Butterfly encore

On Tuesday I took my son Oliver to see Richard Wilson’s Butterfly at the Wapping Project. Maybe I didn’t read the publicity properly but I really wasn’t expecting anything so exciting. We talked to the artist and pestered his crew as they coaxed a beautiful, shiny light aeroplane from an unrecognisable lump of crushed aluminium and steel – the plane at the centre of a web of colourful tensioned straps. It was beautiful and quite moving.

I took lots of pictures – I put most of them here. I also used Apple’s iPhoto to create a 640×480 Quicktime movie (1.7 Mbyte) from the stills (Juliet helped me edit it!).

New York decides

I don’t want to gush but I’m really thrilled for NYC (and for the rest of us emotional New Yorkers) that the City settled on Libeskind’s replacement for the Twin Towers. A perfectly measured memorial to the lost as well as a thrilling and contemporary reworking of the skyscraper myth for the 21st Century. Brilliant. I want to be in the long queue to ride the lift to the viewing deck on opening day. Thanks to Demos for the link to this visualisation from the NY Times. Click on ‘Envisioning Downtown’ once you’ve read the article.