Turntable that looks natural, sounds natural.

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Echoing the vinyl disc’s gentle concentric carvings, the Barky turntable’s base has something similar, but something that has been around for millennia. A cross section of wood taken from an ash tree, the Barky’s base has wooden age-lines that match perfectly with the shape and nature of vinyl, creating something that looks absolutely surreal as you begin to notice the biomimicry of sorts.

Each Barky (I kind of love the trivial name) comes with a slice of ash that’s unique with every piece, finished with a polyurethane coating and paste wax for that glistening polished look. Sitting atop it is a glass platter and blackened solid brass spike feet, along with an award-winning Rega Elys2 cartridge and super high-end Rega RB330 tonearm, giving you a turntable that sounds as natural as it looks. Sigh, I’m in love!

Designer: Audiowood

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An Interview with Christopher Schwarz, Part 2: The Anarchist Toolmaker

It’s 1996, it’s nighttime and Christopher Schwarz is underneath an office desk in Frankfort, Kentucky, sleeping. With both a Bachelors and a Masters in journalism and a few years of work experience, Schwarz is struggling to get his local newspaper startup off of the ground, and the workload demands overnight stays at the office.

Fast-forward to 2017 and Schwarz is underneath a Roman workbench, wide awake, inside the Saalburg, a reconstructed Roman fort outside of Frankfurt, Germany. “I spent a lot of time under that bench with a flashlight,” Schwarz recounts. He was studying the workbench’s construction for an upcoming book. The Frankfort paper hadn’t worked out, but Schwarz had achieved his goal of becoming a publisher with the formation of Lost Art Press.

Launching Lost Art Press and a tool manufacturing company, which we’ll get to in a moment, required more than finding the right piece of furniture to lie down under; in the gap between Frankfort and Frankfurt, Schwarz generated 21 years’ worth of content for Popular Woodworking, wrote nine books, taught classes at sixteen schools in five countries and appeared in countless videos produced by himself, PW, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, ShopWoodworking.com and others.

Schwarz has not only wielded a lot of tools in that time but, partly inspired by the “frustration at the bench” he described in Part 1 of this interview, also applied his journalism training to learn about how tools are made. He put this knowledge into practice in 2015, when he and a couple of friends launched their manufacturing venture, Crucible Tool, whose mission is “To make good tools that we honestly need.”

“We don’t make precious things for collectors,” the Crucible Tool mission statement explains. “There are no serial numbers or limited edition this or that. And we don’t make tools that someone else already makes really well.

Crucible Tool’s Improved Pattern Dividers.

“Instead, we make tools that have been overlooked or desperately need to be improved or refined.”

Here in Part 2 of our interview with Schwarz, we discuss using tools, making tools, furniture design, anarchy, accountability, photography, and what he hopes folks in the future will do when they look back on our work.

Core77: For the uninitiated, can you talk about what the allure is of using hand tools?

Christopher Schwarz: Oh, I hated hand tools when I was a kid. My family had a farm in Arkansas, and we built our first house [there] with hand tools. I went to college [and thought] “I’m never doing that again.” And of course, as soon as I got out of college, I started taking classes, and it was in handwork.

What I’ve found about handwork is that it is the expression of skill. The machines that we have are great, and I love machines too, but a lot of times [the machine is there] so that somebody unskilled can do an operation. And that’s great, there’s no problem with that. The problem is when designs start to be made around the limits of the machine, which is I’m sure something that the Core77 readers run up against all the time, like “Well, our CNC won’t handle this or that.”

Well, the answer has always been handwork. If you can use handwork, and you have machines at your disposal, and you don’t let the machines dictate your designs, then you’re pretty much free to design whatever you can think of. That’s the beauty, the [freedom conferred by] handwork.

It’s also great if you can…figure out how to make a machine help. I’ve got no problem with [the situation where] you [possess] hand skills, and [are] not limiting your designs to something that a machine can spit out. I really think you need both, if you want to be a really good designer for furniture.

Case in point: Here Schwarz experiments to see if he can make saddling out a seat faster by starting with a drill and a Forstner bit… 
…then hitting it with a scorp…
…and finishing up with a travisher.

Let’s talk about Crucible Tool. It’s not an easy thing to bring a new tool into production, what inspired you to take that leap?

Well, I’ve been writing about toolmaking since I started writing about woodworking, and took a very deep interest in learning about steel, and casting and everything, so that I could be an informed journalist.

And what I found is that there were some tools that just needed to be made. A lot of toolmakers are fantastic toolmakers, but they’re not woodworkers. I teamed up with some other friends of mine, who are toolmakers and also woodworkers, and we’re slowly, gradually bringing tools into the world that are what we want to have at our bench.

The patterns for Crucible Tool’s Iron Holdfasts.
Pattern in the drag, ready for sand.
The pour.
The magic moment.
The magicker moment.

We’re not trying to take over the world; it’s more like, “I want this damn mallet, but no one will make it for me in the way I want it made, to this hardness, with this length of handle,” et cetera. So we make it, and hopefully other people will think it’s good too.

For people who might mistake your focus on historical objects as just slavishly looking backwards, Crucible produces a pair of pattern dividers for which you designed a new hinge, no? A new hinge mechanism.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And it was informed by past designs, but is a move forward. I’m not a puffy sleeve guy, and I don’t wear weird underwear. Historical reproduction is not what I’m into at all. I try to be very…I don’t want to use the word contemporary, but I’m always trying to push forward, and not just trying to reproduce the past.

Crucible Tool’s Improved Pattern Dividers.
You can sharpen the tips to your liking, and the hinge allows you to dial in your preferred level of friction. In two generations, when the steel has worn a bit, all your descendant needs to do is tighten it and it’ll be good as new.
Five easy pieces. 

That’s the same way we are with the tools. We have modern materials. We can use them, but we don’t want to abuse them. We want to make sure that they’re used appropriately so that these tools will last forever, instead of the crap that we find at the home centers now, where design is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, made by somebody who just really doesn’t know what a screwdriver or a chisel does.

In addition to the pattern dividers, Crucible currently makes a set of design curves and iron holdfasts. What else is in the pipeline?

We’re working on a mallet right now. We’re just waiting to get the handle prototype back from a factory. This is a classic example of what we’ll normally do: So in England, they would use a two-and-a-half pound metal mallet head with a short handle for everything. For mortising, for dovetailing, for setting holdfasts, for putting assemblies together and taking them apart. But it never [caught on in America]. They called it a lump hammer over there. I fell into using one of those several years ago, after working in England, and fell in love with it. So we’re designing one, a modern one. I think people will love it; everybody who uses it in the shop goes gaga for it.

We also want to do some more measuring tools. We’ve found that as people’s eyes get older, it becomes harder to read those six- or 12-inch rules, which have black numbers on a silver background. Machinists have a great solution, which is to make the numbers white on a black chrome background–but their rulers are measured in hundredths of inches, so that doesn’t help us. So it’s making woodworking rulers that are easier to read, but use [standard 4R marking] instead of silly hundredths.

You just reminded me of something, that’s to do with what we call “universal design.” I follow a hand tool woodworking group on Facebook, and have read updates from older woodworkers suffering from arthritis and reduced vision. So I’m really interested in the potential for tools designed for people whose physical abilities are declining due to aging. Because it’s heartbreaking that by the time they reach the age where they have all the experience to produce great work, now their body is starting to give out. So I do think there is a market for that kind of stuff.

Oh, absolutely. We’re all getting older, none of us are getting younger. I’m 49, and I’m just starting to deal with some of those issues. So something else that we’re developing is a mechanical pencil lead that you can use when marking out dovetails, tenons, whatever. But what’s interesting about this pencil lead, is that it fluoresces under UV. So that if you have a UV light [or even] a cheap little UV flashlight, all of a sudden you can see a 0.5 millimeter line like it’s on fire. So I’m totally into that stuff, and that’s a good example of how technology can make it better for all of us in the long run.

Whoa. Should I not mention that pencil lead idea, because that’s pretty brilliant [and someone is bound to steal it].

Thanks. No, mention it, that’s fine. We’ve got the formula, we’re just trying to find a factory that will do it for us. No, like I said, I’m open source. We’re not going to patent it, so if somebody else beats us to the market, that’s great too, because it’s great to have it out there.

Both Lost Art Press’ books and the tools from Crucible are manufactured in the U.S.A. Have you run into any manufacturing challenges?

Well, we’ve got some other stuff that we’re still trying to find [capable manafacturers for]. There’s some hollow casting techniques that were really common in the 19th century, but it’s very difficult to find foundries to do that sort of work today. That’s a problem we run into all the time: “Yeah, we used to be able to do that, but we’ve forgotten.”

[We’ve designed] a multi-tool handle, and it’s this open casting and you can put a variety of tools in there. You can put everything from a nail in there to use the tool as a scratch awl, to a knife blade, to a file. It has a million little uses for turning simple objects into very useful tools, but we’ve got to find somebody who can make hollow castings.

Like much of Core77’s readership, my background is in industrial design. And the preface that you wrote for “The Anarchist’s Design Book” really resounded with me, as I think it would with many of our readers. I won’t paraphrase and butcher it here, but it drove home the point that we can build durable objects for ourselves rather than buying mass-produced disposable junk, specifically in a furniture context. Can you talk a little bit about that preface, and what inspired it?

Yeah, the idea of that book, and the idea that runs through my personal furniture work, is that it’s silly for us as designers and builders to imitate gross, ornate, crap furniture designs that were driven entirely by status and money. You look at the history of furniture, or of any basic object that we use, and the designs started out very simple. You can go back and look at 11th century furniture, and you’d think that Hans Wegner designed it. The lines are clean. It’s very spare. It’s about angles, comfort, simplicity to build, and robustness.

But when money first enters the equation, then you have makers who have patrons, are being patronized by rich people. So they start making their pieces more ornate, so that it looks better [than the patron’s neighbor’s] highboy. So that becomes the standard. Then technology comes along, and they find a way to make the ornate stuff for the more common people, [so another maker has to top that for the rich patrons]. And now you have this cycle that just [repeats] over and over, where the rich people determine our design cues, and have in furniture forever.

Whereas throughout human history, we’ve had a silo of furniture that nobody writes about, that is pretty unchanged from Egyptian times up until now. It was the furniture that normal people like you and me use, not the ultra rich. And like I said, it was this very spare aesthetic, I wouldn’t say spartan, but it’s not this ornate crap.

Discovering that sort of furniture and seeing that lineage of 2,000 years of really basic design, and its vernacular–that’s not a great word, but it is the right word–is what inspired that book. It lays out the principles that these pieces were built on, which are much simpler than the really complex ways we build furniture now. And taking those designs from the 11th century, whether it’s Italian, Spanish, Moorish, and building them, bringing them into the modern time, and they’re shockingly modern. I’ve got a 14th century Italian table in our showroom [photo below], and when people see it they think it was something that came out of tomorrow, and it’s not.

The idea behind the book is that there were these construction principles that all of us can use. And the democratic part about it is that you don’t have to have a crapload of tools or a crapload of experience. You don’t have to have seven years under a master in a European system to build this stuff. You don’t have to be good at math. You don’t have to be good at much, you just have to want to build furniture.

And so the book lays out the basic designs that I found, and how to make them using very simple tools. One of them is basically an oversized pencil sharpener, and a drill, and a knife. You can bring in some electric tools, but you don’t need very many. And you can produce stuff that is really pretty good looking, I think. That’s the basis of the book, and that’s guided my work for a long time. And the book was the first time I had the guts to talk about it in public.

You referenced anarchy in the first part of the interview, and are of course known for having written “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” prior to “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Anarchy is a word that can easily be misconstrued. Can you talk about your concept of it?

Sure. By the way I’ve found it’s really difficult to sell, to people in Europe or on military bases, your books when they have “anarchy” in the title.

American anarchism is not the violent sort of anarchism that is associated with European movements. The father of American anarchism, Josiah Warren, is actually from Cincinnati here, very close to where I’m sitting. American anarchism is basically a distrust of large organizations. It’s not seeking to overturn them. I think that American anarchists are very practical, in that you know you can’t run a world without any sort of organization, but it’s a tendency to avoid working with, associating with, or having contact with large governments, large corporations, large churches. That something bad happens when you get a certain number of people into a group. They stop acting like humans, and they start acting like something else.

The way that I work in my life, is I try to limit my contact with all these sorts of people. I pay my taxes, and I’m a good citizen, and all of that. I’m not a bomb throwing person and don’t believe in violence at all, in fact most American anarchists are total peaceniks. It’s more just trying not to get ground up by the corporate culture, and the consumerism, and that’s what American anarchism is.

Of course, every American anarchist is different. I’m sure there’s an American anarchist out there right now throwing things at this article and using it to wipe himself because he hates what I’ve just said, but that’s the beauty of it.

This might be veering off topic a little bit, but it’s a very interesting subject. What do you suppose it is about large groups of people that brings out the crazy?

I think because you can make decisions without accountability. If you’re a car company, you can think “Should we have a recall, or is it cheaper to just pay the fees when people die?” [Without accountability] you can have those conversations, whereas as an individual, you can’t even fathom that. “Is human life important?” Of course it is, and you can’t put it in monetary terms.

You can justify going to war for things that are really amazing. The organization gives you the tools to kill people, and sure there are some individuals who may push you into it, but it’s really having that huge organization that’s like, “Yeah! Hey, we’ve got tanks.” So this becomes a very easy decision, [whereas] I’m not declaring war on Newport, Kentucky. I can’t do that. So I think it’s [the being shielded] from accountability.

Circling back to tools, an underrated one: The camera. You recently launched a website of your own work, and in addition to the pieces themselves I was struck by the photography, which is stunning. Your background is in journalism, not photojournalism; what drove you to ensure the quality of the photography?

Photography has always been important to me. It’s another part of the whole media equation, understanding how to run a publication company. I used to have a darkroom when I was a kid and my first real job was processing studio photos in a photo lab. So I do most of my own photography and have a friend that does some of it.

Being in media you know that images are gold. They’re as important as the words, and sometimes more important. So we’ve taught all of our authors how to do it. And you don’t have to be super talented to take good, basic photographs of your work; it’s just understanding a few basic principles, how light works, what backlighting is, what a key light is, how diagonals work. [Get those down and] you can take really amazing photographs.

The rules are stupidly simple. A lot of times, it’s using fewer light sources and simpler compositions. No need to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

We’ve touched on this topic a bit, but just to beat a dead horse: What is your take on trends, and how can we, as a society, fight fashion?

Dressing like me would be a good start.

[The delivery was so dry I didn’t realize he was joking.] Oh, I don’t mean fashion as in clothing. I mean–

No, no, I know what you mean. I think it’s important to have an appreciation for the past. Not that you’re going to dress up like them, or you’re going to have furniture that is like them. But I think that if you have to build your own stuff, you’re not going to do really crazy, outrageous, ornate stuff, but something far more practical. Whereas, if you have somebody who’s like, “Look, I just want the best, I want to spend, I have a $100,000 budget for this project”–well, you’re going to pull out all of the stops.

So having an appreciation for what other people had to build, and then building it yourself. That’s how I inoculate myself from trends.

And this isn’t new, this idea’s not mine. If you look at Kaare Klint and a whole foundation of Danish modern furniture, which we think of as this radical change from what came before, it was actually very much looking back at English and Chinese furniture and saying, “How can we take the best of those, and produce something that reflects today?”

And that’s the best for me: Taking the best of the past, and smoothing it out for what we need right now. And hopefully, if we do that, then maybe somebody will look back at what we do, do the same thing, improve upon it, and make something beautiful.

__________

And that concludes our interview with Christopher Schwarz. By the way, here’s something I didn’t expect when I first contacted him requesting an interview. In this video explaining the design and manufacture of the Crucible Tool holdfast, listen carefully to the things he says and explains about materials, manufacturing techniques, design and, while he never says “UX,” the clear priority on the user experience, even to the detriment of marketability:

Based on that video, if you didn’t know who he was and I asked you to guess his profession, I’m willing to bet you’d say “Industrial designer.” 

Guess I should’ve kept going with that alphabet thing in Part 1.

______________

Where you can follow Schwarz’s work:

– The Chris Schwarz Blog on Popular Woodworking. “Your typical workaday blog, what I’m doing in the shop, shop tips, stuff like that.”

– The Lost Art Press blog. “More about the hardcore research that I do, the books that we’re publishing, and my personal work.”

– The Crucible Tool blog. “Pretty straightforward, [whatever] we’re doing at the foundry or at the machine shop, making tools.”

– Lost Art Press’ Instagram.

– His website of personal work.

– His YouTube channel.

Steelcase's VP of Design on Designing a Carbon Fiber Alternative in a Startup Environment

Steelcase recently announced SILQ, an office chair inspired by the sleekness of aerospace designs and the high-performance of Paralympic prosthetic legs. While the chair itself is beautiful and the inspiration is clear in the final result, SILQ’s uniqueness lies in its revolt against the corporate design process, stagnant work days and luxury materials. 

Steelcase VP of global design and engineering, James Ludwig, worked with just four other designers on this project. They kept their work a secret for months, literally locked away in a small room within Steelcase’s massive Innovation Center. 

With motion around the workplace becoming an increasingly popular trend, the five-designer team behind SILQ recognized a hole in the market. They knew they needed a beautiful chair that wasn’t meant to be sat in for an entire day, but a flexible one that can be a place of landing while running to and from meetings and taking standing breaks—the new way of work. SILQ’s form factor eliminates many of parts used to create typical office chairs, which means it heavily relies on material to create motion.

After designing the chair in carbon fiber, a material that made sense based on its strong, lightweight qualities, Ludwig and his team realized carbon fiber was too expensive to reach a wide enough audience. This realization sparked the idea to create a new, cheaper polymer that mimics the high-performing qualities of carbon fiber.

We sat down with Ludwig to chat about SILQ’s fascinating design process and the “aha” moment that lead to his team’s material breakthrough:

Core77: Let’s delve right into SILQ’s design process—it’s insane that you were able to lock your team in a room for months to carry out this secretive design project.

James Ludwig: We came out for snacks.

Well, that’s good to hear. 

It’s a metaphor for, I would say, creating context for a fragile idea to become more robust and ready to be set free in the wild. We literally took a small room in the Innovation Center, which is about 50,000 square feet and is quite an impressive space. But, our space for this project was something like 10 feet by 15 feet. We literally did put paper on the windows and a lock on the door, and only two of us knew where the key was hidden. It was really to protect the idea more than it was to lock us in a room. 

While we would go about leveraging all the resources that we have around us, which the whole organization provided, it was also about freeing the head space and creating time on people’s calendars to not have to worry about the things that they might’ve on a day-to-day basis—going to meetings with people who finance and the typical things we do in product development. Letting the idea really drive the process rather than the process drive the development of the idea.

When I say locked us in a room, we did have that private space. One of the designers who was on the project actually said, “Yeah, I didn’t go to a meeting for a year.” That was so amazing, first of all, that we were able to do that. And second of all, the impact it had on being able to go deep on the idea and develop it. In a way, this is not so common in a corporation.

You had the vision for SILQ about ten years ago—was it frustrating for you to wait this long to bring it to life?

I would say the great part of my job is we have over a hundred projects ongoing every year in my studios, so there was no shortage of things keeping us busy. And we were doing some really interesting, innovative things along the way, even in the seating category. I would say it was more of a nagging sense of something there without being able to solve it than it was frustration. 

When you talk to designers and architectural people whose roles are to take some big foggy problems and make them more tangible, it’s often an accumulation of small insights from unrelated experiences that make them have that, sort of, “aha” moment. I guess in a sense, it was the confidence. We were patient. We accumulated the capabilities and the knowledge, but there was always that thing in my mind that was a little nagging sense of wondering when would we be able to get back to this. That then drove us to say, “Well, no one’s ever gonna ask for this. So, we just have to do it ourselves.” 

A common theme throughout this process for you was “material becomes mechanism”. Can you speak to the meaning of this and how you applied it to SILQ’s final design?

There’s something magical that happens when materiality becomes a big part of the equation—what it looks like, how it performs and what it’s made of. I hold the principle of these three things coming together in a unique way pretty highly in our design philosophy, and we were wondering if we could do that in a more complex system. I had previously only seen that in simple systems like the contact lens or the heart stent.

There is a virtue in simplicity, and machines don’t generally embody simplicity. So, the nature of a material-based solution really sat in a sweet spot for us—how can we fuse the notions of simplicity and performance? Once you get there, you’re like, “Well, there has to be something new. We can’t just elaborate on the same old exquisite mechanisms, machines.

Is that what led to you and your team’s decision to develop this new material?

Yeah. I think what happened along the way was, our previous knowledge of carbon fiber was sort of the genesis of the initial idea and solution. The invention was being able to solve this technical challenge of complex motions supporting the human body at work with something that’s material-based and elegant. We were able to solve that challenge with the use of carbon fiber.

That was the moment of invention, but I think the real, true moment of innovation was when we realized, “Well, there is a premium to carbon fiber, and while we know we can sell something like that because it’s a compelling proposition, innovation is really defined by impacting lots of people’s lives”. So, the drive to create this new material process was really the drive to turn this invention into a true innovation and be able to sell it at scale. Obviously, we’re a business and price defines how many people we can reach. We needed to move from a premium solution to a more mass market solution, and that was what the drive to invent the new material was.

What would you say is the main thing you learned from this whole experience?

I feel like here I am. I’m in this large corporation who has a leadership position, and we built our brand on all of these things, and yet the ability to play startup was so key to this process. Every traditional leader in any business right now is faced with numerous disruptors, and some of those are coming from different places, from non traditional competitors. We’re no different in that instance. So, when we’re together as an executive team, there is very little resistance to try new things, in the sense of disrupting ourselves from the inside. So, that was key.

There’s always a why, a what and a how when you solve a problem. So, for me, why was this important? Well, the nature of work is changing. It’s not about one person, one desk and one chair. People are moving around. They are looking for an ecosystem of spaces—the best place for me to work at any given moment in the day, when I need to focus or when I need to collaborate. We saw that as a key opportunity, and if we would’ve solved this in ’08, it might have been too early. So, that’s the why.

The what, obviously, is the chair. We were able to create something that really fell into this sweet spot of recognizing the need for a a new intuitive.

The how was also a big part of my job, which is that we need to continue to reinvent, not just the things we do, but how we do them. If you were in one of my one-on-ones with my boss, the CEO, we’re always trying to figure out how I can spend time working with my teams to discover new ways to do things so that we don’t become stagnant as a big company. The experiment in how to do things differently led to this new solution, and that was, for us, almost equally as exciting.

What do you think SILQ and this new material mean for the furniture design industry? 

I have a hypothesis that in every product category or even at an industry level, there are these things that I call threshold moments, where after you move through them, it’s hard to look back and say, “I could be excited about that again.” Look at the telephone or even how we communicate—when I was growing up, I was making telephone calls on dial phones, and then the touch tone phone was the big innovation. And, now look at the devices we’re using to communicate with. Aside from maybe some projects that are done with irony, if you think of the world-changing communication device, it’s going to be hard to imagine having to dial or push a bunch of buttons while these experiments exist. I think in the same way, in our industry, it’s going to be hard to look back and be excited about sitting on machines.

Time will tell, right? I think it’s a threshold moment. For us, we’re excited about this, but we’re all also excited about, now, the knowledge and the platform to be able to work on new material-based ways to replace these machines in our environment. We have enough complexity around us, so it’s time for a new simplicity.

***** 

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

SILQ will be available in the new high-performance polymer as well as carbon fiber. Learn more here.

Link About It: Philips Lighting Will Make Video Games More Immersive

Philips Lighting Will Make Video Games More Immersive


Razer and Philips just announced a partnership that plans to make gaming experiences so immersive that the room in which they’re played come to life. Philips Hue globes will connect with all Razer Chroma-enabled devices, and reactive lighting will……

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ListenUp: The Saxophones: Just You

The Saxophones: Just You


As divisive as “Twin Peaks: The Return” was, each episode’s musical performance introduced viewers to an auditory environment only Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch could create. “Just You,” penned by the aforementioned masters, left a resounding……

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"Will Amazon's HQ2 actually be good for whatever city wins the race?"

North American cities are fiercely vying to secure Amazon‘s second headquarters, but will the retail giant really improve the culture and infrastructure of the area it finally chooses? Aaron Betsky doesn’t think so.


As the competition for the second Amazon headquarters heats up and the Republican’s war on cities intensifies, we have to wonder whether attracting that investment will actually be good for whatever city wins the race.

The question the preliminary results raises: What makes a city attractive? Is it their landscape, or is it what humans have made out of that place? Does the actual physical city matter less than the physical and information infrastructure, the financial and regulatory systems, and the political state of the place? Or, is it ultimately the people who live there, their experience, levels of education, and ability to work together?

What is remarkable to me about the choices Amazon made is how little the attractiveness of nature or climate seem to matter. Whatever else Columbus, Indianapolis, or Toronto might have going for them, it is not a sublime landscape. For that you would have to turn to San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, or Phoenix, none of whom made the list.

Instead, the common denominator among the largest group of finalists is that seven of them are along the so-called Acela Corridor: they are part of the 500-mile-long Boston-New York-Washington metropolis. The next largest grouping is cities in the plains of the Midwest or South and, whatever might be attractive about Nashville, Columbus, Toronto, or Atlanta, it is not a dramatic landscape, a forgiving climate, or a sense that they could be a new Eden.

Amazon and its ilk would like everything they can get for the cheapest possible price

What seems to count is a trade-off between cultural and intellectual capital, and price. The Acela Corridor sites offer the former, while the heartland choices provide cheap land and labour, along with a lack of restrictions, ranging from regulations to NIMBYism, that make it easier and thus cheaper to operate in those areas.

This is not to say that you can’t find a few nice ravines in Washington DC (Rock Creek Park), or that Pittsburgh doesn’t rise with some elegance out of the confluence of three rivers, but that is not at the core of their attractions. What matters is what is embedded in their institutions and highways.

This should not be too surprising. Cities are artifices that we as humans make at a scale that they create a second reality. It would seem to me that the ideal city, at least from a capitalist point of view, would be one that was as cheap and flexible as possible, while having good universities, schools, museums, libraries, and theatres.

However, there is a problem, which becomes clear when you realise that none of the finalists offer such a combination. It appears that price and quality of urban infrastructure cancel each other out. There is a race to the bottom, parasitically turning on infrastructure to – as Amazon does in its practice – leach value out of everything the capitalist organisation touches. Amazon and its ilk would like everything they can get for the cheapest possible price, but they might have to choose.

The cities on Amazon’s list that have the most infrastructure are not cheap as places to work or live

By its very nature, investing in those institutions that educate us, that increase smarts, and that create a highly developed shared culture that will make workers more happy and productive, costs a great deal of money.

In our American system, that money has to come from the place itself. Paying for such investments will, in turn, mean high taxes, while also creating certain fixed nodes and focal points that will restrict sprawling development. The cities on Amazon’s list that have the most infrastructure are not cheap as places to work or live.

This is, of course, not the case in many places around the world. In parts of Europe, central governments decide on the allocation of resources, and can favour certain cities over other. You can see this mechanism at work most clearly in the former industrial and mining cities of the Ruhr or England’s Midlands, where massive outlays of tax monies have produced revitalised areas that are now modest growth nodes.

However, even there structural costs remain high, so that you still tend to see more investment in the Irish or Slovak countryside, where favourable national tax laws, good national education, and cheap land and labor attract industry and corporate back offices.

If Amazon arrives in one of the places offering massive tax abatements, it will not invest in the infrastructure

Over time, you have to assume that the amount of people and money that companies such as Amazon moving to such places as Indianapolis, Nashville, or Columbus bring with them will help them build on the existing, not exactly non-existent infrastructure (Columbus is, after all, the home of Ohio State University, while Indianapolis is the site of several major museums) so that these cities will be able to attract ever more businesses.

That seems to be the logic used by cities and states that offer massive tax abatements in the hope of attracting corporate behemoths. The problem is that Amazon wants to use such places without paying for them, the same way it used infrastructure to keep its delivery prices close to zero.

Thus, even if Amazon arrives in one of those places, it will not invest in the infrastructure. The only silver lining we can hope for is that, over the course of decades, in-migrating funds will make urban landscapes better.

Amazon will get its goodies, and we will pay for them

That is certainly the calculation of those cities giving away their investment in culture, education, and infrastructure for a low price through tax abatement. The Acela Corridor choices, meanwhile, hope that somehow tax increments will eventually allow them to shore up their crumbling backbone and cultural offerings.

I have no doubts that certain parts of the downtowns will, as they have already done in the case of most of the non-East Coast finalists in the Amazon race, become safe for the kind of high-paid people who will take some of the jobs here.

The effect, however, will remain limited. Out there in the featureless sprawl, these companies will further generate as they bring an ecosystem of suppliers – and back office and support workers who need cheap housing, education, and places to work – to an area with a lack of investment and of good services.

Not to mention the dearth of a beautiful and resourceful landscape, which will mean that the vast majority of inhabitants will be condemned to live in the sort of anti-urban expanses that are so deadly to a shared and meaningful culture. Amazon will get its goodies, and we will pay for them.

The post “Will Amazon’s HQ2 actually be good for whatever city wins the race?” appeared first on Dezeen.

RIBA cautions architects about MIPIM misconduct

RIBA president Ben Derbyshire has warned architects attending the MIPIM property fair to adhere strictly to the body’s code of conduct, following the sector’s involvement in the Presidents Club scandal.

In response to the call for the RIBA to take a stronger stance on sexual inequality, the president called on members attending the world-leading property networking event to become whistle blowers for inappropriate behaviour.

“There have been some reports regarding inappropriate behaviour at MIPIM in previous years. The RIBA takes this matter extremely seriously and strongly condemns any form of sexual harassment or discrimination,” Derbyshire told Dezeen.

He made the comments in the wake of the Financial Times’ expose of sexual harassment at the Presidents Club, which has focused attention on MIPIM.

In previous years there have been numerous allegations of inappropriate behaviour by delegates at the notoriously male-dominated networking event, which is a key opportunity for architects and industry professionals to secure work.

Derbyshire urged architects to adhere to the professional body’s code of conduct, which demands members act with integrity and respect the rights of others. It also calls for compliance with the Equality Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, race and disability.

“We are committed to ensuring architecture and the wider construction industry are inclusive and we have strict requirements for our members through our codes of professional conduct,” said Derbyshire.

“All members attending MIPIM as part of the RIBA delegation are expected to report any inappropriate conduct to RIBA staff and MIPIM organisers immediately.”

Derbyshire said in his role as RIBA president he would play a pivotal role in eradicating inequality in the sector.

“I am determined to play my part in driving change and to support the RIBA’s ongoing measures to eradicate inequality,” he said. “We have mentoring resources to support female staff including a Women into Leadership event and the nationwide roll-out of our mentor training launched last year.”

“Our Practice Role Models project shines a light on exemplar practices and our Employment and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policies commit RIBA Chartered Practices to providing non-discriminatory and inclusive working environments, upheld by our Code of Practice, complaints procedure and sanctions,” added Derbyshire.

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Latest Dezeen Mail features futuristic photos of Tokyo and a mirror-covered office tower

The latest edition of Dezeen Mail includes Blade Runner-inspired photographs of Tokyo’s metabolist architecture and a proposal by Dutch firm MVRDV for an office tower with an interactive, mirrored facadeSubscribe to Dezeen Mail ›

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Drone footage offers aerial vantage of Bogotá's major architectural projects

Graphic designer Camilo Monzón Navas has used a drone to capture architectural sites across Colombia‘s capital city Bogotá, including projects by notable architect Rogelio Salmona, a bullring and a domed planetarium.

Navas came up with the idea for the Aerial Facades photoset while viewing the city from the top of the 10-storey apartment block he lives in. He said the impressive viewpoint prompted him to explore his home further and set out with a Mavic Pro personal drone to capture it from above.

“From the zenith views, the structures of the city’s roofs, streets, parks and buildings are seen in a way not usual for all of us, because most of the time we see the world from the floor,” Navas told Dezeen.

While images of densely packed developments and busy highways offer an overview of city life, Navas’ series also focuses in on some of its most impressive architectural landmarks. These include buildings designed by Rogelio Salmona, who is regarded as one of Colombia’s most important 20th-century architects.

“They are places of cultural and tourist interest in Bogotá, and many of these structures are architectural heritage of the city,” he said.

Salmona’s Virgilio Barco Library is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site and praised for its integration into the surrounding parkland. Navas’ image from above shows how the green space both wraps the red-brick library and slots between its assortment of volumes.

The Colombian architect’s Towers of the Park, a residential complex in the city’s Macerena district, also features in the photoset. Officially known as Residences The Park, it comprises three red brick towers and plenty of public green space.

The photography shows how the blocks are arranged in a curve around the city’s Santamaría Bullring – a feature that Navas says might otherwise go unnoticed from the ground.

“What most struck me about these constructions is the beauty and geometry that we often let go unnoticed by the speed of the city itself, we do not stop to contemplate a little more what the city offers us,” he said.

The bullring, completed in 1931, is also a structure of significance and was named a National Monument of Colombia in 1984. Other prominent buildings in the series include the domed Planetarium of Bogotá, which also functions as a cultural centre.

Navas, who is continuing to document the city on his Instagram account, aims to capture as much as he can in one day, but is often forced to stop on account of Bogotá’s weather.

“The challenges are often climatic challenges,” he said. “In Bogotá it rains a lot and I usually take all my photos at the same time, but many times I can not continue capturing images with the constancy I would like.”

He then edits the photographs in Photoshop, heightening the contrast and tones. For example, strong orange hues in the image of the bullring contrast surrounding green areas, while amplified contrast in an elevated shot of the city’s high-rises highlights the sun breaking through the clouds.

Navas also sometimes combines images taken from eye level and above, resulting in impossible folded landscapes like those seen in 2010 sci-fi movie Inception.

Drones are proving increasingly popular with architectural photographers. Recent projects have seen architect Mariana Bisti provide a tour of Hong Kong from above and videographer Chang Kim document the Chicago Riverwalk one year after its completion.

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Jim Gaffigan Hilariously Hijacks a Stranger's Tinder Profile

On the latest episode of “Tinder Takeover,” Jim Gaffigan takes over a volunteer’s Tinder account…(Read…)