The Ideas Bazaar

From the Air

There's a piece in this weekend's FT magazine about a project that was conducted in the last days of the Shah of Iran's rule - to photograph the country from the air: 

When Georg Gerster first flew over Iran on a business trip, he decided that he should somehow photograph the contours and colours that he saw passing beneath him. The Swiss aerial photographer bypassed officialdom by hand-delivering a request, in October 1975, to the Imperial Court in Tehran. Within weeks, Gerster was meeting an Iranian official anxious to know what kind of aircraft should be purchased. The Empress Farah, it seemed, had taken a liking to the project.

The pictures displayed in the piece are mesmerizing in a way that only pictures from the sky can be - but these seem to accurately portray the details of the landscape below and also to transform that landscape into a well detailed and slightly abstracted painting. For example:

Tabriz, June 13 1976
Tiered croplands in the highlands near Tabriz, the earthquake-prone home of the Blue Mosque

Some of the pictures put in mind of the Belfast-based artist Clement McAleer, one of whose pieces I was lucky enough to pick up for a rather good price at an auction last summer.

Lime Quarry - Clement McAleer, image courtesy of James Wray and Co. Gallery

The book ‘Paradise Lost: Persia from Above’ by Georg Gerster (Phaidon, £35) is published on March 21. 

Trading Places

From Peter Day's excellent World of Business podcast, and a long interview with Richard Florida (16.9.08), there was a fascinating little section on the nature of the work environment, managerial style and organisational success, sandwiched between high octane chat about cities and Detroit & GM vs. Toyota.

Specifically, Florida talks about a presentation he gave at Google's NY offices and how he has come to conclusion that once people have experienced this type of environment (only possible within a city context he suggests) and the Google style of managing people (see this previous IB post on Google and innovation) they wouldn't work in any other: "talented and smart people have a choice".

In this context he paraphrases management thinker, the late Peter Drucker -

You can't treat the knowledge worker like an industrial worker, you have to treat him or her like a volunteer whose commitment to your organization is contingent on them wanting to be there. You have to get people intrinsically excited about your organizations, you can't beat knowledge out of them, you can't pay money for knowledge out of them, you have to excite them internally. And the the city they live in, the physical space they work in, are a critical part of this picture.

Right on...

The Trees

Words and picture out of sync but great words...

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin

Murmurs of older people's stories

Murmur hits Dublin, with a focus on older people's oral histories of the docklands of the city:

[murmur] is a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. We collect and make accessible people's personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them.

The stories we record range from personal recollections to more "historic" stories, or sometimes both -- but always are told from a personal point of view, as if the storyteller is just out for a stroll and was casually talking about their neighbourhood to a friend.

It's history from the ground up, told by the voices that are often overlooked when the stories of cities are told. We know about the skyscrapers, sports stadiums and landmarks, but [murmur] looks for the intimate, neighbourhood-level voices that tell the day-to-day stories that make up a city.

Coffee as Metaphor

(Picture cred)

Typically perceptive piece in the FT magazine by Tim Harford in his Undercover Economist column. This one on coffee, as sold nowadays, as a metaphor for the nature of the economy and the nature of the way we need to view the micro decisions that shape the way the world is - with special reference to global warming heating:

The curious thing about the cappuccino, I observed, is what a remarkably complicated product it is. The milk came from a methane-producing dairy herd, probably somewhere in the UK but perhaps further afield. Behind the scenes stood the farmers, the cattle breeders, the manufacturers of refrigerated tanker trucks and countless unknown others. The coffee was steamed out of Brazilian beans using a machine of Italian manufacture. The machine was electric, although whether the electricity came from coal or gas or tidal power I have no idea. The complexities are endless.

It sounds like those who he was debating with were not impressed / non-plussed, so he continued:

I’d like to defend the humble cappuccino as a unit of analysis. Our human economy may have to change substantially to respond to global warming. Yet what is our economy if not the sum of all the cappuccinos?