no2self.net

Treat this post as an advert. Yesterday I returned, for the first time in years, to a bookshop on Bath Street in Wolverhampton (in between the brewery and West Park). In the space of a few minutes I found three great books, purchased two and (being £1 short) had the third saved for me until later in the week. After such a successful trip it seemed only fair to mention the shop here in the hope of providing some free advertising for them.

Situated on the converted ground floor of a late Victorian house, the shop deals in second hand books and collectables. In a similar fashion to the best shops in Hay-on-Wye (who, by the way, have a festival coming up soon), the shelves creak under the weight of the imbalance between the number of books in the world and the number of people who wish to read them. Each section title is hastily scrawled onto the edge of the timber shelf, and where the shelves run out, a cardboard box steps forward to carry the burden. That unmistakeable smell of knowledge/wisdom* hits you as soon as you walk in the door.

The first item I bought, fairly leapt of the shelf as I stared up at the tall shelves, since it was only Friday night that I had mentioned the author in a previous post. Having recently only borrowed Arthur Koestler‘s The Act of Creation from my boss, I am now the proud owner of my own copy. A real find as I believe it is now out of print. I may also need to consult it for a further response to the Salingaros piece about Tschumi that I’m planning/hoping to write.

Book number two was Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek; an author that Pete, one of my environ – mentalist friends, has been recommending to me for a while.

Finally, I also found a hand typed, drawn and photocopied book about Buddhism. I had a brief flick through it and then noticed that the publisher listed on the back page was 147 Lea Road, which is only just around the corner from me. I think it is a translation of the Pali Canon; I’ll find out when I go back to pick it up later this week.

A great shop that deserves all the customers it desires – go and buy a book.

Multi-tasking while typing this evening, I discovered that Radio 4 has an archive of all the In Our Time shows, including one from 2002 on Buddhism.

* this is volume dependant – one is clearly not the other

• Everyday Matters. a series of occasional essays on creative things, journal making, drawing,etc.

Web log by Danny Gregory – some delicious pen and watercolour drawings to be found here

• MicroSky

‘ …MicroSky is a freeware planetarium for mobile/cell phones with Java-support and a connection to the internet…’

• Ferguson Hill speakers

166cm tall, 8mm thick toughened cast acrylic horns – £9000 a pair

• Design Guidelines for Visualizing Links – Jakob Nielsen

‘…Users shouldn’t have to guess or scrub the page to find out where they can click…’

• london art aggregator

high culture squeezed together into one RSS feed – art smoothie anyone?

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Posted mainly as a gift to my friend Rob S, but also as an offering to any architecture students who happen to Google for RIBA Part 3 Management Papers, I give you my own paper from last year’s exam (PDF link).

• Warning A: If you are not an architecture student taking your part 3 exam, this will not be of any interest, move on.
• Warning B: If you are an architecture student and you choose to use it as inspiration, be sure to make a decision about whether or not humour has a place in an exam that will be the culmination of 7 years of study.

My paper flies dangerously close to the sun in terms of its funny/straight ratio. I got lucky; my examiner had a sense of humour and he enjoyed it. Yours may not, in which case your wings will quickly melt during the final interview. I’d been reading Arthur Koestler at the time and he reassured me that wit was a conduit for creative thinking. He’s dead right, I got a good mark.

Predictably, my comments in the AJ a few weeks ago prompted a response in this weeks edition from Thom Gorst.

Yes, the University of Central England in Birmingham is likely to be the university that Phillip Singleton left out when implying that the city had only two universities (AJ 29.04.04). We are the university that hosts the region’s only school of architecture, and I was also disappointed that Rob Annable in his follow-up letter (AJ 6.5.04) should associate us with poor recruitment.

If anyone should want to see for themselves just what has been happening in the Birmingham School of Architecture and Landscape during the past year, then please visit our show at the Arts cafe in St Martins at the Bullring (opposite ‘that’ building) from 21-24 June. The school is buzzing with a new energy, and has been greatly strengthened by a healthy relationship with our colleagues in practice.

Professor Thom Gorst, head of the Birmingham School of Architecture and Landscape

Well done Thom. A balanced response that managed to back up my original point, reprimand me for doing the school a disservice, get in a plug for the upcoming show and flatter the visiting tutors. Not bad for a couple of paragraphs.

The good news is that a couple of e-mails between us earlier this week has hopefully put us all square, and I’ve been invited to the private viewing of the show next month.

It seems this one just doesn’t want to lie down. Salingaros posted a response to the criticism of his paper on Tschumi, and Brutal Joint followed it with a response to the response. City Comforts just filed a response to the response to the response.

It went like this:

Salingaros…

Note that we are not dealing here with theoretical physics, which requires a language not known to everyone; architectural theory should be written in a common language understandable to every person. After all, they have to live with its applications.

Brutal Joint…

We have to live with the laws of physics, too; that doesn’t mean we should all be conversant in string theory. We listen to music, but we’re not all expected to perform Schenkerian analysis. It is wrong to suggest that just because everyone uses buildings, architectural theory should be dumbed-down to the level of those who have had no architectural instruction.

City Comforts…

I don’t think so. By the same logic we should do away with voting and leave politics to political scientists. No

It might go further like this:

By the very act of voting we give a group of people permission to deal with politics on our behalf. We are asking them to be political scientists for us so that we don’t have to. It’s not that we should be blind to the subject and ignore what happens thereafter (the word idiot is derived from the Greek word ιδιωτης, idiôtês, meaning a person who declined to take part in public life, such as democratic city government¹), but we should recognise that there are discussions that occur between politicians and politicians and then there are discussions that occur between politicians and the rest if us. So it is with architecture.

There is a long history of architect to architect discussions and even architect to architect design; what matters is whether or not the net result benefits the end user. You don’t need to to understand beauty to appreciate it. Well, I don’t anyway.

1. encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Idiot

Fellow LUG member Sparkes suggests that this site is for people interested in fun things or built things.

Like someone who has difficulty with the letters F and T, you can’t say fairer than that.

Much to my embarrassment, I almost missed this. The book that taught me how to read and helped me develop my sense of humour has finally started to take shape as a movie. Filming has started for the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie and you can follow the latest news on the production team’s web log.

A long standing project that nearly died along with it’s creator, the Hitch Hiker’s movie could, I suspect, go in one of two possible directions; a successful adaptation that Douglas would have been proud of or…no, I can’t bring myself to type it. However, I’m encouraged by the news that Martin Freeman, who plays Tim in that widely acknowledged work of genius: The Office, will be playing Arthur Dent.

When I say that the book taught me how to read, I mean in the sense that it was the first book that taught me reading could be enjoyable rather than a chore. I still remember reaching up and taking it off the shelf of my high school library for the first time. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve turned to it since.

Other useful links include: ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha and Magrathea, who have an interview with the directors.

Lunch. Yesterday. Conspicuously, I sit in the shade on the north side of St.Phillips cathedral watching as the rest of the city basks in the sun. It makes sense to stay in the dark when you’re only a few hours away from picking up the biopsy results on a suspicious mole on your back. The attraction of a green, landscaped space in the centre of an otherwise gray, urban environment, seems to be enough to allow people to overlook that they’re eating, drinking and sunbathing on a graveyard.

Waiting for an event to come my way, I stare across the square and remember something I was once told about the design of town squares. Location and author are now forgotten, but I vaguely recall somebody telling me that, historically, the size of many squares in towns and villages have a direct relationship with eye sight. The distance across a square being best defined by the ability to recognize someone on the opposite side. If you have 20/20 vision, the square that St.Phillips cathedral sits on just about works. I don’t recognize anyone across the square, so I move on.

It turns out that the event was waiting for me in the coffee shop. Well, events, actually. I pick up a booklet advertising a festival called Fierce and find some interesting stuff.

• World Tea Party – tea as a meeting point for different cultures.
• Urban D:tour – street theatre at the Bullring, including irational.org urban climbing dtour.
• Uncle Roy All Around You – real time game played online and onstreet.

Just a selection of stuff that interests me. There are a bunch of other projects happening in the Midlands over the coming months.

The results of the biopsy came back that afternoon. I’m in the clear. Although the consultant tells me that I have moles that are architecturally dysplastic, which seemed rather fitting. I’m back there in a few weeks to have another removed. Spending so much time with stitches in my back is doing nothing for my fencing and climbing practice.

• World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition

archive of all 5201 submissions

• SpaceShipOne – leading participant in the X Prize competition

it looks like these guys are going to be first

• Ansari X Prize

‘…a future in which the general public will personally participate in space travel and its benefits…’

• climateprediction.net portal

distributed computing project to map our doom

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