One from the ‘I must write about this but never got around to it pile’. An article in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal and on BBC looks at how a recent virus outbreak in the online game community World of Warcraft is being used as a research tool to study and predict the patterns of a real world pandemic. (more…)
Reinier de Graaf presented OMA’s Ras-Al-Khaimah project to a packed audience last thursday for the Architecture Foundation in London. After a characteristically thrilling account of global urban affairs effectively narrated by statistic and graph, the talk turned to the patronisingly-titled “city in the desert” project (as though we could describe London as a “city by the river”), bringing on what could be described as one of those “Elvis has left the building” moments.
OMA’s reading of Dubai as a study in banality has its response in the banal urban proposition for RAK, though in this case, banality is not the insistent cultural phenomenon of Dubai’s skyline, but rather the unashamed rolling out of the urbanist’s stock-in-trade - “compact city” densities, a public transport loop, and (yawn) the accommodation of a naturally occurring oasis. The mediocrity of this proposition is nowhere near recovered by its context-less square plan and generic city grid, tired emblems of what may be late-OMA mannerism. This is a scheme so mediocre it begs the question - what happened to one of the most intellectually engaging self-critical practices on the planet? (more…)
Japan thinks the real world should be more like Gundam, the apocalyptic robot war series. Next year, a team of experts from all walks of life will join together to form the Gundam Academy, an academic institution dedicated to bringing humanity into the age of mecha suits, helper robots, and space colonization. It’s time for the Universal Century. (more…)
Drifting endlessly above the earth are the suburban dwellers that occupy these visions of 70’s space utopias. In the looming shadow of the cold war fears of nuclear apocalypse led us to envision new worlds above the crust of the earth drifting endlessly as orbital suburbs with all the comforts of home. (more…)
Nothing dates like images of the future. As a wide eyed child I remember sitting cross legged on the floor, with the flickering images of the Jetsons illuminating my saturady morning, thumbing through the pages of the Usborne books of the Future and the World of Tomorrow series. (more…)
We have been invited to exhibit The Specimens of Un Natural Histories project at the upcoming DesignCinema Exhibition in Istanbul. The exhibition and accompanying conference will run from the mid till the end of November. On display will be drawings and photographs of a range of specimens. If you cant make it to istanbul then cast your eyes across to the slow thoughts column where you can see the project immortalised in blog form.
Five hours from Tokyo and a half hour boat ride across the Setonaikai, one finds Naoshima. This island retreat once was a fishing village, but is now an art-themed Elysium inhabited by sculpture parks, two spectacular Ando museums, and a fishing village exquisitely retrofitted with site-specific artwork. Even the ferry terminal is a Sanaa bespoke. (more…)
On a street of love hotels in Osaka, the Don Quijote building presents the idea of ‘facade as amusement park ride’, in so doing, referencing the room compartments of capsule hotels and indeed the capsulized love within pay-per-hour hotels. (more…)
Hackbridge Ring Proposal
Tomorrows Thoughts Today just presented a paper at the Royal Geographical Society’s Annual Conference. The paper was titled Retrofitting Suburbia: Navigating from the Generic to the Specific and is part of a larger provocative exploration into the consequences of the sustainable suburb model. With thanks to Richard Gatti who kindly read the paper while TTT was stretched across Asia on other projects. The conference programme can be found here.
