Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space, by Charlie Hailey

The Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Cindy Sheehan’s Camp Casey, the Seeds of Peace Camp, the Post-Katrina Superdome:

The ubiquity and diversity of camps calls for a guidebook. This is what Hailey offers, but it is no ordinary one. Not only does he establish a typology of camps, but he also embeds within his narrative a key to camp ideology. Thus we see how camp spaces are informed by politics and transform the ways we think about and make built environments.

Planetizen's top ten websites of 2009

Wait.

A best-of list for 2009? Already? I’ve bookmarked them all in delicious; go and save them all to yours if you’re pressed for time.

How the information age is changing university libraries

“The brutalist ’60s architectural style of the current building reinforces the old view that libraries are built to protect the books and not to facilitate the use of resources and services,” Brodie says.

Agreed.

'Post-speculative melancholia,' saltation & a cemetery in a parking lot

‘Post-speculative melancholia’ [via blackbeltjones]
This post does what everybody circa 1999 thought blog posts would do nothing but: “I felt like X when I walked down the street today and saw Y.” What sets this post apart, of course, is that it describes and names that feeling X we’ve all been having lately when we walk down the street and see Y (let Y=any number of ridiculous iPod accessories). It’s post-speculative melancholia:

in which a sweeping utilitarianism suddenly arises, in which
technologies must do something or else get lost and the drugged
up sense of nothing mattering is followed by a come-down in which the
whole thing seems regrettable.

Through the sandglass: the man who figured out how deserts work
[via rodcorp]
An article about Ralph Bagnold, the man who “documented saltation, the process by which flying sand grains land and kick yet more grains into the air.” In his delicious comments for this bookmark, rodcorp wonders what else works like this? Any suggestions?

Oklahoma’s strip-mall graveyard
[via criticalspatialpractice]
A Native American cemetery in the middle of a parking lot:

View Larger Map

Process blogs, custom cities & cozy airports

Doing science online

[via nielsen]
I’ve encountered several faculty members who have a low opinion of blogs, including academic blogs. I’m thinking about giving a presentation about what I call process blogs. These are blogs that present either one big problem (as I hope the The Daily Clique does) or several problems (as Terry Tao’s does) and work to solve these problems using the tools and communities that have developed around online conversations (comments, RSS, search, delicious). From Michael Nielsen:

You can think of blogs as a way of scaling up scientific conversation, so that conversations can become widely distributed in both time and space. Instead of just a few people listening as Terry Tao muses aloud in the hall or the seminar room about the Navier-Stokes equations, why not have a few thousand talented people listen in? Why not enable the most insightful to contribute their insights back?

You can also think of blogs as a way of making scientific conversation searchable. If you type “Navier-Stokes problem” into Google, the third hit is Terry Tao’s blog post about it. That means future mathematicians can easily benefit from his insight, and that of his commenters.

Customised city

[via anne]
This article’s take on the popular “city as open-source software” metaphor is backed by an exceptional collection of supporting examples, including Montreal’s Roadsworth:

Perfectly mimicking the colours and aesthetics of Montreal’s metropolitan street markings, Roadsworth plays with the visual language of the street itself – joining two streets by painting an oversized zipper head where their lines merge, or transforming a pedestrian crossing into a row of oversized birthday candles. The city’s visual grid no longer functions as a symbol of control but as a catalyst for expression.

In a post from Spacing a few years ago, Peter Gibson—Roadsmith’s given name—explained his motivation for playing with the city:

“Painting images on the street is actually a very innocuous gesture in the face of the problems that exist. We are living in serious denial if we feel that business as usual is going to ensure our continued survival and well-being.”

Documentary filmmaker Alan Koln premiered Roadsworth: Crossing the Line in Montreal late last year.

At home with the modern Goths: Richard Rogers, Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour

[via bldgblog]
Architects talking about coziness. I’m now fascinated by the Madrid Barajas Airport:

There was a deliberate decision there to go for warmth and texture - to do what airports don’t do. We asked - what don’t we like about airports? It was things like those greying carpet and ceiling tiles, finishes that made you feel uncomfortable. At Barajas the roof swoops down quite low, you almost feel you can touch it.

There are some great images of Madrid Barajas on Flickr.

Homogenizing the internet, criminalizing ornamentation, writing to learn & two blogs

We start with two rants, a hundred years apart. The first is concerned that internet search results increasingly favor a more homogenous bunch of information sources; the second argues that it’s criminal to add ornamentation to useful things.

All hail the information triumvirate!

[via migurski]
For the third consecutive year, Nick Carr reproduces ten Google searches of ten general topics. In 2006 Wikipedia held the top spot in two of the ten searches; in 2007 Wikipedia held the top spot in eight of the ten searches; this year Wikipedia held the top spot in all ten. Carr worries about the homogenization of the internet:

in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine.

I agree with Michal:  ”Google is the only one that’s an actual problem: its methods are secret, its data is proprietary, and its goals explicitly commercial.”

Ornament and crime

[via rodcorp]
Written in 1908, this essay by Austrian architect Adolf Loos argues that “[t]he evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects” and that because ornamentation often forces objects to go out of style it is a crime to waste resources adding ornamentation. The first few pages of the essay are available via Google Books.

Becoming writing, becoming writers

 [via mathemagenic]
I’ve recently finished reading a stack of articles about writing, particularly about writing literature reviews. They’ve helped immensely. The article linked here offers an idea of writing “as a learning tool which enables what researchers know about themselves and their topics” and suggests “that writing should be included more intentionally in our research methods courses” (from abstract).

Designculture in brief

[via anne]
A new tumblelog, centering on “the cultures of design and the designs of culture.”

Sunday is for sounds

[via mtchl]
An mp3 blog. His top five albums of 2008:

1. Fleet Foxes - Sun Giant EP/Fleet Foxes
2. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
3. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
5. The Walkmen - You & Me