Category: Sports
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Sketchbook: New SuperNormal column by Max Gadney, on real-time data visualisation and football + “Football” by Danny Blanchflower
I'm watching Germany vs. Italy at Euro 2012. It's currently exhibiting most of the characteristics that Max Gadney wrote about in the latest issue of Domus: quixotic improvisation and extreme technical skill, cohesive teamwork and the individual brilliance of Balotelli, fluidity and structure, deep history and contemporary culture, data driven insight and unpredictable chance ……
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Shoot! All Stars
To mark the start of the football season – or more honestly, to clear some space on my hard disk – some old football cards I scanned in, from a time when footballers were certainly uglier (Carlos Tevez notwithstanding):
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‘Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait’, by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno
I've had a sporadic relationship with Douglas Gordon's work, yet it's had a profound effect on me when I've seen it, heard it. Maybe I've been lucky enough to have experienced his greatest hits, the two works based around Alfred Hitchcock; '24 Hour Psycho', in which the film is slowed down to play over a…
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The Damned Utd, by David Peace
David Peace’s ‘The Damned Utd’ is a fairly extraordinary book. A fictionalised account of Brian Clough’s 44 days in charge of Leed United Football Club in 1974, it captures perfectly the essence of the age, the sport and the men of the time, most of all the unique Clough himself. It’s utterly compelling, hovering between…
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Journal: Design. Architecture. Football.
The World Cup is everywhere, so what better time to thread a series of theoretical passes together into a sinuously flowing move? On why football is so compelling for so many people, and what can that tell us about the practice of design and architecture. (I'm thinking of playing John Cage in the hole behind…
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Shanghai Diary 2005 #7
A further entry in Justin O’Connor’s Shanghai Diary 2005 [context and introduction here]. This entry is dated 1st July 2005, and in visiting a football match in Huangpu, and reading Momus’s blog, Justin discusses how the perceived homogeneity of Chinese working class – if that term makes sense at all – is differentiated from the…
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Herzog and De Meuron’s Allianz Arena
The new Allianz Arena football stadium in Munich, designed by Herzog and De Meuron, is a quite beautiful piece of work, which puts Norman Foster’s compromised new Wembley to shame on several fronts. For a start, it’s come in on time and on budget (for a quarter that of Wembley, actually), but also features innovations…
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Campioni!
As Tony Blair said: "Unbelievable. Incredible. Brilliant." Actually, Michael Walker in The Guardian put it better, in rather more mythic terms: "It took someone with the vision of HG Wells to construct this stadium out amid the pylons and rubble on the extreme margins of Istanbul. It would have required a storyteller with the equivalent…
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I’m All Right, Hack
“How funny it seems – funny-strange rather than funny-ha-ha – that, getting on for 20 years after Margaret Thatcher extinguished the power of the British trade union movement, the nearest thing to a Militant Tendency in modern Britain should be these prominent beneficiaries of the free-market economy, their wealth based on the fortunes of Rupert…
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Boston/Cambridge Diary: Cities divided
Part of ‘Boston/Cambridge Diary’ series: context here Despite a few strong pieces directly addressing race, one of the better chapters in A Good City [UK|US] is Howard Bryant’s piece on the city’s racial politics and history refracted through the lens of baseball and basketball. The former an arena for a traditional resistance to black players…
City of Sound 