Decoding the Decodex (to the Codex Seraphinianus)
For those interested in Luigi Serafini’s Codex, I posted a hack translation of the accompanying «Decodex» that came with the most recent edition.
The Six Weirdest Cities People Actually Live In
Look, we’re idiots: None of us knows what, exactly, goes into city planning, but we assume it’s probably a lot of distinguished gentlemen emailing each other about math, statistics and blueprints. But somewhere along the line, somebody accidentally CC’ed the insane asylum, and we wound up with the following civilizations that simply should not be.
(via @tylercowen)
Cristóbal Vila, Fallingwater
Cristóbal Vila created a beautiful CGI fly-through — from construction to completion — of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
(thanks, Chris)
Chicago Screenshots
Chicago Screenshots is a (slowly growing) collection of Chicago-centric movie and television stills, presented as architectural and urban landscape photography.
Art Institute adds Warhol’s ‘Empire’ to Chicago skyline
From 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. [Friday, December 9], the modern skyscraper [the Aon Center] overlooking Millennium Park will be acting as a movie screen onto which the Art Institute of Chicago will be projecting Andy Warhol’s eight-hour silent, black-and-white epic “Empire,” which consists of one long, unbroken shot of New York’s Empire State Building. Said to be the first outdoor U.S. screening of this landmark — if not exactly action-packed — film, the event marks the very public, logistically challenging kickoff to the Art Institute’s new exhibition Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977, which opens to members Saturday and to the public Tuesday.
Ice Cube Celebrates Charles and Ray Eames (and Los Angeles)
In a world full of McMansions where the structure takes up all the land, the Eames made structure and nature one.
(via @gary_hustwit)
The Transportation Building (Chicago, Illinois)
Like a keypunch card it was, in a way. Long. And slim. And punctured.
I lived in it for a couple of years. Strange to say (perhaps), I might have lived there happily for many another year.
But that is a very long story. And it moves both backwards and forwards.
The Unbridge
A series of moats and fortresses were built over the West Brabant Water Line region of the Netherlands during the 17th century in order to provide protection from invasion by France and Spain. Fort de Roovere was surrounded with a shallow moat that was too deep to march across, and too shallow for boats. In turn the earthen fort had remained protected –until now.
This trench-like bridge was designed by RO & AD Architects to allow tourist access to the fort in a natural, thoughtful way.
(via inhabitat)
things to see in Rome when you think you’ve seen it all
Being that I’m on a moratorium against photographs on my own blog, I’ll break my sight-silence (sitence?) to show you some things you might otherwise not know about:
photo out of context
(via)
You’re built like a car (You got a hubcap diamond-star halo)
Europeans have all the fun: lower drinking ages, funner beaches, easier lifestyles and . . . dinosaur skeletons having sex in their museums. This exhibit, which clearly shows two T-Rexes “mating”, is located in the Jurassic Museum of Asturias in Spain.
Via @leatherarchives.
Oscar Niemeyer’s Palácio do Planalto
This Morten Anderson photo of Oscar Niemeyer’s Palácio do Planalto set me on a search to find others. I couldn’t find a better one. Here is more about Niemeyer. Here is his Palácio da Alvorada.
Update: I had the Palácios reversed in the original post.
My favorite public bathroom
in Chicago is in IIT’s McCormick Tribune Campus Center, designed by Rem Koolhaas and OMA. I’ve loitered in it twice within 24 hours — and I’m staying and working three miles north of IIT.
I think Deron wants to move in. Whether into the bathroom or the Center generally, I’m not sure.
Osaka Station City fountain
via jwz
(Im)possible Chicagos is a series of hallucinatory joyrides through one hundred and twenty five asynchronous Chicagos.
Alexander Trevi‘s first joyride through (Im)possible Chicago traversed Acer Necropolis.
Trevi recently completed his nineteenth, wherein:
At night when you’re out driving, you can tell which neighborhood you’re in by the light of the streetlamps, because each ward basks in its own different hue. For instance, if the streets are all aglow in azurite, you’re definitely joy riding around Marquette Park.
Zoning codes require that windows are tinted according to the neighborhood’s chromatic identity, so no matter how the interiors are lighted, houses, skyscrapers and 7-Elevens do not give off wayward wavelengths.
Even your car lights beam out the same color. But when you cross over into another ward, they instantaneously switch filter to match that ward’s assigned spectrum.
boxercising earthquake
A friend called a few weeks ago to tell me about a skyscraper that had to be evacuated after an earthquake in Seoul. For ten minutes the building made wide metronomic swings. Thing was, there had been no earthquake registered in the area. It was a mysteriously super local event. After a two-week investigation, the epicenter had been narrowed down to the building’s twelfth floor gym where the side kicking, upper-cutting, and fist-jabbing of seventeen middle-aged Korean women boxercising to Snap’s 1990s hit “I’ve got the Power” seemed somehow to have hit the building’s resonant frequency, sending the whole structure into convulsions.
(thanks, David)
“They are tearing out part of the heart of Buenos Aires”
The interior of the historic Cafe Richmond was gutted a couple of weeks ago; a spot once frequented by Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene may be replaced by a Nike Store.
The plight of the Richmond has dominated local media since the cafe’s insides were gutted last Monday morning. Apparently to ensure it could not be returned to its former splendour even if the local government rules against the Nike shop, the Richmond was emptied of its historical interior, right down to its grandiosely comfortable Chesterfield wingback leather armchairs, in a 3am raid. The movers took the precaution of pulling down the security camera on the front of the building first.
“It’s against the law,” said Monica Capano of the city’s Heritage Preservation Commission. “The Richmond is one of the city’s emblematic landmarks.”
For a personal view: Oh, no: La Richmond by my friend Charlie.
quote out of context
The basis for rejection is flawed. Many high-profile structures would fit within the strangely contrived rule against invoking the imagery of phallus shaped buildings. One element of the mark that apparently offended the PTO was “the circular design at the base of the design and the shape of the design at the top. None of these elements are present in a traditional design of a tower or obelisk.” (Office Action at 2). One can only infer from the rejection that it is meant to imply that the “circular design at the base” represents testicles and the “shape of the design at the top” to represent the “dome” of the penis. It is important for the Examiner to keep in mind the aforementioned teachings of famed psychoanalysts – simply because a structure is phallic in nature, does not mean it is a penis. One may invoke the symbol of strength, the phallus, without it being a literal tallywhacker.
via Popehat
Mondrian Drop Ceiling
Thought I’d share something I’ve been working on.
With a lot of help, I created this Mondrian style drop ceiling. When my friend was installing a drop ceiling in my room crowded with ductwork and utilities, and the ceiling wasn’t going to come out very uniform, we joked that we should just make the ceiling of all sorts of different size panels. And then it hit us.
So, we plotted out the desired locations for rails and determining the panel shapes, and fit everything together, unpainted. The panels were labelled and removed for painting. Next, running complex computer simulations, a second friend and I came up with the color pattern. The rails were painted in enamel, mini rollers were engaged, and the whole thing was put back together again very carefully.
It is surprisingly difficult to get a complete photo of an entire ceiling.
Much love and thanks to N, D, and R.
More photos of the process on my tumblr.
Iowa State Fair Update
Gigantor: A one-pound hamburger served between two grilled cheese sandwiches and topped with macaroni and cheese will make its debut at the Bird’s Nest at the top of the hill at 3000 East Grand Ave., by the AE Dairy Stage.
Artifice and foam rubber
In fact, so much artifice and foam rubber is often used to create the sexually alluring woman that it’s sometimes difficult to know where the lady ends and the foam rubber begins.
Via dangerous minds by way of Roger Ebert.
headline of the day
Architects design home made entirely of Hummers
You’ve Been Eminent Domain’d
I guess this is what you get when you put an extension on a house this close to the ever-widening DC beltway, but man… I still feel bad for these folks.
The Bradbury Building
Another thing Amanda did while I was in Los Angeles was give me a tour of the city that was both incredibly personal and instructive. The most amazing moment was how she handled taking me to The Bradbury Building. It almost feels unfair to describe it — so you can get a glimpse of what the experience was like — because that’s the opposite of how she handled it. She just said, I’m going to take you by The Bradbury, and we parked, and then we walked in.
optical illusion of the day
