elseplace

Internet Picture of the Day: Fuck Archigram...

2012-01-19T21:53:00.000-08:00

Coffee Break

2011-12-30T14:42:00.000-08:00

ACHTUNG SOCIETY

2011-12-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

Fiction: An Intern Architect's Creative Sundays

2011-11-13T15:07:00.000-08:00

By Orhan Ayyüce

[You need to read this first..]

" i live in a no window cold basement apartment in manhattan. we share the kitchen counter and the hot plate for cooking and of course the bathroom. it is expensive, around 1100$ per month, but being close to office in tribeca , a twenty minute walk, surely helps. i wake up around five in the morning just to turn the electric heater on and go back to warm bed for another fifteen minutes until the room gets little warmer. during this time i usually turn the tv on and watch the local news. once i am up, i turn the hot plate to boil some water for my instant coffee and go online to check e bay to see if i am still the highest bidder on those boots or something before the winter settles in. i love buying used clothes, my only indulgence in life.

once i have my coffee my cat wakes up and i clean her litter and put kibble in her bowl and fresh water for the next 12-14 hours while i am gone working in architect's office where i make half of the rent in addition to what my family sends me to shop.

we work on sundays because my boss feels creative that day and we are there to make it happen for him. he typically comes to his desk and creatively solve one or two window details before he goes down to play his grand piano. sometimes we even clap him after he finishes a boring but meticulous rendering of some piano music. usually i put my headphones and listen i-pad music and only clap when i see other interns doing it.

sometimes our boss gets generous and sends couple of us to get 5 dollar domino's pizzas for lunch. why dominos? because there is one down the street and it is one less decision for our boss to make. he says he is allergic to cheese and asks the interns to pick his olive oil spaghetti from giofranco's on the way.

all day we make computer drawings of our boss' ideas and each time he resolves a detail we hear new concerto from his piano. this goes back and forth for few times until he feels he created enough for this sunday and heads back to his small 3000 sq. ft. condo down the street. he lives in this gorgeous place his wife interior decorated and was published in new york times recently.

after he is gone, the work considerably slows down in the studio and people start to disappear one by one. i decide to go when i realize that i have been here for 10 hours already. i stop by hot dog place and pick up those 2 for 1.99 deals albanian guy sells and go home and repeat what i have done in reverse order of the morning.

sometimes i call my parents who want to know if i made my student loan payment this month. they don't know any of this as i tell them project i am working on just won the competition in china. they think my boss is really lucky to have me and i should ask for retirement plan after china project success."

Further read: via BEZOAR

First Beverly Hills Gas Station

2011-10-24T22:20:00.000-07:00

Archinect - Neutra VDL - Cal Poly Pomona

2011-10-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

Urban Operations: Wilshire Star Maps

2011-09-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

"No other place in the world has such a fantastic collection of underecognized and underappreciated vertical architecture as in Los Angeles. In a city of mostly low-density avenues and sprawling suburban tracts, no other street in L.A. contains as many of these Modernicus Erectus as Wilshire Boulevard." — Urban Operations

Since 2006, the annual pamphlet on skyscrapers is published as an ongoing research project by the office of Los Angeles architect John Southern, Urban Operations. This year's issue, "Wilshire Star Maps" is a limited edition of 100 prints and a digital edition you are about to enjoy. It also features an essay by Orhan Ayyüce, "Wilshire Boulevard: A Drive-By Family".

Digital copies of Urban Operations' previous pamphlets, Slopscraper, Sumoscraper and Skyscrapers of the Dead are also available at their website.

Wilshire Star Maps by Urban Operations

SpareTop 9/2011. OA

2011-09-03T17:36:00.000-07:00

SPACE OF POLITICS

2011-09-02T22:40:00.000-07:00

Summer Journal

2011-08-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

With all the people traveling and taking pictures of beautiful places they are vacationing, I feel like the people in old city, in front of the social club, a coffee house or the tailor shop, freshly hosed down, you and your friends consider once a year visit to central park of the city a trip to countryside, never leaving the neighborhood, the street, the smell of the buildings, sounds of children playing on the sidewalk, vendors selling their goods, occasionally a rat chased by few people, noise of cars from the boulevard beeping on impulse, friends stopping and chatting about the family, gossiping about the neighbors, regulars playing cards inside the club and the man with a trilby hat talking like a mob boss, every page of the newspaper on the card table is read and creased, this is the city life in the summer, this is New York, Los Angeles, this is Istanbul, this is Cairo, this is Rome, half empty, this is where the old oscillating fans blow and you hear someone washing dishes from upstairs apartment.. This is a travel to everyday life in metropolis.

PLASTIC DUMMY CAMERA

2011-07-20T17:26:00.000-07:00

"NEVER TRUST A CAMERA IF IT IS DUM AND PLASTIC"

IF YOU have to SIGN a RELEASE FORM, it's PROBABLY WORTH DOING.

2011-07-14T18:11:00.000-07:00

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Genius Production in Architecture Schools

2011-07-08T11:03:00.000-07:00

Many times a typical architecture student is made to believe he or she is a special breed, a special talent the world needs, a genius worthy of $15,000 education per semester in private avant garde schools, taught in cutting edge theories and design, by the people who are experts beyond criticism.
But, during the summer when the schools have shed their clothing and no one is around, the reality is a naked truth.
A student needs to see this.
This is the reality, and, this is a snapshot of this condition.
More time for a new school and social research is needed?
If so, drop out now!
Otherwise, you will graduate from your desk, another tuition will be deposited and the new student will start all over again.
It is like being beaux arts f'd every semester. Draw, make, script, present.., whatever and what do you know?

Tourism in Los Angeles Series, #1: Down and Out on Wilshire Boulevard

2011-06-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

Photo by Orhan Ayyuce 6/29/2011

Decay News: SUPERIOR COURT, Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles

2011-06-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

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If It Was Me #2, Dutch Colonialism

2011-06-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

The other day I made this diagnosis to a problem about a house, whose style ID was in question. The new owner was asking if this house was Queen Anne style in a public forum.
I replied,
"Dutch Colonial is harassed by QA's little brother..;.)"
And, went on to post a photoshoped image of what I would do with it, by saying,
"do it like this as if you were in a west coast design magazine..."
Here is the said house with my design suggestion overlay.

Review Season 2011

2011-06-11T12:55:00.000-07:00

L-R; Thom Mayne, Karen Lohrmann, .., Albert Pope, Orhan Ayyuce, Frances Anderton, Christophe Cornubert, Jeffrey Inaba, Alan Berger.

I have been in many year end reviews in in few architecture schools in California and Arizona. Besides my own studio's presentations at Cal Poly Pomona, this year's highlight was the suprastudio jury in UCLA. I have been following this research studio directed by Thom Mayne and Karen Lohrmann and the work was really good in terms vaiable solutions and research results trying to incubate a change via culture in selected American cities with population one million or less. In addition to studio instructors, the jury consisted of Nicola Twilley, Orhan Ayyuce, Albert Pope, John Enright Francis Anderton, Christophe Cornubert, Jeffrey Inaba, Alan Berger and others. There were few partial appearences by all interesting but heavily resisted persona of Jeffrey Kipnis. This was the most focused group of students working on the possibility of city scale change. The proposals and solutions were presented but it was not clear architecture's role was redefined. I stressed my commentary on the limitations of physical aspects of architecture and its ability to change the city without the economical conditions of just income distribution is achieved first. In short, summarizing the urgency of capitalist evolution first, which Zizek calls the new and improved communism. Otherwise the building style fashion and all the luxurious public architecture remains as a self serving ode to the dying profession of architecture as we know of. As of now architecture represents a conservatism of holding its nineteenth century curriculum and manual. In a sense, solving the citiy's problem with geometry does seem old school.

AI WEIWEI's WICKED PROBLEM, proposed New Cultural Complex in Shenzhen, China

2011-05-24T12:31:00.000-07:00

AI WEIWEI's WICKED PROBLEM, proposed Samaranch Memorial Museum in Tianjin, China

2011-05-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

SMALL, BIG, FOG and LEONG LEONG

2011-05-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

“Three Glen Small related projects unknowingly and independently conceived by others 25-30 years later” was going to be the title of my short prose but these days I am trying to write less and let the images and statements do the talking.

During the composition of this I thought of these:
Being highly innovative is a relative term.
I enjoyed the uncanniness of the similarities and valued the differences.
It was entertaining

My friend Glen Small is a brilliant architect

At the end, there are countless number of 'alike' things but each fingerprint is unique, would you say so?

Project One

Turf Town
Designed by Glen Small, 1983
Unbuilt
Statement:
“WHEN I WAS DESIGNING IN 1969 AND 1970 FOR DEVELOPERS, I WOULD FIGURE OUT THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF VOLUME AND UNITS THAT I COULD GET ONTO THE PROPERTY AND HOW THE BEDROOMS COULD BE BROKEN AWAY TO MAKE MORE UNITS.. THE LAND WAS EXPENSIVE AND THE DEVELOPER WANTED ALL HE COULD GET. I FELT THE UNITS WERE INTERESTING AND CONTROLLED BY TYPE FIVE WOOD CONSTRUCTION THAT WAS LIMITED TO TWO STORIES. I WAS TOLD THE BUILDING DEPARTMENT KEPT A MODEL OF WHAT MY TWO STORY CONSISTED OF. IN REALITY IT WAS FIVE STORIES HIGH, THE LAW ALLOWED TO BUILD UP GRADE ON THE SIDE YARDS, TO BURY THE PARKING ON GRADE AND HAVE MEZZANINE LEVELS THAT WERE 1/3 THE FLOOR AREA OF THE ROOM THAT THEY WERE OPEN TO AND ACCESS TO A SPLIT LEVEL ROOF. I COULD JUST AS WELL HAVE BEEN DESIGNING WITHIN A SET OF CRITERIA THAT PRODUCED ROOF GARDENS, RECYCLING OF WATER AND GARBAGE, SOLAR ENVELOPS, FOLIAGE GREEN WALLS ETC.
THE SITE, THE OLYMPIC PARK AREA WAS AN AREA OF LOS ANGELES THAT WAS A TYPICAL GRID IRON STREET PATTERN THAT IS FOUND THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES. IT WAS SELECTED FOR ITS LACK OF CHARACTER AND UNIMPORTANT CONTEXTUAL BUILDINGS ON THE SITE. ALSO IT OFFERED A CHANCE TO BE IMPLEMENTED IN OTHER PARTS OF THE CITY AND OTHER CITIES.
I HAD A GROUP OF EIGHT STUDENTS TO WORK WITH. I BANGED OUT THE CONCEPT INSTANTLY I PICKED THE FUNCTIONS AND THE PATTERNS OF VISUAL GAME FOR EACH BLOCK. THE STUDENTS WERE INVOLVED AS DEVELOPERS WORKING WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THE ZONING THAT I SET UP. THE SITE WAS FOUR BLOCKS , THAT CREATED ONE LARGE RECTANGLE GROUPING.
MY CONCEPT WAS TO CREATE A SOLAR ZONING ENVELOPE FOR HIGH DENSITY DEVELOPMENT THAT INCLUDED ECOLOGICAL AND MOVEMENT SYSTEMS. ALL HERE AND NOW STUFF THAT COULD BE BUILT. RALPH KNOWLES A PROFESSOR AT USC HAD DONE ELABORATE STUDIES OF SOLAR ENVELOPES THAT THE SOUTHWEST INDIANS HAD INCORPORATED INTO THEY’RE BUILDING GROUPINGS. HE USED THIS AS INSPIRATION TO DEVELOP PRESENT DAY COMPLEX SOLAR ENVELOPE PROPOSALS. I IN CONTRAST WANTED A SIMPLE SOLAR ZONING CODE THAT DEVELOPERS AND PLAN CHECKERS COULD UNDERSTAND AND WORK

WITH.”

Mountain Dwellings
Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) 2006
Built
Statement/Quote from a Dezeen article by Marcus Fairs :
“How do you combine the splendours of the suburban backyard with the social intensity of urban density? The Mountain Dwellings are the 2nd generation of the VM Houses – same client, same size and same street. The program, however, is 2/3 parking and 1/3 living. What if the parking area became the base upon which to place terraced housing – like a concrete hillside covered by a thin layer of housing, cascading from the 11th floor to the street edge? Rather than doing two separate buildings next to each other – a parking and a housing block – we decided to merge the two functions into a symbiotic relationship. The parking area needs to be connected to the street, and the homes require sunlight, fresh air and views, thus all apartments have roof gardens facing the sun, amazing views and parking on the 10th floor. The Mountain Dwellings appear as a suburban neighbourhood of garden homes flowing over a 10-storey building – suburban living with urban density.
The roof gardens consist of a terrace and a garden with plants changing character according to the changing seasons. The building has a huge watering system which maintains the roof gardens. The only thing that separates the apartment and the garden is a glass façade with sliding doors to provide light and fresh air.”

Project Two

Copy Cat Skyscrapers (see. a+u 09:86 featuring Glen Small for more student work, p.53-60)
Studio Glen Small, 4 th. year, Sci Arc student project by Uri Sally, Fall 1985
Unbuilt
Statement from Glen Small on “Copy Cat Skyscrapers” studio:
“THE COPY CAT SKYSCAREPERS EMERGED QUITE UNEXPECTEDLY FROM A SEMESTER OF TRADITIONAL SKYSCRAPER DESIGN. THE STUDENTS RESEARCHED HIGHRISES IN NATURE, HISTORICAL, PRIMITIVE AND CONTEMPORARY HIGHRISES, AND THE COMPONENTS OF HIGHRISERS. THE CLASS VISITED HIGHRISES UNDER CONSTRUCTION AND ARCHITECTURAL OFFFICES THAT SPECIALIZE IN HIGHRISE.
THE CLASS WAS UNEVENTFUL, DOWNRIGHT BORING, UNTIL BY CHANCE I SHOWED THEM A XEROX SYSTEM I WAS EXPERIMENTING WITH TO PRODUCE “FIERO TOWER,” A HIGHRISE OF XEROXED CARS. THAT DID IT. THE CLASS CAME ALIVE WITH IDEAS. WITHIN FIVE WEEKS, THEY PRODUCED UNIQUE IMAGERY OF HIGHRISES. THE MORE THEY USED THE XEROX SYSTEM THE BETTER THEIR IMAGES BECAME. THE XEROX WAS THE DESIGN TOOL FOR THE PLANS, ELEVATIONS AND SECTIONS. AVERAGE STUDENTS BECAME EXCELLENT STUDENTS BECAUSE THEY NO LONGER HAD TO RELY ON DRAFTING SKILLS. STUDENTS LOOKED AT OBJECTS IN PERIODICALS FOR INSPIRATION. THEIR EYES OPENED, AND THEY CAUGHT THE SPARK THAT PROPELLED THEM BEYOND FASHION AND HISTORISM INTO SIGNIFICANT EXPLORATION.”

Beekman Tower
Designed by Frank O. Gehry
Built, 2011
An excerpt from New York Times article by Nicoloi Ouroussoff titled,
“Downtown Skyscraper for the Digital Age”
“The power of the design only deepens when it is looked at in relation to Gilbert’s Woolworth building. A steel frame building clad in neo-Gothic terra-cotta panels, Gilbert’s masterpiece is a triumphant marriage between the technological innovations that gave rise to the skyscraper and the handcrafted ethos of an earlier era.
Mr. Gehry’s design is about bringing that same sensibility — the focus on refined textures, the cultivation of a sense that something has been shaped by a human hand — to the digital age. The building’s exterior is made up of 10,500 individual steel panels, almost all of them different shapes, so that as you move around it, its shape is constantly changing. And by using the same kind of computer modeling that he used for his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, more than a decade ago, he was able to achieve this quality at a close to negligible increase in cost.
But Mr. Gehry is also making a statement. The building’s endlessly shifting surfaces are an attack against the kind of corporate standardization so evident in the buildings to the south and the conformity that it embodied. He aims, as he has throughout his career, to replace the anonymity of the assembly line with an architecture that can convey the infinite variety of urban life. The computer, in his mind, is just a tool for reasserting that variety.”

Project Three

JungleTheater, 1984
Designed by Glen Small, 1984
Statement from Glen Small,
“IN THE SPRING OF 1984 AN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION WAS ANNOUNCED FOR TIMES SQUARE THEATRICAL AREA. PHILIP JOHNSON (THE LATE PROMINENT EVER CHANGING COMMERCIAL ARCHITECT AND ARCHITECTURAL BROKER) HAD UPSET NEW YORK WITH A LARGE DEVELOPMENT PROPOSAL FOR THE WORLD FAMOUS TIMES SQUARE AREA. THUS, A COMPETITION WAS PUT TOGETHER TO SHOW ALTERNATIVES TO DEVELOPING THE AREA. THE PROGRAM STATED THAT PROPOSALS WOULD BE CONSIDERED FOR THE AREA IN GENERAL, THAT THE TIMES SQUARE BUILDING COULD BE TORN DOWN, AND CREATIVE SOLUTIONS WERE BEING SOUGHT. FOR ME THESE WORDS WERE FRESH MEAT IN FRONT OF A TIGER. I PUT TOGETHER MY SCI-ARC SECOND YEAR STUDENTS AND WE KNOCKED OUT A PRESENTATION IN THREE DAYS. A REAL SHAME, BECAUSE THE CONCEPTUAL IDEAS DESERVED MORE.
THE BIG OVERRIDING IDEA WAS TO CONNECT OLD AND NEW BUILDINGS TOGETHER UNDER A TENSION STRUCTURE ROOF, CREATING A GIGANTIC GREEN HOUSE. GREEN HOUSES HAVE ALWAYS HAD A SPECIAL APPEAL TO ME. THE IDEA OF FEELING LIKE YOU ARE OUTSIDE, BECAUSE OF THE LIGHT AND AIRINESS, BUT ALSO PROTECTED FROM THE ELEMENTS IS THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS. THE CRYSTAL PALACE WAS THE ULTIMATE BUILDING FOR MY TASTE. IT HAD THE COMBINATION OF NATURAL LIGHT, AIR, PLANTS AND PEOPLE. THE NATURALLY LIGHT INTERIORS OF THE AVERAGE SHOPPING CENTER HAS VALIDATED THIS APPEAL. TO MY AMAZEMENT, BECAUSE I AM NAIVE ENOUGH TO THINK THAT OTHER PEOPLE WILL LIKE THE SAME THINGS I DO, SOME PEOPLE ARE OPPOSED TO THE BIG GREENHOUSE INTERIOR SPACE THAT REPLACES THE STREET. IF YOU LIKE TO HUDDLE IN WINTER CLOTHING SIPPING COFFEE IN FREEZING WEATHER YOU DEFINITELY WOULD BE OPPOSED. OR BECAUSE WE HAVE ALWAYS HAD OPEN STREETS THAT ARE EXPOSED TO THE ELEMENTS IS REASON ENOUGH TO KEEP IT THAT WAY. EVEN IN CALIFORNIA, WHERE ALL SORTS OF VARIED WEATHER OCCURS, TO ENCLOSE SPACE IS QUESTIONED BY MANY. DO YOU FIND PEOPLE DRIVING AROUND IN WINTER WITH THEIR CONVERTIBLE TOPS DOWN? RARELY AT NIGHT, WHEN IT IS RAINING, COLD OR WINDY? ”

Below a poem written by Glen Small on the project, Jungle Theater

THE COLD WIND CHILLS OUR BONES AND THE ICY PAVEMENT IS TREACHEROUS.
WE GINGERLY DART DOWN THE SUBWAY STEPS, AND ENTER THE GRAFFITI DRAGONS.
AS WE JOLT TO A STOP AT TIMES SQUARE, WE THAW IN A TROPIC HEAT.
THE ROAR OF WATERFALLS IS HEARD OVERHEAD AS WE ASCEND UP CASCADING STAIRS TO A MINIATURE ELECTRONIC YOSEMITE VALLEY.
CARS SURROUND US, BUT WE CLIMB TO THE ELEVATED PEDESTRIAN WALK.
SLOWLY WE HIKE UP THE PATH ON THE SIDE OF THE BUILDING, STOPPING TO GAZE AT THEATERS AND SHOPS, OR VIEW THE MULTIPLE ACTIVITIES WHICH SURROUND US.
ALWAYS COGNIZANT OF THE EXTERIOR WEATHER PROJECTED ON THE BIG SCREEN,
WE ARE SUSPENDED IN TIME AND SPACE IN A KINETIC MOVEMENT WITHIN THIS GIANT CENTER STAGE.

the Audi Urban Future: Project New York
Designed by LEONG LEONG, 2011
Statement from architects:
“Our proposal for the Audi Urban Future: Project New York exhibition on the future of urban mobility, on based on Standard Architecture's previous proposal for a metropolis "reclaimed by nature," imagines a city with new and unpredictable relationships with nature. While mobility is an essential part of contemporary life for human beings, it is also a basic necessity for maintaining bio-diverse ecologies in urban settings like Manhattan. As weather patterns become increasingly unpredictable and environmental conditions more dire, increasing biodiversity will maximize the resilience of the city while minimizing disaster risk and aid recovery efforts. In order to capitalize on biodiversity, Manhattan will have to relinquish a certain degree of control. By introducing a new zoning and organizational system that mobilizes ecologies and animal species, the city will benefit from a nature that is not artificial, controlled, or well-behaved. This new development will offer a resilient form of growth for the future of the city by prioritizing the mobility of ecologies as much as human beings.”

Celebrate Two Hearths Filled with.., Cash! $39.99

2011-04-19T15:57:00.000-07:00

The joy of true love touched our hearts all around the world with the engagement announcement of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Now a lovely portrait of the beaming couple is available for the first time in a heart-shaped Gallery Editions limited-edition canvas print nestled in a heart-shaped frame. This Bradford Exchange exclusive commemorates the historic Prince William and Kate Middleton engagement and celebrates two hearts filled with love!

The canvas print features a full-color image of the couple standing before a red satin backdrop on the day of their engagement announcement, with Kate's infamous heirloom sapphire and diamond engagement ring proudly displayed front and center. It arrives ready to hang in its custom heart-shaped frame enriched with a deep mahogany finish and golden trim. Strong demand is expected in anticipation of the Prince William and Kate Middleton royal wedding, so don't delay. Order now!

Editor's note:

Please observe the suggested display composition in a living room situation.

Ouch!!!

2011-04-16T23:49:00.000-07:00

WHINING ARCHITECTS ARE EVERYWHERE...

2011-04-14T16:24:00.000-07:00

Before - After - Neutra, or, Ready - Set - Neutra.

2011-04-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

Before

After

Here we had Lieb House moved. Now it is Neutra's turn. Maxwell House good to the last drop. Tadaa. Here it is in Angelino Hts..

"The Army of One"

2011-03-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

OA, Los Angeles 3/16/2011

That 70's Architecture Studies

2011-02-22T09:25:00.000-08:00

In the seventies, Southern California architecture schools were busy with transformational action. UCLA, Cal Poly Pomona and its offspring Sci Arc were often publicized for their student works in LA Times Home Magazine. Enjoy the past dreams and the descriptive text in enlargeable photographs.

flickr slideshow

Homeboy

2011-02-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

Homeboy
Photographs, Michael Rotondi
Story, Orhan Ayyüce

If It Was Me: (UAE Parliament in Abu Dhabi, Like a Revolution Style)

2011-02-03T17:08:00.000-08:00

I started yet another series today in my blog. It is called "If It Was Me" which aims to take other architects' important projects of world class design and interferes like an uninvited guest.
As the first one in the series, I took Ehrlich Architects winning design for UAE Parliament in Abu Dhabi and added a public pier in front of it.
I thought a building of importance such as this should not terminate at a median strip of palm trees but open into the sea and provide access and recreational space to people who might also use it in peaceful political debates.

Before

After

Later I thought what if revolution comes to Abu Dhabi. People were everywhere..

And, Like a Revolution Style

It all started here in Archinect News:
http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=104319_0_24_0_C

Freeway Series: ARISTOCRAT MOTEL

2011-01-16T19:18:00.000-08:00

Bigger Los Angeles in 2100

2010-12-29T21:16:00.000-08:00

... Bunch of Ideas...

2010-12-17T01:07:00.000-08:00

Internet Machine really want to give you happy

2010-10-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

Islam's Pray Anywhere Genius

2010-10-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

Bedouin praying in the desert

Ultimately Islam is a flexible religion when it comes to its formal places of pray.
Its humble notions of adaptability and reductionist roots is manifested many times in its history. When it comes to physical environments that stands between the faithful and their God, Islam provides its minimalist practice of architectural demarcation. It is this demarcation where we see, in its most beautiful expression, the true aesthetics of functionality of religious refuge in day to day situation.
As the simple line of this separation between outside and inside erodes, so does the distance between the believer and his God.

Open air mosque in Gelibolu, Turkey

It is a common scene in Islamic countries, mostly on Fridays and religious holidays when the faithful spills over the streets, activating a particular spatiality and turning the urban environments to informal prayer halls.

Of course on occasions tensions with the authorities are all so real when protests must be put in action, making Islam all responsive to daily workings and the problems of the specific local communities. At that level, religion is not a passive piety of the masses and their everyday life but an active demonstration of a political choice by the people of the Islamic faith.

Top; street prayers in Kashmir Region, India. Middle and bottom; street prayers in Istanbul, Turkey

All this, on the events of the people's efforts to stop Islamic Center in lower Manhattan, take note.

In that case, buildings are not necessary. The New York grid itself could be utilized.

Map of Lower Manhattan, New York

*Archinect link to the article with reader comments

Waiting for Chris Burden

2010-09-26T21:43:00.000-07:00

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Photo: 9/25/2010 by OA

Future of Urbanism

2010-09-14T13:48:00.000-07:00

First in the series of Archinect Sessions @ VDL House with Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLG) and Bryan Finoki (SUBTOPIA) held on September 11, 2010.
Future of Urbanism was the topic of the conversation.

On Proposed Manhattan Mosque and Islamic Community Center

2010-08-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

I am not a practicing Muslim. Perhaps, then, not a muslim at all. Growing up in a secular but, nevertheless, un-officially and majority muslim country, I have been exposed to Islam, learned about its traditions, customs, and, as an architect, developed great appreciation for the design of its places of worship.

I don't necessarily want this mosque in Manhattan be built because it worries me that it will further radicalize the violent right wing fanatics in United States who see Islam as a threat to their existence, as the enemy and as the source of all evil on earth.
To them, this is the clash of civilizations. The enemy is described as a bloody and oppressive force raising from hellish petro-rich Arabian deserts and Afghany caves, whose ugly bearded men with hooked noses trying to destroy the ever so innocent, fair and humane, blessed and all superior kingdom of western civilization.

On the personal front, because of this proposed mosque, if in fact built, I will be subjected to even more hatred and racial profiling than what became an unwelcomed fact of my already complicated diaspora life after 9/11.
In short, my work will be distracted, it will be harder for me to prevail professionally, and most disturbingly, my well being will be exposed to actual violence, consuming my time while continuously negotiating my rights with angry and righteous people in everyday situations.

Consider the thinkable and highly possible, some of the aggressions toward muslims, without discrimination, could develop into further psychological and racial repression, physical disturbances, such as public beatings and other torturous humiliations, downward spiraling all the way to lynching.

Muslims don't have many reliable and empathetic organizations to turn for protection.

Their faith and culture is demonized at worst, disliked and mistrusted by the significant section of the American society at best.
And, what is the most worrisome, these negative sentiments are now getting institutionalized in the Crusades like causes of tea partying masses.

These are not exaggerations.

I have been looking at hundreds of readers' comments in newspapers and websites regarding this issue and most of them are outright life threatening to my profile. These disturbing and eerily aggressive group-thinking are freely circulated and unchallenged by the authorities in charge of protecting the well being of the innocent.
America's sizable muslim community is openly attacked and made to suffer the highly orchestrated accusations. The horrors generated, vocalized, broadcasted.
These are well beyond the usual discriminations I was just getting used to.

"Bomb their mosques"

"Build it, get them all inside - then burn it down"

"Deport them"

"Gather and send them to labor camps"

"Nuke their homeland"

"Chop their heads and display them in Ground Zero"

"Strip them naked and make them piss on Quran"

"They don't deserve to practice their despicable religion in Manhattan buildings when an abandoned small factory or a farm building will suffice. What's a building for a barbaric camel jockeys anyway?"

So on, and uglier.

These should be alarming to people who are living peacefully in this country.
No doubt, when the hooligans are done with muslims and eradicated them from 'their chosen' society and 'finalized their dissolution,' they will re-concentrate their efforts to purify and rid of their communities from non believers, gays, abortionists, liberals, socialists, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Gypsies, drug users, illegal aliens, hippies, independent women, men, prostitutes, Chinese, Africans, intellectuals, dangerous books and progressive thinking, just to name a few.
This is their occupational therapy, purpose of their vengeful existence, evil passion and manipulated brains for easy exploitations. This is what glues the sheep together.

I imagine, the falsity of their valor goes undetected until much later, when they realize that the war they made believe to fight was a lie.

Watch and be proactive for the disinformation carnage and violence of 2012 general election campaigns.

*Originally this post was written for this discussion thread in archinect.com

COLLAGE: SIXTH FLOOR VIEWS

2010-08-17T18:41:00.000-07:00

HOSPITAL INTERIORS: Colleague and Other Monitoring

2010-07-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

HOSPITAL ARCHITECTURE

2010-07-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

GOD IS IN THE DETAILS #3

2010-06-19T23:02:00.000-07:00

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View from the office window

2010-06-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

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Libeskind Saved

2010-06-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

Surprising the architectural critics, hundreds of Turkish and Palestinian architects defend Daniel Libeskind's Ontario Museum from an angry mob of Israeli artists demanding changes on the window pattern and interior design. Some say the conflict is a 'light and space' issue.

RANDOM VIEWED @ HARVARD, Even #'s VOL.2

2010-06-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Cover

Dean's opening

#610- DAVID TURTURO

#574- ALEC SPANGLER

#678- KA YIP

#596- ANDREW TEN BRINK

#606- GREGORY TRAN

#480- ANTONIO PETROW

#84- LIAN CHANG

LUNCH SPECIAL

2010-05-27T21:54:00.000-07:00

(+)

The Man, His House, His Drawings, His Books and His Ashes in Reverse

2010-05-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

Music Night: "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU" Random picks , all good - Part 2

2010-05-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

The new batch of spell checkers has been unearthed from you tube followed by previous selection. A bit obsessive but not everybody collect stamps...

Previously:

About the Song in Wikipedia

Posting Types: Racist Geert Wilders Inspires Unemployed Architects

2010-05-13T17:26:00.000-07:00

Posted here in the internet by someone who calls himself Geertrude, possibly inspired by this Geert:

"25 Americans, on average, are killed by illegal aliens every day (about evenly split between motor vehicle accidents and outright murder).

Do the math: That works out to more than 9,000 deaths per year, or more than 36,000 deaths over the past four years. That's more than ten times the number of Americans killed in Iraq over the past four years"

Some will argue that the statistic represent a general number applied over all of population, but simplistically, eliminating Illegal immigrants would have saved 36,000 lives. Simple math.5/13/2010

prompted this response:

fighting against getting help to cope with all the fear and hatred, (your) information shows you have been doing badly, your sketchy assessments are not very good, 'you think' people coming after your livelihood of assumed 'owning' but real life is more co-operatively earned and populated than you paint and broadcast, your mathematical ideas unimaginatively dwelling on even more irrelevancy and eventually located in the losing end of those very snake oil statistics. you will remain minority within the bending blinders of your own mind and relating to crude extinction of your last island of greedy existence of self entitlement, period.
your dividends are desperate and your propaganda is only worthy of selfish panic.
it must be a hell thinking like that, day in and day out, nights included, which are dark and long, sort of, cold, lurking around getting away with murderous misdemeanors when it comes to you, causing your own kind of limited experience of life itself, wasting away and never get to the work of everyday living, are you really for war or a fight even though my consensus is you are the warrior-less warring kind dodging the shots on you while confined to living in the under-neat bunkers of fear without a chance of sustainable evolve. you will meet zapotec since it lives in many other minds, except, he is like that on your face, died fighting. who do you have? other than rusting border patrol vehicles as your 'tool' of corpse producing army of one liners power mongering on the gasolined desert heat and as if you personally preferred to join with them against the possibility of getting along with the world and helping your people live better, free of nightmare scenario management.
- oa

PAVILLIONS of Shanghai

2010-04-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

My take on it here.

previous coverage

The Meaning of Architecture

2010-03-28T14:56:00.000-07:00

FREEWAY PICTURE OF THE DAY

2010-03-11T21:30:00.000-08:00

(click here to read) LET TOMORROW'S LEADERS HAUL YOUR JUNK TODAY

Random and Related

2010-02-20T23:10:00.000-08:00

What goes around comes around

2009-12-20T14:26:00.001-08:00

What goes around comes around

Urbanization of Tehran

2009-11-24T20:06:00.000-08:00

1985

2009

NASA Earth Observatory

THE GOODBYE ERA

2009-11-23T18:20:00.000-08:00

(+)

Music Review: U2 on YouTube

2009-10-26T22:33:00.000-07:00

Looking from and glued to my laptop's flawless high tech stream of DSL jettisoned podcast last night, U2's Los Angeles concert in Pasadena's Rose Bowl to 96,000 was a spectacular event befitting of all the technology, sponsorship, globalism, slowly cooked glossy leftism in need of the American flag as well as BlackBerry and YouTube.

The long ago sold out tickets of the concert was only part of it. It didn't stop over 7 million and growing views YouTube had in less than few hours.
This concert will definitely will go down to the archives of Rock's web presence. I have already added it to my favorites list symbolized with a heart sign.

It is an impressive show of U2's ascend to critical mass audiences as the group has come long way since their planned chaos on a Los Angeles rooftop in the late eighties.
Joshua Tree has grown big enough to get almost half of the world's Rock and Roll audience to repeat after “I still haven't found what I am looking for.”

The theme: “What time is it in the World?,” is fittingly appropriate to ask in this digitally connected age U2 so well familiar with.

The musical U2 is one of those bands who found their sound early on and it was so pungent and beat was always at full communication with poetics of Irish culture, texture, activist political message, bad boyism and with the directness of their lyrical lines.
Add to that, simple compilation of rock instruments played by the original members flawlessly and in a hypnotic manner.
Add to that, is Bono's fine sand voice equivalent of several instruments all masterfully timed.

“In a little while it'll hurt no more...”

We are talking about a band knowing how to read ballads into their brand of music and if that is not enough, they are calling the commander reading from international space station.
“Space travel turns me on,” says Bono wishing the commander “safe home.”

After that, we land in Rabat, Morocco to watch the sunrise with them. The Band knows its reach.. He repeats, “What time is it in the world?”

Production wise, the stage theatrics and sound were beautiful and intricate. It feeds on the transformative concept as it expands and subtracts visually and conceptually with lights, media and narrations.
A smart marketing idea driven layout, an outer stage itself circles around the center stage connected by bridges allowing full round stadium seating and artist interaction. Over that is the four legged and multi functional creature/spacealienship reminding the all familiar LAX theme restaurant.

These days musical talent is just the part of the show. A band leader must also be the captain of this spaceship with hundreds of people behind the scenes making the enterprise go boldly without glitches.
The production makes the full use of the media architecture.

Even the spontaneous moments look composed with this band and I don't know if this is a requirement from astronomically well paying audience making full use of their cell phones and becoming individual stations, also broadcasting to their friends, families and cyberspace, demanding and getting full blown industry professionalism.
Whoever is behind the scenes here is as important but it is the immediate fans in the stadium and people like me watching it at home, who will politicize and make this concert memorable. Bono thanks us home audience at the end as well.

If you will, the design of the show and its production incorporates anything from website architecture to software architecture to just architecture.
It was fun and engaging.
One of my favorite concert moment was Bono coming back after the first encore (there were two) as the electric space man.

The political U2 is predictable... “Vamonos muchachitas, Hola... Viva Mexico” and the credibility of Bono's track record gets you Archbishop Desmond Tutu on digital screen sending much helpful AIDS medication and unity messages and U2 is powerful enough to send political requests to Iran and Burma via the co-operation of Amnesty International.
Bono doesn't need to be anybody but himself, nevertheless, on stage he describes himself as somewhere between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny de Vito with a touch of Dennis Hopper.
He is a better messenger and U2 is a giant facilitating platform as the brand.

Part of him “wants to riot.”

All this is fine except, we don't know how much of it is going to weld one of the sponsors “Honda” to our stream of conscience to everyday corporate paycheck to corporate paycheck kind of lives which Bono fails to address. This is a dangerous place to fall for otherwise well meaning musicians and well meaning and downloading audiences.
I understand every penny and every action counts if it is saving one life or adding one more better human condition in the world. Bono himself most willingly puts himself into that category, like many other celebrities, impacting goodwill and benevolence.
Yes, part of him wants to riot, but he is surrounded by enough sponsors that he does suppress that part of him. Then he runs into murky seas of contradictions.

Not to worry, in fact his strength comes from those contradictions. Bono as the band's leader has gained respect not for his political views first, but because U2 is a great band and their music is highly profitable. They know how to carry their music and that is the highest level a rock band can ever achieve. The band members Edge, Bono, Larry Mullen, Jr. and Adam Clayton hugging each other after a stellar performance is a show of that common ground solidarity in itself. After all they are a band and middle school friends from Dublin.

In the light of all going on, “What time is it in the world, where are we going?” seems to be a timely critical question we must ask ourselves.

Powered by that, U2 and this concert exceeds any normative ticket.

OA 10/2009, Los Angeles

YouTube link

A Blast from the Past: MOVE: Sites of Trauma

2009-10-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

"On May 13, 1985, police dropped a bomb on a west Philadelphia row house in an attempt to evict members of a radical organization known as MOVE. Eleven people were killed, 61 homes were destroyed, and around 250 people were left homeless.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the MOVE conflict is that it was marked by a concrete, physical spatiality," writes architect Johanna Saleh Dickson in 'Pamphlet Architecture 23: Move: Sites of Trauma'
+
8 part video documentary of the conflict on YouTube.

Pamphlet Architecture 23 - Move: Sites of Trauma (Paperback)

Dubai at Night

2009-10-06T19:58:00.000-07:00

NASA image

With Palm Jumeirah and the camel racetrack indicated.

FUTURAMA Mon Amour

2009-10-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

It is now tomorrow. Looking for the rich oil deposits under the sea. Tired? Check into the Hotel Atlantis. Creating productive communities in the Amazons... There is new beauty and strength in the city of tomorrow. Oh yeah...
The voice gets increasingly emotional toward the end...

Thanks Eric Chavkin.

Music Post: Eartha Kitt

2009-09-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

Eartha Kitt

In 1968, during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kitt encountered a substantial professional setback after she made anti-war statements during a White House luncheon. "In 1968 she was invited to a White House luncheon and was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War. She replied: 'You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.' The remark reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears and led to a derailment in Ms. Kitt's career."

LIVE FOREVER: The Results

2009-09-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

BUSTLER.NET

LIVE FOREVER

2009-08-06T19:31:00.000-07:00

“Music has been my outlet, my gift to all of the lovers in this world. Through it, my music, I know I will live forever. ”

Michael Jackson lived one of the most extravagant, magnificent, and crafted lives in centuries. What act of design could possibly outshine the combined effect of the star's own intricate life?

While the music and images Michael left us will seal his cultural immortality, we are still obliged to commemorate him. What is the nature of a monument to Michael Jackson? What single place do we choose to remember a person who touched the globe and had aspirations for the moon?

What is the appropriate scale to remember a man who operated on everything possible -from the studied renovation of his own human form to the creation of an architectural-scale wunderkamer at Neverland Ranch? What design proposal can top his own unrealized plans to construct a 50-foot robotic replica of himself that roams the Las Vegas dessert shooting laser beams out of its eyes?

Live Forever challenges you to design a monument to the epic that was Michael Jackson. There are no limits to this open competition. Your monument may be located anywhere you choose and be any scale that you deem appropriate.

Jury
Christopher Hawthorne - Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic
Michael Bierut - Pentagram / DesignObserver
Sam Jacobs - Fat / Strange Harvest
Orhan Ayyuce - Archinect Senior Editor
Bryan Boyer - Archinect Senior Editor
Paul Petrunia - Archinect Founder/Publisher
Heather Ring - Archinect Senior Editor

This competition is hosted by Archinect.com and Bustler.net

Art Review; Moss, Kipnis and the Box

2009-07-31T18:41:00.000-07:00

CONVERSATION UNDER THE BOX
By Orhan Ayyuce

I almost didn't go if it wasn't for a business meeting I had near SCI Arc right before the much anticipated gallery installation talk between Eric Owen Moss, architect and school's director and his friend and critic Jeffrey Kipnis about ; architecture related, grid related, art related, poetry related, related over the top and 'what's inside of me' personal installation of aluminum produced cube, precariously hanging from the ceiling above, bondaged with finite, centered circular flat bars, fighting a war against orthographic and infinite grid.

An integral part of the visual concept, the exhibition incorporated a boxing ring or some other theatrics influenced seating arrangement, demanding your focused attention to the work uber alles. If you were sitting in the gallery, you were either an actor or an audience, a part of the performance piece that was half there half was not. And like me, if you were watching the whole set up from up above, you were the overflow looking at the work from an eye level, sort of up close and personal way.Down below, the uncompromised wooden chairs similar to those depicted in the rendering were full.The conversation started with few anecdotes and talk show jokes to get the people relaxed.

Predictably, the territory of art and architecture challenged as the first conceptually 'serious' issue. I have seen that before and done it myself. That is usually and rightfully a typical argument of architect produced installations when dressed as art in a gallery for not art but for architecture.
Under the 8'x8' cube bondaged with circular ribbons:“What's inside the cube and what you don't see, what this work is about,” answered the author to a question that could be summarized as, “what is this?” Yes, and no surprise to me at that point, it was declared “art.”The audience was asked to go 'inside the box' and find out for themselves.

Sure, I will go see what is inside "The Center of The Universe” by Bruce Nauman in University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque, but do I want to know what the 4'x8' aluminum sheets are screwed to? And bother to know the lyrics of the bondage song? Perhaps I would, but rendering of the bigger scheme of things at the gallery entrance hardly left any curiosity in this reviewer's mind.

Obviously and as stated by the architect that was what resided in the box. Like the attendees, I knew.Yes, most art is autobiographical but architects are architects. We have buildings. It is less interesting when it is both ways. And sometimes that goes for artists declaring their work architecture with no convincing text or function.
In fact, for me, the territory of art and architecture is not that casual and easy. There is precedent.
As for the grid discussion in art, I will stick to Rosalind Krauss' “Grids” essay I read many *Octobers ago. Recommended to all interested in art via grid related way...

Getting back to the gallery talk, the rest of the apologies of courage and bravery to inspire the students etc., did not make the free fall of the cube any less harmless or any more meaningful.
There was even a Jenny Holzer comparing / compensating attempt at one point when I said “oh no.”

And as if by default, this crowd's go-to guy Peter Eisenman with his 'easier piece' was the anchor at one point, even in his physical absence. He was still ruling maybe because the audience could see what's inside his box, I was pondering on the freeway, driving home.

However, credit does go to always vulnerable Mr. Moss for fearless and semi stable homecoming. Courageous, yes. Exposed, yes. Mediocre as art, yes.

Jeffrey Kipnis, the interviewer, the conversational theorist, an insider, is cynical, yet so sweet...

“Architecture needs an enemy,” says Eric Moss, but does art need a friend?

*"Grids" from October #9, Summer 1979 pp. 9-22 MIT Press.

The article was originally published at Archinect.com

SAME BLOBS SAME

2009-07-11T13:32:00.001-07:00

Photo; OA, 07/09 (poster; collection of the author)

This post is based on a Nam Henderson titled news item in Archinect, about “Transitory Objects,” the latest exhibit at Vienna’s influential Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Gallery.

There is an element of 'a safe' resolve in these pieces. Not inspiring but merely scratching the surface as plastic art.
Lynn's ideas are still the most exciting here, but he is looking more and more like the road show with this circle.
You can only hold on the rope too long without the building important buildings that revolutionize the production, use and economy as well as the way of living. No, Zaha won't be able to save too many people either. She is all in for herself and there is only so much room.

A gallery is a tired place for it after all these years.

In architecture, modernists, post modernists and others too, produced belt buckles, dinnerware, walls and curves, but they were producing the real buildings as well, in real time, live.
Some of blob work caught on fire but didn't transfer as good. Soon, I predict, there will be less press interest in it.

There is something to be said about blobs' strong appearance not too long ago and relatively fast disappearance in last few years.

A lot of the building ideas produced here are unbuildable, most are software driven work and they don't provide much useful info on immediate issues on hand and on the ground.
After 'we get it' that a lot can be done with computers as far as configuring the endless curves, we realize structures of the plastic minds (no pun) match the depictions of fluid pencil and stream of imagineering.

Indeed it is a loss that strong ideas ending up as decorative objects, lobby art, glue gunned together for the structural stability and sold by the unit count.

I could also ask "where do we go from here?" but it already feels like we have arrived.

Also see;
'Every home should have a Greg Lynn blobwall' by Bruce Sterling for Wired Magazine

Picturesque Life: View Property #1

2009-07-11T12:39:00.000-07:00

Photo; OA 07/09

Michael Jackson Memorial Reject

2009-07-06T17:26:00.001-07:00

I am a Michael Jackson Public Memorial Service reject

They don't really care about us...

Monumental Moment

2009-07-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

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!"

2009-06-30T17:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-30T17:41:00.001-07:00

Dear L, Get Well Soon...

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

2009-06-30T15:19:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-06-14T16:04:00.000-07:00

OA, 6/09. Echo Park

The American Egypt, the Film

This Is Why I Love My Radio

2009-06-14T15:47:00.000-07:00

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

Another reason...

PAVILLION CITY

2009-05-30T14:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-26T18:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-24T13:42:00.000-07:00

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 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 in cheek love bite for the National Museum that Rem Koolhaas 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

2009-05-21T01:34:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-17T03:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-12T15:07:00.000-07:00

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 as of now and will always remain so. 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 sweet 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 expat firms that 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

2009-04-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-25T16:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-22T14:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-10T00:50:00.000-07:00

CAL-POLY, Pomona Lecture

2009-04-07T23:32:00.000-07:00

May 22.

DUBAI's NEW WORLD

2009-04-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

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 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 More changes if you look!

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

2009-03-31T16:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

Photo: Rob Bennett for The New York Times

Story is updated in its original spot!

What Do You Consider Work?

2009-02-27T18:02:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-24T15:53:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-18T14:37:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-17T00:48:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-15T21:57:00.000-08:00

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?"

2009-02-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

-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

2009-02-11T22:22:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-11T16:07:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-09T17:44:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-06T19:44:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-31T19:31:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-27T14:28:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-26T11:42:00.000-08:00

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...