Matthew Shaw and William Trossell, the London-based duo known as ScanLAB Projects, continue to push the envelope of laser-scanning technology, producing visually stunning and conceptually intricate work that falls somewhere between art and practical surveying.
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London’s plan to grow up might go down, Elon Musk’s quest to make electric cars cool, and funny anti-Rob Ford ads appear in Toronto. Plus: Learning from streets in Vietnam, Paris, and Manhattan. All this and more in this week’s Urban Reads.
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Cities change: skyscrapers go up, row houses are torn down, neighborhoods gentrify, earthquakes destroy. Vintage photographs of cities can be fascinating in and of themselves, but the familiar unfamiliarity of these time-warped photographs are especially intriguing.
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The architects at London-based Buchanan Partnership have just built this tiny little flower stall for a shop in Ladbroke Grove, its CNC-milled exterior inspired by the rippling textures of electron scanning microscope images of plants.
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If we have to get advertising everywhere, is should all be as fun as this bus shelter ad in London, where they used augmented reality to make passengers believe that meteors were striking the city or a tiger was freely roaming through the street.
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London looks cool from street-level. London looks really, really cool from a helicopter—specifically from the Metropolitan Police Department’s Air Support Unit, a fleet of three that flies around providing support to the ground-bound team below. In between felony-fighting duties, the officers manage to take some truly incredible urban shots.
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It seems like every big city is facing a major housing crisis. But things are looking up in London: not only is the city planning an astounding 230 new towers that will fundamentally change the skyline, but an impressive 80 percent of those towers will be residential.
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Londoners! The luckiest amongst you will be treated to a bizarre new public event next week, hosted by culinary wunderkinder Bompas & Parr. On Friday, March 14th, before a live, paying audience, "food writer, pop-up chef and Sunday Times columnist Gizzi Erskine" will "swallow a medical grade pill-cam which will broadcast its footage live to video screens." Everyone there in attendance will thus watch, over the course of roughly two hours, as Erskine’s digestive system is filmed from within, live on screens for all to see.
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For most writers, the idea of a retreat is a wistful fantasy. That’s because many writers live in the city, and the subway doesn’t go to that perfectly reclusive cabin in the woods. So what’s a writer to do? Well, you could just build a cabin in your backyard, like this guy.
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In London this year, six well-known architects will jockey for a chance to build a large public building. Sounds pretty unremarkable, right? Except that the structure was already designed and finished—more than 150 years ago. Now, a Chinese property developer is holding a design competition to recreate it.
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