As early as the first century A.D., Western cartographers and geographers began to speculate that there must be a large continent in the southern hemisphere, to act as a counterbalance to the large known landmasses of the north. Beginning with Magellan, explorers sailed out into the vast expanse of the Pacific hoping to find and […]
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Landscapes of Quarantine: Call for Applications
I’m very excited to announce my husband (Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG) and I will be hosting a design studio called Landscapes of Quarantine in New York City this autumn – with the resulting projects to be displayed in a public exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in early 2010. […]
Cupcake Gentrification
The unstoppable rise of the cupcake over the past five years has been analysed in terms of retro-food chic and nostalgia, the infantilisation of Western civilization, the triumph of appearance over substance, and even American political culture. After all, a cupcake is both democratic (one equally-sized cupcake each) and libertarian (there is no imperative to […]
Secret Meat
I first saw sot l’y laisse on a restaurant menu as a teenager, somewhere in south west France. I risked appearing the fool by asking the waiter what on earth they were, and even though I couldn’t quite follow his explanation, ordered them rather than make matters worse. […]
Digest | London Yields, Harvested
London’s Building Center hosted a daylong seminar at the end of May called London Yields: Getting Urban Agriculture off the Ground. The speakers covered a lot of terrain—so, instead of a full recap of the event, the following list simply explores some of the broader ideas, responses, and questions about urban agriculture that stood out […]
Atmospheric Intoxication
A former boutique storefront in London has become the temporary home for a pop-up bar with a twist: 2 Ganton Street is currently the U.K.’s “first walk in cocktail.” Created by Bompas & Parr (known for their earlier experiments with glow-in-the-dark jelly […]
The Water Menu
The concept of terroir has its origins in French winemaking, as a means to describe the effect of geographic origin on taste. As a shorthand marker for both provenance and flavour, and as a sign of its burgeoning conceptual popularity, it has spread to encompass Kobe beef, […]