0802 watercube 2 057_1, originally uploaded by chrisbosse

Chris Bosse’s Beijing Watercube photoset.

• Work Architecture Company’s Urban Farm, winner of this year’s PS1 Warm Up competition (above).Architects brief. (via)
• Analyzing the Internet Collapse – Multiple fiber cuts to undersea cables show the fragility of the Internet at its choke points see a cable map and an undersea cable map we’ve linked to previously
• Homage to the Stamp – Series of stamps inspired by Otl Aicher – Otl Aicher who?
• We will migrate into the sky
• SLUMS: What to do?
• London Profiler – Easy to Use Geo-Demographics using Google Maps

Original lead type set, originally uploaded by chelseyhotel

Marinas Twin Towers, originally uploaded by plemeljr

Via Ben H comes a series of 50 Icon Eye’s Manifestos, which are all interesting to read; especially check out Rem Koolhaas’ manifesto, Europe is doing almost ridiculously well:

We fly for next to nothing, we have the highest quality prisons, Europe gave us millions of new friends, Frisian Lakes are maintained in order, sewers that ruined the most beautiful beaches are gone, the Spanish countryside is now a polished backdrop for whizzing high-speed trains.War criminals are put on trial. Ireland is rich. The Turkish think about who they want to become.
…
400 million of us dictate the taste of six billion people. We decide what is beautiful and what is good behaviour. (sic) Our rules are contagious and are voluntarily complied with by all others. No one is afraid of us, yet we are immensely popular.

While Rem’s cheerleading of all thinks European, along with their forthcoming commercial and capitalistic hegemony is great and all, other so-called manifestos are more instructive on where we are going from here. Specifically:

• Hernan Diaz Alonso/Xefirotarch – Notes on Mutation and the Pursuit of Horror (and sometimes the Grotesque).
• Peter Eisenman – The spectacle is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity.
• OSA (Office For Subversive Architecture) – Passivity can’t be wrong… it’s safe

I know the idea of gathering 50 manifestos from different designers and architects was to comparatively illustrate the differences, but in the three above ideas you have three completely different world views, all relating to ornament and form.
I can’t shake the idea that we haven’t completely closed the arguments of the late 1990’s; perhaps the decade’s long aberration of riches will settle down and we will all have so much more time to read and argue about Post Colonial Theory and decide once and for all the manner of form, how/why form is derived and whether or not linguistic theory is applicable to design. Or have these issues already been resolved, and I was too busy working with developers?

What’s really wrong with newspapers

Via Fundrace.

Vote!, originally uploaded by plemeljr

Scale Ruler, originally uploaded by filmingilman

Somewhat lame list of Wallpaper* Architects Directory 2007 and certainly not lame list, Wallpaper* Graduate Directory 2008. I can’t help but feel that Wallpaper* hurts their cause by being so over-the-top pretentious I can barley stand it.

Mono Lake Tufa Towers, originally uploaded by chaybert

Since the Hoover Dam was built, there has never been a water shortage on the Colorado, never a day when there was simply not enough water in Lake Mead to meet all the downstream allocations. Drought, and a realistic understanding of the past, have made such a day seem more imminent. Under the pressure of the drought, the seven Colorado basin states have agreed for the first time on how to share prospective shortages.

Read this National Geographic article, Drying of the West The American West was won by water management. What happens when there’s no water left to manage?, and view the accompanying photographs. Or read The Eternal Dustbowl, Paying for the sins of L.A.’s water barons has created a half-billion-dollar boondoggle concerning Owen’s Lake and the environmental impact of water diversions on a massive scale. This reminds me of when I visited Mono Lake in California, a wasteland the result of Los Angeles water projects. Mono Lake is the now a veritable salt flat, whose water level was 45 feet higher before Los Angeles began to steal its water.
Ask yourself if those who live out West shouldn’t be paying huge taxes on the water they are consuming and wasting. Then remember that the water projects outlined in the above articles pale in comparison to the truly huge projects in China, namely the Three Gorges Dam and the South-to-North Water Transfer Project.