Helicopters, policemen, slogans, burning cars at the riots in Copenhagen in February 2007. A Zine."

Awesome stuff. You can buy a copy at You Work for Them for $12.

London Loves Lawn

(image from Flickr user Jonny2005)

FlyTower, by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey is an art project to grow grass on two faces of the Flytower of the Lyttelton Theatre at the National Theatre on London's South Bank.

Intended to last up to 10 weeks, the artists expect the grass to turn yellow and die, a poetic reminder of global warming.

Turf puns are essential, it would seem. "When the going gets turf .." chirps the Times, while "It's turf at at the top" chimes the Telegraph:

"The couple have dreamt of "growing" the theatre for years. "We used to get the 59 bus across Waterloo Bridge to Brixton, which is where we were living," says Ackroyd. Then Harvey chips in: "We joked about growing the whole building."

But I think this is less about greening the grey brutalism of the South Bank and more about tapping a national obsession of the English with their lawns. We have a fundamental basic desire to each own a patch of grass (which partially explains why we've never taken to apartment living).

It's no surprise that Wimbledon is the only world class tennis tournament to be played on grass, or that the turf at Wembley or the pitch at Lords are hallowed, sacred terrains. (Indeed, in the 1970's, Scottish football hooligans delighted in digging up the Wembley turf as an act of desecration, much celebrated by PM in waiting, Gordon Brown, who proudly proclaims: "There's a pub in central Scotland that displays a lump of Wembley turf to commemorate the victory").

Elsewhere, Pingmag features the work of Patrick Blanc, who has been growing Vertical Gardens, or mur vegetal, for many years:

"It has been proved that the Vertical Garden enhances atmospheric humidity in its vicinity, thus enabling small ferns and mosses to appear and seeds to germinate. Shops and museums turn out to be very suitable places for this kind of implementation indeed. And even though a car park is supplemented with specific artificial light… tropical plants that survive by growing in the shades are perfectly suitable for sunless locations."

My own patch of lawn is a failure. The grass is lumpy, mossy, has bald areas. In the summer the ground cracks, and the grass yellows. Not for me a verdant green carpet. I detest mowing. My secret plan is to install Astroturf, but I can't help but feel I'd be betraying my Englishness.

The virtual bleeds into the real

While computer graphics, animation and games get more 'real', far more interesting to me are the cases where the virtual bleeds into the real.

The best recent example of this was "Modern Japanese Classic" this wire-frame sculpture of a Subaru Impreza by artist Benedict Radcliffe. It was recently parked outside a gallery in Mayfair which was showing more work by Radcliffe inside.

The wireframe car, sits impassively, unexplained, a ghost from the virtual. It marks a point of slippage between the world and a mirror world. It certainly confused the hell out of local parking wardens, who issued it with a number of tickets.

This slippage between the real and the virtual - sometimes called Hybrid reality - is also the work of artist Aram Bartholl. In the installation Speed, he faithfully recreated the track marker arrow from the computer game Need for Speed in Bremen, Germany.

Then of course, there is the emergence of real world Google map pins. There's no limit to where this could end.

City of Signs 2

These are the images I was racking my brain over to remember a city of signs I'd seen before.

Floating Logos by Matt Siber takes the concept of Roland Barthes concept of free-floating signifiers literally.

"Making the signs appear to float not only draws attention to this type of signage but also gives them, and the companies that put them there, an otherworldly quality."

Future Systems: Homage to Vaughan Bode

Can I be the first to suggest that the design by Future Systems for the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague resembles nothing more closely than the hat of Cheech Wizard from the Vaughan Bode comics, beloved of graffiti artists worldwide.

There's a great archive of Vaughan Bode cartoons online here.