industry
Dark satanic mills
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?Monumental structures
These disused gas cylinders occupy a site on the outskirts of Stockholm. For the first ten years after moving to London, the view west across the train tracks was of a similar pair of monumental structures, transfigured by every sunset. One has since been dismantled to make way for the expanding national and international railway stations.
Savage, hostile, and cruel
Some may find puzzling or distasteful the parallel I am drawing between the study of nature and the study of technology. After all, nature is good and good for you, whereas everyone knows that technology is ugly, evil, and dangerous.
A few centuries ago—say, on the American western frontier—a quite different view prevailed. Nature was seen as savage, hostile, cruel. Mountains and forests were barriers, not refuges. The lights of civilization were a comforting sight. We took our charter from the book of Genesis, which grants mankind dominion over the beasts, and felt it was both our entitlement and our duty to tame the wilderness, fell the trees, plow the land, and dam the rivers.
Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
A Book by Brian HayesThe Factory Photographs
A Book by David LynchI love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.
Scales of cities, scales of software
An Article by Linus the SephistAmerican cities seem like a product of industrial processes where older European cities seem like a product of human processes. This is because most American cities were built after and alongside the car and the industrial revolution – the design of cities took into account what was easily possible, and that guided the shape and scale of everything.
Software has similar analogues. There are software codebases that feel much more industrially generated than hand written, and they’re usually written in automation-rich environments fitting into frameworks and other orchestrating code.
…But despite the availability of cars, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of European, human-scale cities, because ultimately cities are places humans must inhabit and understand. In the same way, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of hand-written codebases even in the presence of heavy programming tooling, because ultimately codebases are places humans must inhabit.
Age of Invention
A Series by Anton HowesI’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the lives of the individual innovators who made it happen. I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers. My research explores why they became innovators, and the institutions they created to promote innovation even further.
Life-friendly design
An Article by Ralph AmmerI suggest that our industrial heritage has been an important preliminary stage. The next step is to carefully examine and implement design values that nurture our joy of life. Just like our “industrial design” illustrated our industrial values, a life-friendly design could express our biophilic values.
This optimistic design approach differs from naive nostalgia or fear of extinction. There is no way back to nature but only forward to nature.
In the Eye of the Beholder
Haven't you noticed?
I remember my mother sitting me down at the age of about five with pencil and paper to draw an acacia tree in the yard while she busied herself with her own sketchbook.
After a while she came over to see my efforts. “Splendid! But haven’t you noticed how the trunk narrows as it rises? And see how the branches flatten out sideways, not like that oleander over there, where they all go up at a steep angle. Now don’t rub that one out, just do another drawing to compare with the first one.”
Wordless questioning
The comparison of forms raises questions and drawing can be employed as a wordless questioning of form; the pencil seeks to extract from the complex whole some limited coherent pattern that our minds and eyes can grasp. The probing pencil is like the dissecting scalpel, seeking to expose relevant structures that may not be immediately obvious and are certainly hidden from the shadowy world of the camera lens.
Outlines
Photography teaches us that the very act of putting a line around the edge of an observed object is an artifice. Such outlines rarely appear in photographs, or, for that matter, in nature, and yet…and yet?
An outline sketch that bears little relationships to the so-called objectivity of a photograph might actually transmit information to another human being more selectively, sometimes even more usefully, than a photograph.
If the brain is unlike a camera in actively seeking outlines, there is the strong implication that “outline drawings” can represent, in themselves, artifacts that may correspond more closely with what the brain seeks than the charts of light-fall that photographs represent.
Agents of thought and experiment
The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment. Photography has a great future, but no matter how much ancillary wizardry photography accumulates, it will not be in competition with “drawing” in the broadest sense of that term. There will always be a role for exploration by the hands, encumbered by no more than a piece of ocher or a stick of charcoal.
Its practical utility is as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore.