Essay: ‘Ego’: On masterplanning and London; plus, relaunch of The Journal of The London Society
David Michon recently asked me to write a piece for the new issue of The Journal of the London Society. I'm posting a version of it below. David has just taken over as 'honorary editor' of the Journal, and has produced a wonderful new issue. The London Society itself has been around since 1912, but despite […]
PaperLater
PaperLater is a new service from Newspaper Club (see previous entry on newspapers, and Newspaper Club.) As with Newspaper Club, it ingeniously wrangles the dynamics of both newsprint and the internet into something entirely new. In short, PaperLater enables you to save articles off the internet to read later, via a little click of a […]
Journal: Back “Hyper-Reality: A New Vision of the Future” by Keiichi Matsuda
Production drawings by Keiichi Matsuda An uncharacteristically brief post just to point you at Keiichi Matsuda's Kickstarter campaign, launched today, for his ambitious new films about the modern city, set in Medellin, Colombia. Matsuda's previous work is quite brilliant—I've mentioned it before—and the premise of this new series is even more promising: "It will be […]
Sketchbook: Fabrica 2013 Informal Annual Review: Fabricanti Handbook
On my second or third day here, I showed the peerless Tom Sachs Studio “Ten Bullets” movie. Enjoy: “Ten Bullets”, tongue in cheek and deadly serious at the same time, captures the spirit of a studio, of its people and of the work they do there (without showing the work, really.) I knew right away that […]
Sketchbook: Fabrica 2013 Informal Annual Review: Journalism/magazines: Colors #86 and #87
I'm incredibly proud of the work done by the COLORS team in the last year, from the "Going to Market" issue that launched just as I started, to the recent issues on "Making the News" and "Looking at Art" (with the pages of the fourth pasted up on the wall of the COLORS office as […]
Journal: Fabrica Lectures
Since I've been at Fabrica, one simple thing we've done is to increase the frequency of the lectures and workshops we host here. Fabrica had a long tradition of inviting people to come and talk, or run workshops—in the distant past we had everyone from Tomato to Issey Miyake, Ferran Adrià to Michael Nyman (sadly […]
Journal: Roberto Saviano at Fabrica
Roberto Saviano's speech at Fabrica, 21 May 2013, after a brief introduction by me, and Enrico Bossan. Beware: it features my pitiable attempts in Italiano, which you may wish to skip. We were honoured to have Roberto Saviano speaking at Fabrica yesterday evening [Update: you can now watch his speech (in Italian) above, or at […]
Sketchbook: Colors magazine, Colors #86 “Making the News”, and Colors News Machine
If you were to make a list of the ten most influential magazines of all time, I'd hazard a guess that Colors magazine might be in there, so it's a particular privilege that we get to produce Colors from Fabrica. I won't go into the past of Colors as that's widely available and discussed elsewhere—suffice to say […]
Journal: Fabrica
I’m writing this flying over the Alps, on BA579 from Venice to London. It’s a big blue sky lit by hazy sunshine, and the Alps look unreal. We just flew a few metres over a contrail, a perpendicular arc into the sunlight, hundreds of kilometres long, a surprisingly distinct temporary structure of curly vapour. Best […]
Journal: Fulcrum, the Architectural Association’s free weekly newspaper
This is a fantastic idea: "Fulcrum is a weekly architectural publication printed on Bedford Press at the Architectural Association. It was founded in January 2011 by Graham Baldwin, Aram Mooradian & Jack Self." As I'm posting this, the current issue (#51), edited by Baldwin and Self, happens to convey some of the thinking behind the publication, […]