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What are the modern equivalents of medieval cathedrals? Design history buffs will always allude to dear old Roland Barthes and his declaration, in 1953, that the new Citroen DS fit the bill perfectly: "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object."

As the century progressed, describing something to be 'like a cathedral' became shorthand for an epic creative undertaking, something as ambitious as building a monumental palace of worship by hand, from stone and wood. It wasn't ever a terribly suitable metaphor, and only Barthes really pushed it far enough to make convincing sense ('There are in the D.S. the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign Nature.')

Every now and again, the phrase re-surfaces, most recently in this piece by Sam Leith: The World of Warcraft video game is every bit as glorious as Chartres cathedral. 'Like a cathedral, it is a supreme work of art that is, on a brick-by-brick basis, the creation of hundreds of artisans and craftsmen, many of whom will be long gone by the time it comes to completion; indeed, since WoW is in a state of permanent expansion, it may not ever be "complete"'. It was a simple piece of hyperbole, a deliberate prod aimed at stirring those who don't fancy equating the great ongoing cathedral of the modern age, the Sagrada Familia, with the story of Kil'Jaeden (no, us neither).

Happily, it's not a comparison that's been widely embraced, even by the gaming community. As Steven Poole wrote on Edge Online: 'WOW is not like a cathedral. It is like a global amateur-dramatics society with a wardrobe full of elf costumes – and there's nothing wrong with that. So why seek to claim instead, absurdly, that it’s on a par with one of the pinnacles of western culture?' There are two things at play here. The first is the desire that video games are taken seriously as an art form, a battle that has long been won but which still seems to be fun to fight, and the second is that many feel there is a cultural void that needs filling. Boringly enough, the great modern cathedrals probably are just that, the great modern cathedrals. But in the irresistible rush to add some kind of mystical gravitas to technological progress, cathedrals will continue to be erected in the most unexpected places.

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Standard Grey, a tumblr / Amazing Future, who needs monographs? / A Journey Round My Skull's Tumblr / Voust, a tumblr / Technical Black, a tumblr / Stylemag.net, where magazines go when the paper runs out / stop motion frenzy: Nobody Beats the Drum - Grindin'. Check the Herzogian Making of....

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Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough: 'Ouroussoff has an opinion about design, but his reviews offer not much more than that opinion. His approach - little history, less politics, occasional urbanism - shrinks the critic's role to commenting only on the appearance of the architecture'. In particular, his penchant for 'nostalgia' as a term of abuse. 'But "nostalgia" (whose nostalgia? Nostalgia for what era, what architect?) without context becomes a straw man, an illusory opponent for contemporary architects to triumph over.'

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Mostly happy hipsters over at The Selby. Some are fun, some are smug. Some may even be unhappy / In Almost Every Picture, a new box set of Eric Kessels' remarkable collection of found photography / the Foster Car and Straker Car from UFO / a flash game to celebrate a new ski jump. Soon, every new building will come with its own game or app.

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Photographs of the Polish town of Puszczykowo by Kuba Ryniewicz. Sets include Fences and Wild Cat in the City, a plethora of animal prints / Lookwork, a new visual aggregator looking for folk to make contemporary virtual mood boards / Front Pages, a tumblr / Niemeyer's Brasilia: A Tribute / related, Oscar Niemeyer talks to Vice Magazine / Informal Repair Culture / see also Afrigadget.

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The Audi 100 Avant Duo, a hybrid from 1989 / The art of list-making / Outerland, a photographic project by Allison Davies / NASA's Blue Marble at the Goddard Photo and Video Blog's photostream / Japan is Sexy, or so we're constantly being told. Object/people/place fetish / a map of sinful Amarillo. We see potential in rolling out sinful maps or Google Earth layers for _everywhere_.

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Graphic design by shooting the breeze / hello my name is dennis, a weblog / The Moldy Doily, costume culture / everyday structures, on infrastructure and the overlooked / at Y Mag, which has also started a promising drawing section, entitled I hate rendering / we love music every single day / tinder, a weblog / Ribambelles and Ribambins, retro kids stuff / March 20th is Obscura Day, uncover the obscure in your city (e.g. the River Fleet and the Wellcome Collection).

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Land Animal, 'a blog dedicated to the awesome stylings of the e-Mix Tape' / typography weblog by Rasmus Broennum / strange, aerospatial sculptures by Hiroyuki Hamada at \\\, regularly nsfw (via SpaceInvading) / boat as island / above image from Southsiders / graphic design by Gavillet and Rust / Pau to Canfranc / ArchiTakes, 'on architecture in New York and beyond' and currently musing on the contemporary obsession with wayward fenestration.

Is it really hip to be glum? Riffing on the insta-popularity of Unhappy Hipsters: 'US psychologists ... cropped pictures of models in ads so only their faces were visible, then asked people to rank them in order of mood. Overwhelmingly, models ­advertising pricier brands were judged to look glummer.' (pdf link: Facial Displays of Emotion in Folk vs. Elite Advertisements).

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Antonio Contador's 6=0 consists of six copies of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence". "The records were bought on ebay and never removed from their original envelopes and they never will. Each of the records will travel: from my house to each exhibitions place, from each exhibition location to another, to each envelope another one is added. Upon arrival the date is annotated and a photograph of each envelope is taken to be shown on the next exhibition." Showing at the CMCA

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The Most Popular Journal / iconism is not dead, including CCTV redux and OMA's design for a homage to Roger Hargreaves / The History of Philadelphia's Watersheds and Sewers / The First Word: A Dictionary of New Architecture / Binky the Doormat / Muriel Auclert Real Estate, modern houses for sale in France / Artur, contemporary architecture tours in Budapest / Big Lorry Blog / Styledeficit, a tumblr / illustration by Wells Brown.

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Thinking outside the bun: redesigning the hot dog ("If you were to take the best engineers in the world and asked them to design a perfect plug for a child's airway, you couldn't do better than a hot dog") / cruise back in time with the history of the Wienermobile / Inventory Updates, upscale, hyper-tasteful fashion blogging / yet another set of Penguin and Pelican book covers / Parr's ambivalent obsessions, Poynor on Parrworld: The Collection of Martin Parr. More images at we make money not art.

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Lost Landscapes of Detroit (via) / Traffic control in Pyongyang / post-earthquake in Chile - follow Platforma Arquitectura for information / Who here recycles? / Random Brand finds music videos, but not for a while / Come on Sugar, Let me Know, the standfirst says it all: 'This week, Giles Turnbull reaches out to the masses on Chatroulette for advice on sexiness, with horrifying consequences.' / Arcadia demade, retro-engineering modern video games / A magical miniature day in the life of NYC / The Tom and Jerry Censorship Comparison Guide / what's it like around the Watts?

The US embassy proposal has become the online architecture subject of the week, with countless (or probably very countable, if you know what you're doing) virtual column inches devoted to the competition, the controversy, the winning scheme, the design, the constraints, the problems, the impossibility, etc. Will Wiles goes a little more in-depth in Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us, exploring the brave new world of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation ('there are such things, for instance, as armoured trees; a growing tree can absorb steel bars that will help it stop or slow a rogue vehicle' - at what point will this kind of subject stop being 'Ballardian' and start being 'BLDG BLOGian'?), and how this has resulted in 'a building designed with explosions in mind. A shape formed by the manipulation of spheres of destruction.' Just wait until the pigeons get into that funny plastic facade.

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In and Out of History, on Tintin, banality, collaboration and imagination / Tintin drives a car / from the film Tintin and I / Notes + Links by Casey A.Gollan / New British Comedy Relationship Chart / Of paper and things, more indications of the tangible interacting with the digital. Their sidebar offers a huge collection of illustration, craft, design and ephemera blogs, e.g. Bold on Grey.

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Film grabs of London in the 1960s, via The Cartoonist (a car that's still alive). Good then and now comparison to be made with this shot from 35 years ago. Also, Alexandra Road under construction / thanks to Yes We Work for suggestions.

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What Am I Doing Here? Tall Buildings and High Anxiety in Las Vegas, a piece by Mark Lamster. Accompanying images / a fun piece of fantasy urbanism / all about the mellifluous 'cellar door', which always makes us think of the Lemonheads / beautiful infographic on Snake Oil Supplements.

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Become a werewolf icecream man / far more about Survival in the City, with scans aplenty at David Galletly's great site / Leeds: the human expectoration is black here, a photo essay of staggering bleakness / Ampere's And, a tumblr.

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A quick trawl through the latest in urban presentation and 3D tech. It's early days at the Day Trail Pool (via Digital Urban) / also via DU, the work of Rob Carter - animated cityscapes and buildings, especially the fabulous modernism-to-gothic transformations of Stone on Stone / the Martin Jetpack.

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Android entertainment: ULoops / ">Music 4.5, a conference / Thounds, 'a recorder for your music thoughts', smoky ears and all / time-lapse movie of home-working by Dorian Moore / related, a quote from Geoff Dyer, 'Writers always envy artists, would trade places with them in a moment if they could... In the age of the computer the writer's office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing small business.'

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House life in a Koolhaas: 'Characteristically, Koolhaas — whose projects are always radical and frequently perverse — flouted received wisdom about architecture for the handicapped with his House in Bordeaux, which American building inspectors would deem a potential death trap.' (clip) / Lewis's Fifth Floor: A Department Story (via the Guardian). Inside an abandoned department store in Leeds, photography by Stephen King.

Gypsychique, a tumblr (occasionally nsfw) / work by John Whitlock / the impending Cupcake Bubble, looking for some kind of Gladwellian hook in the relatively recent spike in production/consumption of small fancy cakes. The trend is definitely there, but 'The real problem, though, is that the cupcakes are essentially reactionary.... willfully uncomplex, familiar, and comforting' / Is this your luggage? (via).

Just What I See, iPhone street photography / you know, Vintage For Kids / all about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch / post-cube polychromatic wonderland, a lawyers' office by Hofman Dujardin Architects / architectural photography by Luke Hayes / Panorama, a new architecture newspaper / paper engineering by Mark Hiner / The Popular Edge, 'Pop-Up and Book Art News' / art by Catriona Finnie /

More office shenanigans. It's hard to imagine going from the Loblolly House to this, Kieran Timberlake's proposed US Embassy in London. More critiques: LA Times ('[the design] suggests putting an emphasis on action instead of values, measurable behavior rather than symbolic gestures') and The Guardian ('Cool, remote and superficially transparent, the winning design does reflect what we can divine of the US political process'). Apparently it was not to the liking of Lords Rogers and Palumbo

There is a lot to say, of this we are sure takes issue with the term 'design thinking' / damaged goods by Barnaby Barford / art by Victor Timofeev (blog): a beautiful set of drawings, reminiscent of very early Libeskind / SuperCity, an architectural model / Lunarized, a tumblr

Inside Tommy Westphall's mind, a graphic by Nicholas W Skyles. The kind of meme that would be non-existent - impossible, pointless, whatever - were it not for the internet / linked before but consistently fascinating, Very Small Array / cute paper houses / talking about ugly buildings, as Boston gets to grips with its frankly magnificent City Hall.

An impending darkness. We've recently become aware of Blogger's intention to 'switch off' something called FTP publishing. Last time we looked, our settings said ominously 'You are publishing via FTP'. Admittedly there seems to be plenty of information out there (e.g. Blogger FTP info) but it highlights an unwelcome side effect of 'push button publishing'; that one inevitably forgets exactly what each button does, only that one needs to push it. The things facade is paper thin, jerry-built on a rickety frame of bad html, poor design decisions and fudges, its foundations swampy and prone to subsidence. Remove one brick and the whole edifice is in danger of tumbling down. We'll endeavour to 'migrate' with minimum inefficiency, but if anyone knows of a 'one button solution' that turns this particular structure into a shiny wordpress blog without bringing this whole charade cascading about our ears, we'd love to hear it.

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Other things. The BBC posts about the Boneyard, or AMARG, to give it its official title / imagery collected at Fontanel / 20 Jazz Funk Greats, an mp3 blog / Spoilt Victorian Child has re-emerged as SVC Records / Filling the Gap, slightly psychedelic photo manipulations / Sky: A Dubai Video by Philip Bloom.

The work of Reynaud Philippe, especially 'Forms of Google Earth' / dead spaces: beneath motorways, places Joe Moran writes about quite successfully / it was a pleasure to be linked on this page, all about a new global visual language for the BBC's digital services' (slightly bandwidth murdering though). It's a fascinating read - almost as in depth as Dan Hill's legendary analysis of Monocle.com.

Street poetry at a barriga de um arquitecto / Abbatts cards at Kickcan and Conkers / possible use for Chat Roulette: as a venue for an endless imaginary gig, with a constantly shifting, demanding, restless and attention-deficit audience / on tape fetishism. Hardly surprising: every technology has a twilight, a passing and a revival / design by Tom Skipp.

Art and photography by Christoph Draeger, including Catastrophes 1 and 2 and Voyages Apocalyptiques / Satan's Laundromat, an abandoned photolog / The Holy Sandwich / recommended: Life Stories, a 'pick of the best profiles and life stories from news and magazine sites and blogs around the web' / via Life Stories, extracts from the John Hughes Archive.

Hypertext as the death of arcana, or how the click killed curiosity. The depth of the internet is, of course, limitless, a bottomless pit of html that can take us off and away on any number of unexpected byways and diversions. Yet is this expectation of diversion flattening out our experience of the physical world? The days of an internet where every stumble was a moment of true discovery are gone forever, perhaps, as curatorial zeal fast overtakes quiet collectomania as the principle online activity.

This post at Tomorrow Museum sums it up, Facebook is worse than AOL: 'Back in the day, AOL had a lot of secret gardens. According to my friend Erin, there was a Spin magazine message board frequented by established rock critics that at an off the index location. A lot of corporations and publications created "channels" which would include chat rooms and message boards. These were about as successful as the businesses with Second Life presences. But some users would take over the dead space and make it their own. Several online friends and I once claimed the message boards for a Canadian radio station long after it was launched and quickly abandoned. Likely the citizens of Second Life do that with virtual ghost town storefronts.'

Remember when GeoCities died? It's a stretched metaphor, but many of those pages will turn into ancient overgrown walls marking strange patterns in the middle of a dense jungle, their purpose almost impossible to decipher. Internet archaeology is just another strand of curatorialism, fed by Archive.org and the perverse attraction of digital kitsch, a medium that gains in curiosity and cute value far quicker than its real-world equivalent. Technological kitsch moves quickly, and digital kitsch even quicker still; the multimedia experiences of the last decade are quaint and laughable, just as we will soon be perversely thrilled by the clunkiness of 2010's attempts at augmented reality.

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Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov / art by Paul Tebbott / Lady Gaga, the Illuminati Puppet / more conspiracy; was The London Weekly, a new freesheet in the capital, deliberately intended to be utterly awful? / state of the German magazine scene / Let's Celebrate with Cake / Art 313, odds and ends / what was the first ever hypertext document? The Aspen Movie Map, a sort of proto Google Streetview.

Spacemen: Friends and Foes, post-war paranoia manifested as science fiction presented as fact. Via Ask me-fi. Related, the Samsung Aircruise, a 'clipper in the clouds'. Steampunk meets the contemporary aesthetic / tni SYLLABUS, 'TNI readers curate the internet,' from The New Inquiry / mellabrown, a tumblr / Not until 2027, a tumblr / updownacross, a weblog / turrbull, a weblog / the ARCH+ photostream.

The Spatial Agency Database, architecture, design, theory and movements in biographical form / Up Close and Private, a web publication / After You Left, They Took It Apart: Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes, Photographs by Chris Mottalini / vans in the landscape, at Vans and the places where they were / OPEN Dalston, investigating planning issues in a London borough / Lightning Bolt, an interview.

Roger Ebert writing about Jermyn Street / Mayonaka, a tumblr / a touchscreen electric guitar from Misa / Sliding Lego house / buy a Russian Truck / Printeresting Notebook, a weblog / searching for rare vinyl in West Africa, especially these pictures: I, II. At Voodoo Funk.

The attraction of the technological failure, and how the internet serves as a dispensary of extended footnotes to otherwise forgotten history. Take the Sinclair C5, now firmly established in the canon of entrepreneurial also-rans, an idea not so much beyond its time, but out of time, the answer to a question that no-one was asking. But were it not for the internet, the C5 would languish in the very marginalia of cultural commentary, the nuts and bolts of its brief existence papered over by snide remarks, quips and references. Now every little dead end and half-baked idea is glorified and celebrated with its own chapel of rememberance or mausoleum, turning the internet into a repository of abandoned strands of human ingenuity.

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A forthcoming exhibition at the V and A celebrates small spaces, including 1:1 structures by seven international practices: Rintala Eggertsson, Terunobu Fujimori, Helen and Hard, Studio Mumbai, Sou Fujimoto, Rural Studio and Vazio S/A.

Art saved from the Nazis / art saved from itself / the second video ever posted on youtube was of someone falling over / the greatest extended takes in movie history / rounding up consumption, the Amazon Filler Item Finder / Linefeed, a design weblog / photographs by Rob Hann / amazing model village.

Wooden toys by Take-g / Tin Trunk, fashion history / paintings by Steven Pennaneac'h / Angry People in Local Newspapers / Vintage Headlamp Restoration / AE Worldmap, architecture aggregator / Grange Hill then and now (via haddock) / photography by Marquis Palmer.

The RV Hall of Fame (via BBC) / Sell Sell, a weblog / Volume, an architecture magazine / urban exploration: cathedrals. Great rooftop shots of Paris / A decade that was not: in architecture too, on the aughties ('noughties'?) as ten years of architectural destruction and the failure of the profession to offer anything more than hollow symbolism in response.

Curiouscurious, a tumblr / Every Bell That Tolls Me, a tumblr / Baubauhaus, imagery cascade / Exit Magazine's minimal YouTube presence is like the anti-iPad / aKun, a tumblr, which introduces us to the work of Chris Kenny and the concept of desire paths / Eventual Ghost, a weblog / Annalogs, a weblog / the Guess Where London? pool / In Pictures: House Moving in Chile.



A selection of editorial headings by Winsor McCay, 1867-1934 at Golden Age Comic Book Stories (via number61). What an absolutely marvellous website. The richness of the illustration on the following pages is breathtaking, all the more so for being scanned at half decent quality in epic quantities. The work of Arthur Rackham; Dugald Stewart Walker; Kay Nielsen

The age of cross-pollination. Curation Culture, for want of a better term, thrives on cross-pollination. Everything is interesting, and what's more, we've developed the tools and the aesthetics with which to create the deep levels of analysis that would overwhelm a masters thesis from the 80s or 90s. Take this, the Samizdat Drafting Company's One Book, Many Readings loving, obsessive examination of the 'choose your own adventure' books of the 1980s, complete with a remarkable set of animations and the ability to 'play' a book.

It's beautiful and fascinating. Yet content is practically overwhelmed by presentation. The contemporary digital toolset rips the books into their constituent pieces, making kinetic art out of what would once have been created with a set of index cards and an eraser. The site cross-pollinates modern obsessions - retro style and gaming and infographics - to create a dataset that is ultimately more than the sum of its parts, reflecting not so much our interest in the original books but in their role as a source of data.

(There are plenty of places online to find out about CYOA, Fighting Fantasy, etc., including the original company. The Samizdat project's conclusions were that the CYOA books gradually decreased in complexity over time (perversely going against Steven Johnson's contentions in Everything Bad Is Good for You that pop culture is increasingly multi-threaded and dense).)

As part of the analysis, Samizdat draws parallels with the typographic chaos of early web pages gradually giving way to restraint, concluding: 'When a world of new possibilities has just opened, it's hard to find the will for restraint. But, in time, people scale back the more gratuitous uses of this sort of glitz, moving from what's possible to what best suits the material.' In typography, perhaps this rings true, but in all other aspects of online culture, scaling back is not the dominant trend. Instead, information density and manipulation are pushed to the fore, their complexity a virtue and the brave new worlds created by statistic-saturated infographics form yet another spoke in the cut-and-paste culture celebrated by the visual weblog.

Sites like information aesthetics and cool infographics focus on contemporary graph fetishism; the data is almost a secondary consideration to the presentation. Nicholas Felton's 'Annual Reports' are a classic case in point, not only the ur-form of the personal infographic, but a clear precursor to the proliferation of Apps for tracking every aspect of your life.

Up until a few years ago, the information-saturated environment was a visual cue for extreme, dystopian futurism - Blade Runner's looming airship/billboards, or Minority Report's highly targeted augmented reality advertising. The logical conclusion of such a future is rendered in the speculative 'augmented hyper reality' video by Keiichi Matsuda, currently doing the rounds ('Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.'). For fans of data density, augmented reality is truly a blessing, a means of overlaying the modern world with the many layers of extraneous data that would otherwise continue to go unseen.

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Other things. Error Gorilla, a tumblr / The Brown Car Blog, pretty self-explanatory / Daniel Simon's work is unashamedly romantic, almost old-fashion in its shiny, fetishistic futurism / Cloudberry Cake Proselytism, cheerleading for old school indie pop / BooBooGBs photostream, old school Hollywood glamour / Burning World, an mp3 blog / make tracks on train tracks. Reminiscent of the great Fisher Price Music Box Record Player (not to be confused with the Fisher Price Phonograph, which could play actual records. More info).

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England's most hated building to be demolished. Surprisingly this is the 'IMAX' in Bournemouth, a piece of waterfront regeneration tat that has long since lost the cinema that gave it its name and currently houses only a KFC. Here's hoping Plymouth's Drake Circus isn't too far behind / related, Confessions of a Conservation Officer / it's nice when ephemera is dovetailed with contemporary practice. Delicious Industries' Reference Box is a good case in point.

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A collection of trade secrets / Photos of 24 abandoned and decayed hotels from around the world / The Soviet Heritage and European Modernism / squatting culture in Barcelona: Squat Barcelona and Usurpa / paintings by Gigi Scaria / Guitars for OK Go by Moritz Waldemeyer.

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British high tech architecture as evidence of 'a na•ve dream of an America which never existed', and now the epitome of contemporary cultural banality, at entschwindet und vergeht. Response at NB and S, mostly on the same page / more commentary: melancholy, sadness and Zaha: 'And this futility just deepensÉ the building is an example of 'Google Earth Urbanism'. That is to say; all this complexity can only really be seen from directly above.'