a new broom

What with the medium being the message an' all, I've pimped my blog and spruced things up around here using blogger's new advanced template editing. It feels a lot less constrained and generic now I think. I might simplify the links too as there are a lot but, then again, not enough. I've kept the links to other stories (as opposed to sites) because it seems a good way to flag up interesting articles without having to write anything about them necessarily. As for the content, well I can't change that I'm afraid. Not sure about the ee cummings style no caps but I hope you like it anyway.

Perhaps I should bolster up this brief post with a couple of links to things elsewhere worth reading. Firstly, via @markasaurus, there's an excellent post on Philip Johnson's Glass House (and the rest of his New Canaan estate) here by David Byrne, which is somewhere I tried and failed to go see when in the states at the beginning of the year. I've long been fascinated by Johnson's Machiavellian role within recent history of US architecture and his high-modernist updating of the picturesque stately home garden in Connecticut.

For reasons wholly to do with petty inter-FAT rivalry I don't think I've ever linked to anything written by one of my colleagues before but, you have to say, this is the bomb.