The best of the Cosmic Inspiro-Cloud 2018

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Robert Burley – Maintenance Shed, O’Hare Airfield, Chicago, 1985 – a personal favourite

Introduction:

The daily image published on Tumblr under the banner of the Cosmic Inspiro-Cloud continues to grow its audience with around 16,800 followers on Tumblr and Twitter. In 2018, the 365 images received just under 60,000 notes, comments, likes or retweets.

Cosmic Inspiro-Cloud in 2018

The monthly themes for 2018 were:

January – Albert Frey
February – Two Engineers – Pier Luigi Nervi and Eduardo Torroja y Miret
March – Sweden Builds
April – Conceptual Art and Photography
May – France – 1948-1965
May – Advertisements from Architecture Forms Functions 1965-66
July – John  Lautner
August – Airports: Architecture and Landscapes
September – Modern Architecture in Brasil 1928-1958
October – 20th Century Signal Boxes in England and Wales
November – Architecture, Architects and Cars
December – Doll’s Houses

The most popular theme for the year was the collection of thirty-one John Lautner buildings in July with just under 11,000 notes. Lautner was followed by Albert Frey with just over 10,000 notes and Arne Jacobsen on 5,262 and Two Engineers – Pier Luigi Nervi and Eduardo Torroja y Miret – just under 8,000 notes.

On Twitter a different picture emerges:

Top three images on Tumblr and Twitter

The top three rankings for individual images on Tumblr were entirely from the John Lautner theme:

1. John Lautner  – Living Room, Wolff House, Hollywood, California, 1961
2. John Lautner – Living Room, Malin House, (Chemosphere) Hollywood, Cailfornia, 1960
3. John Lautner – Swimming Pools, Motel, Desert Hot Springs, California, 1947

The top ten is shown below:

The top three rankings on Twitter were completely different:

1. Vilhelm Lauritzen Arkitekter – Copenhagen Airport, 1962
2. Pier Luigi Nervi – Hangar, Orvieto, Terni, Umbria, Italy, 1935
3. Nicolas Esquillan – Hangar à Deux Nefs, Marseille, France, 1949-52

The top ten is shown below:

Postscript

We really enjoyed putting together the Architecture, Architects and their Cars theme (November 2018) from which the Rolls Royce parked beside Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester University Engineering Building is a particular favourite.

James Stirling and James Gowan – Rolls Royce Phantom III, Leicester University Engineering Buiding, Leicester, England,1963

To quote Tom Heneghan,

“Stirling’s photograph of the car at Leicester parodied the photographs that Le Corbusier habitually took of his latest works with his own car parked in the foreground. In so doing, Stirling satirised his own pretensions and – tongue in cheek – allowed the image to assert that the engineering building – his first major work – was part of the lineage of the greatest Modernist experiments.”
Tom Heneghan, A+U 2015:06 No 537

We also enjoyed the Airports – Architecture and Landscapes theme which didn’t score highly yet there is a wealth of interest around technology in the landscape, the re-purposing of redundant airfields and airports, the bleakness of airfields and their negative role in the climate crisis.  Most contemporary airports are grim places for the passenger. The romance of flight for the passenger has largely gone, replaced by dismal and perfunctory terminals without any sense of being part of the landscape – especially relevant in the Highlands of Scotland where most airfield locations are stunning, atmospheric and full of stories about aircraft and people long gone.

Summary

If you want to look at the range of work published in 2018 on the Cosmic Inspiro-Cloud perhaps the most accessible starting point is the Archive page which sets out the publications by month in a masonry grid. The Cosmic Inspiro-Cloud also has a Facebook page and Twitter feed which publishes the native images rather than just a link to the Tumblr page – so if you are interested you might find it easier to follow the Twitter account.