BigShinyThing

Conceptual/installation artist Rebecca Murtaugh codes/covers her bedroom with Post-It notes. The various colours represent different materials, such as wood, paint and fabric.

Via the Insurgent Muse blog.

More of Rebecca’s work is viewable on her site.

Under Construction by designers Us and Us, invites viewers to:

…have your say about what kind of buildings and amenties would improve city life, as well as sharing your thoughts on favourite buildings, haunts, spaces and places - and your least favourite. The designers will be on hand to help you make your mark with a kit of cardboard, pipe cleaners, plasticine, stickers and wire - in the best Blue Peter tradition - as well as brewing you the requisite cup of tea. Be as ambitious or a simple as you like, just so long as you get your point across. Will the public’s view of architecture in our city be the same as the people who are mapping out the future of our city? Will an alternative secret London appear? The final map of London will be photographed and sent to all who participate.

BST visited this week and took the photo above as well as installing our own Big Shiny Thing roughly in the location of Stratford — see our Flickr photostream. This Friday, the entire map will be destroyed as vistors are invited to jump up and down on it.

Under Construction is at The Architecture Foundation’s Yard Gallery, 49 Old Street, London EC1 until 30th September 2005. Tonite’s event starts at 7pm.

The copy reads:

MISSING: levels 26-31. Last seen between levels 25 and 30. If you have any information regarding their whereabouts, please contact www.gravestmor.com as the lawyers on level 33+ are growing anxious…

From Gravetsmor, via Bldgblog Blogspot.

HM Redsands was built in 1943 to counter German warplanes. It was abandoned in the 1950s but a decade later became home to a number of pirate radio stations. Today is stands derelict and unloved apart from a group of enthusiasts who have vowed to save the structures for posterity.

The fort, designed by Guy Maunsell, is made up of seven towers. Each of these has a two-storey house (36 ft by 36 ft) on top of four 65 ft concrete legs. in 1943, the towers, complete with crew, were towed out at spring high tide and hand-winched on to the seabed. They were then linked by steel walkways.

The fort was home to 265 men on six week tours at a time. Not surprisingly, the solitude led to a spate of suicides after which knitting was instituted as a hobby to keep the men busy. In total, the army forts in the Thames shot down 22 planes and 30 flying bombs but amazingly were never hit.

Both The Times and BBC Breakfast have picked up on the story in recent weeks. Meanwhile, artist Stephen Turner is planning to spend six weeks on one of the towers. He will be keeping a diary in order to produce a book about the experience, funded by a $42,000 Arts Council grant. He says on his website, “The Seafort Project is an artistic exploration of isolation, investigating how one’s experience of time changes in isolation, and what creative contemplation means in a twenty first century context.”

We shall see.

Icon Magazine reports on how a new legal brothel in Antwerp has called in the interior designers. Antwerp introduced a ‘tolerance zone’ in 2001, and developer Franky De Coninck commissioned leading Belgian designers Quinze & Milan “creators of atmosphere” to fit out the first purpose-built brothel in the new zone.

The result is the Villa Tinto, a 51 room state-of-the-art brothel. A safe working environment was the first priority for Quinze & Milan after consulting with the sex workers who would be using the building. The brothel boasts a state of the art alarm system, safes to store cash, and en suite bathrooms. It even has an on-site police station. The workers asked Quinze to also install red and black neon lights that would illuminate their bodies in the display windows but also hide blemishes. They also requested discreet tilted mirrors on the floors of their windows so they could vet clients as they approach and decide whether to open their windows for business.

De Coninck approached Qunize after the designer wrote an article in a Belgian magazine bemoaning the lack of design aesthetic in modern day sex work, “It’s the biggest business in the world, it’s always seen as not so beautiful. But if you show the business part of it, I think you can build an erotic style.” De Coninck has since asked Quinze to collaborate on another brothel in Barcelona.

This sanitised vision of a legalised sex trade is in stark contrast to the brothels documented in Timothy Hursley’s book,Brothels of Nevada: Candid Views of America’s Legal Sex Industry (pictures below). Nevada has had a legalised sex industry since the 1970s and Hursley’s photos of sad rooms and nylon nighties seem a million miles away from Quinze’s slick vision.

What a difference a few decades and a design aesthetic make.

In this case, a derelict station master’s house off Brick Lane is transformed with a lick of paint and a huge blue rabbit. The same lovely building has recently turned up the Babyshambles video ‘Fuck Forever’.