To any brain surgeons out there: The "Stroke of insight" experience can be accurately reproduced, with similar feelings of enlightenment but no brain damage, via the ingestion of psychedelic drugs.
IMHO The selection is rather poor. 4 of the 10 speeches are regarding a simple technical product. While they might be cool, touchscreens and Wii remote hacks are not going to change the world, while many other talks do just that. Only 3 or 4 of the talks are actually thought-provoking, and having seen almost all talks I can think of at least 10 that were more inspiring.
Several of those (3,8,9) are among the first videos released. People (like me) that have stumbled onto TED recently and start from the beginning will view those first. Also, the iPhone, Photosynth, and WiiMote probably come up in searches because they have Google juice.
I discovered TED talks on the day of the iPhone keynote, searching for more info about multi-touch. So I would guess that video got a lot of its hits from other people doing that.
We often like to think we are morally superior and smarter than our ancestors, yet the success of Philippe Stark (The Caliban, as nicknamed in 2100's History books) is a clear sign of our own moronity - the moronity of our times as we should call it - and will be the subject of mockery from our grand children.
The damage these people did (Starck and the architects in the same school, wich are currently overwhelming) to our cities and landscape would have been more than enough for a guillotine ride two centuries ago.
If you want to figure out what we have escaped from these people, look at this nightmare :
"Until recently, European architects have either connived at the evisceration of our cities or actively promoted it. Relying on the spurious rhetoric of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, they endorsed the totalitarian projects of the political elite, whose goal after the war was not to restore the cities but to clear away the “slums.” By “slums,” they meant the harmonious classical streets of affordable houses, seeded with local industries, corner shops, schools, and places of worship, that had made it possible for real communities to flourish in the center of our towns. High-rise blocks in open parkland, of the kind that Le Corbusier proposed in his plan for the demolition of Paris north of the Seine, would replace them. Meanwhile, all forms of employment and enjoyment would move elsewhere. Public buildings would be expressly modernist, with steel and concrete frames and curtain walls, but with no facades or intelligible apertures, and no perceivable relation to their neighbors. Important monuments from the past would remain, but often set in new and aesthetically annihilating contexts, such as that provided for Saint Paul’s in London."
"“Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong—like communism—to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. . . . Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e., unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions.”"
The ugliness of US cities all has to do with the "modernist" rational approach to architecture. Unlike the europeans brains, cities were not importable.
What is the point of living, sleeping and working in ugly places ? The damage done in Europe was attenuated because of our patrimoine, aka the things that our ancestors gave us, but we still have to fight against crooks like Starck. They have success, they have recognition, they have money, and they are the prominent icons of what we lack in our days of cultural relativism : taste.
>The ugliness of US cities all has to do with the "modernist" rational approach to architecture. Unlike the europeans brains, cities were not importable.
I think New York is pretty awesome. It's not ugly, it's intensely functional. With the density of services, a life can be lived on any given street. You can find a town's worth of people that share any given common interest. Despite being immense, it feels cozy and organic in a way that DC does not. It has thriving art and theatre scenes and hundreds of subcultures. Does any European city come close to its beauty? I'm asking honestly here, not rhetorically. New York is the most awesome city I've ever seen, but I've not traveled much.
San Francisco and New York are two cities definitly worth the trip. I have a personal preference for S.F as a tourist, maybe because I was younger when I visited it and was really impressed by the Golden Gate wich is a masterpiece. You'll find a strong soul in both cities.
Of course I was speaking of the average US city and it's suburbs and malls. I had in mind Los Angeles for example. My grand-mother lives in a very beautiful place in Orange County, but when I "visited" L.A there was nothing at all worth it.
U.S are worth the trip for the sole natural landscapes and national parks. I visited a lot of these and it was more than impressing. Wherever you go, you are overwhelmed by space, the diversity, the endless cornfields, the infinite horizon, and a sense of liberty that is unmatched anywhere else I went. It's even better than in the movies.
Regarding the beauty of New York compared to other cities, you'll have to appreciate it by yourself, a travel to Europe is definitly worth the trip, Italy and France might be your best options. One thing for sure that you'll find is that these cities are really different.
Philipe Starck is not a modernist. He's not even an architect! He's an interior designer. His work has nothing to do with the likes of Le Corbusier or Van der Rohe. Your timelines aren't even right. The modernists all died in the late 1960s. Starck didn't become popular until the late 1980s. Calling him a crook because he's associated with the modernist school of architecture (which he isn't) is utterly beyond incorrect... it doesn't even make sense. In fact, it so doesn't make sense, I feel like I'm the victim of a clever troll. If that's the case - touche.
He's not just an interior designer. He does design physical objects.
But you're right. Starck is about as far as you could get from totalitarian city planning. Which incidentally would have been just as bad with or without modernism. Speer's Berlin would have been at least as nasty as Le Corbusier's Paris.
Starck designed several buildings wich are famous in France because of the complaints of the people who have to work inside (one has a facade with no windows at all, for "design" purpose). He designed many properties and led a project wich theme was "One house for everybody" where he designed the cheapest house possible so that "everyone could have one", packed in some residences, and sponsored by the governement. You couldn't actually get more totalitarian than this.
You don't hear a lot about this side of his work because most of them were fiascos, a french TV (Canal +) even dedicated an investigation to the building he designed, because of all the people complaining. I tought it was obvious that Starck wasn't an architect stricto sensu, but "Architect", "Designer", "Urbanist" and even "Modernist" are just labels, the only thing that matters is what people actually do.
Ask the people who have to deal with his creations on a daily basis, or read about these fiascos. This will be more interesting than playing with labels.
