Here is a playlist of National Geographic’s “Megacities” series. I was poking around to find some architecture documentaries and ran across these. I grouped them first by cities and then by themes that they made episodes around. It starts out in North America with New York, checks in on Las Vegas (yeah, it’s basically a city in a desert… totally a lot of work to create a modern city there), pops down to South America, and then crosses the Atlantic to look at some European cities (London and Paris), and then jumps over to Asia, starting with Mumbai and then checking in on Hong Kong and Taipai. I’ve also found a Jakarta documentary, but the resolution is so low it would be an embarrassing addition to the playlist.
Here are some selected Industrial Design lectures by Matthew Bird from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has a self-deprecating sense of humor, which you can really see in “Bauhaus to Broadway” (below).
The first one, above, is “Josiah Wedgwood for Industrial Designers”:
Josiah Wedgwood was a tireless innovator who introduced and employed many important components of what designers still do. Or SHOULD do. This is an overview of Josiah Wedgwood’s work, with a focus on how it shows evidence of early Industrial Design thinking and process. And the first Chia Pet!
This 80s-retro documentary is hosted by a socially awkward engineer who fumbles his cuecard-reading way through uncomfortable, scripted segues with props that illustrate the point being made. It’s a decent documentary on engineering, nonetheless.
Here is a documentary on Mid-Century Modern architecture, using Arkansas buildings as examples.
I like architecture and urban planning, so you can see why I am intrigued by this lecture delivered from Gresham College (who has been all about talks open to the public since 1597 [!]) by Proffesor Thurley. This is totally one of those things you can put on and then walk away from, since there are only a few slides, and mostly a bunch of talking.
It traces the history of worker housing in Victorian Britain that sprung from the industrial revolution, but you will notice there are quite a few U.S. parallels, especially their take on light wells in the slums–the deleterious absence of which (amongst a gigantic amount of other basic things) was so famously documented in New York City by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives (free and clickable, btw, through the Bartelby Project).
Here’s a video slideshow of some of Riis’ photos from New York City tenements (yeah, could not quickly find an online gallery with clickable thumbnails for those of us from the ADD generation *shrug*).
But what’s interesting about Britain’s approach is that when their cities’ populations exploded, they went straight to low-rise duplexes with communal privies and bake houses, along with a shared interior courtyard. This echos the contemporary cohousing movement whose principles are sneaking their way into the minds of progressive city urbanites, through labor-sharing initiatives like TaskRabbit (where you can sell your skills by the hour, to bidders that need random things), and urban farmers’ markets.
The second half–the “Splendor” bit– is about how London’s Italianesque architecture is a visual callback to the Renaissance Medici family, who so famously were both merchants and art patrons and basically shaped the architecture of Italy in doing so. Interestingly, London’s first futures markets rallied in pubs, which were razed to make way for London’s monuments to capitalistic wealth games and its financial center-ness.
Clockwise: Square Circuit Board Cufflinks in Blue, Jessie and Megan of Techcycled, Blue Square Circuit Board Necklace, Red Circuit Board Heart Necklace, Circuit Board Ring in green.
Techcycled is a collective of women engineers who also make jewelry out of circuit boards. All of their pieces are packaged in jewelry boxes and come with a information card on their history.
Pieces are $30-$55. Available at Fractalspin.
I’ve added Cat5 Earrings to the ethernet jewelry line, and now you can get them as a set: Cat5 Choker, Bracelet and Earrings Set. Neato!
Aka “Pitbull in a Tutu,” Charlotte won third place at Wicker Park’s Boo-palooza, and we took home a sweet gift basket of dog delishiousness.
She then had a vet appointment and then amused many people over in Retailland (Logan and Elston strip mall), even while in traffic in the car. Hooray.
Check out these photos of all the cool stuff that came in her gift basket.
I got her when she was a puppy from Chicago Bully Breed Rescue, or CBBR as they call themselves, a rescue and fostering nonprofit.
Urbanized posits that city dwellers must not only forge an innovative self-reliance, they must imagine higher forms of living. The radical fluctuations of growth and decline happening in modern cities necessitate infinite innovation. Urbanized is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to make sense of a world flowing into cities. This visually arresting film, like Hustwit’s past work, elegantly conveys the omnipresence of design in daily life. Essential viewing.
Ha! Finally someone is taking bread clips seriously!
I made a mixed-media work a while back from bread clips in the theme of Space Invaders, since I’ve been collecting them for quite a while.
“Bread Intruders”
Here’s the proposal:
A publication in this month’s BMJ Case Reports, a peer-reviewed publication of the British Medical Journal, offers a “proposal for phylogenic plastic bag clip classification”. Contributing authors include John Daniel of the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (HORG).
Proposal for phylogenic classification advances bread clip science