la strada

Active during the 1920s and 1930s visionary Genoese civil-engineer and architect Renzo Picasso, we discover via City Lab, was a truly cosmopolitan citizen informing his professions with detailed studies of traffic and infrastructure from great, bustling urban centres all over Europe and North America—drafting fantastic, futuristic diagrams that appreciate the parallel, symbiotic flow of circulation as something stratified, and multi-layered.
Click on the images for a larger view.
Believing that large cities could be transformed into vertical utopias with good administration, his designs relied heavily on the use of towering skyscrapers—grattanuvole, already familiar to the aspiring architect.
Though perhaps ahead of his time and a cross-town superhighway’s moment has passed for our present (not that other solutions are being proffered) but the overpasses, underpasses and dedicated lanes that are common place may not have been integrated into city planning without Picasso’s appreciation of how complex systems function and intersect and the nature of the snarls and slums to avoid.

being called a nerd wasn’t always taken to be a badge of honour

Collectors’ Weekly features an in depth conversation with historian and cultural ephemera caretaker Rebecca Onion (whose name might strike some of you long-time readers as familiar as the blogger behind The Vault, part of Slate’s constellation of blogs) on her new book that critically and thoughtfully explores the fraught and precocious relation that America (and by extension other nationalities) has had with education and the sciences.
As understudies, surrogates for how society judges itself, children and how they are portrayed and reared as either very modern or paradoxically anti-modern (either as digital natives or digital naïves, something potentially pure and innocent, like a wild child) and our concerns, priorities and norms as societies are reflected in either how we encourage or begrudge not just the glamourous, swashbuckling parts of the disciplines but also those yeomen’s tasks that require years of toil and dedication, without even getting into the realm of stereotype and misogyny. The book and its subject of study couldn’t have come at a more crucial juncture with not only the accepted science behind human contribution to global warming and climate degradation being rejected but there’s also a general backlash against expertise and being an informed, stake-holding populace as well as cuts to educationally inspiring programmes. Having read about the role that mega-fauna had played in contributing to the stability of grassland not long ago, it made us angry that one of Dear Leader’s creatures of the court was supposedly trying to sell him on the idea of resurrecting a mammoth—but surely in spite of any environmental good it might do but rather to keep on display at his tacky resorts or let his horrible children hunt on safari for sport. The interview with Onion is really though-provoking and is worth reading in its entirety, which can be found at the link up top plus find out how to pick up a copy there as well.

retrolithic

Geoff Manaugh’s latest speculative piece in BLDGBlog that turns over the aesthetics of civil engineering to an algorithm that has demonstrated a knack for the scenic initially made me think of another trail of a neural network plucking idyllic postcards from vast collections of unprocessed data, but the examination went deeper to question what these heralded breakthroughs in artificial intelligence might mean when the gauge of their success is our hazy ideal.
Humans own sense of taste and proportion are in turn thought to be informed, like our myths and oral traditions, by surveying the plains of Africa and learning that certain configurations of contour and shading invite prey and shelter—and are in tour reflected in the art and landscaping that we find unconsciously resonant. Advertisers exploit these sort of backdrops all the time to draw us in—or at least not to offend by choosing something anodyne and universal. What do you think? I do admit that in a moment of laziness recently that has since proven quite serendipitous and worth repeating I have turned to a PfRC site-specific image search to try to pick illustrations to go with some posts that I don’t have a specific for. With over four thousand articles and more photographs (mostly confusingly captioned or labelled), I’d prefer to recycle one of my own—especially pictures I’ve taken myself rather than accumulating more, I restrict the search criteria to this site and tell the search engine a few topics in the post, and I’ll get results like the one pictured—which is exactly what I had in mind. If our digital amanuensis and analyst is only rewarded for being a feed-back loop that draws on our oldest comforts neither side is challenged and the process seems like atrophy rather than growth.

have you seen any russians in west virginia, ohio or pennsylvania?

Just days after someone leaked to the press the full, revealing transcript of Dear Leader’s telephone conversations with foreign heads of state, his embattled though quick to squander any sympathy the public might have formed for him for working in such a toxic climate Attorney General announced that four White House staffers have been charged with unauthorised release of information. In an aggressive crackdown that might meet the definition of a witch-hunt, he pledged to stop the culture of leaks and would uncover the culprits, adding that no one is “entitled to surreptitiously fight their battles in the media by revealing sensitive government information,” never mind that his mission in defence of an individual who has a substantial portion of the medium exclusively rigged to support his agenda, no matter what form it’s taking at the moment and speaks further to importance of distinguishing between what is an illegal leak (the disclosure of classified information), a legal leak (almost everything else) and gossip or speculation.
It’s just like the regime painting with too broad a brush when it comes to fake news—just because the truth is not flattering does not mean that it’s not the incontrovertible truth. The Attorney General is also reformulating the subpoena laws so that journalists might not so easily protect their secret sources. I wonder how that will manifest itself. At the same time, it was revealed that a small delegation of members of the intelligence committee travelled to London—with sanction by the rest of the members—to confront the former MI6 spy who compiled the Moscow dossier on Dear Leader. The law-makers did not met with the ex-spy but were being I suppose vaguely menacing. Then, and speak of Friday afternoon disasters (some people take all week to think up problems to spring on others)—Dear Leader announces a working vacation at one of his New Jersey golf resorts, abruptly but argues it was timed to coincide with long-planned renovations to the official residence—which Dear Leader recently described as a dump. The White House’s superintendent probably struggled to come up with something plausible quickly, but I suspect that they’re installing more surveillance equipment in efforts to intercept patriotic leakers. Such paranoia eventually backfires, especially given this bumbling cast of morons to include a Majordomo that suggests lie-detectors be installed—and Dear Leader’s own atrocious behaviour (not that it hasn’t already been broadcast before and to little lasting avail) will be on display.

heart of sharkness

Though I can imagine dealing with a hailstorm of vicious man-eating sharks might seem presently rather mild and the preferred challenge in comparison to the plagues that Dear Leader is capable of calling down on civil society and the environment, in case you had not heard—as Dave Log informs, the disaster horror comedy movie franchise that has started to attract all sorts of bottom-rung actors who vie for cameo-roles was also courting the likes of Donald Trump to play none other role than president of the United States of America.
Although second choice after Sarah Palin refused the part, Trump was reportedly very keen to be presidential, even if it was in a gory and bad film, with David Hasselhof, and Charo, and several other reality television stars. Trump was rather crestfallen in January of 2015 when his team of handlers asked him not to appear in Sharknado: Oh Hell No! as production might interfere with his actual bid for the presidency they were pushing the serial candidate to announce soon. I wonder what kind of persuasive argument that had to weave in order to get Dear Leader to give up on a sure thing for laborious long-shot. In this instance, I think we can all wish that his baser instincts would have prevailed.