{architecture} – Page 28

Weekend links 489

Typhonic Neural Tantra by The Wyrding Module.

• November 2019, as many people have been noting, is the month in which Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner takes place. At Dangerous Minds Paul Gallagher writes about the unrelated William Burroughs script whose title was borrowed for Scott’s film.

• More Ridley Scott (sort of): disco was still a big thing when Alien was in the cinemas 40 years ago, so Kenny Denton reworked Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien score into a disco single which he released under the name Nostromo.

• “The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature.” Umberto Eco on the cult of the imperfect.

• Jonathan Glazer has made a short film, The Fall, for the BBC but the corporation’s restrictions mean that (for the moment) it’s difficult to see if you live outside the UK.

• New albums at Bandcamp: Typhonic Neural Tantra by The Wyrding Module, and Emotional Freedom Techniques by Jon Brooks (aka The Advisory Circle).

• Hawkwind dancer Miss Stacia and the Barney Bubbles estate have made a line of T-shirts based on Barney Bubbles’ Space Ritual design.

• Walter Murch and Midge Costin on the art of cinematic sound design.

• Ivana Sekularac on the former Yugoslavia’s brutalist beauty.

• Congratulations to Strange Flowers on its 10th anniversary.

• Geoff Manaugh on the witch houses of the Hudson Valley.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 19 experimental horror films.

• Fall (1968) by Miles Davis | The Fall (2011) by The Haxan Cloak | Fall (2014) by The Bug (feat. Copeland)

Progressive American Architecture

The architecture in Gilbert Bostwick Croff’s book of building designs may have been considered “progressive” in 1875 but seen today most of these buildings scream “haunted house”, or at least, that peculiar American variety of the same as popularised by Psycho, The Addams Family and countless other films and cartoons. Whether old or new, to European eyes these houses have always looked strange, being an exaggerated 19th-century variation of certain forms of Continental architecture that you wouldn’t find anywhere in Europe. Croff’s examples are more exaggerated than usual with their elongated verticals and barbed ornamentation. Seventy years later, with the ravages of time and neglect afflicting their splendour, those that remained standing would look distinctly sinister amid the neat suburbs that grew around them, hence their transmutation into the archetype of the haunted house. Croff even predicts the future status of the style in a note on one of his designs: “The Shadows are intense and the effect very striking.” His book contains almost 100 different plans and architectural details. Browse or download it here.

Weekend links 486

Magma concert poster, 2017. Art by Jofre Conjota.

• The Dream Foundry is a new venture with a mission “to bolster and sustain the nascent careers of professionals working in the field of speculative literature.” This includes artists as well as writers, and to this end I was asked to answer a few questions about my work as a creator of book covers. I also offer some advice about visibility as an artist which I tried not to hedge with too many caveats. Related: my cover for The Resurrectionist of Caligo by Wendy Trimboli & Alicia Zaloga was one of the covers of the month at Muddy Colors.

• “…for a band that were so compositionally advanced, they were adept at producing primordially insistent and hypnotic rhythms.” John Doran on Magma (again), appraising the band’s music and history before presenting Christian and Stella Vander with questions from appreciative musicians.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 731 by Meemo Comma, mr.K’s Soundstripe vol 2 by radioShirley, The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XIX by David Colohan, and The Pumpkin Tide by Haunted Air.

• At Dangerous Minds: Roddy McDowall reads HP Lovecraft’s The Outsider and The Hound. Related: David McCallum reads HP Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and The Haunter of the Dark.

• “Mathematics is not unique in drawing out charlatans and kooks, of course…” David S. Richeson on cranks, past and present.

• “I plan to take psychedelics again…” Helen Joyce, the finance editor of The Economist, takes a trip.

• The City of Light and its shadows: Brassaï’s Paris.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Dennis Hopper Day.

• Paris (1958) by Perez Prado And His Orchestra | Paris 1919 (1973) by John Cale | Paris 1971 (1971) by Suzanne Ciani

Weekend links 485

Art by Augustus Jansson for the Queen City Printing Ink Company (c.1906).

• Much of my music listening for the past couple of weeks has been the compositions and soundtracks of the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, so these links are pertinent: Jóhannsson and ensemble live at KEXP in 2010, and a memorial performance of Virdulegu Forsetar from last year.

• “[Her] approach to making electronic music was hard work, too, but it was less about controlling sounds and more about surrendering to them.” Geeta Dayal on Éliane Radigue whose Chry-Ptus has been reisssued by Important Records.

• Safe From Harm: Tim Murray on how Coil helped AIDS awareness on VHS. The video in question, The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex, may be viewed at the Internet Archive.

• In the LRB podcast Ian Penman and Jennifer Hodgson discuss Penman’s new collection of essays, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track.

• “A land of fog and emotional nightmares.” Oliver Wainwright on why Britain booted out the Bauhaus.

• Mapping Scotland’s Grim History of Witch-Hunting by Feargus O’Sullivan.

• Long-Haired Stars & the End of the World: John Boardley on comets.

• My Will by Minimal Compact, a new version of an old song.

• La Danse Des Comètes (1970) by Nino Nardini | Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie 1 & 2 (1973) by Kraftwerk | Cometary Wailing (Valley Plateau) (1981) by Bernard Xolotl

Fantaisies Architecturales by Henri Mayeux

An entire book of architectural caprices is just the thing I like to see, so it’s a shame that most of the examples in Fantaisies Architecturales (1890) by Henri Mayeux are little more than sketches. Mayeux was an architect and a professor of decorative arts whose previous book had been a guide to the composition of decoration and its historical use. Fantaisies Architecturales applies a similar approach to architectural styles, offering a variety of historical pastiches as well as suggestions suited to stage designs and more contemporary buildings.

Mayeux’s inventiveness is considerable but he shares with many of the architects of 19th-century expositions a reluctance or inability to imagine anything that breaks with the styles of the past. Étienne-Louis Boullée’s colossal plan for a cenotaph for Isaac Newton (proposed in 1784) remains astonishing because its design is so unprecedented. The construction of the vast internal sphere may have exceeded the engineering limits of the time but the unadorned abstraction of the design is closer to the architecture of the 20th century than anything from the 19th. The Eiffel Tower had been built a couple of years before Mayeux’s book was published but it wasn’t until the Exposition Universelle of 1900 that Paris saw any other buildings that could complement its architectural novelty.

Continue reading “Fantaisies Architecturales by Henri Mayeux”