modernarchitecture.net

Thinking inside the box

Posted October 9th, 2008

Why you should never, ever leave a copy of the Harvard Business Review lying around where your six year-old can reach it. [More...]

This week we launched a new web project, Digital Karnak. Primarily aimed at college instructors and students, it documents in detail the ancient temple complex of Karnak in Egypt. The project makes use of various recent technologies such as Ajax and Google Maps programming to organize the database in spatial terms.

The early 20th century World-wide Web

Posted June 29th, 2008

The New York Times recently ran this feature on Paul Otlet, the Belgian information scientist and utopianist. You can also view a short documentary on Otlet that was made for Dutch television here. The article is a helpful overview, cribbing primarily from Françoise Lévy’s essential, detailed, but very hard-to-find film, The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World. It doesn’t, however, clarify what has always seemed to me the primary difficulty of Otlet’s project: the often confusing distinction between collecting original documents (in the form of paper or evidentiary objects) and cataloging them. Otlet’s Mundaneum did both.

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Décollage

Posted June 18th, 2008

Renovation work in the École Militaire métro station in Paris last Spring produced this found object — a promotional poster inviting visitors to the new Orly south terminal, inaugurated by de Gaulle in 1961. Translation: “Visit Orly: Come see an achievement of French technology.”