RIP Jane Jacobs

Toronto’s Mayor, David Miller: Jane was a champion of diversity, a diversity of buildings, residence, businesses and other nonresidential uses and different people of different ages in an area at different times of every day. She gave us eyes on the street. Her philosophy was a neighbourhood’s safe, active, vibrant and economically successful when there …

book upgrade

I’ve never read any Jasper Fforde, but having just visited his web site and stumbled upon such delights as his ‘book upgrade centre’ it’s become clear I have no choice but to add all his work to my wish list. 1: Editions covered by this upgrade: All United States Viking hardback editions. ON NO ACCOUNT …

le urban design

More on Gordon Cullen’s Townscape: My 4 year old son has three modes of operation: drawing, climbing and watching TV. That’s it. There are no others. The first two are easily explained by the science of genetics, the third less so, but I write that having spent the last 4 hours mesmerised by my PC …

My 2006 reading list.

From the top: Seneca: On the Shortness of Life Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus Giedion: Architecture, You and Me Pevsner Architecture Guide: Birmingham Iain Banks: The Algebraist Dostoyevsky: Notes from the Underground and The Double Sven Lindqvist: A History of Bombing Kevin MacNeil: The Stornaway Way Italo Calvino: The Castle of Crossed Destinies Primo …

dear santa

More letters and a suggestion for your (my) Christmas wish list. It was my boss’s birthday last week. Here at the office we usually end up spending a considerable amount of time trying to decide what gift to get when birthdays come around. This time the solution came to me in a flash and I …

creative reaction

For Rod McLaren and his How We Work series. Fernand Léger, painter (1881-1955) by Siegfried Giedion Léger rebuilt his country place in the Chevreuse Valley without an architect. He thought it would serve him for a long time. Here he invited his friends. A table was pushed into the studio and spread in the midst …

reading list

I’ve managed to snaffle a copy of the reading list from the MA Urban Design course at UCE. I offer it here as inspiration to anyone looking for new stuff to put on their Amazon wish list: PDF link: MA_UrbanDesign_ReadingList_2005.pdf It seems that post-modernity is the theme du jour. I can help out with a …

useful things

It seems that the last 12 months has indeed been the year that the WWW finally got useful. Ten years on and we finally got there. Blosxom, Bloglines, Usemod, Flickr, PlanetPlanet, Moblog.co.uk and now Librarything1 (and of course, del.icio.us2). We all need structure and I think I need it more than others thanks to my …

now you see me

Ok, so that won’t have been a lot of use to you if you read it via RSS – visit the entry in your browser to see the full librarything.