Canadian megastructure
In 1976, the architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote about a new building type of the late-postwar period. These “megastructures,” as he called them, were characterized not by their size but by their structural frameworks that promoted (if only rhetorically) formal and programmatic polyvalence. Banham dubbed late-1960s Montreal “Megacity” because of its seeming abundance of megastructures, but this was to some extent an illusion created by Expo 67. [More...]
Thinking inside the box
Why you should never, ever leave a copy of the Harvard Business Review lying around where your six year-old daughter can reach it. [More...]
The early 20th century World-wide Web
The New York Times recently ran this feature on Paul Otlet, the Belgian information scientist and utopianist. You can also view a short documentary on Otlet that was made for Dutch television here. The article is a helpful overview, cribbing primarily from Françoise Lévy’s essential, detailed, but very hard-to-find film, The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World. It doesn’t, however, clarify what has always seemed to me the primary difficulty of Otlet’s project: the often confusing distinction between collecting original documents (in the form of paper or evidentiary objects) and cataloging them. Otlet’s Mundaneum did both.
Décollage
Renovation work in the École Militaire métro station during a visit to Paris last Spring produced this found object — a promotional poster inviting visitors to the new Orly south terminal, inaugurated by de Gaulle in 1961. Translation: “Visit Orly: Come see an achievement of French technology.”
Coring Traffic
This project was part of a larger exploration in data visualization. Building on a documentary film made by of the project team members, the project borrowed the metaphor of ice core sampling to represent the spatial expansion and compression that we perceive while driving on the freeway that result from the ebbs and flows of traffic. It made use of publicly available data feeds based on freeway traffic speed sampling on the 405 freeway between south L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. [More...]