A Passion to Build follows the meteoric careers and tangled love lives of two leading architects and their iconic designs for a major international athletics event – the EuroGames, which is to take place in the fading northern city of Frampton-on-Tees. Frampton’s energetic and scheming Mayor believes the investment and legacy of the Games will restore some vitality to the once-booming economy of the area.

The design teams struggle to create great buildings and have to fend off critics like the conservationist Duke of Frampton who would prefer to see the stadia designed in the traditional style.

The lives of the architects unravel as they compete to design the best building and to win the much-vaunted Frazer Prize. Their struggle reaches a dramatic climax at the spectacular opening ceremony of the EuroGames watched by millions around the world.

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Hello, I'm Peter Murray and have started Clip-Kit in order to explore the medium of the internet and its relationship with publishing.

The site is named after a magazine I started in 1967 while at the Architectural Association. My co editor and publisher was a fellow student, Geoffrey Smyth. Clip-Kit literally existed of a plastic clip and a kit of pages that the subscriber received on a monthly basis. I have recycled the name for this e-publishing site because I see a real connection between the technological advances in printing in the 1960s and the growth of the internet today.

Prior to the development of offset lithography, the power of print was in the hands of the very few. From the days of Gutenberg it was the very rich and powerful, the church and the state, who controlled the technology and the content. They were aided and abetted in the 20th century by the print unions and their restrictive practices. The small letterpess publishers who blossomed at the end of the 19th century required the highest level of skills to operate and were therefore of limited accessibility.

Offset litho on the other hand allowed the publisher to use artwork of all types - drawings, photographs, typewriting, even cuttings from other publications could be pasted together and transferred photographically to printing plates. These changes to the technology of putting ink on paper provided access to print for a far wider community than was ever possible before and it heralded a revolution in magazine and book publishing.

The internet permits a similar but much larger step change in accessibility and is having a revolutionary impact on publishing around the world.

Clip-Kit's ad hocism will be maintained on this site which will build up over time to include a wide and catholic range of publications and re-publications as well as a free archive of magazine articles and reference relating to the books that have been published. In time we will be developing media rich publications including videos, computer aided drawings and audio.

In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan wrote that "the medium is the message"; the revolutionary nature of technological change in communications is evidence that the medium is vitally important in who can access and who can distribute information. This site celebrates that.

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Email: info@clip-kit.com