cityofsound

Challenge to an architect

"To give tangible, architectural, expression to an ideal is a fascinating and daunting challenge. And when that ideal embraces powerful, yet essentially abstract, actions such as the gathering and dissemination of news, and has at its core the mission to inform, inspire, educate and entertain the public, then the challenge to the architect is truly awe-inspiring."

From Dan Cruickshank's foreword  to Nicola Jackson's new book "Building the BBC", accompanying the aforementioned exhibition at RIBA.

The book and the exhibition made me (even more) proud to work for the BBC, actually. It's not perfect, nor is it an easy place to work, but if you engage with the ideals behind it, it can be truly inspiring - as in the challenge described by Cruickshank. More on this later, including how we're interpreting the notions of 'transparency to the public' exemplified by the exhibition.

Posters at Rennies

Rennies is a lovely little shop round the corner from me, in Holborn/Bloomsbury, London. Their shop/site has many examples of fine British poster design, from the days when 'design for the public' had suitably high status.

Smoke

Magazine about London:
Smoke

Demos report on mobiles

"Location-aware mobiles will be 'killer app' ... but users need to see the trade-off between privacy and delivery of location-based services, says new report", which can be downloaded here:

Demos: Mobilisation
The Guardian: Mobile phones: we love them, we hate them, but are they about to transform our lives?
(tho contender for dumb-ass headline of the week - how could they possibly not have changed our lives already?)

Ambient sound and VR

An article in the latest issue of VRMAG dealing with ambient sound in city VR panoramas, written by Rich Studer.
VRMAG: Ambient sounds and VRs
[via Michelle Bienias - thanks!]

iPod's looking tired

Is it just me, or is it that since the new iPods arrived, my current iPod not only seems suddenly irrevocably scratched but also is crashing with increasing regularity, stalling on track changeovers, sometimes stuttering forwards in 5 second leaps, and often crashing iTunes when connected to my Powerbook?

Is it just me subconsciously beginning to 'justify' buying a new iPod, or would a conspiracy theorist suggest that Apple is engaging in some horrendous sabotage of the existing product base in order to drive new sales?

Architects and urbanists lectures online

Columbia University architecture school have put online a few great lectures about architecture, as mp3 downloads from their Spring '97 lecture series, including Bernard Tschumi and Marshall Berman. Found a couple in the Fall '97 series too.
[via Pete Marsh - thanks!]

High Rise Dreams

"It's amazing now to think that, for radical young architects in Britain in the 50s, the place to realise your ambitions was working for local authority Housing Departments. But, inspired by the modernism of Le Corbusier and their own post-War socialist ideals, a generation of architects embarked on a radical programme of social engineering that was to change the face of our inner cities from Victorian slums to shining, high rise concrete blocks. Carole Lochhead's excellent documentary traces the realisation of this dream - and its ultimate failure in the face of underfunding and the grim realities of council estate life ... Time Shift tells the story of how a group of idealistic young architects working for the LCC changed the face of council housing in Britain."

TV: Thursday 19 June 2003 9.30pm-10.10pm; rpt Sunday 22 June 7pm-7.40pm, BBC Four

BBC Four: Time Shift series page

Found some audio interviews with Le Corbusier while I was there ...

A social network caught in the Web

"We present an analysis of Club Nexus, an online community at Stanford University. Through the Nexus site we were able to study a reflection of the real world community structure within the student body. We observed and measured social network phenomena such as the small world effect, clustering, and the strength of weak ties. Using the rich profile data provided by the users we were able to deduce the attributes contributing to the formation of friendships, and to determine how the similarity of users decays as the distance between them in the network increases. In addition, we found correlations between users' personalities and their other attributes, as well as interesting correspondences between how users perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others."

First Monday: A social network caught in the Web

Other new First Monday articles:
Analyzing the taxonomy of Internet business models using graphs by Chiou-Pirng Wang and KwaiChow Chan
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/wang/
The dead poets society: The copyright term and the public domain by Matthew Rimmer
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/rimmer/
Toward a model of information policy analysis: Speech as an illustrative example by Terrence A. Maxwell
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/maxwell/
Business models of news Web sites: A survey of empirical trends and expert opinion by Frederick Schiff
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/schiff/

Young texters

Again, relating to a previous post around texting, and how texting was a different mode of communication to talking, this latest suggests young people prefer texting to talking. That makes me feel young. Which is good on a sunny London afternoon.
BBC News: Young prefer texting to talking