Tomas Saraceno at the Barbican

I went to hear Rem Koolhaas talk about the future of London's skyline on Friday night. He was busy in Kuwait so Norman Foster took his place.

Anyway, before all the drama I sat in the curve for a while. The curve's that 80 metre curvy bit in the Barbican which I'd never noticed before, and this thing is the first specially commissioned bit of work for the space. It's a moving panorama of Salar de Uyuni - a very big salt lake in Bolivia. Saraceno used a ring of 32 cameras to make it. The clouds move steadily, and it's quite beautiful.



Saraceno's other projects are pretty impressive too. He's making habitable cells: cities in the sky that change form and join together like clouds via aerogel, under the guise of Air-Port-City. He also calls tensegrity his hero, and has made the world's biggest solar energy geodesic balloon. Lots of wow:



He's talking at the Barbican July 3rd at 6.30 too.

the Beatles

I don't hide the fact I love the Beatles back catalogue, that'd be silly. We worked our way through the discography (as many bootlegs as we could too) and the anthology series by '96. I know lots of really useless trivia.

So, it warms my heart to read Woebot on 10 unfamiliar Beatles tracks because they are anything but, and his filter's refreshing, and I haven't read anything new on the matter in ages.

I also used to snub pre-'64 stuff when we were little and constantly reshuffling our top 10 (something I never try nowadays) because I thought it was too simplistic, ha! But anyway, I got wise and we've got an ace LP from their Hamburg days (live! at the star club) that I'll put on now. And then maybe their sessions at the BBC (live! at the bbc 62-65). Then maybe a French mish-mash LP (The Beatles First.)

I'm totally in the wrong age group for this kind of thing, but that's ok. I guess it's nice to know I'm not a "young hairy hipster" as he puts it.

Sonar

I'm not even going to touch the musical side of things because knowing me, I'll spend most of the day time in the shade of the auditorium, and most of the evening getting lost. However, I enjoy both these things and have great plans for a strap-on hydration machine, akin to a bum bag with plastic water bottles instead of pockets. And fruit, lots of fruit.

Anyway, here are some things I'm looking forward to:

Regine WMMNA has curated the a la carte section which this year has the theme of Google Earth and Google Maps Hacks.

The ghost of Georges Perec is following me around, this time in the form of a series of public performances and online mappings that examine the hidden stories captured by private wireless CCTV streams and how they intersect with the visible world around us. It's still called Life: a user's manual.

Raster-noton has a sound installation in the Essential room. (I'm guessing it's this)

Social Fiction are doing a walk. I have to copy the entire blurb, just because:

Oh no! I thought also, it's another one of those zany generative psychogeography experiments which seem to be going on everywhere at the moment. I mean, you can go to any random blog & within 3 double clicks you find yet another report of a psychogeographic walk talking about 'aimlessly wandering in memory of the flaneur' & 'the sublime spell of the algorithm' always supplemented by shady pictures of even shadier back-alleys or modernist high-rises towering into the sky. Well you know, it was fun in the beginning but now it's just everywhere, psychogeography has become as fashionable as Prada. What do I say, it's even worse: psychogeography has turned into the Dolce & Gabana of the pedestrian underground.

And also, some nice wow-inducing tools will be on show:

Valerio Spoletini's V-Scratch


Marina Yanagisawa's Howlin


Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On


I finish by patting myself on the back: this year I'm staying in 2, not 3 hostels over 5 days. Also coming back 2 days before Leopard Leg record release show at Bardens and an exhibition at the Truman Brewery as part of free range. My great time management skills have exerted themselves once again.

London Architecture Biennale | June 16 - 25

So, I planned my itinerary over a month ago. I couldn't help it, the architecture week website has little boxes you can tick which result in a personalised email. My highlights:

Tours


London Architecture Biennale - Route Wayfinding: Jason Bruges Studio are using a network of magenta weather balloons over London to make people look up at buildings. Wow.

15 Spaces: walk around the City including hidden spaces looking at the way people navigate the area.

Talks
Rem Koolhaas at the Barbican: talking about the future of London's skyline.

Regeneration Debate: Urban planners talk about sustainability.

Films


Lagos/Koolhaas: Koolhaas takes his students to the Nigerian city.

Social Cinema :open air screenings @ Scoop: AA students screen their short films.

Social Cinema: A Series Of Temporary Cinemas Neglected space around landmark buildings become cinemas for a night. Like St. Paul's walk underneath Millenium bridge.

Exhibitions


Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956 - 2006 (Found out about the new Barbican show via email titled Would you swap your semi in surrey for an ice-house? Ha)

Southwark Architecture: historical artefacts on show, but also new proposals for development across the borough.

Materials of Invention: 100 Years of Construction Innovation. Technologies since the '30s and predictions of future trends.

Bike Tours
The Changing Face Of London: Urban Change And Regeneration

Water Cycle: Contemporary Architecture Along Rivers And Canals In Central London

Bridges

The Paper Bridge: School children make a 6 metre paper suspension bridge in Clerkenwell.

Bill Fontana Harmonic Bridge: The vibrations made by pedestrians and weather conditions on the Millenium Bridge transformed into sound installation. Yes!

Stuff I can't bundle: Pecha Kucha where participants show 20 slides in 20 seconds. And let down of the week: a Railings exhibition which isn't a retrospective of our city's railing design, but instead an exhibition of paper affixed to the things. Grr.

Weekend.

(Fan no. 1. Thanks Chris & Dan)

Tomorrow evening Margarita, Kate and I are filling some space at the Whitechapel gallery with electric fans. (If you have a spare one lying about, let us know and bring it along!)

Sophie's also got the Duloks (cheerleading) Headless (noise) and Bat for Lashes (strings) playing, under the umbrella of Where the Wild Things Are. I like that, it's a great book.

And Alex has made a pretty poster for Saturday night:

Talking Graphics | Jonathan Barnbrook: politics and design

Jonathan Barnbrook is talking at the LCC Elephant and Castle tonight 6:30 £3.

Greenwich district hospital

(by andwar from the greenwich pool)

It's actually been demolished. Haven't been to the area in a while, and I shouldn't be surprised - derelict since 2001 - but I guess I entertained fantasies of little communities doing great things in there all this time.

This was the first building I remember having an opinion about. We moved to London when I was four: my parents worked there, we lived on its doorstep and it was stunningly imposing. If I were to make a personalised set of Eames cards to build a home, this would feature.





Never known much about its design, but I've found the following from offkilter:

Built 1962 - 1970 Greenwich District Hospital was the first complete hospital to be designed by the Ministry of Health's Hospital Design Unit.

At that time, the traditional hospital building was a tall ward block over a podium of diagnostic, treatment and service departments. Instead, Greenwich District Hospital was built using the concept of universal hospital space: large continuous horizontal areas clear of columns or service shafts, but with ready availability of services to any part of it.

This style of structure led to a compact, low-rise design that had the advantage of easy transfer or evacuation of bedridden patients in case of fire. The whole hospital was to be ventilated mechanically and none of the windows would open so that the air in the wards would be as "pure" as possible.



A 1964 BMJ article expands on the 'revolutionary' engineering:

Prefabricated and pre-cast components will be used for the whole structure and the construction is such that the inside of the hospital can be altered as medical needs and the needs of the population change. If necessary the hospital can be extended upwards and sideways to provide 50% more accommodation.