Steve Taylor

CALIFORNIAN ARCHITECTS MAP ARE USING AI TO PUSH A NEW FRONTIER INTO UNCANNY VALLEY A new book from Californian architecture studio Metropolitan Architecture Practice sets out to explore the current status of AI in building design. Steve Taylor dives into a richly designed, image-heavy publication from Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers to find tech as collaborator, heavy texts, uncanny valleys & New Frontier ideologies. Read & See More at: https://recessed.space/00320-Architecture-X-Architecture-MAP Link in bio ----- Referring to Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic (AXA from hereon in) as a weighty tome is not just metaphorical: the 272-page book clocks in at 1.12kg – 250g more if you include the equally chunky slipcase. It also aims to be heavy in the other sense: with an uber-cool design; cornucopia of 450 full colour and monochrome images; seven theoretically dense texts (I glance down inadvertently from the screen to the page at this point and the words “photography’s so-called indexical relationship to reality” catch my eye); and standout quotes from big thinkers that punctuate the flow. Apart from the deep orange of the endpapers and a handful of highlighted pages, the white type of the text sits on matt black coated stock. The whole artefact has been meticulously printed in China and beautifully produced by Hong Kong based Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers. ----- @map_studio_2022 @oscarrieraojeda.publishers @architecturebooks_ @persistentanomaly

CALIFORNIAN ARCHITECTS MAP ARE USING AI TO PUSH A NEW FRONTIER INTO UNCANNY VALLEY A new book from Californian architecture studio Metropolitan Architecture Practice sets out to explore the current status of AI in building design. Steve Taylor dives into a richly designed, image-heavy publication from Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers to find tech as collaborator, heavy texts, uncanny valleys & New Frontier ideologies. Read & See More at: https://recessed.space/00320-Architecture-X-Architecture-MAP Link in bio ----- Referring to Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic (AXA from hereon in) as a weighty tome is not just metaphorical: the 272-page book clocks in at 1.12kg – 250g more if you include the equally chunky slipcase. It also aims to be heavy in the other sense: with an uber-cool design; cornucopia of 450 full colour and monochrome images; seven theoretically dense texts (I glance down inadvertently from the screen to the page at this point and the words “photography’s so-called indexical relationship to reality” catch my eye); and standout quotes from big thinkers that punctuate the flow. Apart from the deep orange of the endpapers and a handful of highlighted pages, the white type of the text sits on matt black coated stock. The whole artefact has been meticulously printed in China and beautifully produced by Hong Kong based Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers. ----- @map_studio_2022 @oscarrieraojeda.publishers @architecturebooks_ @persistentanomaly

CALIFORNIAN ARCHITECTS MAP ARE USING AI TO PUSH A NEW FRONTIER INTO UNCANNY VALLEY A new book from Californian architecture studio Metropolitan Architecture Practice sets out to explore the current status of AI in building design. Steve Taylor dives into a richly designed, image-heavy publication from Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers to find tech as collaborator, heavy texts, uncanny valleys & New Frontier ideologies. Read & See More at: https://recessed.space/00320-Architecture-X-Architecture-MAP Link in bio ----- Referring to Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic (AXA from hereon in) as a weighty tome is not just metaphorical: the 272-page book clocks in at 1.12kg – 250g more if you include the equally chunky slipcase. It also aims to be heavy in the other sense: with an uber-cool design; cornucopia of 450 full colour and monochrome images; seven theoretically dense texts (I glance down inadvertently from the screen to the page at this point and the words “photography’s so-called indexical relationship to reality” catch my eye); and standout quotes from big thinkers that punctuate the flow. Apart from the deep orange of the endpapers and a handful of highlighted pages, the white type of the text sits on matt black coated stock. The whole artefact has been meticulously printed in China and beautifully produced by Hong Kong based Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers. ----- @map_studio_2022 @oscarrieraojeda.publishers @architecturebooks_ @persistentanomaly

Disused quarry infrastructure encountered on a Boxing Day walk in the hills north of Barcelona. Massive aerial conveyor belt transferred rock to a now-abandoned processing/loading building. Spectacular industrial ruins, though the denuded landscape indicates just now thoroughly material was extracted from the area.

Tonight @thepostbartottenham I'll be talking about some of the underground electronic music spaces I've been researching over the past four years. I'll touch on topics including autonomy, spatial appropriation, the Black Mediterranean, raving-as-theory, urban interstices, bricolage and the power of the espresso martini. Thanks to @starface999 for the invitation, @lydia.aphra for making the connection & @oliconner for logistical support.

Absolutely no concessions to geographical nuance in the route map on the Italian high-speed train from Paris to Aix-en-Provence.

I rarely write for magazines at the moment - I’m pouring all my words into a PhD thesis. But I couldn’t refuse my friend @johnlw ’s invitation to review The Face Magazine: Culture Shift for @eyemagazine_ while it was on at the NPG. I was the first person to work with @nicklogan on The Face (from issue #2) and I’m very grateful to @_paul_gorman_ for documenting my contribution (by reporting Nick’s kind words) in his book The Story of The Face. A turbulent and formative time!

THE MESSAGE IS THE BOTTLE: CLAES OLDENBURG & COOSJE VAN BRUGGEN IN MIDDLESBROUGH In the public square outside the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art – MIMA – is an unexpected sculpture of a seemingly-hollow, oversized, leaning bottle. It is a work by celebrated artist couple Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, constructed in 1993 & the only public sculpture by the artists in the UK. Steve Taylor visited the gallery to see an exhibition looking at the history, meaning & legacy of the project. Read & See More at: https://recessed.space/00261-Oldenburg-van-Bruggen-MIMA Link in bio ----- The Wikipedia entry for the public art produced by the husband-and-wife team of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen lists some forty-six works, almost all of them gigantic replicas of everyday objects made in durable industrial materials, beautifully painted or otherwise coloured, and placed outdoors in site-specific locations; the artists referred to them as their “large scale projects”. Some are situated in the public spaces of world cities such as Los Angeles, Barcelona, Tokyo, Paris, and Seoul; others sit in the grounds of art or design institutions in Kassel, Bilbao, or Weil am Rhein. And then there’s the one in Middlesbrough. At the heart of this smallish not-quite-yet-post-industrial north eastern English port town is Centre Square, within which sits Bottle of Notes, an outlier in the duo’s oeuvre not only in its location but also in form – a 22m high skeletal outline of the object, the only solid part being the cap. Centre Square occupies a sizeable break in Middlesbrough’s gridded street plan. It is broadly open, enclosing green spaces and an artificial lake, and surrounded by buildings in a mish-mash of styles – late Victorian Gothic, civic PoMo, 1970s local government Brutalism – which give the appearance of having been carefully placed side-by-side like Lego pieces or Monopoly houses by a giant. It’s an apt comparison; Jonathan Swift’s subversive, surreal play on size and scale in Travels in Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver was, according to Richard Cork, a longstanding “talisman” to Oldenburg. ----- @Mimauseful @persistentanomaly

THE MESSAGE IS THE BOTTLE: CLAES OLDENBURG & COOSJE VAN BRUGGEN IN MIDDLESBROUGH In the public square outside the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art – MIMA – is an unexpected sculpture of a seemingly-hollow, oversized, leaning bottle. It is a work by celebrated artist couple Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, constructed in 1993 & the only public sculpture by the artists in the UK. Steve Taylor visited the gallery to see an exhibition looking at the history, meaning & legacy of the project. Read & See More at: https://recessed.space/00261-Oldenburg-van-Bruggen-MIMA Link in bio ----- The Wikipedia entry for the public art produced by the husband-and-wife team of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen lists some forty-six works, almost all of them gigantic replicas of everyday objects made in durable industrial materials, beautifully painted or otherwise coloured, and placed outdoors in site-specific locations; the artists referred to them as their “large scale projects”. Some are situated in the public spaces of world cities such as Los Angeles, Barcelona, Tokyo, Paris, and Seoul; others sit in the grounds of art or design institutions in Kassel, Bilbao, or Weil am Rhein. And then there’s the one in Middlesbrough. At the heart of this smallish not-quite-yet-post-industrial north eastern English port town is Centre Square, within which sits Bottle of Notes, an outlier in the duo’s oeuvre not only in its location but also in form – a 22m high skeletal outline of the object, the only solid part being the cap. Centre Square occupies a sizeable break in Middlesbrough’s gridded street plan. It is broadly open, enclosing green spaces and an artificial lake, and surrounded by buildings in a mish-mash of styles – late Victorian Gothic, civic PoMo, 1970s local government Brutalism – which give the appearance of having been carefully placed side-by-side like Lego pieces or Monopoly houses by a giant. It’s an apt comparison; Jonathan Swift’s subversive, surreal play on size and scale in Travels in Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver was, according to Richard Cork, a longstanding “talisman” to Oldenburg. ----- @Mimauseful @persistentanomaly

The Cimetière du Père-Lachaise is the perfect place for an autumn Paris walk, and, yes, you can check out the tombs of Oscar Wilde or Jim Morrison. But the highlight for us was the resting place of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the polymathic French agronomist and pharmacist whose achievements range from the first smallpox vaccination programme to a technique for extracting sugar from beets. His crowning achievement, however, was his discovery as a Prussian prisoner-of-war of the potato as a ubiquitous source of cheap, easily produced nutrition for humans, rather than its up to then role as pig food. At some point in the 18C the potato had even been outlawed by French law; it was Parmentier who engineered its rehabilitation and nascent popularity; a raft of French dishes involving potato are named after him. People leave potatoes on his tomb - tokens of respect and gratitude for the spud and its central place in the French diet. Although Halloween (an unwelcome American import) is majorly overshadowed in France by the following day’s La Toussaint - All Saints - this hadn’t stopped the tomb being accessorised with fresh pommes de terre, many of them carved pumpkin-style.

The Florence courthouse - Palazzo di Giustizia - in the Novoli district is an unhinged postmodernist mashup; a very late instance of the style considering it was completed in 2012. As you can see in pic 3, the architect Leonardo Ricci included a cheeky reference to the Vasari Corridor, a feature that repeats itself all over the city.

Wuppertal is strung out along the valley of the Wupper, so venturing off the river on either side can involve a cardio workout climb. Hauling yourself up one of the steepest streets, Sadowastrasse, is well worth it to see its Wilhelminian mansions - Wuppertal has more of these late 19C/early 20C over-the-top statements of industrial and textile wealth than any other German city.