Category Archives: Journal

British Government Launches Architecture Policy Review

The British Government will launch an Architecture Policy Review headed up by headed up by Terry Farrell which will report back at the end of the year. It was commissioned by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey.

Farrell will look at four main points the government’s role in promoting design quality, the economic benefits of architecture, cultural heritage and the built environment and improving education about architecture and buildings. See the report in The Guardian and  BD. You can write comments about the review direct to Farrells office here:  FAR@terryfarrell.co.uk

The Terrainator

terrainator

The Terrainator by Dan Wilson is a service that prints a region of the world of your choice into a 3d model delivered to your door. You can do it all online and have it shipped to you for around $45. Not all areas on the globe are covered yet and I got some mixed results making maps of places I know in the UK, but the Alps and mountains of Scotland look great. As data is added both the areas covered should increase and the quality of the models will too.

I would love to see Dan add cities, imagine New York for example and even single buildings.

Thanks Pinboard!

I first came across Pinboard during the great escape from Delicious which came about the time that Yahoo sold them off. I checked out a few other services, I even ran for a short time a tiddlywiki out of my Dropbox. Then I took the plunge paid my 9 dollars and signed up with Pinboard, that was in October 2011. It was just what I was looking for.

On the 4th of January last year I got an email from Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard, giving me a year full archiving account. There had been a small glitch with a note I had saved the evening before, and by way of apology he upgraded my account to full archiving for a year. I had noticed something awry the night before but honestly had thought nothing of it so I was more than pleasantly surprised by his email.

Pinboard has kept slowly developing without changing character and now with a few recipies from ifttt I can tie many of the things I use day to day back to pinboard for easy archiving. For example all my items in pocket I’ve read and all my google reader starred items are automatically backed up to my pinboard account not to mention my tweets.

So while facebook goes from strength to strength and twitter mutates into a media company there are services like pinboard that provide proper proactive customer service. Unlike some others it doesn’t leverage your content, (which you signed away to them) because it provides you with a service you pay for yourself. So thank you Pinboard!

Lebbeus Woods RIP

Architecture is about the lack of stability and how to address it. Architecture is about the void and how to cross it. Architecture is about inhospitability and how to live within it.
Lebbeus Woods would have had it no other way, and—as students, writers, poets, novelists, filmmakers, or mere thinkers—neither should we. - Geoff Manaugh about Lebbeus Woods who passed away Yesterday

Tesla Museum

A few years back I wrote about Nicola Tesla and his Wardenclyffe Tower building.  That site is now for sale and  Matthew Inman is trying to raise the money to buy the site and to start a museum dedicated to Tesla. If there is one thing you need to do today that is donate to this fund!

To see why this is such a good idea go to the article written by Matthew. Then go donate.

Update: As of a few days ago they reached their target to buy the site but there are still some days to go and they need all the money they can get to get the museum up and running. (via)

Higgs Boson Particle Confirmed

A great day for science

The Higgs boson appears in a theory first fleshed out in 1964 by Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University and five other physicists. Finding the particle proves there is an energy field that fills the vacuum of the observable universe. It plays the crucial role of giving mass to certain subatomic particles that are the building blocks of matter. (via)

Finnish Whiskey

Living in Finland and having previously written about Finnish Wine I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about Finnish Whiskey. You heard it right there may be a nascent Whiskey Industry hiding in the Finnish woods. Check out the Wikipedia page on Finnish Whiskey and you’ll see there are currently two producing Whiskeys. The two distilleries are Panimoravintola Beer Hunter’s and Teerenpeli Distillery.

Guggenheim Revisited

Since I wrote last about the proposition of the Guggenheim Museum coming to Helsinki a lot has happened. I had a good look at the background of the Guggenheim ventures since Bilbao, the type of museum envisaged and didn’t like what I saw. But also I didn’t really think it would happen, at a time of budget cuts and austerity I didn’t think that the city would have the financial muscle to build it. But I was wrong on a few fundamental assumptions.1

For mainly those reasons the Guggenheim coming to Helsinki looks like a distinct possibility. So with the council about to vote on the subject in April it’s worth taking another look at the proposal on the table. Those of you who want a detailed look at the proposal can have a look at the official report here. OK so what will GHelsinki offer us lets check the for column.

Continue reading →

  1. It will be smaller than I thought cutting the cost from prohibitive to reachable. It clearly has the support of some of Finland’s top art players like Carl Gustaf Ehrnrooth who is both Finnish and on the Board of the Guggenheim. Two name just two things I missed first time around. [↩]

Against Censorship

SOPA & PIPA are the sort of Bullshit censorship models we can do without on the internet. That’s why I went dark on the 18th January and thankfully they were defeated this time. Have a read of some background to the well thought out arguments as why we need to oppose these types of measures now and most likely in the future too is easy to find.

The Kindle as the Endless book

 

So my first ebook reader a basic Kindle 4 came in the post  just as the first Kindle fire was being launched in the States. I had been thinking of getting one for a while but with the recent revised lineup bringing a nice design simplification and price drop of the basic model I decided to take the plunge now.  After a few weeks a weekend away and a Christmas break with it I think I have a good basic impression of the Kindle and the act of reading on one.

Continue reading →

Schooling from two perspectives

A couple of links first about the Finnish School system in the Atlantic.

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America’s school reformers are trying to do.

Compare this with an article in the Guardian today US Schools with their own police.

More and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour?

Having two kids in the Finnish system I’m not sure I agree completely with the ideological thrust of the Atlantic article or that the introduction of Police into some US schools is a cause rather than a symptom of US educational problems but I can say I’m nothing but impressed by what I’ve seen for my own children so far.

So long and thanks Christopher

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. I happened on Hitchens slapping some inane point down, using almost verbatim the quote below.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Karl Marx 

Paris Post-it Wars

Paris is in the grip of a post-it war:

Hostilities were first engaged on the gleaming facades of Montreuil office park, east of Paris, home to gaming giant Ubisoft and BNP-Paribas bank’s IT systems. The conflict has since spread to the business district of La Défense, and to the equally besuited enclave of Issy-les-Moulineaux, which houses France’s greatest concentration of telecoms and media companies. In fact, across the French capital, the summer has been enlivened by a corporate collage contest known as La guerre des Post-it (the Post-it wars).

Two questions spring to mind immediately, what is it about the French that they seem to be all born Situationists, and I wonder if the war could be spread to Leppävaara?

Of course a website has started in tribute to it. Postitwar.com. Here is a video also.

Finnish Wine

Temola Winery

The most northerly wine in the world is produced in Olkiluoto in Finland1 with the help of nuclear powered waste water. But what I find more interesting is that Finland actually has a small network of farms making their own wine from Finnish berries (Blackcurrent, Blueberry, Whitecurrent, Cloudberry). Who’d have guessed that there is a nascent wine industry here.

There are signs of a kind of underground renaissance in Finnish food but it’s two faced with the basic food industry mainly monopolised and industrialised. I wish we could get back to producing, and eating in a more natural and direct way.

  1. according to wikipedia [↩]

Summer Listings

So I’m about to go on holiday for a month and with about 30 half finished posts, 3 or 4  half read books at home and a partially updated website, this is all par for the course so I’m not going to worry about updating anything in particular (also par for the course).

It might be worth pointing out a few things about the redesign though. Firstly its based on Scherzo by Leon Paternoster, go over there and check it out. It’s html5 and a responsive design try checking it out by resizing your browser, then look at it on your phone. Also it supports Internet Explorer with the respect it deserves, so try using ie8 or up.The redesign was prompted by a rethinking by me of my footprint on the web.

With the partial demise and rebirth of delicious and the current stagnation of flickr both services that got me into the social side of the web I have kind of rethought this webspace as the safest and only place to really put my non physical stuff. Mandy Brown summed up better than I could say about my attitude to how things are preserved on the web. Everything else then, twitter, facebook, whatever, is just a conduit, and a conduit that will close or monetise my stuff at some point in the future in a way I can’t accept.

So everything else from now on becomes a place through which I go. Everything that’s really mine stays here. That means that I’ve started a shadow site called hyper.lewism which is just my collection of things I do on the web whether it be bookmark, tweet or comment I want to keep or find a building or picture I like. lewism stays as it is mostly my thoughts about the built environment, hyper.lewism is a bunker and linkblog of everything else I’m interested on the web that’s mirrred back to me so I can keep it. We will see how it goes.

Anyway in the real world I have some major things to do to sort out our new house and I’ve been thinking about how we live in conjunction with that. So hacked from Saul Griffiths‘ talk & Jyri Engeströms‘ list here is a rough list of how I’m going to enjoy my summer a little better.

  • Eat Less and More Healthily.
  • Exercise More.
  • Spend more time with my family.
  • Live Closer together (in a philisophical way also).
  • Breathe cleaner air.
  • Drink cleaner water.
  • Relax & Listen to some muisc.