Exemplifying sustainablity and reuse, my ‘iPod and adaptive design’ article for Core 77 gets another run out in this month’s Icon magazine (issue 12, May 2004). Core77 have also allowed me to post the original full article on this site, for future reference – Oh, and there were some interesting comments gathering there too.
Edited down a bit for Icon, and retitled "When perfect isn’t good enough", it’s interesting to see my writing devoid of links. I’ve grown so accustomed to writing link-heavy pieces, I’ve begun to rely on it. I realise how affected I am by early exposure to the late-lamented Automatic Media sites Feed and Suck. Their densely-hyperlinked style of writing was described in more depth by Automatic supremo Steven Johnson in his excellent Interface Culture:
"What you can see in Suck’s oblique syntax is not the birth of a new language, but rather the birth of a new type of slang. It’s a jargon, but it’s not built out of words or phrases. It’s the slang of associations, of relationships between words. The slang evolves of the way you string together information, the way you make your references, not the words you use."
Still, despite the article being de-slanged for print 😉 thanks to Icon for printing it.
A year old, Icon looks to be shaping up as a great mag – UK-based, covering a wide range of architecture and design with some zest. You’ll notice this month’s cover features Daniel Libeskind’s new building for London Metropolitan University on Holloway Road, London. There was a particularly hateful column by Robert Elms (who I generally like!) in Time Out recently about Libeskind’s building, and about how it was appropriately ugly for an ugly road (paraphrasing) – essentially that Holloway Road was more authentic ‘as was’, and should be left that way. In response to that ridiculous cultural tourism and obscene preservation of poverty, I applaud Libeskind’s intervention (not that I’ve seen it yet) – anything to lift that area, even visually. Even bearing in mind Jonathan Bell’s excellent article on ‘New Radical’ architecture in Blueprint a couple of months ago – that most of today’s radicalism is expressed in terms of form alone – it’s difficult not to be excited by the appearance this building in this space.
City of Sound 
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