Author Archive
Monday, April 10th, 2006
The pay as you go future
Sometimes, even comfortable Brits can shake us out of our complacency. I just got around to seeing Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, which was first screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2003. The screenplay, a cooperation between Winterbottom and his longtime writer associate, Frank Cottrell Boyce, hits on all the right cylinders: the cordoning off [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Architecture,Film by pzingg
Wednesday, February 15th, 2006
The mother of all snowstorms
It was the best of times, even though, or possibly due to the fact that, life itself (as well as all the trains, boats and planes) was running at half speed. The only depressing note in this otherwise strange world (strange in that it was almost identical to the feel of the Chronicles of Narnia [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Architecture,New York by pzingg
Thursday, October 13th, 2005
No direction home
The fiddler, he now steps to the road He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed On the back of the fish truck that loads While my conscience explodes The more you hear Highway 61 Revisited the more it resonates with the feeling of angst and doom anyone born in 1951 feels today. The road [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Dylan,Miscellany by pzingg
Sunday, May 22nd, 2005
Archigram 2005
30 years in the making. Apparently the money and design (by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro) have been found to create a new vision for reusing the elevated tracks on New York’s lower west side: The High Line. Every city in America with an industrial past could use a little help like this.
Comments Off - Posted in Architecture,New York by pzingg
Sunday, May 1st, 2005
Metropolis
New York, 3 weeks ago. When corporate greed meets Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, look out. This building (the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle) is from some angles a futurist dream, from others just a hulking mass overshadowing the kitschily lovable 1960′s ex-Huntington Hartford Museum of Art by Edward Durrell Stone (right foreground). Apparently, David [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Architecture,New York by pzingg
Wednesday, March 30th, 2005
Goin’ digital
We’ll be on the right coast this week, with a new content grabber, the Canon PowerShot S70, wide enough for architectural photography. If the weather smiles on us, there may be things to discuss. Hopefully, the author will find that the transition from emulsion (and a 10-pound SLR with bulky shift lens) [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Miscellany by pzingg
Sunday, March 27th, 2005
Anti-gravity room
Hang on to your hat. How come this guy Ka-Ping shows up everywhere?
Comments Off - Posted in Miscellany by pzingg
Sunday, March 27th, 2005
The web that will be
It would be nice to have the web be the platform for software development, and after several years of the doldrums, the folks at Google and Yahoo! have grabbed the attention of developers everywhere. They are starting to share former secrets on development sites. Some of the things that might make it happen for developers, [...]
Comments Off - Posted in World Wide Web by pzingg
Saturday, March 19th, 2005
The human landscape
I wanted to express my affiliation with observers of the edges of landscape. There is something deep and moving about understanding the contradiction between the smallness of the individual when seen in the context of a frontier landscape and the immense power that human civilization has had in changing the face of [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Film by pzingg
Thursday, March 17th, 2005
Visions 2: How to codify human knowledge
What is the longest running unfinished project on the web older than the web itself? How about Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project. Did TBL base the web on Xanadu? I haven’t done the reading. Now that hard disks and network storage is so cheap, and processing power is even cheaper, why can’t we finish the project? [...]
