December 2009
7 posts
News Tower
Since the 1960’s Rupert Murdoch has amassed one of the world’s largest media empires. His News Corporation owns hundreds of newspapers, television networks, movie studios, publishing imprints, and web properties worldwide. His holdings are successful largely because of their populist sensibility and their timely appeal to traditionally under-served market segments. For example, Fox...
Netscapes →
Mask of Emotion →
As if our real faces weren’t able to convey emotion. Another step towards the irrelevance of the human body.
America's Medieval New U.N. Mission →
For Eric -
Every secure enclosure, whether it’s a castle, a complex, or an entire country, defines a perimeter of concern: We’re safe inside; the rest of you are on your own. A car bomb might peel off the federal tower’s “sacrificial façade,” shatter the glass-walled skyscrapers next door, and crater First Avenue, but America’s diplomats would, one hopes, remain unscathed inside their reinforced...
November 2009
18 posts
Sustainability: advancement vs. apocalypse →
Reminded me of Tainter’s two approaches to complexity, technological innovation or collapse.
Stressing the Web, ‘NewsHour’ Begins an Overhaul →
“Already the show has picked up its pace, although by commercial standards it is hardly noticeable; some of the lengthy segments and in-studio interviews have been shaved by a couple of minutes. And now, if a story breaks late, there’s more effort to pursue it immediately for use on the air or online “rather than wait until tomorrow,” Mr. Lehrer said”
The panopticon →
“a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”
The pros and cons of the Daily Telegraph newsroom →
“Look at the design of an “up to date newsroom” and surprisingly it looks like the Panoptikon designed by Jeremy Bentham for an 18th century prison: the goal was to control people and to give the impression that the directors always knew - night and day - what the prisoners were doing.”
Content sharing at News Corp - a long time in the... →
“The portal will be entirely internal and business-facing and will, according to the firm’s statement, “improve newsgathering efficiencies and identify areas of cost savings… investigate the company’s worldwide contracts and reliance on global news services”. Murdoch said in the release that the unit is “vital to our success as a global media entity”...
News Corp's new global content-sharing service:... →
“21st-century multi-media information service…When Sky News reports that Gordon Brown has called an election, everyone in the NWS family can run with it. When TG24 learns that Vesuvius has blown its top again, everyone in NewsCorp will have it. Immediately. And from a source we can trust - us.”
Is Murdoch's Bid to Join Bing and Ditch Google... →
“The central struggle of monetizing online news is that ad rates for web pages are significantly worse than the print ad rates that once buttressed newspapers. So for a newspaper publisher like Murdoch, big online traffic helps, but it doesn’t pay for a sprawling roster of reporters and editors.”
The Architect as Totalitarian →
“Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform.”
The Architecture of Information: Open Source... →
Technically this is about software development but it seems pertinent to what’s happening in the news media today.
Change was in the air →
Sean Hannity uses footage of Glenn Beck’s bigger protest to make the GOP’s health care rally appear more heavily attended.
“Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive....”
– Stewart Brand
Work and the City →
“…the book offers a whistle-stop tour of a story well-told elsewhere but always worth considering - how we got into this fix, via the Taylorism-inspired production of the modern office, culminating in the hegemonic 1960s American environments. Duffy draws on sociologist Richard Sennett’s phrase of “brittle cities” to illustate the infrastructure this leaves cities with:...
Victor Timofeev →
Amazing drawings by Victor Timofeev, also check out the rest of his site.
Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse →
Recommended by Kazys
October 2009
18 posts
How big is bad? - Charles Jencks →
“In the mid-’70s, I tried to wrestle with this question and formulated a law of architecture that explains why the bigger corporate modernism gets, the more boring it usually gets. I called this ‘the Ivan Illich Law of Diminishing Architecture’, after the man who discovered counter-productive growth in other fields.”
Koolhaas - Theory of Bigness
1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures.
This impossibility triggers the autonomy of its parts, but that is not the same as fragmentation: the parts remain committed to the whole.
2. The elevator—with its potential to establish...
Can a project exist that is capable of integrating and at the same time subverting the architectural banality that capitalist tactics seem to elicit? And how might it eliminate the polarized professional positions of “resistance” and “integration” - both of which are concepts remaining from a modernist demagogy that is scarcely relevant in a world dominated by global...
Chemical Archives →
For Caren - “The idea of a poisonous atmospheric archive being unintentionally released—on a global scale—makes me wonder what sorts of news reports we might read in several thousand years’ time, when carbon tombs start to leak their quarantined contents back into the atmosphere. The buried skies of an industrial era, put to pharaonic rest beneath the earth’s surface, will make...
Soft Robots →
For Eric
A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Skyscrapers →
“The standard urban model emphasizes differentials in access across locations, which determine land price differentials and building heights. This explanation leaves out an important force that appears to have historically influenced skyscraper construction: an inherent value placed on being the tallest.”
Skyscraper Index →
“A 1995 analysis of New York and Chicago experience by Carol Willis estimated that historically, two-thirds to three-quarters of skyscrapers were conceived for rent alone; corporate “edifices” imposing their owners brand name (including most of historical record-holders) were a minority, and they too leased space to tenants.”
Skyscrapers and Business Cycles →
“Architecture simply doesn’t count…. With pitifully few exceptions in the past, New York’s skyscrapers have never reached for anything but money.”
Towers of Debt →
Redesigning Hell →
The title says it all.
Controlling the weather in China →
The World's Top 10 Ugliest Buildings →
Port Authority Bus Terminal comes in at an impressive #5.
September 2009
8 posts
How the Coming Newspaper Industry Collapse Will... →
Paul Gillin outlines the pending demise of the newspaper industry
Dan Rather on the news industry →
A shift
As I mentioned earlier, I will be shifting my gaze from Stalin to a more contemporary evil client. After some deliberation I’ve decided Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation would make for an interesting discussion on the state of mass media in today’s society. Newscorp is a behemoth, firmly one of the “Big Six” media companies, and by various metrics the first or...
"Infrastructural Aggrandizement"
Since I don’t think I will have the opportunity to work for Stalin anytime soon, I decided to look for a more contemporary (translation: not dead) client to focus on for the semester. More to come on that later…
Before leaving the Metro though, a few thoughts. Although the idea of “infrastructural aggrandizement” (as Kazys put it) was an interesting one, the topic of...
Moscow Metro Stations
As a primer to this studio we were asked to look into some evil clients / evil buildings. Deciding not to grapple initially with defining evil, I decided to just pick the most evil client I could find. Although Adolf Hitler initially came to mind, I stumbled across the Moscow Underground stations built during Joseph Stalin’s reign and could not resist posting them here. Additionally,...
