With a baby on the way and two vintage cars in our garage, one a red 1963 VW Ragtop Mike's owned since age 15 and the other a champagne 1963 Ford T-bird, a tough decision had to be made. One of them had to be replaced...
The year was 2006, and, believe it or not, these old-timers were pretty much the only cars we'd ever owned. With our purchase of a new car that winter, we made a 43 year leap in automotive technology overnight.
Today's car industry is brainwashed by its own car culture, with its obsession for speed, styling and fantasy. The car business has become one of repackaging, steering people's focus towards style and a narrow definition of performance, not on our true needs.
We quickly realized, however, that despite 43 years of automotive progress, with its advances in safety, efficiency, and manufacturing, the driving experience remains basically the same as it was in 1963.
After experiencing this somewhat disappointing time warp, we wondered how we could contribute a new point of view and perhaps spark more significant progress for the next 40 years.
The current climate gave us the final push--with the car industry lost, an urgent focus on global warming, awareness of oil dependency, and the economic down turn, the stars had aligned. It is time to sow seeds, to experiment. Armed with a small design studio, we set out to design a concept car in search of an optimistic new future. And it quickly became clear to us:
A shift must take place from styling cars to redefining them.
The presentation centers around a 10-week project my graduate students in the SVA Designer as Author program completed around "designing a prosthetic arm," and we were incredibly privileged to have Aimee Mullins, Frank Wilson, John Kunniholm, and Elliot Washor come in as guests. Diana Lui shot portraits of the students at the conclusion, and I have to say that this was an incredible teaching (and learning) experience. Humbling, daunting, and elating at every twist and turn.
One of the students, Jackie Lay, is completing the project website which will include way more info on each of the student's work than I could include in the talk, but catch this video in the meantime for the story on the genesis, design, and development of the whole thing. I'll post a link to the project site as soon as it's up. Thanks again to all the students who made this happen--it was an incredible experience to be a part of.
Be sure to check out all the Compostmodern videos here.
Last month, a cadre of guerilla architecture critics (or just plain vandals) splashed the white walls of Richard Meier's Ara Pacis Museum with green and red paint, thus rendering the Italian tricolor in an unintentional homage to America's greatest living painter, though permanent Roman habitué, Cy Twombly.
It was presumably the first outwardly visceral manifestation of popular distaste for the building.
Many others no doubt would like nothing more than to deface the museum. The mayor, for instance, has been very vocal about wanting to remove it (minus the altar, of course) and then reconstruct it fuori le Mura. Whether this would mean that the original will be recycled for the new building or entirely torn down into unsalvageable detritus, these urbicidal fantasies of demolition, alteration and displacement are pretty much on par with the spatial history of the piazza.
The new building, for instance, replaced a pavilion partly designed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo under Benito Mussolini to house the Ara Pacis, which was discovered offsite and relocated to its present location. This earlier building was dismantled, because it was deemed incapable of protecting the ancient monument from Rome's damaging pollution and summer weather. However, a stone wall containing inscriptions of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti was kept and incorporated into Meier's building design.
Meanwhile, the demolished pavilion itself was part of a Fascist program of erasure. Mussolini wanted to create a new piazza, the center piece of which would be the Mausoleum of Augustus. At the time, parts of the tomb laid buried beneath several layers of urban fill and topped with the latest in a long line of adaptive reuse programs, from a fortified castle to a bullfighting ring to the most recent, a concert hall. The tomb was further “hidden” by narrow streets and dense urban growth. To “liberate” it, Mussolini simply had the surrounding neighborhood razed to the ground.
Left untouched were a couple of churches, one of which, San Rocco, is a fascinating impasto of Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical and Palladian styles. These survivors — together with Morpurgo's pavilion and a complex of new modern buildings for use by Fascist Party functionaries — were calibrated to frame the bounded space of the new Piazza Augusto Imperatore.
It's interesting to note here that embedded on the facades of the new buildings are friezes, mosaics and inscriptions, a decorative program no doubt intended to create a link with the sculptural reliefs on the Ara Pacis on the other side of the piazza. One of those inscriptions, apart from mythologizing Mussolini and Fascism, actually commemorates the restoration of the Mausoleum of Augustus and by extension celebrates the urban pogrom that had to be metted out in order to “liberate” the tomb from its shadowy grave. So perhaps if the mayor were to carry out his own pogrom, then he, too, may commemorate it with yet another set of friezes on the front of the new museum. These will also memorialize our liberation from starchitectural stupor.
In any case, to add to these violent, cross-spatiotemporal architectural critiques, Meier stated after the demolition of Morpurgo's pavilion but before the start of construction of his new museum that he wanted (and may yet still want) to tear down the other Fascist-era additions to the piazza. These buildings may have perfectly acted out Mussolini's urban scenography of Fascist ideologies but the resulting piazza is an incredibly failed urban space. It's inhospitable to everyday use and pedestrians avoid it. Meier presumably knows better. And if he gets his way, then there would be another occasion for textual frotteurism and iconographical link-orgy: a sculptural band of friezes in which we see the wannabe urban planner in the guise of the Angel of Modernism — Meier Dux, the liberator of the Eternal City from its own ancientness.
But we're obviously digressing.
When reading about the incident, what grabbed our complete attention wasn't the paint job. What actually spurred us into confecting this post was the porcelain toilet and the two packs of toilet paper left at the scene.
Because these scatological implements aren't the most imaginative form of “activism” (or for no other reason than just because), we set about concocting less facile, though dubiously practical, strategies of protest. We used the following as points of departure.
1) As far as we know, no one has yet come forward to claim responsibility for the vandalism. The presence of Graziano Cecchini in the crowd of onlookers at the scene, however, elicited some very faint accusatory speculations. Cecchini, you might remember, was the artist and member of the neo-Futurist group, ATM Azionefuturista 2007, who dyed the Trevi Fountain red nearly two years ago, an incident which we covered here then. If you can also recall, he turned the fountain's crystal clear waters into a vermillion Nile as a way to protest the obscenely high cost of organizing that year's International Film Festival of Rome — like a self-righteous Moses preaching to a bunch of uber-consumerist Ramesseses.
2) Earlier that summer, another incident occurred at the Trevi Fountain and at other Roman fountains. You can say that it was similarly faintly Biblical: the waters parted — or rather dried up — which is probably the same thing. The culprits that time weren't hydro-anarchists venting out grievances with the hegemonic elite or vandal-artists enacting one of their staged happenings using the built environment as their canvas and minor urban disasters as their paint. As we reported at the end of last year, the water supply to the fountains were cut short when construction workers across town damaged an ancient pipe while building a private underground car park. The blockage was discovered when a waterborne camera was slithered through the city's rhyzomatic ecosystem of voids to pinpoint its location.
While the tired, sweaty tourists around the city didn't erupt into a riotous mob, this incident left us wondering whether they could be agitated into a pillaging horde if you strategically pinch the right combination of ganglial pathways of the city's infrastructural network.
3) Staying in Rome but venturing more than a century back in time: in the 1870s, we read in The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, archaeologists dug up the floor of the Colosseum and exposed its basement corridors. This apparently upset so many people, including the Pope, because it meant removing the arena's religious paraphernalia, such as the Stations of the Cross, a huge crucifix in the center and a hermitage and its hermit. The recently unified Italian state, in other words, was seen to be trampling over sacred ground, and the birthplace of so many martyrs and saints, was to be converted into a secular artifact, an archaeologist's play pen.
But of greater interest for us here is the fact that during the excavation, drainage was such a problem that the sewers and underground corridors had filled with water. Harkening back to when it used to host mock naval battles, the Colosseum remained an artificial lake for many years until a new sewer was built to channel the water away.
4) Returning to the present but now venturing out of the city: decorating this post are CC-licensed photos of Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin, one of several installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by the Mexican artist Héctor Zamora at this year's Venice Art Biennale.
5) Further afield: in an article published by The New York Times in 2003, we learned that public works officials in New York sent a self-propelled, submersible Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) down into in the 85-mile long Delaware Aqueduct that supplies New York City with half of its drinking water. Millions of gallons have been leaking, and they wanted to know where and how it was seeping out.
Leakage of up to 36 million gallons a day was detected starting in 1991. The leaking stretch lies somewhere between the Rondout Reservoir in the Catskills and the West Branch Reservoir, a way station for city-bound water here in Putnam County.
The escaping water is just a small percentage of the 1.3 billion gallons supplied by the system each day, but still equals the daily consumption in Rochester.
Water percolating upward hundreds of feet from tunnel leaks has created wetlands and damp areas in Ulster and Orange counties that endure even in the region's worst droughts.
The city's engineers have been periodically sending, as recently as last month, torpedo-shaped, deep-sea robots to monitor the cracks.
There are important lessons about crumbling infrastructure and the importance of surveillance and maintenance in an age of peak water and climate change that no doubt could be extracted from here, but we have to move on.
So. Instead of leaving cute trinkets next to one's object of disgust, you go for the jugular.
First assemble together a fleet of self-propelled, subterranean dirigible. Be sure that they can navigate through both water-filled tunnels and more airier ones. To be able to track their location and velocity, implant each one with an iPhone or any cheap, GPS-enabled mobile device.
With maps of the negative labyrinth on hand, you let them loose. At designated strategic nodes, you phone them. They pause in mid-flight. Seconds later, they inflate and wedge themselves very tightly in the tunnel. If the tunnel is too big, then several of your dirigibles will clump together to ensure total blockage. And then finally, using the sewers' miasmic vapour as a reagent, their nylon skins fantamagically fuse with the tunnel walls and turn metallic, nearly diamond-hard. An hour or two later, manholes and storm drains begin venting your furious critique. A further hour or two, an artificial lake lays stagnant next to (or better yet, surrounds) the target building.
Of course, the target needn't be a building. It could be a new plaza as anti-pedestrian as the Piazza Augusto Imperatore. Or an obscenely overbudget hyper-park. Or a grotesquely earnest memorial. Or a similarly ghastly public art installation whose aesthetics suggest it has time-travelled from the 80s. Whatever it is, you consider it a pestilential addition to the built environment in the same way your artificial lake is a deadly public health hazard.
Not surprisingly, others with their own beef and their own agenda will copy your tactics. Sewers all over the world will be swarming with dirigibles, buzzing with the amplified hum of their tiny propellers. Artificial lakes will bubble up and vanish, rising and falling in accordance to the perennially shifting climate of architectural taste.
Not surprisingly as well, officials will try to stop these acts of sabotage. They will take sewer maps out of the public domain. They will even request the federal government to classify them as state secrets. Consequently, all public works employees will have to undergo extensive background checks and sign non-disclosure agreements. Urban adventurers will be charged with espionage if found hiking through the tunnels. Their penalties will be severe. If the public before were ignorant of the vast underground landscape that makes their life possible, only getting a hint of what lies beneath when an underpass is flooded, then they will now be utterly, completely, permanently oblivious.
When an underpass does get flooded because the sewers can't drain the water fast enough, the story gets censored from the day's news. When a kid discovers an old sewer and then gets lost in it, there will be no search and rescue and thus no wall-to-wall television coverage of the melodrama. There will be no prolonged national hysteria over the fate of the child. And there will be no photogenic heros to be made. The parents will simply be told they never had that child.
The kid, like the sewer maps, will be redacted.
In response, sewer anarchists will outfit their dirigibles with DIY sonars or laser scanners. They will make their own maps with
As a counter-countermeasure, combat engineers will reconfigure the network into an even more bewildering jumble of tunnels. They will dug fake tunnels, tunnels that leads to dead ends, tunnels that impossibly knot into itself, tunnels with sonar-cancelling pings, tunnels that lead to headquarters, tunnels that effloresces into a thicket of infinitely bifurcating tunnels, and tunnels that lead to other dimensions.
Alternatively, they will de-tangle the network. Obsolete tunnels will be filled in, others will be consolidated. Certain segments will be expanded into rationally planned, naturally lighted, cathedral-like vaults. These tunnels will actually be more than what the city needs to funnel its wastewater and stormwater, but at least they will be hard to be barricaded. It's the Haussmannisation of the sewers.
The other side, of course, will simply hack their dirigibles into more sophisticated mapping tools and employ advanced computer modeling techniques to simulate alternative infiltration strategies.
It's one side always trying to outwit the other side.
According to the brief, this avant-garden is “an intervention that frames and presents this experience by creating an electronic sound field amidst the poplar trees – building on it, transforming it, and ultimately creating a woven fabric of sound.”
As visitors wander through the site they will become aware of slowly shifting and changing sounds that are familiar but not clearly identifiable – the buzz of insects, perhaps, or white noise from a radio. Five sensors capture changes in wind speed and direction that are then translated into subtle changes in the sounds broadcast through a grid of small speakers and amplifiers that are distributed throughout the site. A conversation develops as the trees whisper back and the electronic sound field changes in response.
But consider, meanwhile, Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation, in which you listen in to the “quiet popping sound that is produced by the water passing through the cells of the Xylem tubes and cavitating as it mixes with air on its way upwards. In the background is a deep rumbling sound that is produced by the tree moving vibrating.”
Consider, as well, Markus Kison's touched echo, a site specific sound installation attached to iron railings on a hill overlooking the city of Dresden. There, the public can hear the recreated aural landscape of Dresden during a nighttime bombing raid in 1945. But to listen in to the sounds of airplanes droning and of sirens wailing and of bombs whistling as they fall to earth and then exploding, you have rest your elbows on the iron railings and cup your hands over ears.
As explained by the artist, the sound “is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through the arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction) and cannot be heard by anyone else. Visitors suddenly get an idea of what it must have felt like that night; they travel back in time to this situation. Everyone by dealing with this terrifying event becomes a kind of 'memorial' of it. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions.”
Combining these two other installations, perhaps one could imagine a re-working of the first so that rather than the recording and listening devices scattered about the place, they are implanted into the trees. And instead of sitting on a bench or just standing there having reconstituted ambient noises blasted at you, there is a more direct, physical engagement: you cup your hands and let elbow and bark touch. Or you press your ear against the trunks of those trees to hear the soundtrack.
And yes, you can even hug them, letting the vibrations course through your body — reverberating through your bones and echoing through the chambers of your lungs until they hit an ear drum, much changed and re-sampled by your own body. It's a Forestry and Anatomy mashup.
To hear the sunless interiors of their roots, you'll have to lie flat on your stomach and press your ear against dirt.
And who knows, perhaps the sound emanating from the earth and then filtered through a certain body type may sound incredibly like the otherworldly harmonics of Jupiter.
I'm taking a long 4th of July weekend out of town away from the city and computers. Posts will resume early next week. My weekly page will resume on July 13.
Consistent internet access has been hard to come by these past few days, post-Rome, so posts have suddenly come to a standstill – but I'll have new material up ASAP... More soon.
And still yet another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens: with the caveat that we haven't yet seen any of the gardens in person — to repeat: not a single one — and thus we're only judging by image and text alone, our handicapped favorite is the entry by the team of Claudia Delisle, Karine Dieujuste, Philippe Nolet and Sami Tannoury.
“This garden,” they write, “takes its form from the most common garden tools: 66 sprinklers that remind us of the residential garden. This installation takes roots in the collective memory, reminding us of spontaneous childhood water games.”
Watery naves fleeting in and out of form. Infectiously joyous children and adults shooting through the spritely, melodically sputtering fountains, shrieking as if experiencing a kind of hydrological rapture — that is, until keeling over, comatosed from too much nostalgia of domestic bliss.
This installation is called Poule mouillée!, which can be loosely translated as: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
photo copyright by anarchitecture, christoph wassmann
Poissy-sur-Seine, 33 kilometers north-east of Paris, features two buildings of Corbusier: the famous Villa Savoye and its "Mini-Me" – the gardener’s house at the site’s entrance. Likewise, the tiny building inherits the basic attributes of Villa Savoye: pilotis and ribbon glazing – the perfect mini-house.
photo copyright by anarchitecture, christoph wassmann
Notification of upto35, an international competition for architects up to 35 years old, landed in my inbox earlier today. It asks for "proposals for the construction of a student housing unit in Kerameikos and Metaxourgeio (KM), an area in the historic center of Athens, Greece...Special emphasis is placed on exploring structures that consist of separate student housing units with the capacity to acquire a viral character within the urban tissue and sprawl into nearby empty lots." Sounds interesting, though unfortunately I just miss the cut. If only it were upto36...
Click the image for more information and to check out the well-designed web page.
The Monacelli Press has announced a five-volume monograph on Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), spanning 1950-2008. Each volume spans about ten years and features introductions by Henry Russell-Hitchcock (1950-62), Arthur Drexler (1963-73), Albert Bush-Brown (1974-83), Detlef Mertins (1984-96), and Kenneth Frampton (1997-2008), as well as commentaries similar to their SOM Journals.
The first three volumes are reprints of the original Verlag Gerd Hatje editions, while the last two are brand-spanking new, covering some exciting years when the firm's corporate sheen was enlivened with some exceptional output, particularly schools. Owning all five is most likely only for die-hard fans (how many are there?), but each volume neatly encompasses the evolving phases of the corporate powerhouse's long tenure as one of the most successful and important american architecture firms.
Afterparty, this year's P.S.1 Young Architects Program by MOS, 2009. The installation opened Sunday and runs until September 28. Also on display at the museum is YAP 10th Anniversary Review, "a visual chronicle of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Museum of Modern Art's Young Architects Program, one of the most acclaimed architectural arenas for emerging talent of the last decade."
Stopped by the opening of MOS's outdoor installation Afterparty at P.S.1 this afternoon. I must admit my expectations are not typically stratospheric for these things, since the limited budget for the annual Young Architects Program really precludes anything too ambitious. And, frankly, the projects of the last few years have been kind of redundant in the sense that there are only so many ways
Exactly four years ago today, in one of our very early posts, we noted the start of the latest edition of the International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens. We would like to tip our readers again the start over the weekend of this year's festival, which will last until 4 October. Below are some photographs of the gardens to temp you to make a trek to Quebec.
While the gardens look rather inventive, something you'd expect when the designers are given absolute creative freedom, however, you can be sure that there will always be some sort Picturesque-esque visualary:
It's interesting to note briefly that not one of the gardens are peddling in what Piet Oudolf, the avant-gardener of the High Line, would call “the soft pornography of the flower.” The installations are less about botany and almost singularly about sculpting spaces and programming them with melodrama.
Over at David Byrne's blog I came across this monstrosity by none other than Michael Graves, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, Texas. The former Talking Head memorably says, "This very out of place structure somehow lingers, like a fart left by someone no longer in an elevator."
[Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, TX by Michael Graves & Associates | image source]
The architect explains the building "is a 300,000-square-foot office building and regional bank-processing center. A pitched roof marks the wing housing secure cash processing facilities on the lower floors, while a boardroom, meeting rooms, and dining rooms benefit from panoramic views of the Houston skyline visible from the two levels above. The wing opposite contains the storage vault under a green tile barrel-vaulted roof. These volumes are intended to exhibit the Bank’s commitment to security, as the loggia at the building’s entrance suggests outreach and openness."
[Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, TX by Michael Graves & Associates | image source]
The Masonry Contractor's Association of America (MCAA) calls the building a true "masonry masterpiece." Why? One reason is because "Mr. Graves used masonry extensively for both the exterior and interior construction." How much is extensive? "The overall exterior consists of 537,000 closure brick (4"x8"x4"), 31,400 blue structural glazed tile (8"x8"x4"), 90,000 modular accent brick and 3,307 cubic feet of cast stone. Additionally, the architect utilized 3,428SF of green precast paving (to match the color of money) at the main entrance stairways and accent pavers in the concrete plaza...over 178,450 fully grouted and extensively reinforced concrete masonry units were used for backup and partition walls...Over 5,800 SF of Hadrian limestone and Palamino tile adorns the main entrance lobby, boardroom and executive restrooms. Green glazed tile units (over 15,000 of them) were used in the walls of the cash processing areas as well." That's alotta masonry!
[Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, TX by Michael Graves & Associates | image source]
Another reason the MCAA loves this building is because Mr. Graves made the thing look like it was made of GIGANTIC bricks, like a toy model blown up to the scale of a real building inhabited by real people. Those 31,400 blue structural glazed tiles help make the majority of the exterior walls read in this manner; they are the mortar to the 537,000 closure bricks "bricks." It's deplorable, as if Mr. Graves is regressing into a grade-schooler. I'm surprised that the Federal Reserve Bank sees this postmodern playfulness as appropriate for a fairly serious institution. Perhaps they are trying to paint a goofy face on highly secure facility.
[Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, TX by Michael Graves & Associates | image source]
That said, I actually like the footprint and massing of the building, the way it fizzles from the pedimented face fronting the highway to the old building it is linked to. The colonnaded roof deck is equally hokey, and maybe unusable during many months in Houston, but it seems to be in the right place. Nevertheless, it does not make up for a design that continues Mr. Graves' treatment of buildings as purely graphic exercises, apparently removed from the considerations of not only occupants but those that are confronted with his buildings on the outside.
[Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, TX by Michael Graves & Associates | image source]
[Image: From OnSite.12, Bed Supperclub, Bangkok (2009) by Sebastien Wierinck].
Sebastien Wierinck's public furniture projects seem to lend themselves to some interesting misinterpretations. For instance, when I first saw the two projects pictured here I thought not only that they were one project, but that they were the black tentacles of some kind of furniture-laying machine.
[Image: From OnSite.12, Bed Supperclub, Bangkok (2009) by Sebastien Wierinck].
In other words, I thought, a tangle of black tubes suspended from the ceiling would, when needed, come coiling down to take the shape of whatever furniture you desired at the time: a bench, a table, a love seat, perhaps even a rug. When you no longer need that particular chair, bench, or nightstand anymore, the coils would simply rewind upward into a canopy of tubes (or perhaps even be withdraw themselves into a machine somewhere in the center of the room, like what's pictured in the first image, above).
[Image: From OnSite.14, Transmediale, Berlin (2009), by Sebastien Wierinck].
After a long day at work, then, you would walk into your house – which has no permanent furniture – and you'd see a shimmering mass of black tubes swaying in a slight evening breeze above your head. You'd push several buttons, and the system would begin to move, drooping down in long loops and turning back and forth in tight corners and curves, all laying out the forms of temporary furniture – bed, table – as you get ready for a quiet night at home.
[Image: From OnSite.14, Transmediale, Berlin (2009), by Sebastien Wierinck].
Of course, this admittedly somewhat willful misinterpretation of the evidence at hand is not entirely wrong: after all, though Wierinck's pieces don't uncoil from the ceilings in ad hoc patterns, forming zones of temporary furniture throughout empty interiors, they are meant to be (literally) flexible, (somewhat) mobile, and easy enough to reprogram for other spaces. But what a beautiful thought: that you could walk into an empty room, hit a few buttons, and then watch as custom, temporary furniture is 3D-printed into the space all around you. Like a strange rain coming down from the ceiling, or the materialization of a dream, usable shapes gradually form – and then you sit, book in hand. On demand, from above.
[Image: All systems go... Original photo by Jim Grossman, courtesy of NASA].
This is just a quick note to get the word out, but I'm falling out of my chair excited to announce that The BLDGBLOG Book – which is finally shipping throughout the English-speaking world, it seems, with people emailing from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the United States to say that their books have arrived – will officially go live on Tuesday, July 7, with a two-hour launch party hosted by the Architectural Association and sponsored by Wired UK. Here are the details:
The BLDGBLOG Book Global Launch Party Sponsored by Wired UK @ The Architectural Association Tuesday, 7 July 2009 | 6-8pm 36 Bedford Square, London Free and open to the public | Cash bar
Plus special guest(s) to be announced! And here's a map. The basic gist of the evening is to show up, grab a drink at the AA bar (they serve Leffe, one of my favorite beers), take a look at some of the awesome student projects that will be on display that night throughout the building as part of the AA's year-end exhibition (so bring a notebook! there will be cool ideas all over the place and students who deserve the attention), and then wander downstairs to the bookshop and dining area, in the basement, where the "launch" itself will take place. So come by, have a drink, talk to people, flip through the book, purchase a copy from the AA bookshop, get it signed, do whatever it is that you want with it – enjoy the images, read the interviews, rest your beer on it, show it to people – and just sort of hang out till 8pm or so, when it all comes to a close. It's not formal, and it's not a lecture. If the weather's nice, you can even step outside and enjoy the blue skies of Bedford Square. Meanwhile, I owe a gigantic thanks to Brett Steele, director of the AA, for hosting this event and Thrilling Wonder Stories last month; to Ben Hammersley, associate editor of Wired UK, for his own interest in all things BLDGBLOG and for bringing me on board last month as contributing editor at the magazine; and to Liam Young, who was absolutely instrumental in seeing these plans come together. Hope to see you there – and expect a very long post next week about The BLDGBLOG Book itself, which I'm excited to introduce to everyone, finally, now that is has officially hit the shelves.
Brandon Safford's I Dream of Architecture, a new blog I linked to last Monday, has posted an interview with me, in which we discuss architecture, education, blogging, and other fun topics. Accompanying the interview are images from my CCNY Urban Design studio final project (the flip book one) in Lago Agrio, Ecuador.
“Starchitecture” is a glib neologism that reduces hard-won reputations and decadelong undertakings to little dabs of glitz. Gehry can hardly bring himself to utter the word, but the mere mention triggers a tirade revealing deep wells of grandiosity and resentment. “It suggests an egomaniac trying to flaunt his wares at the expense of the public. It’s an opportunistic journalistic trick. There’s so much bad stuff being built that people don’t address, so they fasten on the half of one percent that gets into uncharted territory for humanistic and idealistic reasons. There is ego involved; everyone has to have that, or they don’t do much. But architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It’s about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations, because people go on vacation and they look for it. When I go to Bilbao, they want to touch me. If I were an egomaniac, I’d just move there.” (italics added)
"...humanistic and idealistic reasons." Giving Gehry the benefit of the doubt, we humans have such power of self-deception.
Prime central London residential property prices have recorded their first quarterly growth since starting their slide from the peak of September 2007, according to a new report.
Pent up buyer demand, which built up through 2008 and the early months of this year, has flowed into a market that is increasingly short of quality stock, says the latest quarterly index from Savills Research.
Planet Architecture
Planet Architecture is a site that gathers every single day the numerous blog posts that are written by people who share the same interest and passion: Architecture. The content of Planet Architecture is constantly actualized, as new summaries of these websites are added to Planet Architecture on daily basis. Every day, you can find new ideas, new info and the latest news on this site. The wide range of summaries on different architecture related topics can help you, in an efficient manner, to find the desired information.
Updated on July 03, 2009 03:01 AM UTC. Entries are normalised to UTC time.
[Image: From OnSite.12, Bed Supperclub, Bangkok (2009) by 
[Image: From OnSite.12, Bed Supperclub, Bangkok (2009) by 
[Image: From OnSite.14, Transmediale, Berlin (2009), by 
[Image: From OnSite.14, Transmediale, Berlin (2009), by 
[Image: All systems go... Original photo by Jim Grossman, courtesy of 
