{ feuilleton }

Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow

Writing about Evoluon a couple of years ago I mentioned my affection for all those one-off Space-Age constructions with suitably science-fictional names: Evoluon, Skylon, Atomium, Space Needle… You could add Futuro to this list, a micro-building in comparison to the latter pair, with a similar flying-saucer styling as Evoluon. Futuro wasn’t a one-off design, however, but a prefabricated dwelling intended for mass production. The original plan by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen was for a plastic ski lodge that would be light, easy to assemble and quick to heat. The prototype he built in 1968 caught the imagination of investors, and other uses were soon proposed. The ski-lodge idea was thwarted by planning regulations but the Futuro was modestly successful all the same, and might have been a much bigger success in the United States if the oil crisis of 1973 hadn’t raised the cost of the plastics used in its construction. Enough Futuros were sold before production ended that many of them are now scattered around the world, some in better condition than others (see The Futuro House for details). One of the early models was bought in 1971 by the mayor of Todmorden, a small town in Yorkshire, which yielded the photograph below.

There’s no mention of the Todmorden Futuro in Mika Taanila’s short documentary film, Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow, but we do get to see many of the others in photographs, brochures, magazine features and period footage. Taanila made his film in 1998 when Matti Suuronen and some of the people who worked with him or helped promote the Futuro were still around to be interviewed.

The film isn’t greatly informative—we learn very little about the design or construction processes, or about potential drawbacks or problems—it’s more a snapshot of an era when industrial design was proposing radical solutions with new materials, plastics in particular. I find the whole idea of the Futuro inherently attractive, and I’d like to know why we don’t see more general-purpose architecture of this kind. Buildings with curved walls have never been popular as housing—furniture is difficult to site, and you can’t easily hang pictures or mirrors on a curved surface—but they can serve other purposes. The Futuro, like other buildings of its kind, gestures to a future that still hasn’t arrived.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Day of Expo 70
• Impressions of Expo 67
• Expositiana
• Evoluon
• The world of the future
• Space Needle USA

Los mitos de Cthulhu

Appearing on Spanish bookshelves this month is Los mitos de Cthulhu, a 576-page story collection which I spent the first half of this year illustrating. This is my third illustrated Lovecraft for Editorial Alma, with an introduction by ST Joshi and translations by Jesús Cañadas, and is easily the biggest to date in both size and page count. The book is a hardback with an obi strip, and includes a feature which Alma have been applying to other titles in this series, with a single illustration (in this case a panorama of the risen R’lyeh) that covers the front and back endpapers while also wrapping across the sprayed page edges. You may have noticed that sprayed edges have become a minor trend in the publishing world especially with big collections like this one. The edition of Frankenstein that I illustrated for Alma was given sprayed edges when reprinted at a larger size in the USA and Poland but Los mitos de Cthulhu is the first book I’ve worked on where I’ve had to create something specifically for this effect. What I’ve yet to see is another publisher spraying the page edges with a single illustration that runs inside and outside the book.

Where the interiors are concerned, the brief was to create ten full colour, double-page illustrations for a collection of twelve stories, with the choice of illustrations being left in my hands. This was obviously going to involve a lot of work but I was pleased to be given an opportunity to create a new series of digital paintings in full colour. In recent years I’ve done so much digital collage, monochrome drawing or vector illustration that the realistic painted side of my work feels unduly neglected. Some of the stories I ended up choosing were ones I’d illustrated before but a few of them I was tackling for the first time.

In rough order of completion, the story list is as follows:

The Call of Cthulhu

Not my first view of R’lyeh but this is the first one I’ve done where the ruins look like they’ve been underwater for a very long time. The book’s endpapers were created last, when all the illustrations had been completed. This required adding an extension to the piece above, a tricky business with a digital artwork but not as difficult as it would have been using physical media.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

This, on the other hand, is my first visit to Innsmouth. Since all these illustrations run across two pages I’ve tried to give both halves of each picture a point of interest while avoiding the placement of anything important in the centre. Among other things this has avoided my usual propensity towards compositions based on a central vertical axis.

Continue reading “Los mitos de Cthulhu”

Weekend links 851

Amber Light, a print by Phil Greenwood.

• “When I heard the term industrial music, I mistook it for techno and soon learned it was not.” Steven Heller talks to Chris Grimley and Alan Rapp about Industrial Music/Graphics: A Visual History of a Movement.

• Halloween approaches, as does Ghosts on the Cam. Editor Robert Lloyd Parry talks to Swan River Press about his latest story collection.

• “There we were, and we could be naked”: Stanley Stellar’s photographs are a record of gay life in New York from the 1970s onwards.

She researched cultures in which dreams delivered prophetic truth-telling messages from a higher plane. Like splashes and blots, dreams emanated from hidden forces, perhaps of the human mind, perhaps not. She had a metaphysical belief in their potential to put her in touch with supernatural beings, not angels or demons in any religious sense, nor the fairies or phantoms of popular belief, but spirits posited by mystical systems such as astrology and alchemy, otherworldly manifestations raised by enchanters and magi who had developed means of contacting them.

Marina Warner in a lengthy appraisal of the occult and Surrealist obsessions of Ithell Colquhoun

• The October catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the house that vanished, a literal ghost house.

• At Colossal: “Amok Island’s geometric murals teem with vibrant local flora and fauna”.

• At Public Domain Review: The Alchemical Transformations of the Mutus Liber (1677).

• New music: Trinitatis by Deaf Center; Ancient Future by Bana Haffar.

• Old music: Metal & Flesh by Hard Corps receives another reissue.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2026 at Ambientblog.

• “My one political film”: Ken Russell on The Devils.

• RIP Matt Howarth and Eva Marie Saint.

• Amber (1980) by The Residents | Amber (1996) by Little Axe | Amber (1996) by Zoviet France

Ghosts on the Cam

Presenting my latest cover illustration for Swan River Press, and another story collection edited by Robert Lloyd Parry:

Ghosts on the Cam is the third in a series of linked anthologies. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020) collected supernatural tales by members of the Cambridge University Chit-Chat Club, of which MR James was a leading light. Friends and Spectres (2024) looked more widely at works by MRJ’s friends outside the club. In the present volume the authors’ personal connections with MRJ are less strong, though his literary influence is just as powerfully felt. But what really binds the tales collected together here is the town of Cambridge itself, with its libraries and chapels and echoing cloisters, its murky river and misty streets. Many of the authors studied at Cambridge; several worked there; two were born there. In a series of introductory essays Robert Lloyd Parry looks at how and why a small market town on the edge of the Fens has produced so many writers of the supernatural.

A photochrom print from 1905.

As with the cover wrap for Friends and Spectres, we’re out in Cambridge at night, only this time the scene is a distinctly chilly one. The Cam is the river that runs through Cambridge, so a view of the river itself seemed unavoidable, especially when it’s crossed by the elegant Bridge of Sighs which connects two of the buildings of St John’s College. The name of the bridge derives from the Ponte dei Sospiri in Venice, a more appropriate borrowing than when applied to the Hertford Bridge in Oxford which also bears the name Bridge of Sighs even though it spans a narrow road. The bridge over the Cam was built in 1831, and is especially attractive for its Gothic styling which matches the college buildings while making the structure seem much older than it is. The bridge also benefits from having been built parallel to an older bridge close by, the so-called Kitchen Bridge (or St John’s Bridge), which has provided a platform for numerous photographers to capture the Bridge of Sighs from the middle of the river.

The abundance of photo reference was certainly useful but cameras can generate unforeseen problems when you’re trying to create a single extended view of a place which has only ever been photographed as isolated details. Most of the photos of the area concentrate either on the bridges or the mass of college buildings which are enclosed by a wall pierced by Gothic windows. David Hockney used to say that photographs never show you things the way they are, by which he meant that they don’t show you the world as it appears to our eyes: photo views are cropped more narrowly than our field of vision, and lenses of all kinds distort perspectives. Hockney’s dissatisfaction with photography led him to create his mosaic views of people or places constructed from multiple overlapping photographs. I had to do something similar (albeit much more precise) to achieve this view of the Bridge of Sighs which is wider and deeper than anything you’d be able to capture with a camera. The older photos of the bridge revealed that the group of trees by the bank have been pruned back several times, while the river wall had gone in the opposite direction, having once been overgrown with ivy. Since all the stories are set in the past I’ve restored some of these earlier appearances although the buildings themselves have changed very little since the bridge was built.

That’s a lot of words about architecture for a book which is really concerned with the supernatural. There is a ghost in the widescreen picture if you look carefully, possibly two ghosts. As with Friends and Spectres I leave it to the viewer to decide about the second figure.

Ghosts on the Cam will be published in December, and is available for pre-order here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Friends and Spectres
• Ghosts of the Chit-Chat

Leaving Home: Orchestral Music in the 20th Century

In which orchestral conductor Simon Rattle explores a century of music in much the same way that Robert Hughes explored a century of art in The Shock of the New. Or almost… It’s unfair to compare this more modest TV series to a landmark which was shot on film and with a budget large enough to allow Hughes to present his art history from locations all around the world.

If you’ve ever felt in need of an intelligent introduction to the challenges of orchestral music then Leaving Home is the ideal guide. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) in 1996, a time when the channel still was still devoting a considerable portion of its programming to the arts. Simon Rattle was a wise choice as a presenter, being a conductor with a less intimidating demeanour than some, as well as a proselytising nature. His intention here was to dispel the difficulty which many people still feel when faced with atonal compositions (twelve-tone music, aleatory music, serialism) by explaining how these musical forms evolved and why they’re not so difficult at all once you appreciate the reasoning behind them and the context out of which they emerged. Music is a curious medium in this respect. Where other art forms can start to feel distinctly old-fashioned and even thoroughly antiquated once a few decades have elapsed, there’s a lot of European music which is well over a hundred years old yet can still challenge and disturb an audience today if that audience is unprepared. Rattle’s explanations parallel The Shock of the New by dividing a century of artistic evolution into distinct modes or themes. The structure of the series and the music under discussion is as follows:

Programme 1: Dancing on a Volcano
Wagner, Prelude to Tristan and Isolde
Schoenberg, Transfigured Night
Mahler, Symphony no. 7
Strauss, Elektra
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, nos. 1 and 2
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, nos. 3, 4 and 5
Berg, Violin Concerto

Programme 2: Rhythm
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring
Varèse, Ionisation
Mahler, “Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Reich, Music for Pieces of Wood
Nancarrow, Piano Roll no. 21
Boulez, Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna
Messiaen, Turangalîla Symphony

Programme 3: Colour
Debussy, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Stravinsky, The Firebird
Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé
Debussy, Jeux
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, no. 3 “Farben”
Boulez, Notations
Messiaen, Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum
Takemitsu, Dream/Window

Programme 4: Three Journeys through Dark Landscapes
Bartók, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin
Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 4
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 5
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 14
Lutosławski, Concerto for Orchestra
Lutosławski, Venetian Games
Lutosławski, Symphony no. 3

Programme 5: The American Way
Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue
Ives, Decoration Day
Carter, A Celebration of Some 100 x 150 Notes
Copland, Appalachian Spring
Weill, “Lonely House” from Street Scene
Bernstein, “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story
Cage, Sonatas and Interludes
Cage, First Construction in Metal
Feldman, Madame Press Died Last Week at 90
Riley, In C
Adams, Harmonium

Programme 6: After the Wake
Strauss, “Im Abendrot” from Four Last Songs
Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw
Boulez, Le marteau sans maître
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, no. 4
Stockhausen, Gruppen
Britten, Serenade for tenor, horn and strings
Stravinsky, Agon

Programme 7: Threads
Berio, Laborintus II
Henze, Symphony no. 8
Gubaidulina, Zeitgestalten
Kurtág, Grabstein für Stefan
Birtwistle, Ritual Fragment
Turnage, Drowned Out
Knussen, Flourish with Fireworks

“Leaving home” in Rattle’s explanation is a phrase that refers to music leaving behind the rules and harmonic bases of the previous centuries. It also refers to various forms of exile and social change, departures from earlier orthodoxies. Much of the music explored here was created in years and nations beset by wars and revolutions, and, as Rattle notes, art created under such conditions can’t help but reflect its time. I have the book of the series by Michael Hall which is very good in its own way, filled with a more detailed history and musicology, as well as many photographs and paintings relevant to the compositions. What the book lacks is the music itself, and this is the real strength of the TV series. Rattle spends each programme either sitting at a piano or conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra who play extracts of all the pieces under discussion. Rattle is a proficient pianist which that means in the first couple of programmes he’s able to physically emphasise some of his talking points, in particular those instances when a composer deliberately deviates from expectation. Watching an orchestra perform a composition you’ve just heard described is much more effective than listening to a recording, especially when we reach the 1950s with extracts from a performance of Stockhausen’s Gruppen.

Continue reading “Leaving Home: Orchestral Music in the 20th Century”