Friday, November 10, 2017

The publisher as protagonist: Hating contemporary architecture

“There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.” 
~ George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession (courtesy of Tim Hulsey) ... read more


The curious influence of Samuel Moyn.  How did the deceptively boyish-looking historian at Yale became a role model to a generation of  young political thinkers?



Prosecution Futures? Multibillion Dollar Orders in Coinbase Trading Platform


Some mighty strange, and mighty big, orders in a Coinbase trading platform order book…

As Auric Goldfinger would say, “Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’”


Adventures in the Slavic Kitchen, a book of essays with recipes, by Igor Klekh, translated by Slava I Yastremski and Michael M Naydan









Skyscrapers and Land Values: Evidence from Chicago on the Costs of Building Tall Cities



Why “building tall” is not an answer to urban housing affordability

       In The New York Times today Damien Cave looks at Australia's Amazon Book Battle, as Amazon tries to enter the famously and protectively insular market. 
       Good to see the local independents seem to be doing well:

Big box stores are rare and independent bookstores are strong: Their sales accounted for around 26 percent of Australia's book business in 2015, according to Nielsen, up from 20 percent in the late 2000s, more than double the share for independents in the United States.


WHY YOU HATE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE




Australian non-fiction
and although I haven’t quite finished writing the review: Dragon and Kangaroo, Australia and China’s shared history form the Goldfields to the present day, by Robert Macklin.
And from overseas:


And if you don’t, why you should 


The British author Douglas Adams had this to say about airports: “Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of special effort.” Sadly, this truth is not applicable merely to airports: it can also be said of most contemporary architecture.
Take the Tour Montparnasse, a black, slickly glass-panelled skyscraper, looming over the beautiful Paris cityscape like a giant domino waiting to fall. Parisians hated it so much that the city was subsequently forced to enact an ordinance forbidding any further skyscrapers higher than 36 meters.
Or take Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Downtown Boston is generally an attractive place, with old buildings and a waterfront and a beautiful public garden. But Boston’s City Hall is a hideous concrete edifice of mind-bogglingly inscrutable shape, like an ominous component found left over after you’ve painstakingly assembled a complicated household appliance. In the 1960s, before the first batch of concrete had even dried in the mold, people were already begging preemptively for the damn thing to be torn down. There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs. The John F. Kennedy Building, for example—featurelessly grim on the outside, infuriatingly unnavigable on the inside—is where, among other things, terrified immigrants attend their deportation hearings, and where traumatized veterans come to apply for benefits. Such an inhospitable building sends a very clear message, which is: the government wants its lowly supplicants to feel confused, alienated, and afraid.
Hating contemporary architecture