“Despite being surrounded by busy roads, Russell Square gardens remains an oasis of tranquillity amid the clamour of modern London. Designed by Humphry Repton at the beginning of the 19th century, it lies in the heart of Bloomsbury, whose Georgian brick terraces and garden squares were described by the art historian Sigfried Giedion as an architectural composition that is the equal of St Peter’s Square in Rome or the Place de la Concorde in Paris.
Squares are arguably London’s most significant contribution to the development of urban form (there are some 300 in Greater London).”
Photo: Russell Square garden, in Bloomsbury - one of my favourite places in London!
Read the rest of my review of The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town, by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, at the Guardian.
Simon Ings writes:
P D Smith throws off Blade Runner-ish gloom to celebrate the city as carnival. “Weirdly, science fiction writers have often imagined human needs being met in dystopian cities, such as the glass surveillance society in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We,” says the author of City. “There is far more optimism and even fun to be had in the urban visions of architects. Most of Constant Nieuwenhuys’s Situationist city, New Babylon, was given over to public space which people could subdivide however they wanted and use for ‘radiophonic games, film games, psychoanalytical games, erotic games, games based on chance and on coincidence’. Ron Herron’s robotic megastructure could actually walk: this city could really follow the good times.”
More: Arc explores the future of fun
City of the Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, designed by Santiago Calatrava.
“Cities are the ultimate and natural expression of human evolution, of human dreams and needs; they are as complex as the people who build them, as the planet itself… In their architecture and their social organisation they are capable of reflecting the very best in us.” — Michael Moorcock
![Hong Seon Jang :: Type City - “a sprawling metalopolis seaport made of tall lead type buildings and boulevards bisecting the city into a topographic and typographic landscape.”
Letterology [HT @StanCarey]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3tgtfhgyD1qd3zcao1_500.jpg)
Hong Seon Jang :: Type City - “a sprawling metalopolis seaport made of tall lead type buildings and boulevards bisecting the city into a topographic and typographic landscape.”
Letterology [HT @StanCarey]
The German zeppelin Hindenburg flies over Manhattan on May 6, 1937. A few hours later, the ship burst into flames in an attempt to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey.
More images: 75 Years Since The Hindenburg Disaster
“The character of a city comes from its people. And that’s why the best cities are multicultural and cosmopolitan: there’s a unique atmosphere when people are constantly negotiating the differences between cultures and languages. I hope what this book shows is how positive that is, and how urbanism isn’t a new thing. It’s our natural mode of living.”
Me talking about urbanism, Dubai and my new book, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age. Read the interview at Vision.
From ‘Street Life in London’, 1877, by John Thomson and Adolphe Smith:
“The accompanying photograph represents a group of labourers who are in the service of Mr. Dickson, the well-known florist. Their business is strictly limited to flowers, and they never touch either vegetables or fruits. Nevertheless I am informed that there are five hundred flower stalls at the wholesale flower market, and, at a rough computation, two thousand men are engaged to bring and grow stock for these stalls; while another two thousand men find employment in distributing the flowers to their various purchasers. Only a small proportion of these latter are seen at Covent Garden during the daytime; it is in the early morning that they congregate on this spot, and they are soon scattered again to all parts of the metropolis, laden with plants of every description.”
See more of Thomson’s wonderful photos at the LSE Digital Library, which also has mapped the images and created a PDF of the book to download.
“Everyone deserves a little bling on their 75th birthday. That’s what a UC Berkeley astrophysicist is bestowing upon the Golden Gate Bridge on May 27: a ‘bright bauble … like a diamond necklace on a beautiful woman.’” — Golden Gate Bridge to be topped with mirrors
Unbuilt London: Tall Towers And Strange Skyscrapers
“Red oak seedlings in Central Park grow up to eight times faster than their cousins cultivated outside the city, probably because of the urban heat island effect.” — On an Urban Heat Island, Zippy Red Oaks
![Great images of Kowloon Walled City, before it was demolished in 1993, by Greg Girard in collaboration with Ian Lamboth. Daily Mail [via @urbanverse]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3nrz7iNwP1qd3zcao1_500.jpg)
Great images of Kowloon Walled City, before it was demolished in 1993, by Greg Girard in collaboration with Ian Lamboth. Daily Mail [via @urbanverse]
“The walls are like the billboards, the blackboards of the community. I think the evolution of those things is really interesting.” Camilo José Vergara
Camilo José Vergara’s photographs appear at the New-York Historical Society in two rotations: “Harlem: The People” until June 10 and “Harlem: The Place” from June 13-Sept.