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@Barbican_City_of_London

With its striking 1960 geometric zigzag roof, this

With its striking 1960 geometric zigzag roof, this began life as The Lemon Tree Motor Inn on a site developed in the 1920s as the Mountain View Auto Court, more commonly known as a Motel. According to local historian Terry Ryken, back in the day ‘motorists were usually plagued with flat tyres and radiator boil-outs on the 100-mile journey from Los Angeles, which made Santa Barbara a convenient overnight stop. Mountain View offered sleeping cabins for a dollar a night, or a campsite for 50 cents which included use of restrooms and laundry.’ Photo with thanks to @designexplores

Czech Technical University, Prague. Photo with tha

Czech Technical University, Prague. Photo with thanks to @panoskarageorgos The TU’s alumni are a pretty heavyweight crowd, like the new design:) To pick out one, Václav Havel, a titan. Czech statesman, poet and playwright, and former dissident. He noted, ‘You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.’ A leading light in the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ when Czechoslovakians took to the streets and brought down the authoritarian communist leadership. Havel became, by popular choice, the last President of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then, the first President of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected President of either country after the fall of communism. To read more about the dissident experience - check out fellow dissident and friend, Ivan Klima’s two-volume memoir Moje šílené století My Crazy Century.

Abbot’s Cliff sound mirror. Designed by Major Wi

Abbot’s Cliff sound mirror. Designed by Major William Sansome Tucker, acoustic mirrors were part of the WW2 coastal defence system, they worked by picking up sound waves from enemy aircrafts which helped detect their flight trajectory (later put out of business, in effect, by the radar system). Tucker, a Physics Lecturer was posted to the Experimental Sound Ranging Station in Belgium during WW1 where, with Lawrence Bragg, he developed military sound ranging - a system using ‘microphones and mathematics to determine the position of enemy artillery’. In the interwar years Tucker became the Director of Acoustical Research at the Air Defence Experimental Establishment at Biggin Hill. Today what remains of those early experiments are these historic military artefacts which look almost like modernist public art in a sculpture park. Photo with thanks to @terryalanbrown

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