City Hall and The Scoop

click photo to enlarge

London's City Hall is the work of Foster and Partners, more specifically the partner Ken Shuttleworth. Its circular/spherical shape, internal spiral ramp and green pretensions show it to be the offspring of the firm's earlier Berlin Reichstag. Londoners have, as is the British way, given it a variety of nicknames - the motorcycle helmet, the strawberry, the glass gonad and worse. None of these has stuck in the way that, for example "The Gherkin" has pinned itself to the Swiss Re tower at 30 St Mary Axe. Interestingly this glazed and transparent seat of London governance and democracy was built by private finance, made available to the city on a 25 year lease, and is located on private land on the south bank of the Thames: it is part of More London. You have to wonder why a metropolis such as London can't do better than this, and what will happen when the lease runs out.

The adjacent "public" amphitheatre" called "the scoop" (don't you hate this kind of use of lower case letters) was built after City Hall, and it wasn't until I'd passed by them a few times that I saw the echo of the building in the shape of the slate steps/seating of the outdoor theatre. This was clearly intentional on the part of the architects, and it works best when seen from upstream of the pair. On my last visit I tried to get a shot that illustrated the compositional juxtaposition. Unfortunately the light was rather flat, but there was just enough depth in the shadows to make this photograph that I converted to black and white with increased contrast.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 24mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

the scoop

click photo to enlarge
A while ago I devised and delivered a quiz for an organisation to which I belong. It comprised 100 questions, twenty of which were pictures of company logos that the participants were asked to identify. When the quiz was completed, scores had been counted and winners identified, it became clear to me that something I thought would be part of the visual vocabulary of the audience clearly wasn't, with quite a few teams getting less than half marks on the logos.

Logotypes have always interested me. I see them as modern day heraldry. A good logo is visually appealing, clever even, as well as memorable and open to being updated over the years. The Shell emblem is a good example of this, as is Woolmark's. Many neatly encapsulate what the organisation is all about. The best bring to mind the company they represent without the need for the company's name to be written. But, after that quiz I realise that logos are something I notice, think about and appreciate, but many others don't. There's nothing wrong with that of course: I'm sure that I'm blissfully ignorant of much that others notice and value.

I've always had an interest in graphic design, and find it fun to spot new ideas that spread across the field. In the 1990s and the "Noughties" one of the really obvious ones was the script underline/overline as seen in, for example, Europcar, Disney Entertainment, Pizza Hut, Henley (rowing), the UK government Home Office. Another trend, and one that I find somewhat annoying, is the use of company names written in lower case in an attempt to look friendly and modern. An example is the energy company e-on. A sentence that begins with that company's name looks very awkward, and it's hardly better when it appears in the middle. The same can be said of the name of the open-air amphitheatre on London's South Bank that features in today's photograph - "the scoop". In fact, as a title for this blog entry it looks plain wrong, and I just couldn't bring myself to write it that way on the image's title. What possible good reason could the owners have for choosing lowercase rather than capitals or title case? As a subject, however, the location offers a lot to the photographer. I'm not someone whose photographs feature people very much, so I thought I'd compensate for that in a single shot! The shadows that supply a kind of "natural vignette" also appealed to me in this one.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 6.8mm (32mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.66 EV
Image Stabilisation: On