Exploring the disputed concepts of geoengineering and climate intervention: an excerpt from a review for New Socialist of Holly Jean Buck’s After Geogineering.
An essay written for the Fabian Society on making machine learning, renewables and other new technologies work for the collective good.
An essay for New Socialist on the political science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a focus on his most recent novel Red Moon.
Helvetica may still be the only typeface to have starred in a movie. But another great European font, which turned 90 this year, has had a still more profound impact on the world’s visual culture. An excerpt from a feature on the cultural history of the typeface Futura I wrote for The New European.
An excerpt from a feature for the September 2017 edition of boom saloon magazine. The great Victorian social critic William Morris feared the industrial age heralded the end of skilled workmanship. But do emerging 3D printing technologies open possibilities for a new era of craft, realised through techniques Morris could never have imagined?
A review of Owen Hopkins’s Lost Futures, a survey of 35 projects from across Britain, including housing estates, schools, libraries, factories, restaurants and power stations built from the 1950s to the 1970s, inspired by the remarkable resurgence of interest over the past decade in Britain’s post-war architectural heritage, a reassessment – after years of ridicule and neglect – driven by a chronic and worsening housing crisis.
Thoughts on two approaches to rebuilding the shattered cities of Syria.