Living Architectures
There’s an interesting exhibit, “Living Architectures,” going on now for those in NYC at the Storefront for Art & Architecture (conveniently across the street from La Esquina where you can get a taco after).
“Living Architectures” is a series of films that seeks to develop a way of looking at architecture which turns away from the current trend of idealizing the representation of our architectural heritage. The cult of perfect, disembodied forms entirely devoid of people, inevitably leads to a break-up between architecture and living space.”
For example, in Koolhaas, the P.O.V. follows the maid and window cleaners as they go about cleaning this sterile & automated home. Here’s the trailer from this one:
Sky
Sky from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
Read more about the project HERE.
Fidler’s castle
A UK man who secretly built a castle by hiding it with bales of hay has been ordered to tear it down.
To keep prying eyes from noticing his unauthorized abode, Fidler placed bales of hay and tarpaulin around his dream home in Salfords, Surrey, authorities said. The court ruled he could not benefit from his deception.
Authorities said he incorporated two grain silos into the design, covering them with material to give them a castellated appearance.
Seoul’s floating islands
Along with two other artificial islets, Vista and Tera, to be launched by the end of April, the cluster of man-made floating islets will be used for conventions, water sports, restaurants, performances and exhibitions.
Toyo Ito, White O
I wish I could find this picture of Toyo Ito’s White O house from the latest issue of Dwell online.
Trailer for El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1970)
The strangest movie I’d recommend?
Allen Klein presents an ABKCO Film.
It’s lonely in the modern world.
Even in your company, I feel so alone. (Dwell, September 2009.)
Unhappy Hipsters. (Thanks, Kate.)
Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park, a pictorial
High-rise superblocks and identical clusters of row houses set apart from the urban grid have been much maligned as some of the major wrongdoings of modernism, but Detroit’s Lafayette Park—the first urban-renewal project in the United States—tells a vastly different story. Within a sprawling, decentralized city that has suffered near-disastrous decline, this racially and economically diverse enclave just northeast of downtown has not only aged gracefully but today flourishes with new life.
10th Street Bridge
From the South Side of Pittsburgh, you can cross the Monongahela River in lots of places – the 10th Street Bridge will let you walk to downtown.
New Digs for the Fancy Avian Platter…
[more pics of our new loft & an invite to NY clusterflockers to the [belated] Sleepingfish 8 launch/loft-warming shindig here]
Film Fest ‘09
This past summer I spent about three weeks building a set for a local film festival. We had about two hundred dollars and big dreams. (This isn’t including the 65 dollar parking ticket I got in Hollywood when I left my car for less than five minutes to grab the gobo used in the second shot.)
I Want to Live Here
See more pictures of tiny solar houses here.
stackable prefab
Rocio Romero was among the first, and least expensive, architects involved in the prefab Modern housing movement. The LV home, pictured above, was her first project, and has since expanded into a series of kits large enough to meet specific needs. Her latest newsletter shows the LV2 series which allows you to stack the various modules into new and customizable shapes — something offered by other prefab manufacturers, but not, as far as I know, at this price point.
South Aiken Avenue, Pittsburgh, early evening
Deron said, “How about some color in the new year?”
I said, “O.K.”
Twelve Meditations on a Dollhouse | I. Meditation on the Kitchen
The Kitchen. Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle. (Museum of Science and Industry. Chicago.)
“The copper stove in the back of the room is the stove in which the wicked witch locked Hansel and Gretel.”
Twelve Meditations on a Dollhouse | Prologue
At the height of her popularity in the 1920s, film star Colleen Moore earned, it is said, a million dollars a year. In 1928 she commissioned the creation of a massive dollhouse to house her collection of miniatures.
Architect and film set designer Horace Jackson created the floor plan and layout of the dollhouse. “The architecture must have no sense of reality,” Jackson said. “We must invent a structure that is everybody’s conception of an enchanted castle.”
Completed in 1935, the dollhouse was exhibited throughout the United States and Canada to raise money for children’s charities. Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry acquired it in 1949, and there Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle, as it is now called, remains.
the pedestrian is in the store before entering it
The new store’s façade is planned to be completely transparent at street level, with large skylights allowing trees to grow inside the store, thus minimizing the transition from outside to inside and drawing customers in.
Soak
It moves Mumbai out of the language of flood and the widely accepted trajectory of war with the sea and monsoon that this language perpetuates.
quote out of context
George Packer, in “Megacity: Decoding the Chaos of Lagos,” said, “The impulse to look at an ‘apparently burning garbage heap’ and see an ‘urban phenomenon’… is not so different from the impulse not to look at all.”
Edith Green–Wendell Wyatt Federal Building, Portland, OR — redesigned
In Portland, Oregon, there is a project for the Edith Green–Wendell Wyatt Federal Building. That is one of those buildings you will know is sustainable when you walk by it. Often sustainable features are kind of tucked away, mechanical systems and so forth, but we are actually recladding the whole building to be a green façade. I think it will be a really provocative design. You couldn’t find a better location for it than Portland, which has been very aggressive in trying to create a more sustainable city.
Zaha Hadid
Deron? (Signage excepted.)
I used to live here
A panoramic view of Sana’a at sunset.
Update: Tyler Cowen recounts his visit to Yemen, much of which resonates with my childhood memory of the place. It is somewhere I most want to go back to.
Most of the people lived what was still a fundamentally medieval existence in a medieval setting. The center of town felt like how I had imagined the year 1200 in Baghdad.
&
With the possible exception of the Bolivian altiplano, Yemen is the weirdest country or region I have visited.
(via marginal revolution)
Long Horn Meat
Richard Mosse, Saddam’s Palaces
BLDGBLOG: Beyond the most obvious reasons—for instance, there’s a war going on—why did you go to Iraq? Was there something in particular that you were hoping to see?
An interview with Richard Mosse on the photos he took of the transformation of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.
world’s longest sea bridge
China has begun construction on what will become the world’s longest sea bridge.
The Y-shaped link between Hong Kong, Macau and China will be around 50km (31 miles) long in total, 35km of which will span the sea, said the state news agency Xinhua. Due to be completed by 2015, the 73bn yuan (£6.75bn) cost of the bridge will be shared by the authorities in the three territories.
The structure also includes a 5.5km underwater tunnel with artificial islands to join it to bridges on each side.