2012-04-02
A Fuller Review- Bucky and the Bay Area
This weekend saw the public opening of The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area at SFMOMA, the city's modern and contemporary art museum. I thought I should pop in and have a look.
SFMOMA is (still) the only museum here I'm a member of. It's downtown, it has a heavy focus on photography (one of my favourite visual forms), and shows some interesting contemporary art. It also features a couple of rooms that tend to be dedicated to design, and it's these that host The Utopian Impulse.
The entrance and first room are dedicated to Buckminster Fuller's work, with a large Dymaxion map - his design for a world map that's based on an unfolded icosahedron (or cubeoctahedron, although those aren't represented here) to minimise the distortions inherent in displaying a sphere on a flat surface - along with Inventions: Twelve Around One, a series of prints by Chuck Byrne that fuse diagrams and sketches with photographs of Fuller and his inventions. There's also a shelf of the designer's¹ books, along with a display table featuring such lesser-known images as one of his Tetrahedral City proposal, a vast polyhedra situated in the San Francisco Bay.
There's not much new here, though, if you're already aware of Fuller's work. The much larger second room is, by contrast, dedicated to the Bay Area artists, designers, architects, and inventors who've been inspired by it. Here you'll find video, models, artworks, and products from the Ant Farm's proposals for a Convention City, Whole Earth Catalogs, the North Face Oval Intention tent, Nicholas de Monchaux's Local Code, the One Laptop Per Child project, and various models and designs for buildings both built and unbuilt.
It's definitely interesting (and slightly overwhelming) to see how this region has developed his ideas, even if some of the connections seem a little tenuous and could do with further explanation. The final (small) corridor, showing interviews and images from the Dymaxion Chronofile projected onto a custom-designed flattened icosahedral screen, helps somewhat to make the links more explicit; one segment I saw featured Stewart Brand and his "why haven't we seen a picture of the whole earth" campaign, for example. It's also, frankly, a rather amazing piece of AV sculpture.
Would I recommend the exhibition? If you're already in San Francisco or plan to be, and especially if you have a friend who can get you into the museum, then yes, it's well worth a look. However, it's small enough that I really can't suggest anyone travel here. It also makes much more of the Bay Area links than it does provide an overview of Buckminster Fuller's work. Comparing it to the photos and description of the Whitney's show in 2008, it's really just an amuse bouche. It's also a shame, because for all that this work is worth looking at, it doesn't fascinate the same way Fuller's designs themselves do.
Further reading: the exhibition press release is the museum's own summary of the show. I've also uploaded some photos to Flickr. The exhibition closes on 29th July, 2012.
¹ One of the problems with Buckminster Fuller is finding a word to describe him. The Whitney uses "visionary", which is probably right, but for some reason I can't quite bring myself to write that. "Designer" is perhaps not enough either, but I'm more comfortable with it.↩
2012-03-27
More Thoughts On Pagination
For the last month or so, Flickr have been starting to roll out their new "justified" view across the site. It's very pretty, and generally I'm a fan, but as well as the possible criticism of the reliance on JavaScript,¹ it's meant that the easy access to page numbering on the old views has been lost. An off-the-cuff (and admittedly somewhat snarky) remark on Twitter prompted Nolan Caudill to write a well-thought-out post about pagination.
In it, he agreed with my point about infinite scrolling:
Infinite scrolling is basically a pretty representation of the 'next' link that you 'click' by scrolling to the bottom of a page. I'll leave whether or not it's good user experience to others, but as a purely visual experience, I like it. If it's the only source of pagination, that sucks, and another navigation scheme should be provided if having your users be able to look through the list or find something is important.
but he also made a very good point about the failings of traditional "n per page" links:
Pagination should provide accurate navigation points that reflect the overall ordering of the stream, and pagination based around fixed-length pages provide nothing more than arbitrary access into this ordering, where we have to use estimation and instinct about the distribution of the content in order to make a guess of where a link will send us
He goes on to suggest time-based navigation, somewhat like the letter tabs often found in dictionaries. In fact, many sites already implement their APIs this way- Flickr included. Twitter makes copious use of max_id (and this is well-explained in their documentation), while Instagram use max_timestamp and min_timestamp. There are places in the Flickr API that can use min_timestamp and max_timestamp, although there are also traditional page parameters in that call.
It's not just APIs, though. Tumblr's archives are infinite-scroll, but with a month selector so you can skip back and forth through time. (That's on the desktop web, anyway: for some reason the iPad version omits the form.) It's not perfect - if you post hundreds (or thousands) of entries in a month, it's hard to pick them out - but for most users, it works fairly well.
Of course, having said all this, I should really implement something that mixes the visual niceness of justified view with the navigational panache of a timeline. One thought I did have is that a small (sparkline-style?) bar graph of posts over time, although computationally expensive across large archives, would definitely help to highlight busy points to look at (or, depending on whether your friends upload too many photos from trips, avoid). Definitely something to consider playing with.
¹ Oops: I didn't test this, but Stephen Woods correctly pointed out that JavaScript is only used to delay loading and extend the number of photos shown, and that the page works fine with JS disabled. ↩
2012-03-13
The Sizes of Cities
What’s the largest city in the world? This seemingly simple question is actually rather complicated to answer. In my post Concentric Londons, I noted how you can define the city in various ways (and I still missed a few), while my complaints about the interesting but flawed visualisation showing “how much room would you need for the world’s population if the city were as dense as…” noted that the cities picked were defined very differently.
It turns out that the BBC’s excellent More or Less tackled the issue in a special edition, which (thankfully) is also available as a BBC News Magazine article (for those of us who prefer reading words to hearing them). After noting some of the problems I’ve covered - is a city the same as the government region defining it, or is it a contiguous urban area, or perhaps a zone of influence? - they settle on Tokyo/Yokohama, at 30 million plus, as the most reasonable answer to the question.
Curiously, it turns out that there is no official UN (or other reliable worldwide) definition of a city. Where Paris excludes its periphery, London extends nearly to the M25; where New York excludes Jersey City, Greater London expanded in the 1960s to swallow chunks of Essex. That’s not even to consider cities such as Cairo, Nairobi, or Rio de Janeiro, where informal building means a density and sprawl that’s a laissez-faire economist’s dream.
However, that wasn’t the end of the show. The final section covered China’s cities, which, if you believe the numbers, are growing like nothing on earth. However, the numbers may not be that trustworthy. Official statistics, as noted by guest Professor Kam Wing Chan, conflate cities with provinces, which can be largely rural, inflating estimates by as much as a factor of five:
The largest city in China is actually Shanghai. It is commonly thought to have a population of 20 million, but Professor Chan thinks 16 million is a better estimate.
He says everyone just loves to think China’s cities are bigger than they actually are. He has even had to correct fellow experts at a world conference on global megacities of the future.
One thing’s for certain: you can’t take the numbers at face value.
2012-03-05
The Rise And Fall Of London Wall
First things first: for anyone who ends up here hoping for archeology, I’m not talking about the Roman wall, or the medieval one built almost entirely along the same path. No, I’m talking about the post-war development along the (new) road of the same name, just south of the Barbican.
The Blitz during the second world war hit Cripplegate hard, and there wasn’t much left beyond the street plan. As such, the area was a prime candidate for redevelopment, and the far south of the site was made into a dual carriageway, called Route 11 in the plans drawn up soon after the war, but named London Wall once it was constructed.
By 1960 the road was complete, and commercial development was stirring. As the excellent Post War Buildings site notes, as with the later Barbican development, the influence of modernists was strong:
The roadway ‘Route 11’was central to the expression of the ‘Martin-Mealand’ scheme as built. Six towers of identical proportion, sit at equal distance from one another at 45 degrees to the street on a raised pedestrian deck with lower slab blocks at right angles. It was a monumental scheme and owed much to Le Corbusier’s 1933 ‘La Ville Radieuse’ in its geometric vision. It was characterised by generous public spaces and the complete segregation of traffic and pedestrian flows of circulation.
Constructed between 1955 and 1977, the scheme - influenced by cities such as Stockholm, which already had podium-based towers and segregated walkways - must have been a real change from some of the heavy, masonry-based, soot-blackened buildings that surrounded it in the City.
When Michelangelo Antonioni wanted to show Thomas, the photographer played by David Hemmings, in modernist surroundings in the 1966 film Blowup, he had him drive eastbound down London Wall, with those new towers flanking either side of the road, and the pedestrian bridges clearly visible (along with a sign highlighting the newness of the dual carriageway). Within another ten years, the scheme would finally be complete, with the Museum of London sitting where the “car park” sign is in the photograph, and the last of the podium towers - Bastion Tower - rising above it. Another few years would see the completion of the Barbican, joined at the hip - well, high level walkways - to London Wall and hence the City south of it.
What should have been a plan and an area the city was proud of, though, turned sour. Unlike the Barbican to the north, which rapidly found a niche as a spot for city living, the London Wall towers were never quite loved the same way. Before they could age enough to get listed, the buildings - as has happened more recently to Mondial House, 20 Fenchurch Street, and Drapers Gardens - fell out of commercial favour. Built in an age before pervasive air conditioning and computing, they didn’t survive long when deregulation hit.
City Tower was refurbished (along with a recladding in blue glass) as early as 1986, but the biggest blow was in 1988, when demolition started on Lee House, the nearest of the towers in the image above. It was replaced by Alban Gate, a postmodern structure that retained the highwalks from the original scheme, but little else. In spanning the road, it blocked the sightlines that were one of the best features of the 1950s plan, and it also took up far more of the floor plan than the tower it replaced - another massive change between the earlier plans and the more commercially focussed post-1990 developments.
Within the last ten years, all but one of the original towers along the road itself have either been reclad, demolished, or are due to be replaced within years. The one holdout is Bastion Tower - now known simply as 140 London Wall - at the far eastern end, above the Museum.
As Post War Buildings notes when talking about the doomed St Alphage House,
The plans mimic the pattern of development elsewhere on London Wall, where cladding, reconstruction and decking over has been advancing for years. The emerging architectural arrangement has destroyed forever the architectural unity of the scheme and produced a series of graceless structures all competing for attention.
I’m sure the new buildings make a lot more financial sense than the old ones did, and that plenty of people are making money from them (the execrable Alban Gate was the second most valuable asset owned by Simon Halabi when his property empire collapsed). However, I very much regret never getting the chance to properly see the muted, but coherent, scheme as built. In a way, I see its casual destruction as more shocking than the loss of some of London’s Georgian and Victorian terraces. After all, there are plenty that remain, but London Wall was the only place of its kind in the city, and I mourn its passing.
2012-02-13
In Praise Of: Exquisite Tweets
It’s rare to come across a web service you use every day, and rarer still to come across two or three in one year from a single author. However, James Wheare managed that for me last year. Both IRCCloud (with RJ) and TwitShift are now part of my daily life. However, it’s a third, Exquisite Tweets, that I’m going to be writing about.
Everyone knows that Twitter is, even though arguably not well designed for conversations, somewhere that they end up happening. It’s also very focussed on the now, so what happens when you want to refer back to that enlightening discussion on the very ephemerality of the service itself? It’s an obvious enough problem that there are lots of websites attempting to solve it.
Some, like Aaron’s Twitter Viewer, are very minimal. Some are full-blown startups. My favourite, Exquisite Tweets, is somewhere in the middle. It has a public front page of the most recent conversations, and a personal archive page (although I’ve used the service enough that mine apparently makes the server cry a little). The display of a thread uses the background of an account, making changes in voice very easy to spot, and it inlines media (which is a matter of taste, but I think I prefer it).
More importantly to me, though, is that it offers lots of ways to load and curate the conversation. Starting with a single post’s ID, it will try to do the right thing, using Twitter’s API to look forward and backwards for the thread. However, if it can’t (perhaps someone dropped the all-important in-reply-to metadata), you can go to the bottom of the page and “merge conversations” or just “add a tweet”.
ET handles privacy properly. If you authorise your account, it will include posts you can see (handy for me, since I’m a private user, and so are many of the people I follow)*, but it knows to keep them from public view. If there’s someone who made a joke that detracts from the point (or vice versa), there’s a [x] next to each post, so you can quickly drop it. The URL contains hashed IDs, so you can share it, or use the star at the top to preserve it, giving it a permanent ID and URL and making it available in your collection.
All of this is before you even go to the search page, where you can curate posts from a single user (good for the likes of James Bridle’s soliloquies) or a general search (for recording the reactions to a conference talk, for example), both of which use a nice highlighting mechanism to build the thread. There are also pages that I’ve only just noticed for creating a conversation from your timeline or mentions.
The end result is a service that I use perhaps not every day, but every time there’s a noteworthy thread on Twitter that I want to preserve. It’s easy for me to curate with, nicely designed, and it correctly handles privacy. What more can you ask for? If you ever want to refer to a thread, or save it for later, I strongly recommend you give it a look.
* At one point Wheare was working on a feature that enabled the poster to make individual entries in a thread public, but unfortunately it never quite made the cut. Ah well.
