Feix & Merlin’s proposal for the Gasholder No. 8 in Kings Cross

(Source: feixandmerlin.com, via co-zine)

London Poster | Bibliothèque Design | Tribute to Harry Becks definitive London underground map by reproducing it using the two colours specified in the brief – red, for the Central line and black, for the Northern line. The other tube lines were deleted by virtue of not having the colour option to print them.

(via tomoso)

Buckingham Palace Shanty

The climate refugee crisis reaches epic proportions. The vast shanty town that stretches across London’s centre leaves historic buildings marooned, including Buckingham Palace.

The Royal family is surrounded in their London home. Everybody is on the move and the flooded city centre is now uninhabitable and empty – apart from the thousands of shanty-dwellers. But should empty buildings and land be opened up to climate refugees?

Image © Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones.

Background photography © Jason Hawkes 

via ryanpanos

Peter Cook | a tower for SWISS COTTAGE

Tunnel vision: a history of the London tube map

via downwithutopia

Johan Berglund | A colourworks, royal victoria docks, london

The project deals with the point where ground meets water; metaphorically as well as physically, and the psychological power of the void. The site is a former docking bay next to the Royal Victoria Docks in East London, now turned into a Paintworks. The laboratory is complemented with studios and accommodation for three resident artist painters, who become a vital part of the testing and evaluation of the oil and watercolours produced. Sitting below ground level in an empty dry dock, acting as a sunken courtyard, the studios utilise different ways of bringing down light into the dark space.

The Walking City now floating on the Thames

(Source: cubillismo)

Food Delivered in Underground Tubes

The food would sail along in small capsules at upwards of 60 miles per hour. As many as 900,000 capsules could be in circulation in the nearly 2,000 miles of air pressure pipe, all of which would be controlled by smart grids that would keep food from crashing into each other. To give some semblance of order, the capsules would generally be organized into little trains of about 300 linked capsules, each spaced about a meter apart.

Up to 200,000 food-carrying trucks could be taken off British roads, which would save 40 million tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere.

via neatorama + ryanpanos

Gridding London

American cities are gridded, and thus easily readable and navigable. Their Old World counterparts are older, messier and much more disorienting. That is the conventional wisdom. London stands as a prime example of the latter layout, with an organically grown, bewilderingly chaotic street plan.
Entry #417 on this blog discussed a proposal to impose a hexagonal grid onto London’s maze of streets and squares. But does London really need to be shoehorned into an externally-imposed straitjacket? It already has a grid, even if it is not neatly symmetrical.
This map, produced by Matthew Lancashire, shows central London as a relatively simple grid of main thoroughfares, connecting a few dozen central points, and demarcating some of London’s better-known areas.
The grid’s southern edge, for example, is a straight line from Sloane Square to Bermondsey, via such landmarks as Victoria Station, the County Hall, the Tate Modern museum, Shakespeare’s Globe, etc. The lines connecting these dots are King’s Road, Victoria Street, South Bank and other well-known traffic arteries. Lines and dots are presented uniformly, but in fact are highly variable in size and nature. The King’s Road is a traffic-choked shopping street, but South Bank is a pedestrian-only zone. Victoria Station is a huge complex, the Globe a relatively small building.
Further north, the schematic of dots and lines is used to bound city quarters such as Soho (hemmed in between Oxford Street, Tottenham Court Road, Shaftesbury Avenue and Regent Street) or Brompton (the triangle between Brompton Road, Sloane Street and Sloane Avenue).
Mr Lancashire’s map is an interesting companion piece to Harry Beck’s world-famous, oft-imitated Underground Map. That schematic has become such a success at representing the city that it is London’s main navigational instrument. The city has thus, for many travellers, been reduced to a highly streamlined map, more easily navigable by its underground legend than by the actual streets laid out on its messy topside. London has disintegrated into hundreds of small universes all uniformly accessible by, and centred on, a Tube station. This grid map of central London repairs the imbalance somewhat, instilling an overviewable order on the surface by reducing its chaos to a limited number of landmarks, arteries and neighbourhoods.

via ryanpanos

“Branding, it could be said, is the greatest gift commerce has given to culture”

Peter Kidger | Berlin Infection

Sex, Drugs and Bacon Rolls

london | RAFA CASTELLS