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Supercar Sunday

Driving back from breakfast on Sunday morning I noticed a Lamborghini in front of me and then one behind me. A Lambo sandwich.

Nothing that unusual in West London tbh.

Driving further, I noticed more "supercars" and then the street became full of young men taking photos, selfies, filming on GoPros and flying camera drones. I had driven straight into Supercar Sunday. In my beaten up Prius.

I think supercar sunday is a fairly regular community meeting up in fancy cars, but this one was sponsored a bit by HR Owen who provided some extra fancy cars to swell the ranks.

This is a textbook example of one of those phenomena you know nothing about but when you stumble upon it's glaringly obvious why and how it would exist. And they are everywhere online, obviously.

The Lambo behind me was driven by Yiannimize who's a famous Supercar YouTuber. 700k subscribers. Also driving around was Lenny The Geeza. 142k followers on Insta. It's hard to tell whether they make a living out of this and the own the cars, or they work somewhere related to these cars and just drive them around and document it on social media for fun.

Who cares. It seemed to me like everyone was having a nice time.

Watching one of the YouTubes I spotted me driving through the crowd in my beaten up Prius, as shown in the diagram below.

More pics here if you're into that.

Anyway.

 

Modern life is faded

 

We live near the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre and I’ve started swimming there.

There is much to be written about this architecturally and socially. This is just a quick blog post, so lower your expectations accordingly.

 

 

Designed by LCC Architects Department under Sir Leslie Martin between 1953–54 it opened in 1964 as part of some grand plan. It is still a fantastic facility to have locally and it provides a valuable service but it has been neglected with hints everywhere to its former ambitions, like the rest of the park.

 

 

It’s a fantastic looking building from the outside and full of big ambitious spaces inside. As wikipedia says, “It has a particularly interesting interior: there is a central concourse with a complex and delicate exposed concrete frame supporting the roof, which has a folded teak lining”.

Participating in any sporting activity there is a very odd experience.

 

 

The commercialism needed to keep it going results in moments which when combined with the usual faded glories of municipal sports centre jar with the modernist vision.

 

 

 

It’s an incredibly strange budding to put a sports centre in. It feels more like a concert hall, and when I discovered LCC designed the Festival Hall that made a lot of sense. There’s the same large scale but also the odd disconnected nature of the buildings and the slight unease that you’re lost wherever you are. There are three swimming pools; one you have to leave the building to get to.

 

 

What is needs is a billionaire modernist architecture fan to restore it and then operate it in a way it’s still viable to go swimming for for £2.85.

 

A broader interaction

"The design of profitable digital products + services can limit your world view to an extremely narrow perspective."

Required reading for design students and professionals. Good article pointed out by Russell. Make you think.

 

 

Great gifs too.

 

Everyday Contemporary Luxury

 

I was hoping someone would do this apartmentadvertising.wordpress.com My money was on Bridle. We need some London ones.

Found via Edwin Heathcote, the way they market flats (apartments) is so odd. It’s usually three words that sound vaguely aspirational but don’t make any sense.

Always words real people don’t say in those combinations. Made more insulting by the way the words (and usually the buildings) have no sensitivity to the community around them.

 

Like most marketing but even worse.

Ove Arup at the V&A

Went to see the Arup exhibition. Good, worth a visit, too small like all these design exhibitions. Russell, you would like it.

It’s in that funny little space to the left as you enter the V&A. It’s very well made, I guess well “engineered”. They’ve thought harder than usual about how you move around a small space.

There’s a good bit on collaboration and multi-disciplinary teams. Thing is, there always is in these exhibitions about designers from the 50s and 60s. They always talk about collaboration and working in multi-disciplinary teams. They don’t always call it that, but they naturally just work with whoever they need to achieve the end product.

"Our point of view is in favour of teamwork rather than stardom. The data, the knowledge required, can be found not in one person, but in a number of persons."

 

They also always talk about working closely with a client. When Kenneth Grange spoke the other day he told the story of how his early Pentagram colleagues always questioned why he was never in the office. He replied he was always with his clients, what were they all doing?

These designers, the ones they make exhibitions about now, have always worked on big, ambitious projects. And to do that you have to collaborate. Right?

Anyway.