no2self.net

A couple of weeks ago I posted some entries that included a mention of something called ‘this building’ and then ‘that building’. I should explain that the building in question was the new Selfridges store by Future Systems. I had an entry about it written on my PDA, but a clumsy battery replacement wiped it clean. With hindsight this was probably for the best, as it was becoming a little bitter and somewhat less than constructive. This evening morning I’ve decided to try again.

We could talk about the way it has absolutely no relationship with the street, or we could talk about the oppressive scale of its parts and its illegibility, or we could talk about the clumsy detailing that smacks of ideological stubborness wherever you look; but that would only lead to bitterness again. No, rather than critique its urban design credentials, I’m going to use it as a vehicle to tell a story about beauty, using a few interesting anecdotes.

Around the time it was due to open, a friend of mine asked Amanda Levete from Future Systems a simple question over dinner. The question was Why is it the shape that it is?. The reply that came back was simply Because it’s beautiful. That was it. No qualification was felt necessary. She’d decided. The formal solution was offered as the primary (or only) driving force for every other decision that had followed. It’s raison d’etre was to look as beautiful as Amanda dreamed it would be.

Rewind a few years. I’m sat in a lecture being given by American architect Neil Denari. He talks of people and functions, clients and landscapes, weather and politics, technology and light, building regulations and the laws of physics. He shows us the net result of all those compromises and we are dumb struck. I salivate at the spaces and places he creates. When we move to the questions and answers, a hand goes up from the back and a voice says,

Neil, you’ve talked very eloquently about all the programmatic elements that go into making your building, but you’ve never talked about the final form of your buildings and how you think they look. I wonder if you could say a little about your feelings on beauty?

It’s Neil’s turn to be dumb struck. His jaw visibly drops and for the first time in the whole lecture he hesitates and then says,

I’m completely obsessed by beauty. It’s all I think about. I thought that was exactly what I’ve just been talking about for the last forty five minutes. It is, isn’t it?

Neil doesn’t believe he’s been given the key to the cupboard of divine geometry. His role isn’t to oversee a selection of shapes that are pleasing to his eye. He divines his own beauty from the solutions that are born of the compromise between conflicting programs.

Next time you visit Selfridges, see if you can count the number of compromises that have to be repressed and hidden to sustain the vision of Amanda’s geometry. It’s covered with them.

A few weeks after it opened, I heard the following on the number 52 bus from Perry Barr into the City. As Selfridges came into view, a guy on the back seat said,

Just look at that. It’s a f**kin’ ab*rtion. Have you ever seen anything so ugly?

to which, his friend replied,

I know, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to look like f**kin’ chain mail or a f**kin sex aid.

This entry is an expansion of something I originally wrote on the comments section of Warren Ellis’ site, after he’d posted a picture of the building accompanied by an astute observation that it was the first building he’d seen that ‘looked like it was designed to eat people up and shit them out’. I suspect he had a hand in writing the original brief. I decided to revisit it here because his site archive got fried earlier this year and the article in question is now gone forever.

It’s late/early and I’m off to bed. Tonight I can add another book to the pile on my bedside table, as my signed copy of Lawrence Lessig’s ‘The Future of Ideas’ arrived in the post today. I’ve also managed to snaffle an account on the new Google mail service Gmail, thanks to Peter Lindberg‘s kind invitation. I should also point out that his fine observation today that, there’s a sweet spot between regularity and irregularity in a city’s plan where the city is optimally navigable is part of a story worth backtracking through the blogosphere.

Damn. I swore I’d never use that word.

• Center for Online and Internet Addiction – Help and Resource for Internet Addicts
  

  ‘…A test for on-line users to determine if they may be addicted to the Internet…’

• Distributed Proofreaders
  

  ‘…a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the digitization of Public Domain books into Project Gutenberg e-books…’

• I/O/D
  

  ‘Software is mind control – get some.’

• Lucinda Rogers
  

  via dannygregory.com

• METAMUTE
  

  ‘the interrelationship of art and new technologies’

delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.

Never let it be said that my entries don’t give good value for money. I’m pleased to see that the ‘BBC can’t play mp3s discussion’ is continuing over at boingboing.net.

I should confess that the conversation is moving out of my field of knowledge, as I know nothing about audio compression and CDs. The CDR I sent was burnt using a popular piece of software with an option to create CDs that can be played in a normal CD player. Is this what Mike Todd calls a linear version? If so, then his explanation is correct. I’m pretty sure that John used the CD I sent him, since it was confirmed as received by his team, and when he introduced the track he cited me as the source – when you listen you can hear that I managed to confuse him with a comment about how to pronounce my name. I should have had more faith, John Peel has probably introduced more oddly named bands/people than I’ve had hot dinners.

Er, if that was Sean makes, then this is Sean says.

By the way, this web site of yours…..have you managed to hardwire your cranium to your pc and thus all of your thoughts and activities are automatically monitored and displayed? Otherwise it seems to me that either you must spend at least as much time writing and logging your activities and thoughts as you actually spend undertaking the said activiteis and thoughts, in which case what happens to all the thoughts you had whilst you where logging all of the previous ones, and there seemed to be no section telling us about your time spent typing up the notes – oh it could all get horribly confusing! Either that or you are undertaking a daring and subversive project to undermine imposing and invasive nature of our increasingly monitored lives; the massive and dramatic spread of surveilance and monitoring technology in our cities and towns is built on the premise that we all have information, activities and thoughts that we wish to remain private, but your web page is clever – by proactively displaying and publishing your thoughts and activites, you undermine the theory of privacy, thus convincing the reader/ monitor/ surveillor that they have intimate access to the minutiae of your life, and this is the bit that I like, once you have convinced said observer of this fact you are then at liberty to alter your entries to cover and hide the very activities that you deem to be private – Genius, absolute fucking genius! Rob I admire your devious and underhanded thinking!

Well done. A lesson to us all, especially if our friend Dave Blunket gets his way with his little id card proposal.

I’ve been rumbled.

My friend Sean made this:

He just graduated from the University of Liverpool. His favourite phrase right now is gizza job. Let me know if your favourite phrase happens to be you’re hired.

• AMSN Messenger
  

  MSN for Linux – via a post on the Wolves LUG mailing list (thanks David!)

• LeoCAD Homepage
  

  CAD program that uses Lego as it’s building blocks – available for Linux too!

delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.

Since this entry has just gone up on boingboing, I thought I should clarify a couple of points.

Firstly, when the BBC told me they couldn’t play mp3s, I asked them if they meant technically or legally – they replied saying it was technical reasons that prevented it. I didn’t enquire any further, but in my experience as a listener to the John Peel show, I’ve heard him use several different studios (including his own house ‘Peel Acres’) so perhaps some of them are less well equipped. It does seem odd that Radio 1 isn’t tooled up to deliver mp3s.

Secondly, as I’ve mentioned in one of the writebacks below, when I said John e-mailed me I meant the John collective; it was one of his colleagues that I was talking to. I’m sure you can allow me a little artistic license in the re-telling of this story.

Here’s the tracklisting from the show.

Here’s the link to last nights show, it’ll only be good for a week until the following Wednesday. Rodeohead gets played about 1hr 43 minutes into the show.

The wonderful Rodeohead by Hard ‘n Phirm has made it all the way to John Peel on Radio 1.

It went like this: Sean points it out to Xeni over at boingboing.net. I read it, and as a longstanding Radiohead fan, I follow the link and download it. I listen to it and I laugh. I laugh so hard that tears well in my eyes. I wipe them dry and when my sides stop aching I e-mail Mike Phirman from the band and thank him. Then I e-mail John Peel at the BBC and suggest he plays it on the radio.

I tell Mike about my e-mail and he says:

Right on! Thanks, Rob. We really appreciate that. Hopefully it will get all the way to the lads themselves!

Cheers,
Mike

Then John e-mails to say that he can’t play mp3s on air. Yesterday I sent him a copy on CDR. As I type this, to my absolute delight, John is playing it. Hard ‘n Phirm have got some much deserved UK air time and I got to send a message to John thanking him for teaching me about Half Man Half Biscuit a few years ago.

I think that’s called a win, win.