Christmas shopping is a nightmare (I know, you all know). Not only am I revolted at the amount of absolutely useless shit there is available to buy, I suffer a complete melt-down of creativity and then, when I finally get an idea, nowhere fucking sells it. The one decent present I managed to buy in Alabama for my mum was typically me in that it was too big to transport back to the UK given my suitcase size, a fact that totally passed me by from the day I bought it until the day I packed my bag. From now on, everything is being done over the internet, and all I will have to do is sit at home drinking tea and answering the doorbell. That way, I might even have time to make something for someone, for a change.
A couple of mini rants
This campaign to stop architects working on prison designs (via Design Observer ) seems rather inconsistent to me. OK, so prison might not work very well and for sure there are too many people locked up. But I would bet a lot of money that the kind of architects that would sign up to this boycott have never been asked to design a prison in their lives, and I am sure there will be no shortage of people willing to sign off drawings for new prisons, given that I can't see clients starting to boycott architects who design prisons. Hell, there are probably architects who only design prisons. Surely we should be actually looking for better prison designs. Will Alsop has, I have seen, being working on precisely that, with prisoners themselves. Isn't this a more intelligent and clever way to turn the prison paradigm around into something positive, using the power of good design to make an environment that allows prisoners to see some hope, experience some creativity and be stimulated ...
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