Tartary is slums and pomo Orientalism and post-Soviet social commentary and Roadside Picnic getting-melted-by-your-treasure, and constant war and endless treachery and uncaring thaumatocrats and incomprehensible honour systems and tyrants replacing each other on the banks of the Oxus.

But in true Massala movie style, Tartary is also GIGANTIC ( Read more... )

What do you get if you mashup Zak’s Metamorphosis Amber and the 1e PHB cover?

…deep in the uncharted wilderness the players break through a cruft of goblin nests to discover an enormous, multi-layered gallery filled with tableaux - statues locked in epic combat; miniature cities under attack by squadrons of flying carpets; glittering rooms peopled ( Read more... )

or; The Rats in the Walls.

So, the Indian National Library has just been found to house a sealed secret room, 1000 square feet in area? That nobody noticed before? I think it might have migrated from Cologne last year. They're wondering if there are skeletons or treasures inside. I'm betting it's filled with mysterious toxic gas, India's missing ( Read more... )

Last week, as a break from house-hunting, we took the kids to something you can't get over here: a more or less honest to goodness medieval castle in a hilltop village.* Only to find it was at the time playing host to a Shilpa Gupta exhibition.

Of all the conversations with my son that I haven't been looking forward to, the one about contemporary ( Read more... )

It's really not an internet meme until...
and. (considerably shorter and funnier)

previously.

Fantastic Journal takes on modern architecture as murder theatre. I am reminded of the case of Frank Gehry's Case Western building being deemed unsafe because it was hard to shoot down the corridors.

Sometimes desolation photographs well. Detroit.

Here's a fun game: can you tell the difference between vuvuzelas and modernist architecture in the press? Which do these classic tropes belong to, stadium horns or public housing?

• They're dangerous[5] uncontrolled, they cause injury,[4][12] and spread disease,[6][7] their noise is threatening[8][9][11 ( Read more... )

This is a fantastically interesting article about the Barnes gallery in Philadelphia, which is apparently being picked apart and its pedigreed works rehoused. I never visited it and I'm kicking myself now, because the gallery sounds like a really interesting gesamtwerk - an arrangement of artworks that was itself an artwork, and that has now been ( Read more... )

You Are Here shows where you, and others, have been previously in a gallery space. This seems more relevant to studies of human routefinding than the amazing cloth labyrinth. I'd like to see an airport-wide implementation, though. Or maybe inside Hagia Sophia or AMNH.

Which reminds me: here, the known universe. I'm not sure why we start in Tibet and ( Read more... )

I humbly propose that whatever remains of Bethlehem Steel Mill, Lackawana should be the first stop on the Corpses of the Rust Belt (no sandwich required) Tour. Partly for the photo opportunities, partly because, somehow, it escaped Erich Mendelssohn and Le Corbusier, and partly because, after all, what's reinforced concrete, or the skyscraper, ( Read more... )

Looks like an incredibly useful resource.

Although Jan Birksted on Le Corbusier and the Occult - apparently a conspiracy theory rant about Swiss Freemasonry - probably isn't the best advertisement for it. Pull quotes from the abstract:

...this is of course exactly what they all-from Frank Lloyd Wright to Le Corbusier via Cézanne, Jackson Pollock ( Read more... )