The War You Don't See (2010)

• John Pilger, 'Why are wars not being reported honestly?' The Guardian, 10 December 2010
• JohnPilger.com

Steve Rowell, Playas, NM

Steve Rowell's Flickr Photostream, including shots taken during Steve's visiting fellowship at Newcastle University in June 2010.

Department of Homeland Security helicopters and student troops assault

empty homes during the inaugural simulation event in December 2004.

CLUI photo by Steve Rowell

Steve Rowell's Playas, NM work can be seen here.

Road to Las Vegas (2010)

Jason Massot, 'Road to Las Vegas: A Modern-Day Grapes of Wrath,' The Guardian 28 November 2010.

Detroit Ruin of a City

Detroit, Ruin of a City clip from Michael Chanan on Vimeo.

Rebecca Solnit

Brutalitat in Stein (1961)

Detroit: Making it Better for You (2000)

Detroit: Making It Better for You from Kyong Park on Vimeo.

Text from Rethinking Marxism 15: 3, 404-5:

A project of International Center for Urban Ecology. Directed by Kyong Park. Composed, edited and narrated by Joshua Pearson [9:25min] 2000.

Detroit: Making It Better for You is a 2-channel video, showing a gritty tapestry of images on the destruction of Detroit, the city of the war between the sustainability of the local community against the greed of the global economy. Through its “driveby-shooting” technique—emblematic to the mythology of Detroit as the “Motor City”—the video offers street level views of the urban clashes between the inner city emptiness and suburban bliss.

Robinson in Ruins (2010)

• Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian
• Brian Dillon's piece on Keiller, also from The Guardian
• Spotlight | Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller, UK), Cinema Scope
• 'The Future of Landscape: Patrick Keiller,' interview with Andrew Stevens in 3AM
• Farihah Zaman, 'Home Fires,' Reverse Shot

Into Eternity (2010)

The focus of Michael Madsen's new documentary Into Eternity -- about the inconceivable task of securing nuclear waste deep underground for thousands of years -- is Onkalo in Finland. The Americans have a similar facility called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) located near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Not least among the problems faced by designers of such places is how to signpost a site for curious visitors poking around the site in, say, 10,000 years time.

 

Landscape of Thorns, concept by Michael Brill and drawing by Safdar
Abidi, from Marking the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for 10,000 Years



'Like the gaze of the exorcist, the gaze of the pollution-plagued contemporary is directed at something invisible. The risk society marks the dawning of a speculative age in everyday perception and thought. [...] Not until the step to cultural risk consciousness is everyday thought and imagination removed from its moorings in the world of the visible. In the struggle over risks of modernization we are no longer concerned with the specific value of that which appears to us in perception. What becomes the subject of controversy as to its degree of reality is instead what everyday consciousness does not see, and cannot perceive: radioactivity, pollutants and threats in the future' (Ulrich Beck, Risk Society 73)

• Into Eternity film website
• U.S. Department of Energy Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
• Expert Judgment on Markers To Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [Sandia National Laboratories report PDF]
• Charles C. Reith and N. Timothy Fisher, “Transuranic Waste Disposal: The WIPP Project,” in Charles C. Reith and Bruce M. Thomson, eds., Deserts as Dumps?: The Disposal of Hazardous Materials in Arid Ecosystems (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992) 303-318.
• Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002) 185-191.
• Peter C. van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
• Peter C. van Wyck, “American Monument: The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” in Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Scott C. Zeman and Michael A. Amundson, eds. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004) 149-172.  

Ballardian Architecture

Among the seemingly endless list of events I manage to miss is the symposium Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space, held at the Royal Academy of Arts on 15 May 2010. Fortunately, the organisers have posted a series of video clips of the talks. Click here for programme.


Ballardian Architecture 3 - David Cunningham from static tv on Vimeo.

Border Patrol Colouring Book

Public Collectors is a fantastic website where 'collectors allow the contents of their collection to be published and permit those who are curious to directly experience the objects in person.' One of the great finds here is a PDF of a colouring book for children produced by the U.S. Border Patrol Museum, El Paso, Texas. Can you help the detector dog find the illegal drugs? Click here and scroll down to find the complete book.

Detroit Disassembled

Watch the full episode. See more Western Reserve Public Media.

Motor City is Burning

Julien Temple, Requiem for Detroit (2010)

The Andromeda Strain

Each floor of the bunker is a different colour, intended to reflect different psychological states. And matching paper uniforms.

Brasilia

Subterra

Decommissioned Atlas E missile base in Kansas.

 See also:

• Subterra Castle: Missile Silo Home, RoadsideAmerica.com
• 20th Century Castles, LLC

Fail-Safe

Almost entirely set inside an imagined presidential bunker, Fail-Safe (1964), along with Dr Strangelove (1964), established the subterranean control centre as the decisive absent presence of Cold War spatial politics.

Ken Adam

• Horatia Harrod, 'Ken Adam: The Man who Drew the Cold War,' The Telegraph, 28 Sep 2008.
• Piece on Ken Adam from The Journal of Geebird&Bamby Co.
• Frieze review of the 2000 Ken Adams exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London. Issue 51 March-April 2000.
• Tim Noakes, 'Ken Adam; Drawn to the Movies,' socialsterotype.com, 2008.
• BBC audiovisual slideshow on Ken Adam: 'Designing for 007'.

Thetford

Crazy Golf Gas Rig

Memoire Hotel

Unused/unissued 1974 material from the British Pathé news website.
[Click image - video opens in new window].

Tower Dance Club

Apparently soon to be converted into a boxing club, the Tower Dancing Club on Riverside Road in Gorleston on Sea, Norfolk, stands as possibly the most implausibly sited dance club ever, situated among industrial workshops and overlooking the business end of the River Yare just as it reaches the North Sea.

Luckily, recent plans to develop Riverside Road seem to have come to nothing (see this site for comments on the proposed development) and the Friends of Riverside Road appear to be doing a good job sticking up for the area. Other structures like the 'dolphin' jetties and the lifeboat house might have more heritage appeal but an abandoned postwar dance club lost among the welding yards is a ready made winner.

Newcastle Central Library

Almost secret entrance

© Copyright Mark Smiles and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Demolition video already posted here.

OK, it was hardly glamorous but once the thrill of large open interior space wears off, the new building feels like a cross between a duty free outlet and a sixth form center, but with more noise. Every effort has been made to disguise the fact that this is a library.

Birmingham City Library

John Madin's remarkable 1974 Birmingham Central Library is set to be demolished. A new glittery library is on offer, but where's the improvement? Not sure what the move to replace a flak tower with a tissue box tells us about contemporary urban space.

• Paul Dale, 'End in sight for Birmingham Library after Government refuses listed status,' Birmingham Post, Nov 23 2009.
• English Heritage response, Nov 23 2009.
• Promotional site for the proposed new Library of Birmingham, including interviews with children speaking as if, without the new library, there will be no books in the city for them to read.

Andrew Freeman

(Manzanar) Architectural Double.

The buildings at the Japanese American WWII internment camp at Manzanar were relocated and reused after the war, effectively dismantling the material evidence of the camp's existence. Between 2001 and 2004 Andrew Freeman tracked the buildings down and photographed them.

#11.4.01 - Mount Whitney Rifle Club, Lone Pine, California.

N 36°36.156’, W118°03.749’

Rod Dickson

The Milgram Reenactment (2002)



Historical Reenactment from Critical Spatial Practice

Straight Up and Down

Cabinet Magazine 11 2003

Fiona Banner, Tate Britain Duveens Commission 2010

Working the Line

Good information and images on this project and related things here:

• The 98th Parallel at a456.
• Working the Line at BLDGBLOG
• GeoCaching the Mexican Border Obelisk Monuments at Groundspeak Forums
• David Taylor's Working the Line at Fraction Magazine

Hartmut Bitomsky

High-Ballin (1978)

Featuring Peter Fonda and Jerry Reed, we're not at the bottom of the 1978 truckin' barrel yet.

Steel Cowboy (1978)

There is seemingly no end to these trucking films. Another one from 1978, this time with James Brolin and Rip Torn.

Charles Olson

See Amy Cutler's Write of the Map blog for some excellent poetry/map material.

The Ethics of Dust

Series of installations by Jorge Otero-Pailos undertaken to conserve pollution.

• Jorge Otero-Pailos website
• Interview with Otero-Pailos
• Another interview

Mark Tansey

Action Painting II

Purity Test

Coastline Measure (1987)

Gateshead Trinity Square Car Park

Thompson of Prudhoe have got the job of demolishing this beast.

Thompson promise time-lapse footage of the demolition. The video of the Newcastle library demolition can be seen here. The new library is shiny but the old one was resplendently 'fuck off.' As Owen Hatherley points out in The Guardian, the car park is making way for a Tesco store with student flats on top. There's a form of beligerence in that, too, but it's nowhere near as bracing as stacked concrete parking spaces.

John Madin

BBC documentary on the Birmingham Brutalist from 1965.

White Lightnin

Tom Wolfe, 'The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!' Esquire (March 1965).

Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow

Infinity Cyc

D.A. Pennebaker

Pennebaker's Daybreak Express (1953)

• Short Senses of Cinema article on the film here.
• Pennebaker Hegedus Films website.

Jay Leyda

A Bronx Morning - Jay Leyda (1931)
Uploaded by Iconographe. - Discover more animation and arts videos.

New Topographics Photographs on Google Maps

This map geographically locates the locations of many of the photographs from the New Topographics exhibition. So if you ever wondered where that Robert Adams tract house was in Westminster, Colorado, now you can find out.

Robert Adams, Tract House, Westminster, Colorado (1974).

Gelatin silver print 15.2 x 19.6 cm. George Eastman House Collection.

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001)

Wrecked piers, empty swimming pools, drought, gangs of street kids, it's all here.

'Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare down at its canted floor.'

--J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

Clearly what Ballard needed was a board.

• Good pool skating stuff at Blue Tile Obsession.
• Also see Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (Berg, 2001).

Walter De Maria, Mile Long Drawing (1968)

White Line Fever (1975)

Not really in the same league as Road Movie but part of the oil crisis/70s recession-era obsession with instigating the automobile's integral accident -- this time with trucks. The big year for trucker movies was 1978, with Peckinpah's Convoy and Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way But Loose exploiting the exploitation movies. But White Line Fever, with Jan-Michael Vincent and Slim Pickens, is more pissed off and therefore gets my vote.

Road Movie (1974)

Forget Moonfire, for real existential truck action Joseph Strick's Road Movie is the only real choice. Strick did some great work on The Savage Eye (1959) but spent years making films that attempted to adapt the unadaptable -- Joyce, Genet, Henry Miller. Road Movie is much better: raw, awkward and alienating.

Moonfire (1973)

The most authentic trucking movie ever made? Who would know?
The whole film is available on Youtube here.

Helen Levitt

Jesus College Air Raid Shelter

The Easter 2010 issue of the Cambridge Alumni Magazine CAM has an article

on a WWII air raid shelter beneath Jesus College gardens. Full issue PDF.

The short piece by Diya Gupta is on pp. 18-19. Photos by Steve Bond.