cube capsules | kurokawa

Nakagain Capsule Tower by Kisho Kurokawa.

cube house | ungers

Cube House by Simon Ungers.

London Zine Symposium 2006 | April 22

This year's London Zine Symposium is happening In a squatted place in Russell Square. There'll be lots of nice paper, people, pictures on walls and vegan cake.

I'm helping out with the craft workshop so if you want me to teach you how to knit, come along!

A toy fell from the sky.

The greatest facade in Hackney in my opinion, is this place:



That's what it looks like when it's unfolded, anyway. A toy that's fallen from the sky.
Off of Hackney road, we made all sorts of detours to go see it during P-A-T-H. We always wondered went on inside.

Now we know (and I didn't even have to ring the doorbell): the Guardian ran a piece on frills this Monday, and Fashion Architecture Taste is their name.

David Sedaris on easter.

Audio books are currently helping me through the workload. David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day is one of them. He's second generation greek-american, in one chapter moves to France with his boyfriend. He can't speak a word apart from "bottleneck" so he goes to classes.

In one of them, a muslim student has trouble understanding the concept of Easter.
Some students offer a Christian perspective:

"He call his self Jesus and then he be die one day on two morsels of lumber."
"He die one day and then he go above my head to live with your father."
"He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples."
"He nice, the Jesus."
"He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody make him dead today."

David and his teacher start talking about food:

Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb ... one too, may eat of the chocolate.

who brings the chocolate?

the rabbit of Easter, he bring of the chocolate.

a rabbit? a rabbit rabbit?

sure, he come in the night when one sleep on a bed, with a hand he have a basket and foods.

no no, here in France the chocolate is brought by a big bell that flies in from rome.

I called for a time out - but how does the bell know where you live?

well, how does a rabbit?

At least a rabbit has eyes. They move from place to place. The easter rabbit has character - he's someone you'd like to meet and shake hands with.

Who wants to stay up and wait for a bell? There is no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in and take their jobs. The Roman bell would be lucky to clean up after the French bell's dog, and even then it would need papers. It just doesn't add up.

Germano Facetti | 1928 - 2006

Richard Hollis has told a distilled version of Germano Facetti's story.

He designed some great book covers whilst art director at Penguin in the 1960s.

Rick Poynor told how he implemented the famous grid system in the newspaper yesterday (full colour reproductions too, thank you central line c22:00)

From Dot Dot Dot 6:

In the Spring 1967 issue of the Vignelli-designed trade journal Dot Zero, Facetti surveyed the Penguin design programme in an essay titled ‘Paperbacks as a Mass Medium’. Referencing thumbnails of his own work, Facetti demonstrated the ways in which ‘a disciplined framework of design with a maximum of flexibility’ could prove indispensable for making cover design choices that reinforced the publisher’s corporate identity while maintaining a high standard of quality across a variety of titles. ‘Such efforts on the part of publishers’, Facetti explained, ‘demonstrate that for them at least graphics is reaching a point of professionalism, and is overcoming the arty-crafty approach of the single beautiful achievement’. In an industry where the standard practice was to design book covers title-by-title, the commercial success of the redesign of Penguin Books bore out Facetti’s claims, and US publishers soon followed suit, hiring designers like Troller to create covers for their own trade paperback imprints.

He also starred in one of my favourite films, la Jetee.

Husker Du | Zen Arcade

Where is my copy of Zen Arcade?

This question has been plaguing me today. I'm telling myself I can't work without it: I'm regressing 5 years and I'm going to fish out my copy of Our Band Could Be Your Life" any moment now. If I knew where it was. Every start-up should read it. Could be relabelled Getting Things Done and David Allen would be down with it, I feel.

But anyway, I digress and my piggy-backing days are numbered so I'm typing too fast: who makes pop songs like Bob Mould and Grant Hart nowadays? This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know, so I can listen to music that wasn't made before I was born and feel comfortable with a healthy percentage of its production.

Silke Schatze | Buildings from memory

Missed a bus so I popped into the Whitechapel bookshop to look at some pictures, needed a full-colour sans-footnotes fix. Because the paper is ripped, textured cartridge instant-objet style (which draws me in every time regardless) I picked up the newest phaidon, called something like "drawing, now!". Wasn't expecting much - I know what I like - and yes Julie Mehretu's stuff is in there, but the spine's too big.

Anyway, Silke's drawings made me put everything down and get out my notebook because I'm bad with names, but I remembered it anyway. There's a picture gallery at the Meyer Riegger Galerie.

Studio A 4 UG, 2002.



Elefantenhaus / Mothership, 2003


Villa Torlonia, 2003.


A FORCE FOR GOOD, 2001.

Already imagining fictional-cosmological collaborations between her and Bruno Taut: Buildings for a time that never came, remembering the things that might have happened in a realm just outside the retina.

I saw a bunch of his Alpine Architecture drawings in the Kunstler Archiv last summer, the Kabakovs had made cabinets especially for him and other utopian expressionists. It was great. A couple of my favourites: chandelier islands (the Ralik and Ratak Islands) and proto-Studio Ghibli (Valley with Cascades).

He had a catchy motto too: Character is merely obstinacy, I move in all directions