The Revs Program series of conversations about the past, present, and future of the automobile [Link] and [Link] ended yesterday with a session at VAIL, the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory. David Russell brought his 2CV, Neil Pering his 1966 Lancia and Dick Tuttle his Peel Trident (the futuristic bubble car made on the Isle of…
Author: Michael Shanks
designing for difference? Chris Bangle at Revs
Chris Bangle, car designer, was at the Stanford Revs Program this evening. He’s a superb speaker and came with some great stories, on the back of his notorious leadership of the BMW design team, about how cars might begin again to look more distinctive, when so many today look so bland, just the same as…
Alan Bennett’s satire – the National Trust and heritage
I am hearing a lot about Alan Bennett’s new play “People”, currently running at the National Theatre in London [Link] The setting is where he grew up – south Yorkshire UK, in a run down country house facing an uncertain future. What are it’s upper crust owners going to do to make ends meet? Sell…
What is (of our) human making?
I have joined the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam as part of a new exhibition program. This extraordinary museum [Link] holds the largest collection of contemporary art in the Netherlands. Experiments in temporary and often provocative exhibitions, rather than permanent displays of the collection, are the museum’s specialty, and it runs over twenty a…
automotive archaeology and the physiognomy of a car
Fred Simeone’s new book about the conservation and preservation of cars is out today, launched at Bonhams’s “Preserving the Automobile” auction at the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum, Philadelphia, – [Link]. Fred is prompting a reevaluation of car collecting with his support for sensitive preservation rather than restoration. There have been two preservation classes of cars…
an archaeology of the contemporary past
Today I’m in the Clark Center at Stanford, hub of the Bio-X Program – bioengineering and more. Steve Quake (Stanford Bioengineering and Applied Physics) is hosting a meeting of The Human Document Project – [Link] With us are Laura Welcher (Long Now Foundation), Tim D. White (Palaeoanthropology, Berkeley), Michael Fischer (Anthropological Sciences, Canterbury, UK), Andreas…
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