Awash with opportunity and money while rushed off their feet, architects have been understandably too saucer-eyed to spend time polishing their position. But strangely critics haven't been interested in articulating the narrative vectors either. Maybe they aren't up to it anymore. Despite all these new kinds of buildings, and new ways of putting stuff together, we haven't had a new label yet. You could spin this as a sign of maturity, a kind of post-Jencks third way beyond the Punch and Judy arguments that characterised the 1960, 70 and 80s. But on the other hand, it might mean that nothing worth naming has happened. Not one new 'ism'. Perhaps its because throughout this period we failed to produce a single architectural idea.

Instead of ideas we have made architecture pragmatic, un-difficult, user friendly, skinned in a sheath of contemporary effect, eager to please, soft to the touch, which slips down easily. If you were paranoid, you might even feel that there was a determined effort to bury ideas.

The backstory to British architectures success is the story of what it had to give up: the strange baggage it had to check in, the flammable liquids and the sharp items confiscated at the gate.

Pretty much all of this success is a direct consequence of the twin figures of Foster and Rogers. They have not just have excelled in a particular kind of work, but demonstrated and demanded engagement. Rogers has amazingly bored through the bureaucracy to the heart of political policy, forcing architecture onto the agenda in Town Halls and back rooms of Whitehall, linking the notion of architecture to political buzzwords such as inclusion, sustainability and quality of life. Meanwhile, Foster has demonstrated the commercial possibilities by producing remarkable architecture to make money with, in, and for. While doing this, they have also delivered concentrated moments of exceptional design.

So prolonged and convincing has this double headed pincer charm offensive been that it has sidelined royal taste, seduced politicians and partnered with high finance - and it rolls like a snowball down a mountain side, becoming ever more convinced of its logics and benefits. Architecture has become symbolic of both social progression and status to an exaggerated extent. Buildings act as markers of political delivery and prestige in transforming the skyline of financial districts into your own image.

It was no mean feat given the state of the profession in the 1980s.Fosters and Rogers defined a role for architecture in Britain at a time when the ground was slipping away from the profession: at a time when faith in architects and belief in their value had rapidly eroded.

Their influence has formed a slipstream into which the rest of the profession has fallen - following their lead and benefiting from their drag. Their gravity has reformed the shape of the history from which they emerged. It has become a force that pulls offices into particular shapes, forms the manner of our response and prefigures our clients expectations.

British architecture would have been very different is it were not for two untimely deaths and an early retirement which simplified and clarified the architectural agenda. Would Rogers and Foster have dominated the UK scene so powerfully and so completely if Jim Stirling hadn't died at his mature professional peak? Or if Reyner Banham had been around to direct and refocus the architectural approach which had been spawned by the pen of his cultural criticism? And what if Archigram had defended their position in relation to High Tech – especially that dark, poetic wing of Archigram - if David Greene hadn't retired in a conceptual act sometime in the early 1970s.

These figures and their associates were links to other ways of thinking, offering different ideas about what architecture should be, what kind of cultural act it was. Something much more difficult to contain and more problematic to sell: Bloody-minded, perverse and almost always provocative. And without these multiple voices, British architecture became simpler, more streamlined and compact.

If Stirling, Banham and Archigram had survived, would they have led us to different conclusions? Provided alternative models? Kept open rich seams in British architectural culture that now seem boarded up like a Klondike gold mine? Would they have held back the success story that followed?

Its also interesting to not that the focus of British architecture moves from the cultural realm of the university to the boardroom. Banham, Stirling and Archigrams connection to education is far stronger than that of those who followed. By sidestepping the petty politics of positioning which characterises institutions, it avoids any critical debate. And because of this it becomes increasingly blinkered, and because of this it is in perennial danger of becoming a dead end: the result of other peoples speculations. The High Tech followers ably demonstrate this problematic tendency by failing to move the language, ambition or concern into any new arrangement.

Success can be a curse as British architectures recent purple patch shows. If it's all been so great, then why is it so ... boring? It's the kind of boredom derived from the good and the safe. Predictable because it doesn't challenge the expectations of the market. The Faustian pact that was - perhaps accidentally - struck between architects and the client bodies was to drop the peculiar, the difficult, the overly culturally engaged, the provocative, for a streamlined, frictionless, easy fit.

If one firm is to characterise current vogues in British architecture, it's Make. Their hand-in-glove fit with developers is obviously successful - and success has its own fascination. Beyond this accelerated shimmer of newsworthy-ness is a strange crossbreed of architecture. It is characterised by funny shapes that apparently represent notions of 'contemporary', 'high design', 'signature architect' and other desirable qualities. However, the shapes are not quite as odd or perverse as those designed by the architects from which they have been swiped. They are formed without the hardships, perversions, struggles and disappointments of the intellectual Avant Guard that spawned funny shape-ism. Instead, these are thoroughly shallow shapes formed by a desire to be fashionable. Without the backstory, Shape-ism becomes corporate rather than cultural. It is overly expressive, but has nothing in particular to express - a series of empty gestures writ large.

It is an architecture of easiness, a form of liberalism which fails to make any form of distinction, where nothing is wrong. It is endlessly optimistic to the point of recklessness. It is pro-client, pro-market, pro-almost everything (but most of all, pro itself with total absence of self awareness) and lacks any kind of critical distance. An offspring of baby boomer and dot com excess and degeneracy. It is anti-intellectual, anti -historical, anti-cultural. It represents a philistine idea of creativity. It is an architectural approach that operates like a bottle trap with no way out; smooth sided with no means of escape.

It is the most complete response to the British architecture boom and has been sustained by the money that its clients pour into it rather than its own internal drive. Make has produced an architecture which mirrors the inflation of economic value that has sustained the building boom by producing an architecture of equally over-inflated formalism.

Just as the credit crunch revealed economies to be wrapped around bad debt, this kind of architecture seems somehow hollow. Which is why - despite its attempts at formal invention - it comes across as anaemic. It's Alsop without the late nights, booze and fags, Zaha without the insane vision, Foster without the ruthless clarity of thought, and Rogers without the social concern.

By accident, High Tech became the summation of post-war British architectural culture - the heritage of Archigram and Banham, the Independent Group and so on wrapped up in a genre based architecture. It lead these ideas from the margins to the centre of commercial and political arenas – but on the way polishing and brushing off the more interesting elements: the idea of culture, the engagement with popular culture.

Success came with a heavy price to the profession. Gaps opened up between practice and academia which now seem like chasms. We have lacked a critical figure, someone able to cast a narrative over our architectural product and speculate on its future direction. These factors mean a lack of checks and balances which hand the justification architecture over to the architects own press releases.

Perhaps this era of British architecture will disappear with the credit crunch - as the money dries up, this kind of architecture might well shrivel with it. Perhaps new factions are already emerging - the New Moralists, the New Pop-ists (or the New Pop Moralists) will thrive in the New Austerity. These are firms which argue for architecture as an act of wider culture, who are able to operate on small budgets and are socially and culturally engaged. Tendencies among the younger offices picking up the frayed ends of a golden thread that seemed to have been cut sometime during the Banham-Stirling-Archigram era. It is as though they are re-running history in an effort to explore the alternative conclusions of British architectural culture: The return of the bloody-minded, perverse, pretentious, culturally minded architecture of resistance wrapped up in the future we never had.

From Harmsworth's Magazine, February 1902

"Note: For the purposes of this article the gentle reader of the "London Magazine" will kindly consider himself or herself living in the year of grace 1907. The American invaders, having captured the tobacco trade, the railways, the boot and shoe market, the match factories and most other industries worth winning, found themselves feeling homesick occasionally, but rather than return to the United States they adapted London to their liking - EDITOR.

It seems odd in these days to find a man of education who is really alarmed at the rush and noise of London streets, and I was almost upon the point of calling my cousin Dave a poseur, when he arrived at Victoria Depot, and pretended to be upset by the way the porter grabbed his bag and made off before you could say "Jack Robinson." Yet I soon remembered that Dave had been in Africa since '01 and that great changes had come about since then. So I explained that the man had asked where he was going to put up, and was probably now half way there; and that by the time he got to my flat the Trades' Union Trust valet would have his clothes properly unpacked, brushed and put away.

"A cab," I replied, "why my dear boy, only back-number people do that sort of thing now-a-days. Here you are, home from an all-night journey, hungry and wanting a bath, and yet you talk of cabs. What you really want is a toilet and a breakfast, if you are anything like the old Dave of 'Varsity days."

"Oh, well, go ahead," he sighed, "shew me your Yankeefied London, if you like, only get me out of this before we are mobbed."

"Very well, come along," said I, and led the way through the crowd of yelling porters and touts, each crying the virtues of his own particular method of transmitting baggage, or extolling the merits of the hotel for which he had been sent to solicit patrons. Outside, Dave seemed surprised, but said nothing. Evidently he was wondering what had become of the cabs and omnibuses that used to fill the open space in front of the station, before the new street cars had killed their trade. But it seemed best not to explain matters, so we had reached the electric car-track before the temptation proved too strong, and I remarked, quite casually, that Buckingham Palace Road had been renamed Fifth Avenue, and that the thoroughfare once known as Piccadilly had suffered a similar fate. Dave said never a word ..."

Again, Much more at Forgotten Futures

Forgotten Futures is Marcus Rowland's table-top role playing game based on scientific romances, the predecessors of science fiction that were published in the late 19th and early 20th century - anyone fancy a game? It comes with three hundred megabytes of additional Victorian and Edwardian source material, which can't be bad.

An extract from "If London Were Like Venice: Oh! That It Were!" by Signor Somers L. Summers Harmsworth's Magazine, August 1899, Illustrated by Messrs. R. Thiele and Co.

"Geologists say that the land upon which London is built has subsided 68 feet during the last 500 years. This doubtless is traceable to substratiform deposits, lunar attraction, or causes equally occult; but whatever it is, the figures 68 disarm suspicion. Assuming that the subsidence is still going on, one can imagine the metropolis some day sinking below Thames level and becoming a second Venice" -- Daily Paper.

BUT didn't you know?" asked my travelling companion.

"No!" I answered. "You see, I left England away back in '99, and I have been virtually cut off from civilisation ever since. In Siberia the reading of newspapers is not encouraged, and letters, even if you have friends at home to write them, have a way of going astray unrivalled in any other country. Until I landed in Hull this morning, I had not had occasion to use the English language for years. So it is little wonder that what you say is surprising news to me."

" Quite so," continued the affable gentleman with whom I shared the first-class carriage, " though we have grown so used to it by this time that we almost forget London ever existed in any other form. Let me see, it must have been in 1910 -- the year of the floods -- that the last subsidence occurred. It would have come about naturally in time, geologists said, but the climax was certainly precipitated by the Government's action in allowing London to be undermined to such an extent when the new coal fields were discovered under the city in 1900.

We had been steadily raising the embankments of the Thames, but the floods swept these away, and one morning we awoke to find our streets converted into waterways. All manner of remedies were tried, including a Royal Commission, which, by the way, decided only last week that nothing could be done, thus endorsing the public opinion of fifteen years ago.

Of course the lower stories of all houses had to be abandoned, save as diving baths, but it was a simple matter to add others. Naturally the old street traffic almost vanished, cabs, 'buses, and carts giving place to gondolas and steamboats.

To begin with, we had to import gondoliers from Venice, to instruct our late cabdrivers in their new craft, at the same time adopting many other features peculiar to the Bride of the Adriatic. These, as you can imagine, have had considerable influence on our customs, our architecture, and even our language."

There is much more here.

Super Colossal posts some CCTV footage of a man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. As Marcus writes, it's 'a little like watching a bug in a jar'. I'd like to see the unedited footage to experience the ful extent of architectures horrifying, motionless boredom.

Maybe it's the kind of detail you might get if you zoomed in to Warhols 8 hour film of the Empire State.

Related (in a round about way):

StrangeHarvests miniature re-make of Warhols 'Empire'

How to Hack your Elevator

Dan alerted me to these images which have been released by NASA. Strangely, there seems to be no accompanying explanation. I guess sports fields are being used a vernacular unit of measurement to suggest the scale of exploration carried out on the surface on the Moon by Apollo 11 crew members Armstrong and Aldrin. Sports fields - along with double Decker Buses and Wales - are the most common method of describing the size of objects beyond normal comprehension, into which category the moon most defiantly falls. But its also a mapping of a particular kind of culture onto an extra-terrestrial body, as though space can't be understood as simply empty and abstract entity. Projecting the highly codified spacial diagrams of Football and Baseball onto the moons surface is a way of conceptually filling the emptiness. Perhaps it is this same idea that leads astronauts to play golf on the moon - reducing the physical characteristics of an alien landscape to a tricky par 4 on the way to the clubhouse.

I've always like the inverted idea expressed through Gilbert and Georges 'Souvenir Hyde Park Walk' from 1969. Coinciding with Neil Armstongs historic first steps onto the moon, the two artists strolled through the Rhodedendrums of Hyde Park - somehow conflating the two very different kinds of promenades by overlaying them in time.

Design as a functional activity ended with Philippe Starks Juicy Salif. This iconic lemon squeezer thrust its sharp tripod legs into the heart of Modernism. From this point on, designers would never be able to escape the inherent useless-ness of their activities. As bitter juice trickled down the sculpted chromed surface it dripped anywhere but where it was intended and it stung the profession with its painful lesson: Use is Useless.

Instead of helping us to do things, post-Salif design is a way of helping us understand things. Design helps us to navigate our relationship to contemporary context. It allows us to explore complexities through mute, wordless sensations of touch, texture and form - through materials and technologies of production. Design allows us to feel qualities of the contemporary before they are fully formed articulate ideas - like finding your way in the dark.

Design is a language of whose building blocks are how things are made what they are made out of as much as what they look like. Encoded within these choices are cultural attitudes and ideas to the mechanisms that shape society: to technology and its implications.

It is most obvious in the proto modernism of the arts and crafts movement. Designers such as William Morris played out a dramatic opposition to the cultural effects of the Industrial Revolution through the design of household furniture. Morris revived medieval manufacturing techniques that re-instated the role of the craftsman over the machine. To understand Morris, it is important to recognise that floral patterned wallpaper was actually a radical manifesto.

William Morris - Acanthus Leaf Wallpaper

Contemporary design and architecture are currently benefiting from new waves of digital fabrication techniques. Their impact can be categorised into three tendencies: The Graphic Cut; the Complex Surface; and Nu-Craft.

Klein Dythams Leaf Chapel

The 'Graphic Cut' takes advantage of the ability to computer control devices such as lasers and water jets and thus cut elaborate and intricate patterns into varied materials. The technique itself is two dimensional, and makes objects which are more like a branch of illustration or graphic design. The tendency within this field is to refer to a world of pre-existing objects which are used as quotations squashed flat: elks heads, elaborate baroque furniture, arts and crafts wallpaper. In this way, designers can easily reference history and tradition - though these references are rendered immediately contemporary by the precision of the cut and the flatness of the material. Sometimes the patterns created are wrapped around the overtly three dimensional spaces produced by complex surfaces. In order to create a doubly-complex surface. The CNC technology allows surface elaboration that has been impossible to mass-produce over the last 100 years or so due to labour costs. Though the graphic cut is often references history, it seems oblivious to its most recent forebear, Postmodernism which used historical reference, pattern and flatness as a polemical attack on Modernism. This lack of engagement with by sidestepping the polemics and politics of postmodernism, designers using these techniques. Its effect can be an overwhelmingly rich visual field, or a reduced abstraction close to a childs cartoon depending upon how it is deployed. It uses either richness or abstraction as a way of demonstrating it status as representational design - the too-muchness or not-enough-ness act as a kind of quotation mark - a break from the objects surroundings.

Greg Lynn - Tea & Coffee Tower, Alessi

The Complex Surface is a function of the ability new software provides to design and manufacture in three dimensions. This design approach often uses technologies of rapid prototyping - if not in the final manufacture, then in the design development. Typically designs of this type are non-representational, abstract and sculptural - like 1950s abstract expressionist sculpture except super accurate and highly engineered. They use the tropes that new technology can deliver as a way of symbolising the future. In this way it is an interpretation of a particular machine-loving Modernism, though it rejects any idea of functionalism in favour of a queasy, over-powering sublime effect of form. It finds critical legitimacy in a particular strand of American architectural academia, and is linked to the earlier critical project of figures such as Peter Eisenman. An example of its cutting edge technology is that production of Greg Lynns highly sculpted Tea and Coffee set for Alessi is apparently affected by resources required for the American military presence in Iraq. Though it thrills to the super-high tech in both the way it is made and its materials, it sometimes suggests an affinity for organic form that one might associate with Art Nouveau in its intense use of parabolic curvaciousness. It also shares Art Nouveaus interest and ability to be a kind of totalizing design. It has a scale-less-ness that is seemingly consistent between condiment sets, furniture, buildings and masterplans. The complexity of the surface is beguiling - it twists and turns as though formed in an erotic vortex, attempting to seduce you with endless fascination. The finish of the object becomes important such as seamlessness (which creates the sensation that it might have been born fully formed rather than constructed) and lustre (which accentuates the play of light across its body). These help create a sense of alien-ness - lacking signals of everyday manufacture and a sense of scale that material and making often introduce.

The rise of Nu-Craft as design activity is an alternative response precipitated by the availability of technologies to designers. Rather than a Luddite rejection of technology, or a total inversion as with William Morris, it more often appears as a negotiation between high and low tech. Craft techniques or materials as a way of providing distance from the coalface of technologies novelty. They might include

What they suggest is a kind of authenticity which you could class as physical-ness - a way of manufacturing a 'real-ness' that attempts to form a fissure in the seamless quality of technological production. To do this it draws on sensations such as nostalgia and humour - moments of engagement which are not formal but cultural.

Maarten Baas

The idea of the 'Joke' as a design principle explores the difference between expectation we might have of a material, technique or object and the manner in which it is implemented. This gap is a means of recognising difference.

It also suggests a hybrid condition, sometimes embedding contradictions into objects - tradition becomes novelty, the mass produced becomes hand-crafted (or vice versa). Unlike the certainty of Complex Surface design this design mode works between established positions.

It is visible in the work of Hella Jongerius, Maarten Baas as well as aspects of Marcel Wanders and Jurgen Bey - and many other designers related to design collective Droog.

This design attitude is most closely related to fine art - indeed many of its tactics seem to have been lifted directly from a contemporary art primer to such an extent that it seems somehow too easy. It also echoes some postmodernist design concerns such as taste, value and multiple meanings.

Kieran Jones - Poang chair as Sledge

Nu-Craft includes the activities such as IKEA hacking - where the amateur culture of bedroom computer programming meets generic flatpack furniture. On websites such as Ikea Hacker posters swap tips and projects which "funked up klippan sofa, an ingenious idea for your pax wardrobe, a creative twist on your kitchen countertop, or even advice on how to finally stop forby stools from wobbling". This creative DIY-ism is visible in phenomena such as Make magazine which includes projects from electronics to knitting. These phenomena are closely related to the rise of blogging and the cult of the amateur, and posit a position where everyone can become a designer (as opposed to the specialisms and arcania of high design culture). They also suggest an existence of objects outside the machinations of consumerism.

Unlike the first two categories, Nu-Craft does not try to overwhelm its user with sensation. It is not a stylistic approach or a totalising design vision. Instead it displays wit and ingenuity in specific instances - a kind of design intelligence.

These three categories dominate contemporary design practice. Each of these techniques relates to a way of seeing. They share a commitment to the object as a cultural lodestone - whose significance is a way of describing the contemporary condition (even if they don't themselves admit it). Importantly, they do not propose design as a solution. After Starks Juicy Salif, it has been impossible to imagine design as an agent of progressive change in the old modernist sense. Designs driving aspiration is to improve the world through richness and relevance of its cultural presence. Contemporary design produces devices that are not intended to perform as advertised: as chair, table, lamp or whatever. They are devices whose function is a particular kind of cultural experience.

They do however offer different positions. The Graphic Cut and the Complex Surface - for all their intricacies exploit technology in a simplistic manner - that's to say, they do what they do because they can. Technologies have liberated aspects of design that have, until recently, been un-drawable or unmakable. Their explorations of the design possibilities is a kind of release. In their intricacies of pattern or form they aspire to a kind of technological sublime, an overpowering encounter with digitally crafted complexity. Nu-Craft however has a cooler response to technology. It is selective of how and when technologies are used - a kind of editorial or curatorial attitude to available and appropriate ways and means. Technologies are used here as a more articulate language. The possibilities offered up are more open ended. The Complex Surface for example is a kind of dead-end - a baroque endpiece to a particular history of design as formal object. Nu-Craft steps out of these vectors of design history, instead forging unexpected links and hybridisations.

These differences could be categorised as an open-ness against completeness. If design can no longer be judged by its functional utility, the terms of reference for understanding the success of a design become more complex. Equally, form, composition and other aesthetic qualities are only the means by which an effect is manifested, not ends in themselves. Effect is how the design communicates cultural content and is therefore the primary attribute of contemporary design.

Designs apparent impracticality is not failure; it is the point from which it explores possibilities of contemporary culture (for those who find this a ridiculously pretentious position, there are plenty of products that work). This is why design chairs are almost always more uncomfortable than other kinds of chairs, why design tables are a challenge to use.

It's a big year for stadiums. Olympic year means a series of spectacularly good and spectaculary bad stadiums are almost complete for this summers games. Meanwhile designs for Londons 2012 stadiums are caught in a loop of revision, press release and public vilification. The problem for stadium designers is to work out where the design should go now that the workings of a stadium have become so formulaic: Fosters Wembley is about holding the stadium up with that great big arch, for Herzog & de Meuron its about how you wrap up the outside in both the Allianz Arena and the Beijing National Stadium. But for most stadia there is no escape from the technicalities of the programme. As if often the case, an amazing idea wriggles free from the tightest of situations. At some point, somebody must have noticed the potential of all those seats arranged in rows to become something more than the sum of its parts. Maybe they were daydreaming as they fixed them down, or were struck by a bolt of inspiration while compiling the seating schedule. At some point, someone had a Eureka moment when they realised arrangement of coloured plastic seats could be used to make giant words and pictures. A moment of alchemy when the practical and prosaic is transformed. An doubled up efficiency - where the mechanisms of seating suddenly through their number become giant sized media. The arrangements switch between the scale of a chair and the scale of a extra large billboard, these it made watching those Football Focus interviews with Tony Gubba in an empty stadium worth watching.

For some reason the technique that seems common in Europe - examples here range from Wales in the west to Russia in the East, and almost all are soccer stadiums. There are a few American Football stadiums, but they seem much more infrequently. Perhaps the technique has been passed around Europe via the Champions league, UEFA cup and so on. Perhaps its a function of way that stadiums operate. Maybe its because American Football treats it pitches as sites for graphic branding in a way that is an anathema to soccer pitches.

This technique of seat graphics is a static relation to the fluid, card waving displays of (old) Soviet or (current) North Korean card waving stadium displays. But more on that another time.

Anyone who has heard the strange phrase 'Channel Light Vessel Automatic' as part of that mysterious daily national ritualistic chant of the Shipping Forecast will have wondered at its meaning. Perhaps it is the multiple possibilities of meaning of 'light vessel' or the strange addition of 'automatic' at then end that makes it such a rich and evocative phrase.

According to Wikipedia "a light vessel is a ship which acts as a lighthouse, usually anchored permanently and having no means of propulsion.

Light vessels are used in waters that are too deep for a lighthouse. Instead of marking coastlines, they usually mark marine traffic routes. They are superior to a buoy for this purpose because its navigational aids are more visible. They also usually carry data recorders used in research oceanography, such as wave recorders, and may also function as weather stations.

The first light vessel was placed off the Nore sandbank at the mouth of the River Thames in England, placed there by its inventor Robert Hamblin in 1732.

Some lightships are mobile, such as relief lightships used as temporary replacements while the normal ship is in port for maintenance, and lightships which operated in Arctic waters during the ice-free summer months only, such as the Lightship Finngrundet."

Though essentially pieces of infrastructure, they seem amazingly poetic objects - as though sprung from somewhere amongst the sketches of John Hejduk, and the phrases painted upon them add to their enigmatic quality - especially the ships with 'RELIEF' emblazoned on their sides.

They are bobbing around on the open sea, acting as signs for places that are invisible: names upon a marine chart, or describing the landscape at the bottom of the sea. It's remarkable for a infrastructural/signage system to have maintained the same format over time - at least through their photographic record and across international boundaries.

Crufts 2008 has just concluded. Though it calls itself a dog show is actually a design contest in disguise. Dogs are perhaps Britains most sophisticated design product. Just look at some of the contenders for Crufts 'Best in Show' to see the incredible result of hundreds of years of breeding, of genetic manipulations over generations made to improve in aesthetics or performance, driven by the aristocracies obsessions with blood lines, landscape, hunting and animals. British art and design can but dream of this kind of sophistication. The likes of Ive, Hirst and Foster would struggle to turn out this kind of sleek perfection that we see in glistening black eyes set within fountains of soft white hair. These are sickeningly, frighteningly beautiful things, like mutations of pornography, confectionary, and cartoon mascots. Here are some of this years winners. For a review of last years Crufts: clicky

American modernism, as has been noted, is very different from difficult, perverse, maniacal European Modernism (I'm using big and small 'm's as way of denoting the difference here). Nowhere can this be better seen that in the advertising illustrations of Charles Schridde. These images produced for a Motorola campaign - intended to demonstrate the lastest in domestic TVs - show a fantasy modern: part Frank Lloyd Wright, part Eames and part John Lautner but 100% consumable. It's a vision of an easy, relaxed lifestyle: the plop of an olive into a Martini, the gentle hum of white goods, the warm embrace of synthetic fabrics.

They are vignettes of the possibilities of modern life: A couple dancing on a high rise balcony, cantilevered many stories above a busy Manhattan avenue, a couple watching their child swim from their under-water lounge, a woman in an evening dress as the sun sets and the waves crash against the shore, watching TV in a multilevel house where life is openly laid out from the bedroom to the speedboat.

It is vision of modernity straight out of Madison Avenue which shows the promise of consumerism to splice together pleasure.

Schridde is still going strong, though has left the world of the near future behind, and paints the recent past in the form of rodeos and nature in a sub-impressionist manner.

via &

I'm more a road man myself: tarmac, verges, signs, road markings, bridges, roundabouts, and the timeless joy of the Little Chef on the lonely highway - all that kind of stuff. But cars never really got me. From Toad of Toad Hall to Clarkson (and endless architects who will bore you with classic car enthusiasms somehow justified as legitimate interest by a mis-reading of Corb), evidence indicates that an interest in fast cars compensates for a slowness of thought.

Of course, I appreciate that they are the most significant product that human endeavour has produced. A massive industry fuelled by the liberating dream of escape, of individual freedom, of man-machine-motion. Cars are the most significant organising principle since the mid twentieth century, structuring land, stock markets, employment patterns, and environment. But the things themselves? I'm happy behind the wheel of my wife's Vauxhall Corsa.

So I'm on a business class flight to Detroit looking suspiciously at a cabin full of men reading car magazines. Me? I'm reading a piece on the AOC in the Saturday FT. I'm hoping that somehow I'll be able to glimpse the heart of the military industrial complex amongst the shiny bodywork, gleaming chrome grills and jewel like lights.

A car show is, of course, about cars, but it's also about the dream of the industry and culture that creates them. The cars perfect sheen is hallucinatory as a mirage - and it's meticulously preserved by teams of polishers who remove the publics greasy fingerprints as though wiping down a weapon. This year, despite the ultra confident, self-assured corporate visions lurks the possibility that their dream might vanish. The show takes place against a backdrop of local and international crisis. Motor City has lost thousands of jobs and the brands that defined US car culture are in decline. Globally, the dream is becoming obscured by the clouds of recession, the dust of oil field conflict and looming environmental catastrophe.

The response? Like a dieter tucking into low-fat eclairs, car design is pushing the limit of bigness, fastness, and luxuriousness while simultaneously claiming sustainability as a kind of mantra of self-preservation. Even bull-bar bearing American trucks now come in biofuel flavours - though they are so macho that probably means a tank full of fried food and beer. The new Dodge pick up - launched in cod wild west frenzy with cowboys and a cattle run along Washington Street - makes its own contribution to a sustainable future: 5% better fuel efficiency. Hummers - those extreme mechanical fantasies - response is to make a slightly smaller model which only exaggerated its similarity to a kids mechano-military toy. According to press releases, sustainability can also be a feeling or an aesthetic.

The car show revolves around what's termed 'the reveal': the moment of accelerated strip-tease when the silky drape that hugs a cars contours like the dresses on the girls on the Italian car stands is whipped off to reveal the new model. Once exposed, cameras zoom in pornographically on chrome orifices, folds of steel and the sheen on its buffed skin. These events are carefully scripted and choreographed.

At Land Rover, the build up is so monumental and portentous it sounds like an Imperial Star Ship with Jean Michel Jarre on board with a PA announcement by the same guy who voiced the Nuclear War warnings. Man, it's significant.

It's here that you'll hear phrases like "A diesel powered Super Sports Car!" over a heavy rock sound bed, or a German accent shouting "The Power! The Tradition!" They are as much ideological rallies as they are a way of promoting a particular product.

There are the events too, most of which are baffling. During the introduction of the new Audi TT, Bryan Adams wanders onto the stage for a bemusing acoustic version of 'The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me'. Over at BMW a troupe of satin jump-suited street dancers throw robotic shapes to euphoric trance in a space portal of rings. It's like a ritual dance from the future - lit in the kind of ultra-violet that makes you feel as though you are in geostationary orbit. Quite possibly it's a modern dance interpretation of the stands uber-Tutonic strapline: "More Efficiency".

Each stand sets a scene for the brand and its models. Mini is shiny black and neon, like a 80's nightclub, complete with resident DJ and juice bar. Audi have a stage set version of a high Modernist villa; Dodge have a massive backlit ramshorn logo and moving message sign like a hyped up sports arena; Jeep creates a rocky outcrop with a skeletal Rocky Mountain lodge. Ford is super-brite, lit with a hint of ultraviolet and completely bland. If the Aztecs had had car dealerships, they'd have looked like the Infinity stand (The Temple of Vroom?)

The concentration of brand identity is so saturated that the patchwork of floor materials could be an essay in contemporary corporate aspirations. As it changes from stone flags, to mirrored metallic to deep pile carpet to pseudo grass, via Hessian weave you feel the aspirations and values encoded into floor finish. You can feel this concentrated message encoded beneath your heel.

The activities on the stands are just a brand-centric. Bentley have a craftsman wearing an apron who looks like he came out of the 1950's involved in some intricate work involving hardwoods and leather. Lexus have set up a spa where you can be massaged amongst silver birch trees and executive cars. At Land Rover, an executive club style lounge is filled with piles of culture books: Andy Goldsworthy, Chanel, one of those '100 architect' books, Art Forum, Wallpaper and Monocle and people drinking Guinness.

In a thoroughly un-reconstructed display that only the Italians of Mazzerati, Ferrari and Lamborghini could possibly put on without a hint of irony, girls pout and pose, leaning suggestively across the bonnets of over-powered, ridiculously sculpted cars. It seems like a moment out of time - like pulling a 1970s ready meal out of a freezer.

In an annex, past a security guard, down a staicase and behind a curtain, something else is happening. It's here you'll find the solar powered cars, cars from emerging manufactures, and a selection of pimped-up cars presented by Dub magazine which parody the obsessions with power, presence, technology and luxury.

In a stand that looked like it should be selling strawberries in a lay-by there is a line up of cars produced by Li Shi Guang Ming Automobile Design Co that might well have popped out of a cartoon: Postman Pats van with a Yellow Submarine makeover. They have the most beautiful names: 'A Piece of Cloud', 'The Book of Songs', and the amphibious 'Detroit Fish - which carried the satirical marketing suggestion that it might suit "renowned environmentalist President Bush, ordering this car for his Texas Ranch".

Along with the $2,500 Tata Nan recently announced by Indian manufacturer Tata it is possible that future of cars might deviate from the extreme Anglo Saxon obsessions that have characterised the industry since its origins: an alternative to the mantra of Harder, Faster, Stronger, Better.

Cars in their current form are not inevitable conclusions; they are extreme conclusions of one strand of thought. There may well be other ways to perform the most important role of cars: devices that interpret the cultural idea of journey, that engage with the romance of the open road, and which become the physical manifestation of individual freedom in the landscape.

As I'm in Chicago, I thought I'd dredge this out of the archives. It's part of a series of cut out models that I made some time ago.

download the pdf here

Free with the model comes this link to piece called 'Sorry Mies' I wrote (but never quite finished) on Mies, John Dillinger, the ad-hoc urbanism of the gangster, Robert Anton Wilson, prohibition and reductive abstraction, Mies' Lake Shore Drive as abstract cliff, plazas as abstract plains, and how we both fail and complete his architecture.

Some quotes:

"Four years before Mies arrived in Chicago, Americas Most Wanted Man was gunned down in an alleyway after leaving a movie theatre with a woman on each arm. John Dillinger was the dashing heartthrob of Chicago's gangland. Dillinger optimised the glamorous and chaotic romance of jailbreaking, heist pulling, on-the-run city of rooks nests, alleyways, and safe houses, of Al Capone, of no-go zones and J Edgar Hoovers nascent FBI G Men. His death marked the decline of Chicago's gangster culture which had grown up around Prohibition, supplying the liquor that the government had tried to ban, but the citizens just couldn't live without.

Hoovers dogged pursuit of Dillinger and gangsterism was a victory of a certain kind of urbanism. One that is reflected in Mies' Chicago projects. Mies is on the side of Hoovers bureaucracy, rather than the ad hoc opportunism of the gangsters. But there is mysteriousness and an impenetrability to his architecture too, just as Hoovers bureaucracy of power was, deep down, dark and paranoid. Mies made bureaucracy into a form of poetry, monumentalising though precision and a ruthless editing of architectural possibility.

In Robert Anton Wilsons 'Illuminatus Trilogy' - a sprawling hippy/counterculture/conspiracy epic, John Dillinger becomes a kind of super spiritual guru of the forces of chaos. His break outs from captivity are retold as a supernatural victory over matter. Dillinger dematerialises the prison walls by the power of concentrated thought - a little like the attempt to raise the Pentagon building by the Chicago led yippies and zippies. The Illuminatus Trillogies retroactive dramatisation of jailbreaks describes that weird Miesian dematerialization of solid stuff. Mies' concentration of architectural vision beams out of his eyes like X-ray vision, vaporising the corner of buildings so that enclosing walls seem only like planes, emptying city blocks so that gigantic buildings and plazas feel as lightly arranged as still lives. Chicagos history of chaotic freedom and incarceration is mutely articulated through Mies' architecture."

"Like Prohibition, temperance and abstinence motivate Mies' architecture. And just like Prohibition, the attempting to exclude behaviours only serves to highlight our vice. Mies' Chicago landscapes are a kind of sober architectural or urban "lack". It's only through our use of them that they become part of and engaged with the city. Perhaps we should recognise our own creative co-authorship of Mies' architecture, encourage the build up of ephemera across the surface of the buildings. Somewhere between the extremes of confused intoxication of ephemera and the rational sobriety of architecture that the essential uniqueness of these places can develop"

I'm on a mini-tour of the US right now. I'll be lecturing at the University of Illinois at Chicago on Monday 18th Feb. If you fancy coming along, I'll be in Room 1100, Art+Architecture Building at 6 PM with a laptop, a powerpoint and some stories about FAT. The title is 'All You Can Eat'.

On Wednesday, February 20th, at 5:30pm, I'll be at the Knowlton School of Architecture in Columbus doing what threatens to be a StrangeHarvest/FAT hybrid talk.

Hope to see you there!

Flowers are symbolic of all that is beautiful, natural and normal - and that Valentines bouquet that you just received is a symbol of the natural love felt for you by your partner. But of course, nothing is either natural or normal - but it can be beautiful.

It's more than likely that your bouquet passed through Aalsmeer, the home of the giant Dutch flower market. The complex covers some 250 acres; the auction building alone takes up some 160 acres (one-quarter of a square mile). Each day approximately 14 million flowers and 1 million potted plants are auctioned. That means 3 billion flowers and 400 million plants annually from some 8,000 nurseries. The complex includes five auction halls where 13 auction clocks operate simultaneously in a process of a Dutch auction.

The mechanims of the flower industry are fascinating. Flying over Holland you can see the vast greenhouses. Inside, plants live on an artificial double day cycle in order to force quicker growth. While you are in the air, there are flights full of flowers passing nearby from other flower production sites in places like Ecuador, Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, India, Israel, South Africa and Malaysia.

The beautiful irony is that our desire for an idea of nature renders it unnatural. Happy Valentines!