Wednesday 17 April 2013

Ink stuff

It's been a while. Sorry about that.

There are a fair few pieces by me on newsstands at the moment, although I'm afraid not many of them are available online. One prominent exception is my second piece for the New York Times, published on 23 March, probing the idea that a perfect home is the key to happiness, and tracing it back to modernist ideas about housing, health and hygiene. You might, if you have been kind enough to read it, of course recognise this as being an underlying preoccupation of Care of Wooden Floors.

Speaking of COWF, the German edition - Die nachhaltige Pflege von Holzböden, published by Carl's Books - is now on sale. Buy buy buy!

"The Anxiety of Influence" in Frame magazine issue 91, looks at copying and plagiarism in contemporary design and asks if too much emphasis is placed on novelty. Has fear of plagiarism led to "amnesiac design" that denies its own history and is disingenuous about its influences?

In Disegno issue 4 (S/S 2013) there's an essay by me examining press trips, a fundamental but little-remarked aspect of architecture and design discourse. Do they warp the way we see architecture and design? Are they, in fact, fundamentally corrupt?

I can be found in two places in Icon 119 (May 2013) - in the News section I talk to Sou Fujimoto about his plans for the Serpentine Pavilion, and the role of landscape in his architecture, and in Review there are my very positive thoughts about David E Nye's fascinating history of the assembly line.

A labour of love in the current issue of Art Review (#66, March 2013): reviewing the superb Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard 1967-2008.

In the spring edition of Audi magazine I mark the 40th anniversary of the first mobile phone call by talk to the man who made it, Martin Cooper.

Also now on sale is Metahaven's excellent essay Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (Strelka Press), which is did not write but helped edit. It looks at the potential for anarchic viral online humour to overturn the present neoliberal austerity consensus, and the role of design and designers can play. Also it's witty and provocative, so please do take a look. 

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