Monumental Moment

The monument to commemorate the founding of the Korean Workers Party, Pyongyang

Represented are (l-r);

Hammer for Workers
Paint Brush for Intellectuals
Sickle for Farmers

Baroness Margaret Ford: "SIZE MATTERS!"

The plans for the 2012 Olympic Stadium in London keeps changing. Seemingly progressive and original plan of resizable stadium might be a victim to conservative and corporate mind of Margaret Ford, a Baroness who is now in charge of the Olympic Legacy Team, an organization responsible for figuring out post Olympic use of the venue.
One of her main goal is to make stadium's size of 80,000 spectators permanent.
The Olympic Stadium was designed around the idea that it can be retracted to size of 25,000 spectators after the Olympics, reducing the impact on the environment by that much and still remain as an intimate but large enough sports venue, also making a statement on the Olympic extravaganza we are accustomed to expect in recent decades and in the face of increasing poverty rates around the Globe.


BD online

News at Archinect

L's Operation Morphine

Dear L, Get Well Soon...

KATARXIS Moment: Peter Eisenman and Leon Krier, on dishwashing...

Leon Krier and Peter Eisenman fistfight in Heaven, 1982

There are always these short interviews that I long to master some day...

Copy pasted from here.

This page is reserved for polemics, debates and interviews. This first issue presents a virtual debate with statements by influential architects and intellectuals on the issue of classicism. Based on real and virtual quotes, the debate is fictitiously edited by KATARXIS


Peter Eisenmann: " There are only perfect ideas in the classical ideology. However today, where the elements of cosmology are no longer the same, we cannot return to a classical system. "

Leon Krier: " Our goal as artists and architects consists in understanding that universal system and that universal order which allow us to produce artistical artefacts, in the same way in which nature is creating individual beings. This is what makes classicism: It represents the fundamental system which allows us to create objects of timeless beauty. "

Peter Eisenman: " Classicism encompasses the idea of perfection as it can be encountered in Nature. As I said already, it is not possible anymore today to represent this classical concept of perfection -of harmony between Man and Nature, because this ideal state has been destroyed by forces generated by mankind. One cannot continue to use classical means of representation, because, what they represent, does not exist anymore.

Leon Krier: " It is absurd to prohibit good architecture because we live in terrible times. "

Peter Eisenmann: " Leon, come on, you cannot build this way anymore today! "

Leon Krier: " You can't, but I can! "


katarxis3

IN LOS ANGELES: "The AMERICAN EGYPT"

OA, 6/09. Echo Park

The American Egypt, the Film

This Is Why I Love My Radio

STAR LITE AM-FM 2 SPEAKER. OA, 6/09

Another reason...

PAVILLION CITY

The Pavillions of national show-offs are being built. Most European countries show their interest in rather architecturally 'provocative' ways.
UK Pavillion looks like an 'ass' (human butt.)

See them here... EXPO 2010 Shanghai, China

'FLW' FOREVER by LEGO

VIA NPR. Script by OA

"WHO SAYS, WHO IS RIGHT AND WHO IS WRONG?" Script by OA

NPR: A Frank Lloyd Wright Masterwork — In Legos

OMA: Cornell's New Architecture School

After delays, doubts and economic difficulties and 'put on hold' close calls, Cornell University Board approves moving forward on Milstein Hall. The future building for Cornell's Architecture Dept., and as designed by OMA, under Rem Koolhaas' lead. There are many stories and past coverage on how the School got there and the selection of the project. One thing this is sure, it will be a new type of architecture school that goes beyond the examples of such, among its rivals. Cornell University finally integrating the craft, politics, public participation, and perhaps a new placement of ‘architecture school.’
The project doubles up on Mies' National Museum in Berlin, Germany. First, it makes itself a room among the existing buildings and creates a pedestrian friendly web of a building inside. Once you are in, the proposed building functions with both permanent and the transportive spaces, via its placement and connections. This is all speculative but expected...



At this point and ideally, there is an architecture school, bursting with energy, audience and live wired connections to the world. The school as the active block of in between space, connecting Sibley and Rand Halls. And making The Foundry, the building housing the sculptors, not only come alive but almost put a timely and effective stop to cantilever's gallant move in danger of becoming little too much. I give architects a big point for playing the arithmetic when it comes to the Foundry.
Building's ability to inject such 'circulatory' function indeed surpasses the National Museum's one ended loop and organize the building inside as both permanent school program and the transient people mover, giving the dean of the university to walk over the architecture school and watch the students without their knowledge and perhaps be more informed about what they do.
This is all open architectural broadcasting from the department.
What more an architecture could ask for? Integrate with everything else.
If successfully completed, the Milstein Hall might be programmatically most integrated project. Both physically and conceptually concerning architectural education. Sort of a wake up call to other schools to open up and emerge in a literal sense.
The days of reclusive architecture school is being changed with a space that is the conceptual equivalent of a live public news broadcasting like TV station as a storefront show, once under one of the now sadly gone WTC Towers.

What more, at the end, we will also see a tongue and cheek love bite for the National Museum that Rem has been talking about for a while. Making a building from the buildings of his own, which in turn buildings from other buildings, putting the pieces of floating ideas of several buildings together and pulling all in . Here is your intelligent building and proposition to recalibrate the academic environment of architecture and the public face of the architect in the making.

This is an ultimate manifestation and sure way to increase the volume from the new platform for architecture. This is an opportunity to show architecture is relevant, socially connected, worthwhile, participatory and beneficial to welfare of the public. If there will be any fine-tuning left, this interaction between the public and the architecture should be further blurred. In that regard, one can only wish the premise of the design fulfilled. Starting with the construction of the Milstein Hall, the new set of conditions for architectural education must also start. After the project has built, its effectiveness will be depending on the inventive leadership, curriculum, and the efforts of faculty and the students.

This building will add more value for the Dept. The OMA takes Cornell? Dutch?
This much should be obvious.




images from Milstein Hall website

NNDB = Tracking Everybody

Obama's Bankers

New meaning of surveillance is tracking the well connected people... Who sits on the Board of Directors and for whom he is donating money? Has the owner of Men's Wearhouse George Zimmer aka "You're going to like the way you look. I guarantee it," been to rehab? How many times? How intricate is Barbara Walters' web of business and friends?
Is there a connection between Henry Kissinger and postmodern architect Frank O. Gehry?
How Obama is connected to the international banking scene?
Is there a triangle between Barack Hussein, Michelle and Hillary?
Who else the Flamboyant Scientologist Tom Cruise is talking to?
Huh?
Was Jacques Lacan white, catholic and straight?
What are you doing in the Bushes?
Try Brad Pitt's connections, only 1/3 of them! The ten nodes of Mick Jagger. Romance and Brigitte Bardot? Sure 7 out of 9 "voulez-vous danser avec moi?"

Funeral: Diana, Princess of Wales. OA, mapper

Okay,
Frank Lloyd Wright was a member of 'America First Committee,' a Grassroots antiwar organization founded in 1939 at Yale. Over the next two years, the AFC grew to a membership of 800,000. The group dissolved soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This was all shortly after early modernist master Louis Sullivan's sexual orientation disputed..!
Literature? Sure here is the world of sex and drugs and letters;
William S. Burroughs slept with Allen Ginsberg, who, in turn, slept with Jack Kerouac and earlier Jack slept with Gore Vidal.

Donald Trump's buddy language... OA, mapper

More to gaze and find out... Post your own reconnaissance...
WELCOME TO THE NNDB MAPPER

Music from Turkey

Las Vegas, Rem Koolhaas, Dubai and a Winner, as lights were dimmed before...

First Prize: Dubai Frame by Fernando Donis (Netherlands)Photos via Bustler

Claes Oldenburg and Coosja van Bruggen's’s Flashlight sculpture in UNLV campus is one of the best critiques ever installed as a sculpture in that city . Their carefully placed giant flashlight indeed is on and from close up one can see its dim radiation of light as well as what the the famous strip radiates beyond, not so dim, and restive like the sculpture, but more get up and go and play. It is a summary on scale, consumption, pop, and a very appropriate commentary for a city as a commercial development, busting out visible energy as if there is tomorrow if you keep playing and spending. When noise of Las Vegas Strip thrives and shines on the nightlife, the lights are dim at the University...


Oldenburg/van Bruggen, Flashlight, UNLV Campus 1981. Image from oldenburgvanbruggen.com

Here is a quote from Claes Oldenburg from the website.

The first treatment of the subject was a tower-like open construction which could be climbed by stairs inside to a platform where lights would be directed up into the sky. The proposal was approved May, 1979, but fabrication was put on hold when Coosje developed strong doubts about the concept during the summer that followed, finding this lighthouse version of the Flashlight too mechanical in appearance and the light shining up into the sky too clichèd and reminiscent of authoritarian spectacle. Moreover, she felt the design did not reflect the overwhelming, mysterious presence of Nature all around. Coosje proposed a more original approach: making an analogy to the monumentalization of tiny plant forms in Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst, she compared the flashlight to a cactus which led to a very different formulation of its appearance, creating a daylight identity which had been neglected in the lighthouse approach.

Enter ThyssenKrupp Elevator Architecture Award.

The International, open, single stage, public, anonymous, preliminary design competition
for the conception of a tall emblem structure, to promote the new face of Dubai.

Perhaps unknowingly, the jury selected the best project (i am talking about the published ones) and there is a huge outcry coming from losers of the 900 strong participants. Some seeking apology, re-appropriations, recognition and and flat out denounecement of the Winner.
This is absurd, blinded and really naive.
What the runner uppers reflect are no more than derivative iterations of boring public spectacles, banal light shows and Disneyland like entertainment.


What designer night frame is the second place winner suggesting,


or what about the flying colors of Benetton the tie place represents,


another third place tie with a floating score board perhaps broadcasting the time lost by not purchasing a condominium in half price in Dubai?


As far as the another tie ‘the Mirage” is concerned, I wonder if it was pitched to some other destination first and anyway, whatever. Changing colors and textures where you kiss your partner and say ‘welcome to Dubai?’

Unlike the few complaints on the discussion part of the Bustler article on the Competition, I think the winner, clearly reflects upon series of undefined tears about the feelings of dealings on Dubai. The winning entry not only puts Dubai in its place of framed kitch but also disarms everything else. Not unlike OMA's famous diagram of decorated and simply mundane hi-rise apartments shown in their analysis of Dubai skyline.



I think the winner spent enough time on realizing the drawing and design proposal. The losers can’t get it because it shows that what they been trying to further embrace etc.., Dubai, is already a spectacle for the time being and will always remain so. There is no morality in it and too bad for people, who are trying to make a winningest of the all the spectacles and being totally moralistic about their expensive labor, and unrewarded renderings, after all, beautifully passed by a one liner in a Delirious New York way... A one liner about 'all liners.'

Go home, look in the mirror and tell us you have done nothing critical, but further drank on the poisonous desert milk. Hoping to canquer Dubai, yet being framed.
Go home and don’t look onto Dubai close because you can’t take it. Your colleagues created a city that is better from a distant frame, look but don't touch, Twisted Towers re-framed... The Firms Dubai built.

The winner is like the wheel and there is no point of rediscovering. The rest tries and ends up as cake decoration.
If Rem Koolhaas ever twisted someone's arm for the prize winner, he did it brilliantly. You'll thank him later...

http://www.bustler.net/index.php/article/winners_announced_for_thyssenkrupp_elevator_architecture_award_2008-2009/#comments

Addendum: After seeing the other non winning entries at Bustler, my initial view stands solidified.
http://www.bustler.net/index.php/article/any_love_for_the_losers_of_thyssenkrupp_elevators_dubai_competition/

GOD IS IN THE DETAILS #2

Due to popular demand, I continue to document buildings where the supreme attention was paid to the detailing and curb appeal. These buildings are designed to give an impression of grandeur, class distinction and definitely set your business place apart from the riff-raff-rickety offices everywhere.
GOD IS IN THE DETAILS #1


Various detailing of the components


Entrance


Lobby elegance


Everything is up to building codes too

The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored

A film by director Thomas Johnson and producer Hind Saih.
April 26, 2009. Exactly 23 years after the worst nuclear disaster ever, many untold stories still unburied.

Images from the film:

Ferriswheel at night before the disaster

The Town of Pripryat being evacuated

Aerial photo of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant

Illustration of the accident

Art Review: DAN GRAHAM, BEYOND

oa/DAN GRAHAM INSTALLATION @ MoCA (pirated photo by me)

My review of 'Dan Graham: Beyond' exhibition in MoCA in Los Angeles has just came out in the Architect's Newspaper.

Here is a web copy of the review for elseplace with a pirated picture I took while visiting the show.


DAN GRAHAM: BEYOND

The projectively titled DAN GRAHAM: BEYOND, is Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s survey/retrospective of the artist’s work, which generally regarded as conceptual and complex.

Los Angeles' has a giddy public art scene with heavy hitting one liners in front of newly minted cultural institutions and speculative real estate ventures. One percent public, ninety-nine percent other.
With full size and smaller scale models of his well known pavilions, video works in compartmented viewing pods, texts and photographs, this museum show ought to be a crash course on intelligent public art for this city. It was encouraging to see the interest of the younger generation of viewers during my visit. In Dan Graham’s works, “beyond” has always been there.

It is easy to fall for dismissal, intimidation, misunderstanding, and perverse desire, while participating in and viewing Dan Graham’s work, many do.
However, the works’ intentions usually meant to bypass all that. In Dan Graham’s pieces, the color, composition, lust, pleasure, story telling, fine art, landscape and architecture related layers meticulously studied and carefully placed. The artist’s in depth knowledge of aesthetic theory, compositional un-canny-ness and historical perspective is only second to few.
Even then, the center stage belongs to perception and relations of the mind within and in the periphery of built environments and situations.

Dan Graham’s ultimate punctuation in the works exists unanimously with the participation of the individual and the public.

As the artist himself notes in his books, Dan Graham's works are investigative, revealing and generative via Jacques Lacan’s “mirror phase,” the self’s permanent structure of subjectivity based on the reflections.

In the video and pavilion works of the artist, reflections inform this self-first, and everything else after a timed delay, as the artist manipulates series of actions according to works' intended destination.
The whole systems of cultural codes, innovational particles, material properties such as use of mirrors and camera on cameras, then on monitors etc., packed in that intermediary exchange territory which is in perpetual motion at any given time and deeply rooted in psychoanalytical philosophies.
This is when his works start get really interesting and complex.
Such, weaving and the building upon time-space-light-memory-behavior-communication-etc., relations developed and experimented over the years.
Within Graham’s art, you are as, audience, environment, creator and the created, continuously engaged in series of planned and set systems leading to unplanned discoveries and non-systematic results, on the mirror, there are many chances taken.

One thing is for sure in Graham’s works is that processing never stand still, therefore making it difficult to stop, sit back, and digest. They are highly energetic and in perpetual motion.

Architecture is a division of art generally and conveniently evaluated in its static form.
The end user, the occupant, and the end used, the building, usually take this static condition as granted and limit the critique of each to predictable ends of two dimensional texts even in 3d max, if I may use a little irony...
Dan Graham’s ‘devices’, I quote, or pavilions, as they are called, make sure this static relationship is broken and the dialogue of the signifier and signified is brought back via the specific constructions and the site placement, making the presence of architecture all at once; dynamic, interactive, experimental and so on. Like as if, injecting all the actual movement and life source into the render-frozen method of architectural production and flatly distilled object making.

‘Time,’ when paired with architectural ‘Code’, generates endless number of perceptual and informational systems within the buildings, urban conditions and inevitably, within the social landscape. One can almost view or trace this element in the reflective learning experience of the re-enacted ‘mirror phase,’ with Graham’s pavilions. I assume, one can even justify the shape of the pavilions based on the length of the planned experience as suggested by the artist.
These concepts are the active paradigms of the possibilities of our networked societies, as if deliverable packets of expression, control and stimuli.
This is where we enter spontaneous impact and critical sense of Graham’s experiments, challenging the conventional perceptions of the architectural space, inventive exchanges of mirror images, and incredibly complex movements of seemingly ordinary interactions such as watching and being watched.

Dan Graham is a multi faceted artist, designer, landscaper, writer, storyteller, lecturer, historian, social critic and most importantly, a provocateur, who will make it possible for impaired buildings and landscapes “talk and see,” people “interact,” ideas and thoughts “reflect” and, ‘self’ to learn from its own psychoanalysis.
The viewer/participant must try not to over analyze his works but un resistively experience them, participate in it voyeuristically and consequently be introduced and informed by them, through the critical, narrative, altering and experimental mind of the artist.
In a way, he is a matchmaker of sorts, connecting all kinds of labyrinths and people.

Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha once said for general purposes of understanding of art, that, good art should elicit a response of "Huh? Wow!" as opposed to "Wow! Huh?"
The former is particularly appropriate for Dan Graham’s work.

Orhan Ayyuce
2/23/2009

Music Night: "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU" Random picks , all good

CAL-POLY, Pomona Lecture

May 22.

MO's NEW WORLD

NASA satellite photo

As the Emir of Dubai reaching deep into his pockets to finish his unfinished projects, NASA snaps a picture of his 'revised world.'

Major changes Mo applied:
On sale Canada and USA split by a river like entity,
Panama Canal no more.
Mediterranean Sea is now RIP Creek.
Brand new continents as nude beaches...

Many Mo changes if you look!

A NEW INFRASTRUCTURE Competition - [WE WON! (something)]

Our project 15 UP 15 Down won a special jury picking in much coveted Sci Arc Transportation competition.
Project was mainly drawings of Glen Howard Small's vision of West LA, suggesting transportation and urban alternatives.
I was glad to be the in-house crit and spark plug to get my friend going...
Glen started his drawings in Managua and after being, the Santa Monica Emergency room for kidney staone problems until midnight and finishing the boards in next two days in my small office, project by personally delivered by Glen and, yes, they are all drawn by hand.

See the results at Bustler

Critics' Kid Gloves & Adios Amigos

collage by OA

The architects, who are finishing projects right now are in high demand by the critics. Specially the high profile ones.
Every critic is on a hunt for a new project and if they don't find one, they are opting out for an infrastructure story or ‘the starchitecture is dead’ angle.
It is like; everybody got rid of their silk underwear and put on the kid gloves for harmless boxing...

For the famous ones, open hunt season with secretly grinded axes is on.

It is a matter of time someone comes to their rescue. An unlikely critic like me, for example.

Thank you Frank O., Rem, Thom, Zaha, Foster, Libeskind, Nouvel, etc., etc.

Thank you for a job well done. Keeping the industry going for over a decade until yesterday. Thank you for keeping millions of student projects relevant. Thank you for the design ideas and inspirations. Thanks for the lectures and thanks for the books.

You need to close the book on your previous critics. They are like whores. Untrustworthy. Do you remember when they met you over expensive lunches and cocktails given by magazines, in New York restaurants, hotel lobbies? Do you remember how grateful they were to you, for giving the exclusive interviews laced with few behind the scenes information? Ah so... He/she told ‘me,’ I tell you, you tell your people, tell and read tell and read... Spread the word... Twisted towers coming to town, Brooklyn Bride is pregnant out of wedlock.
Architects forever...

Look at them now, openly criticizing your work in front of public. They are now throwing the book on you and saying you are over. They are now regarding to your projects with no legacy other than gluttony and excess. Your clients put on the same pedestal with criminals. Your lack of social responsibility and your corporate greed all condemned.
Yes, they are.

In the same columns where your supremacy was fed to plebes, then...
Your artistry and irresistible talent easily thrashed, now...

They are printed in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of San Francisco. Never Mind the Chinese newspapers... Freelancers lining up to punch your balls. Public executions on daily ropes.
Did you deserve this?
Of course not! Maybe yes maybe no!
It is not too late! You too can maneuver.
Go for the Obama Doctrine!
It works. No questions asked, no buildings demolished. Put a political sign on the facade and some social issues in the open office space. Yes solar panels, yes recycled carpet schemes. ‘Look ma’ no poison in the whatever building material. No lead just LEED. Everywhere. Never release a rendering without 60% green color.
Think infrastructure! Solar Power. Sustainability...
On your marks...
It is a new dawn, it is a new day... Re-address, re-dress, re-load, re-pack, re-face, re-smell...

Grab that opportunity...

Adiós amigos...

(As yours truly watches the desperately vicious vanity race.)

Lieb House's new home

Photo: Rob Bennett for The New York Times

Story is updated in its original spot!

What Do You Consider Work?

Here is a discussion thread I started in Archinect's world famous discussion forum. The question is a relevant one addressing the legitimacy of internet browsing, writing blogs, posting in internet forums etc., as work. You can foolow it through or submit your thoughts for it there. Here is the link to that discussion thread:
What Do You Consider Work?

I have long asked this question and pondered about it myself.

Many times when I am doing a research and browsing internet, I consider it work.
Many times writing down ideas but not getting paid for it at the moment, I consider work.
Looking at someone else's project, I consider work.
And of course working on paid projects I consider work.
Often reading a book is considered work.
For me the work is one continuous loop.

Architectural firms' websites become more and more like magazines

Thoughthubs, Geographies, Economic News, In-House Articles and similar titles are becoming build in sections of large architectural companies' websites. It is no longer enough for global clients to see and admire the few drawings and finished project photographs. They want to know how the firm is dealing with financial crises, employee cutbacks and what they are working on which locations at the moment.

HOK Message to Our Clients (move the mouse on HOK logo)
SOM on Bending the Grid
RTKL on ThoughtHubs
Foster Essays
OMA on TVCC Fire (news section)

These are great examples on how today's practices continuously handle their own press and stay relevant. Most we have been reading in magazines have been infomercials anyway...

ROYAL FLUSH: Alex Jacob

Elseplace's first issue of the occasional series on random Wikipersona selection. Recommendations are accepted

Alex Jacob (born October 27, 1984 in Houston, Texas) is an American professional poker player.

Among his biggest poker accomplishments are winning the Peter A. Fabrizio Memorial Poker Classic in 2003 and finishing runner-up at the 2006 World Poker Tour (WPT) tournament in Foxwoods Resort Casino on April 9 2006, winning $655,507. Jacob secured his biggest paycheck to date by winning the 2006 U.S. Poker Championship with a first-place prize of $878,500. Jacob has 3 WSOP Final Tables, including a 3rd in Event 3 in No-Limit hold'em at the 2007 World Series of Poker

He graduated in May 2006 from Yale University with a degree in Economics and Mathematics. His talent was spotted there as early as 2004 by James McManus, when he sat down to play at Yale one night and mentioned Alex in an article about the experience months later. Additionally, he is well known for his graciousness and sportsmanship in tournament play.

Alex Jacob's Wikipedia page

WOW! EVERYTHING GOT ANTIQUATED ALL OF A SUDDEN!

Greatest couple on Earth




There is a strange feeling about all these transformations. Unfortunately digital photograph will not age this way... They just crash...

Try your own here
and here...

Valentine's Day

I have visited the Woodlawn Cemetery, on my way to dog park. On Valentine's day. As I was driving by the Fourteen Street and Pico Blvd., in Santa Monica, I was drawn into the cemetery, perhaps by the light it bounced from its green open spaces. I parked the car with the puppies watching me with curiosity and took two pictures, latter one looking up to sky, is an accidental one as I was trying to close the camera.
I have seen a family and a single young man praying by the side of different graves. Both graves looked fairly fresh. The other graves looked well adjusted and weathered, countering sadness of recent departures from this world, with the longevity of love...
What stranger visits a cemetery on Valentine's day?

"CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?"

-Houston we have a problem

At any given moment there are thousands of men made objects, mainly satellites, circling just outside of the Earth's atmosphere. Recently two of these satellites, one Russian and one American, collided above Siberia, drawing attention to this growing problem. Looking from the enhanced illustration above, it is a miracle more of these high speed collusions don't happen.

A related article from New York Times' SPACE & COSMOS Section

Unnatural Selection

photo; science progress

What should I do before I call to place an order?
What comes in a shipment?
How do I place an order?
What methods of payment do you accept?
Do you offer a payment plan?

If I didn't link you to Xytex Corporation website and post the picture above, you'd never guess we are talking about ordering human sperms here. For starters, consider these;"Hair Color," "Eye Color," "Ethnic Origin."

In an article titled "Unnatural selection," writer Marlowe Hood expands on the scene;
"Picture this: prospective parents excitedly clicking through an online catalogue, ticking off the optimal mix of traits for their yet-to-be-conceived child."

In an opportune moment like this, we would also like to say, "happy birthday Darwin."

Additional link: The Handmaid's Tale (the film)

Aquaculture's before and more

In 1970, aquaculture accounted for just 3.9 percent of the world’s supply of shellfish and mollusks for human consumption. By 2000, aquaculture’s share of that food source had grown to 27.3 percent. A conspicuous example of that expansion appears along China’s Bo Hai coast.

More @ NASA Earth Observatory

TVCC Fire, 2/08/09

TVCC Fire, 2/08/09

It is true the situation went into the scale of architecture's 9/11 with the incredible carrying capacity of the countless blogs and fire experts, Rem haters, starchitect opposites, sensation riders, ambulance chasers, regime critics, anti communists, anti capitalists and friends of the enterprise.
As we speak, the smell of the burning rubber and melting steel is already upon China. I don't know if Rem Koolhaas is on a jet plane, to the burned job site.
Whatever the reason for the inferno at the building, one thing is clear that it will be remembered as the day iconic building died, by many. As if proponents of the 'whatever' needed a physical evidence that it has died, this could be it for those people... A believable turning point. When, these days, everyday marks something of the restless times. Best days to be in the news business, if you can stand the constant drumming.




A MURDER ON THE LANTERN NIGHT?

No, not so much the building itself, but the ghostly man next lot, whose dominating presence has been covered by the soot coming from its dead competition.

Perhaps this was a murder, by the two legged monster who killed her and chose the Lantern Night to do it. Since its extreme experience with construction, waited patiently just like the insane arsonist. An opportune moment arrived, when the rubber detail was being wrapped around her, he knew this was the best time to set the fire and blame on the Lantern Night...
A terrible crime has been committed in the name of egotism and irresistible desire for absolute power.
A robust dictator turned its back to demising beauty. A cruel bastard...


Or,



ROMEO OR JULIET, MUMTAZ AND JAHAN, GIRLS IN THE MIDDLE...

Let’s go the other way around. this time the theme is a love story...
Imagine, the irresistible attraction between two tombs in Taj Mahal... The ultimate lamentation of Love and Death, not as good as poetry but better than the filmic and the theatrical versions because of its inescapable presence as two architectural beings, even bisected.

The CCTV was never two, without TVCC of course. Now that his Juliet gone in a towering fire on a Lantern Night.
A sad situation. Watching your Nancy burn in the rubber hell. Contemplate your own future there.
Scared. Sad. Separated by death.


NOW WHAT?

I don't want to know why the building is burned. Architect’s fault or not, Lantern Fire is not my business.
When this all clears up,
I am interested in finding a new girl, no maybe a new nothing, no maybe a temporary lover, no maybe a long term mistress.
Get real, this is now. The speedy world of cast concrete, fast erect steel and extrusions to attach the German made glass.

I want to see the Yang's Yin...

A first memorial for a building...

She, in either scenario, set on fire in two mysteries. Gone, blackened. Leaving the bird's nest and his ETFE girl, the only hi profile couple in Beijing.

Sure, it is a crazy pair of a story above. For the famous pairs at least...

Does that remind you Koolhaas' Delirious New York buildings in bed? Not as full blown love as this though... Theirs was just sex...

Sad story indeed.

You can burn an Icon but Troy, written in Iliad is already seven stories deep below the terra firma... Not necessarily gone.

We need fire marshals and the love stories all the same for its news value...

Music of Resistance

From Al Jazeera

The Music of Resistance is a six-part documentary series that tells the stories of musicians who fight repression and sing about injustices.

They are unique musical personalities from some of the world's most troubled areas - what makes them different is their need to communicate their politics through music.

They are all ambitious and talented but for them 'making it' is not about diamonds and sports cars - it is about radical political change.

They come from Nigeria, Mozambique, the favelas of Brazil, Cape Verde, the desert of the Southern Sahara and inner-city London.

Framed in their historical context and current political circumstances, The Music of Resistance will illustrate their messages through live performances, interviews and images from the communities they sing about and inspire.



Vigario Geral is one of the most dangerous, drug-invested, suburbs, or favelas, in Brazil. Shootings are a daily occurrence but it was the massacre of 21 residents by police that sparked a remarkable music group.
Anderson Sá turned his back on drug dealing and crime and formed AfroReggae - a group devoted to providing an alternative to the children in the favela.



The nomadic Touareg tribes have endured years of drought and civil war. The one constant through this hardship has been the music of Tinariwen.
Once a group of rebel soldiers, training alongside Colonel Gadaffi in Libya, after years of struggle and violence Tinariwen decided to lay down their guns and fight with a different weapon - music.



Seun Kuti is carrying the weight of one of the heaviest musical legacies in Africa. He is the youngest son of Fela Anikelapu Kuti, the creator of Afrobeat and the voice of Nigeria's disenfranchised.
Seun is motivated by endemic corruption and the abuse of Nigeria's youth.



It is a simple request - clean water and sanitation. Afflicted by polio as a child, Feliciano Dos Santos was determined to make sure that young citizens of his native Mozambique do not suffer the lack of sanitation that spreads disease.
This message has become central to the music of his band, Massoukos.



Nuno Santos (aka Chullage) is a Cape Verdean living in Portugal. Half of his fellow Cape Verdeans in Lisbon do not have official documents and live on the fringe of society.
Like so many migrants from this small African island, he faces discrimination daily. His music tries to redress this injustice.

The Music of Resistance airs at the following times GMT:
Monday: 1230; Tuesday: 0330, 1400; Wednesday: 0630, 1930; Thursday: 0130, 1030; Friday: 0330, 1000, 1430; Saturday: 1730; Sunday: 0430, 2030
Watch Al Jazeera

Paul Laszlo: Rich Man's Architect

Laszlo bomb shelter for US Air Force

In one of my conversations with Julius Shulman, he said Laszlo would come to him with a wallpaper sample and ask if the material would look good in a magazine photograph...
How's that for a total design concept?

"Building a house is like giving birth to a baby. The client is the mother, and I am the father." - Paul László 1900-1993

"Rich Man's Architect" Monday, Aug. 18, 1952 TIME Magazine

Architect-Designer Paul László, 52, is a comfort-loving Hungarian expatriate who arrived in the U.S. 16 years ago with $200 in his pocket and a one-word vocabulary: okay. Since then he has enormously expanded both. By catering to the comfort of his rich clients, he has built up a $1,5OO,000-a-year business as designer of some of the nation's most luxurious showplaces. And in his fancy Beverly Hills showroom last week, he was volubly admiring the first samples of his latest commission: $1,000,000 worth of modern furniture to be manufactured in Europe.

Architect László designs his houses down to the last ashtray or built-in Kleenex holder. He protests that money is not everything: "One million dollars will not build the perfect house. You somehow can't put everything you want into it. It's largely a matter of taste, judgment and talent." But money helps.

Among his fanciest projects: the million-dollar Wichita Falls palace of Texas Oilman Charles McGaha (built in collaboration with Architect Allen Siple), which includes a horseshoe-shaped swimming pool, Lucite-legged chairs, hand-painted draperies, and a radio-controlled main gate;* and Movie Producer William Perlberg's cozier ($250,000) rambler, with swimming pool, projection room, Lucite wastebaskets and hip-high combination shelf and hearthstone. Other László clients: Gloria Vanderbilt Stokowski, Freeman (Amos 'n' Andy) Gosden, Barbara Hutton, Sonja Henie, Hollywood Director William Wyler.

Like most modern architects, László makes full use of uncluttered space and free access to the outdoors. His aim: simplicity with elegance. "Warmth in luxury," he says, "is easy. But it is full of pitfalls. You can overbalance a house with the furnishings . . . Today's modern furniture is mostly glamorized boxes. Furniture must help balance a home ... It should so blend with the wallpaper and contours of the room that it does not annoy ..."

It is this "idea of balance," says László, that distinguishes him from most modern architects. And too few of them pay enough attention to the house owner. Building a house, says László, "is like giving birth to a baby. The client is the mother, and I am the father."

From Time Magazine article titled, "Rich Man's Architect" Monday, Aug. 18, 1952
Paul Laszlo @ Wikipedia

Venturi's Lieb House in New Jersey to be Demoed or Moved

Venturi, Rauch, & Scott Brown- Buildings and Projects

Architect Robert Venturi and partner John Rauch's historic Beach House (lieb House) is under a real threat of being demolished. The new owner is willing to give the house free if it could be moved away from the site to make a room for his planned new house. If the efforts by architect's son to move the house on a barge don't materialize by the first of the month, Feb. 2009, the historically invaluable house will be demolished.


Venturi, Rauch, & Scott Brown- Buildings and Projects

Robert Venturi is a living architect and the principle writer of two very important book s on architecture, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning From Las Vegas. He is also the recepient of Pritzker Prize, the highest award given to architects, and many other medals for his work.
His firm VSBA is still active from their offices near Philadelphia.


Venturi, Rauch, & Scott Brown- Buildings and Projects

Following is the architect's statement and description rephrased by Stephen Lauf via
Venturi, Rauch, & Scott Brown- Buildings and Projects

"The Lieb House
Loveladies, New Jersey, 1967
(with the assistance of Gerod Clark [who may the first architect to collage magazine people within architectural renderings])

It is easy to explain what the Lieb House is not: It is not a tasteful natural-wood-shingled configuration of complex and contradictory wings and roofs. It is an ordinary shed with conventional elements. It uses asbestos shingles with imitation wood-grain relief, once the indigenous building material on Long Beach Island. And it uses big elements, such as the stair that starts out the width of the house and gradually decreases to three feet on the second floor. Its unconventional elements are explicitly extraordinary when they do occur, as in the big round window that looks like a 1930s radio loud-speaker. It is a little house with big scale, different from the houses around it but also like them. It tries not to make the plaster madonna in the birdbath next door look silly, and it stands up to, rather than ignores, the environment of utility poles."

Photo; VSBA

Photo; ED HILLE

Story at Philadelphia Inquirer

UPDATE>>>>UPDATE>>>>UPDATE>>>>UPDATE>>>>IN TRANSIT

Watch the video of the move and the temporary new location via pressofatlanticcity.com

Robert Venturi's Lieb House - On the Move/flickr/tud5000/2009.01.29

Robert Venturi's Lieb House - On the Move/flickr/tud5000/2009.01.30

the temporary new location via pressofatlanticcity.com

UPDATE>>>>UPDATE>>>>UPDATE>>>>IN TRANSIT>>>>A NEW HOME

more pictures of the latest move @ tud5000's flickr photostream

It's for reasons like this that I wonder: all quibbles over philosophical purity, in situ vs not in situ, or just generally whether Venturi represents a "discredited" "obsolete" "crap" legacy and we should merely let some kind of style-libertarian nature take its course...*what on earth is wrong with this*? It's the best positive publicity one can ask for; and even the creator himself can appreciate--on an inherently philosophical basis, no less.

Indeed, as an "architectural event", the move is poetry in its own right. It's its own best self-justification. - a comment from an Archinect member, rondo mogilskie.

Also from New York Times:

The spectacle attracted a throng of about 150 onlookers to the third floor of Pier 17 at South Street Seaport, including Mr. Venturi, the 83-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning architect who built the house in 1969 for Nathaniel and Judy Lieb. The Liebs had it built near the northern tip of Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore. The current owner of the property planned to demolish the structure, prompting the unusual rescue effort, which involved selling the house to an owner willing to relocate it.

Standing next to his wife and partner, the architect Denise Scott Brown, Mr. Venturi ignored the tangle of microphones and cameras thrust in his direction at the seaport, and applauded and waved with a weak smile as the 1,500-square-foot house and the barge carrying it came into view, wending its way northward propelled by a tugboat and trailed by a helicopter.

Photo: Rob Bennett for The New York Times


more photos/flickr/tud5000
Discussed at Archinect.com
more @ NYT : Moving on a Barge to a Long Island Berth

Alexander Kluge: Brutality in Stone

Début by Alexander Kluge is an analysis of the Nazi system based on the architecture it left behind. This experimental documentary - ending a period of denial in German cinema - also marked the start of the Neue Deutsche Welle.

In 1960, Kluge (1932, Halberstadt, Germany) co-directed his first short film with Peter Schamoni entitled Brutality in Stone, a poetic montage film reflecting on the notion that the past lives on in architectural ruins; that the ruined structures of the Nazi period in particular bear silent witness to the atrocities committed.
This film is important for a number of reasons: Brutality in Stone marks the beginning of a process in which German film makers of the 1960s and 1970s began to overturn the apparent amnesia German cinema had demonstrated during the 1950s in regard to the Nazi period. In addition, the film was premièred at the annual Oberhausen short film festival in February 1961. The festival was significant because it functioned as a forum for young and experimental film makers attempting to develop modes of cinematic practice outside the rigid, commercial framework of the industrial system - modelled on Hollywood - that had been set up with the assistance of the American occupying forces in the immediate post-war period. A year after the première of Brutality in Stone at the Oberhausen festival, Kluge was one of the authors and signatories of the 'Oberhausen Manifesto', a document that outlined the imperatives of bringing a new kind of German cinema into being.

The 38th International Film Festival Rotterdam

update: watch the entire film at UBUWEB

LIND BUILDING, Marina Del Rey. GOD IS IN THE DETAILS

I think it was around 1985, the glorious 80's, the grandfather of recently dead real estate gluttony.
Oh yes, where were we? At that time working in an office with a receptionist (the good old days of architectural practice.)
One day my the attractive idol, who just got a divorce and had the boss on a leash, told me she had seen 'the most gorgeous building' on the way to work that morning...
Almost 25 years later, then newly built LIND Building still stands. For lease...