Danny MacAskill – Bike rider extraordinaire….

Another video and TV related post, I’m afraid (I do do other things with my evenings, honest) but I saw this guy on TV last night and just had to put his video where I knew I could find it easily.

It speaks for itself really, bike skills like I’ve never seen before…

There are lots of other videos of Danny doing crazy stuff on YouTube (this one filmed in Edinburgh is pretty awesome) but for me, the jump from one train track to the other with a 180 turn and the trick where he rides along the cable in the video below are truly amazing.. In fact I’m still not wholly convinced they didn’t use trick photography……

Banksy TV & Logorama

We watched Banksy’s “Exit through the gift shop” last night on Channel 4, as the artist himself took control of the station for a few hours.

Not seen the film before, and I’m not wholly convinced it wasn’t a complete set up, designed to both take the piss out of the art buying public whilst simultaneously upping the status of both Banksy and Shepard Fairey (he of the ubiquitous Obey design)…

If you haven’t seen it, the documentary approach of the film revolves around the story of Thierry a French cameraman who started filming graffiti artists “back in the day”, before a chance meeting with Banksy provided him with an opportunity to make a film about the street art/ graffiti movement. The film as it turned out was so atrocious that Banksy himself persuades Thierry to give up film making and become a graffiti artist …. which he then does so successfully that he sells one million dollars of work over the week long period of his first ever show…

All very enjoyable, but I thought it all seem rather contrived, all fitting together rather too nicely… The internet is full of theories of course, but in the end it doesn’t really matter, Banksy wins either way…

If it was genuine then it was a good story and well worth watching. If it was a hoax, and the LA public fell for it, buying derivative work from an unknown artist, then more fool them. But you could also argue that if it was a hoax and the work really was by Banksy and Fairey, then paying a couple of hundred dollars for some of their work is probably a bit of a bargain…

Part of Banksy’s programming for Channel 4 last night, included this rather excellent short called Logorama,  in which almost every aspect of the beautifully crafted and animated film is a recognisable corporate logo…

See how many you can count before the land falls into the sea and everyone dies…

The Post Office Tower

I saw one of Andrew Marr’s excellent Making of Modern Britain programmes again over the weekend, the one covering the turbulent times between the mid 60′s to the mid 70′s, when Messrs Wilson and Heath were constantly trying to get one up on each other (sound familiar?)

One aspect that caught my attention was the Post Office Tower, as this iconic building formed a major part of my Architectural Diploma project when I was at the old Polytechnic of Central London back in the early 90′s.

The Post Office Tower was conceived in the mid to late 1950′s as a solution to the increasing number of telephone calls being made across the country. Construction began in the summer of 1961, and 4 years and £9m later, the tower was officially opened by Harold Wilson, who took full credit for this perfect technological example of Labour’s White Heat of Revolution.

The Tower was truly a marvel. The tallest and most expensive building in Britain at the time, it was designed to house a combination of transmitting equipment and receiving aerials as well as public observation decks and the Uk’s first revolving restaurant (initially operated incidentally by Butlins). It also had flexibility designed in so that new technologies could be accommodated…

By the early 90′s with the advent of the unimagined digital exchanges however, much of the main body of the tower was empty and the restaurant had been closed for many years due to security reasons.

The umbrella approach to our final diploma year, under the tutelage of one Kevin Rowbotham, was parasitic buildings: the re-using of all or part of an existing structure and its services to create a new form of “plug-in” architecture.

We all had to choose a London building to infect, and as one of the most prominent buildings in London, it struck me as perverse that the BT Tower (as it was by then) was also the most inaccessible and secretive. I actually phoned up and wrote to BT (on PCL headed paper as advised) trying to organise a trip to the top for me and the rest of the year, but with no success. So I chose the Tower and looked at transforming it into something more appropriate for the times…

Armed only with blind naivety and encouragement from the tutors, and through a combination of fractured coloured glass, external lifts, recycled telephone directories, spray paint, collage and lighter fluid transfer of photocopies, I set out to transform the tower into a brightly lit and highly visible reminder of what it is I thought our nation did best, by creating the worlds first vertical shopping centre…

No don’t laugh, this is what architectural education was like back then (probably still is actually). Who cared whether it worked, or how practical it was, or whether it would benefit your professional career, as long as it was a strong idea, slightly controversial and Kev could get a good image out of it….

You can decide that for yourselves, as I’ve managed to unearth some of my final scheme images… and remember this was all done BC (before computers) when machines were very expensive, and few and far between, so all those lines were drawn with a pen….

There are a number of excellent sites dedicated to the PO Tower here, here and here (I do like Jonathan Glancey…)

I’ve also found some pretty cool film made at the time the tower was opened. It’s in two parts, but the first part below is the best…..