shanghai blade one

In this spectacular Megalopolis series, father and son photographers Horst (born 1946) & Daniel (born 1972) Zielske depict a new city born of the technologically and economically rampant twentieth century - a Shanghai between fiction and reality as the city of tomorrow, an immense city simultaneously full of the exhilaration and the nightmare of modern human progress at its most ambitious and unbridled. The fruit of a 6-year long project to document the city at this historic time of transition, these pictures have a ‘Bladerunner’ surreality and dynamism that cannot fail to speed the imagination. They are as awesome as the futuristic scene they so thrillingly document.

Based in Göttingen, Germany, Horst and Daniel Zielske have been working together in the field of photography for 12 years during which they have produced more than 20 books:

Selected Exhibitons

2006 Megalopolis Shanghai, Two-persons show at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany

2007 Megalopolis Shanghai, Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, NM, USA

2008 Megalopolis Shanghai, Von Lintel Gallery, New York, NY, USA

since 1999 began der Werkreihe Deutsche Landschaften and Veduten 2002 - 2006 Corpus Megalopolis Shanghai 

creases and folds

For this project, Akihisa Hirata new intepretation of the house not as the act to produce an area like a box but as a folded surface created by the movement of the ground. Here, the Architects have found the balance of the pressure between the interior and exterior thus produces the bumped walls and roofs which creates one big volume with subtle division. As one approach the house, we can see the jostle between the inside and the outside in each rooms (i.e. the direct shape of roofs, diagonal protrusion created by external stairs as well as the distortion of space by the folded walls).

under the skin - five

Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Denver Art Museum, Daniel Libeskind

surprise grab

Excerpt courtesy of The Guardian, 10 May 2003 by Zoe Williams:

It would be fair to say that, at the moment, mainstream global culture is preoccupied with the aesthetic and sexual properties of the bottom. All celebrities, male and female, are evaluated on the quality of their behinds, and extraordinary competitions are launched between the arses of a brace of stars (I'm thinking of Kylie and J-Lo, obviously). Other stars speak of the arse stars in the most prolix, purple fashion: Justin Timberlake on Kylie ("I didn't just touch her butt, I totally copped a feel") is easily matched by Craig David on J-Lo ("Maybe she's voluptuous, but you wouldn't be complaining if she was lying naked with that arse in your face, would you?"). 

Try to imagine these nicely turned out young men talking about breasts like that - "I didn't just grope her tits, I totally squeezed!" They'd never be able to look the women in the eyes again (although, if they were breast men, maybe this wouldn't bother them). Suddenly, it is OK to objectify women by their buttocks. Normal, post-feminist standards still abide vis-à-vis all other body parts, but arses? Go for it, mummy's boys. Do your worst. 

The butt stars themselves, who ought to be able to see this competition as just another piece of manufactured chatter, have instead bought into it wholesale. Well, J-Lo has, allegedly trying to poach Kylie's bottom make-up artist. A Minogue "insider" was recently reported as saying, "This industry's not big enough for two bottoms of such magnitude. Kylie's make-up girl has found the elixir of arse maintenance, and there's no way she'll let that awful Lopez woman near it." I think you can probably make of that what you will. 

It is also OK to objectify men by their buttocks, Sex And The City-style, where men are judged by their behinds, presumably because attempts to judge them by their pecs and six-packs have fallen flat. This is the root of male buttock fixation - women objectify men by physical attributes to exact revenge for all the years that men have spent judging women in that way. You judge us by our arses, so we will judge you. 

But bottoms don't - certainly not in their modern, idealised incarnation - encapsulate very well the essence of either gender. Look at Kylie's bum: it is round and pert. Look at Justin Timberlake's: it is round and pert. It is possibly a bit hairier (I don't know). With this fascination, we are not rejoicing in our "otherness". We aren't viving la différence. I don't think that this is completely about sex, either. I think this is also about competition, about each gender taunting the other with an equally unattainable model of perfection. And by centring on the same body part, we make the battle cleaner. 

Advertising, which takes such pride in its up-to-the-minute cultural awareness, has been almost embarrassingly slow in this instance - although, I suppose, as the latecomer to the arse party, it proves the lasting significance of this obsession. The Sloggi billboard concept once had a whisper of texture to it - you may remember, they had a bunch of models in skimpy pants, cycling. This has now been jettisoned in favour of a far simpler and actually much more effective line-up: there is a girl with a watering can; there are other girls, all wearing thongs. The Renault Megane TV ad is similar in content. To the tune of I See You Baby (Shakin' That Ass), by Groove Armada, the camera segues from the large behind of the car to, er, some pretty behinds they just found about the place. Again, the "high concept" here is the arse without the face. The campaign for Velvet loo roll bathetically undercuts the arse supremacy with its "Love Your Bum" ads (these also feature nothing but a butt; the difference here being that the butts aren't perfect. They could be yours, and you must love them, anyway). 

Moving on from this frenzied arse appreciation to the next natural step, we come to a fascination with anal sex. This year is notable for two things: the longest and most depressing anal rape scene in cinema (Irreversible, directed by Gaspar Noé, features a nine-minute violation, which has divided critics - in so far as some of them deem it "necessary" and others "unnecessary"); and the appearance of the word "rimming" in mainstream literature. Adam Thirlwell's as yet unpublished novel, Politics, has an anal sex scene so honest and inept that it almost turns the experience into art. 

Martin Amis has been famous for his arse-centricity since 1980, when he contributed to Penthouse the short story Let Me Count The Times - it included the line, "Vernon sodomised his wife twice a year... on his birthday, which seemed fair enough, but also, ironically (or so he thought), on hers." Amis's forthcoming novel, Yellow Dog, is partly inspired by his own research into porn (or, in his 1980s terminology, "porno"), research that rapidly led him to the conclusion that porn these days doesn't stretch to any sex other than anal. "Pussies are bullshit," he famously reported in an article about porn(o) two years ago, an observation made by porn(o)-maker John Stagliano. In other words, pussies are for, well, pussies - real men prefer to watch it up the papa. But isn't this roughly the same as saying, "Women are pointless"? Isn't this, again, about competition? 

Now, John Stagliano and Buttman, the western world's second most popular arse-fixated porn star (after Seymore Butts), are one and the same person, so conceivably there is a bit of bias going on there. But the fact is, of the three most popular UK porn vendors on the internet, two name their number one bestseller as Omar's Arse-Fucking Anal House (the third names an Amateurs video). Which brings us to the question: how many people are doing this in their own homes? Figures are relatively scant - the most recent National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, in 2000, found that the practice of heterosexual anal sex among women rose from 6.5% in 1990 to 11.3% in 2000 (an increase of 73%) and among men from 7% to 12.3% (an increase of 75%). 

The anecdotal evidence is revealing. Deirdre Sanders, agony aunt on the Sun for 20 years, told me, "I'm not someone who usually goes in for big changes and trends, but I think the internet is having a huge effect on young people's sex lives. The availability of porn, the fact that they can be looking at it in their bedrooms, is affecting how younger people see sex. They see it much more as a commodity. The boys are coming at it with the idea that anything goes, not specifically anal but, yes, threesomes, foursomes, oral sex, anal sex... I wouldn't say it plays a huge part in my mailbag, because I only hear about it when there's a problem. But there's a lot of pressure on young women from young men to do different things, to swap things around." Caroline Buchanan, agony aunt at Now magazine, identifies a different factor, so old school that I'd forgotten about it. "I have heard that teenage girls are being pressured into anal sex, because they don't get pregnant that way. That's the thing I notice again and again: they're just not using contraception." 

Let's rewind a bit to what female commentators have made of the rise of the arse in terms of fashion and celebrity. Fashion editors are routinely quizzed on what, exactly, is going on here, and the majority of them see a positive message for women. Marie O'Riordan, editor of Marie Claire, has said on the matter, "We love a big bottom. Maybe this will be the trigger for a different fashion shape." And the journalist to whom she said it, Frances O'Toole, remarked, "And not before time. Any change in fashion that celebrates the way women actually are has to be for the good." This is the orthodoxy, that misogyny requires women to be thin, while a respect for women requires them to have curves. But the reality is not as simple: J-Lo's bottom is easily as unattainable as Kate Moss's upper arms; Kylie's arse is about as womanly as Jordan's breasts. The truth is, you would be crazy to see this backdoor mania as an empowering function of feminism. 

There is another, far more obvious misogynist top note to anal sex, and that is that many women don't like it. The bald truth of the matter is that men have an anal G-spot and women don't. Eschewing vaginal for anal, therefore, is just another way of saying to women, "Your pleasure is secondary, if not irrelevant." Which is fine, in its place, once in a while (on your birthday?), but not fine if the whole sexual culture is driving in that direction. Now, this is not the whole story: The Ultimate Guide To Anal Sex For Women, by Tristan Taormino, provides sound physiological reasons as to why anal sex shouldn't have to be a girl's own nightmare, as well as techniques for the proof thereof in the privacy of your own homes (I'm too squeamish to go into this; look it up on Amazon). But what kind of cultural trajectory is that? To idealise a mode of sex that effectively excludes one party, and then have to backtrack to re-include that party? Why not idealise a mode of sex that everyone can start off enjoying? 

Susie Bright, an American broadcaster and cultural commentator, argues that our obsession with anal sex has come out of the Aids crisis: "There was such a lot of talk at the height of Aids about the dangers of anal sex that straight people started thinking, 'Wow, it must feel really good for people to take such insane risks!'" I don't buy this, otherwise I'd have taken heroin to see why it screwed me up, and so would you. 

Here are some alternative thoughts from David Cronenberg, the dirty-minded visionary, apropos his film Crash: "It expresses that element of disconnection. It's a question of 'How do you have sex when you're not quite having sex with each other?' It felt right, getting both actors looking towards the camera and not at each other." Again, anal is dirty, "disconnected", raunchier than "loving" sex; but what is truly sexy about it? The disconnection, or the idea that the female is getting nothing from it? That the act is not one of union, but one of usage and solipsism? 

Anal retentiveness has been taken up as a shorthand for people who like to organise their desk items at right angles to each other, but the more faithful rendering of the anal character, as defined by Freud, is a person whose main energy in life is directed towards having, saving and hoarding money and material things. It's a stretch, I grant, to extrapolate from this that an anally-fixated society is one that, by definition, directs its main energy towards having money and material things. But it is certainly the case that we are hurtling towards the apex of capitalism, the most materialistic age man has known - and we are also fixated by Kylie's butt.

Now, it would make no sense to have this discussion without mentioning the racial aspects of arse-centricity. I don't want to say that black women have more sticky-out arses than white women - regardless of whether or not it's true, there is a racist overtone to the observation, since white culture has traditionally focused on the black female arse for racist reasons. David Marriott, author of On Black Men and lecturer in black cultural theory and critical theory at Queen Mary and Westfield, recalls an article headlined Black Venus in the early 1980s, "which reproduced lots of Old Master-type paintings and ethnographic images of black women, which were invariably obsessed with the butt. What was really being anchored was a racist view of the black physiognomy." 

That is, it was all just a (not very well) coded way of reinforcing the idea that black women were closer to simians - and, having more in common with monkeys, how could they not be savages? But though essentialism has largely been rooted out like the bindweed it was, it hasn't entirely gone away. I give you Sir Mix-A-Lot, the novelty rapper, and his song, Baby Got Back (you might know it as I Like Big Butts). The intro features a lot of scoffing about the size of a girl's behind ("It's so round", "I mean - gross"), and concludes that Becky is "just so... black!" And note the recent shocked newspaper coverage of tennis player Serena Williams' big, powerful body. 

The prime importance of the arse in black sexual identity is referenced constantly in rap music, from the really sexy, grubby lyrics of early 1990s hard men (like, er, Lil' Kim) through the more cutesy phrasing of Destiny's Child ("Can you handle my buttocks?" they effectively ask in Bootylicious), to novelty rappers. J-Lo, even though she is Hispanic and personifies that body ideal more than any other, is nevertheless associated through her music, and through her former relationship with Puff Daddy, with rap culture and thus with black culture. The contest between her (sticky-out) arse and Kylie's (tidy) arse is more than a piece o' fun concocted by the tabloids for our enjoyment. While on the one hand black culture is powerfully attractive to, and influential in, mainstream culture, there is a tendency in the white mainstream to water it down - to co-opt it, repackage it and send it back out with a white face. 

Kylie's timid behind is, in essence, a conduit for this very Anglo-Saxon message: defined arses are unarguably nice, but you don't have to be strident, or rapacious, or voluptuous, or black, to constitute a perfect model of femininity. You can be neat and small and white, and still be just as pretty as a picture. That's why it has taken on a life of its own, distinct from Kylie herself, just as J-Lo's has (with rumours of its having been insured for $1bn). In the inevitable backlash, fans on Kylie's website have said, "We're all bummed out. Put your ass to bed once and for all." Even while objecting to the arse, they still buy into the notion that it has a life of its own, and can stay in bed while the rest of Kylie goes out. 

This isn't to say that black culture has more respect and/or love than white culture for the "natural", assertive female form. As Marriott says, "It's relatively recent that the arse has become a designer object. But, for far longer, it's been a part of popular culture, of dancehall culture. There are black street cultures that have always engaged with this obsession. Why, I'm not sure, but I don't see anything in it other than extreme phallic fascination. Men want to penetrate women as if they were men. And certainly in Jamaican and ragga culture, their style of dancing would seem to go hand in hand with an intense homophobia. That's a very simple narrative: that what people most want, they most disavow. I don't see how it could be liberating for women to be put in that position of mediating homoerotic desire." 

This raises an interesting rejoinder to the widely held belief that a cultural fixation with bottoms and anal sex constitutes a kind of tacit acceptance of homosexuality. On the face of it, the more receptive the mainstream is to homosexuality, the more receptive it should be to anal sex. But anal sex with women is not necessarily a means of signalling general acceptance of anal sex as a modus operandi. It is, if you take the Jamaican example, a means of marginalising homosexuality still further by appropriating sodomy for heterosexual sex. In the same way that white culture absorbs black sexual imagery, remodels it and sends it back out in the shape of Kylie, so straight culture absorbs gay practice, grafts it on to heterosexual couplings in which 50% of the group isn't, by consensus, enjoying itself, and sends it back out in the shape of Bridget Jones's Diary (you no doubt remember the scene in which Renée Zellweger says to Hugh Grant, "What you just did is actually illegal in several countries." "You", not "we", of course). This is not about acceptance and belonging; it's about perceiving a threat, an otherness, then milking it down and saying, "Well, it's fine the way we do it, but you're still weird." 

Where ragga culture has arse-centric dancing, middle-American culture has Jackass, which focuses on the arse to an absurd degree. You may or may not have seen the movie, in which good-looking, articulate young men seek to hurt themselves in wholly revolting ways. They shoot metal pellets into their own stomachs and have bruises that describe whole continents on their bellies. They paper-cut their lips and between-finger areas: it's enough to make you sick. They make projectiles of themselves, to fire off every conceivable roof. And then one of them sticks a toy car up his arse, in a condom (the detail of the prophylactic is in itself extraordinary, since they take no precautions against pain or infection in any other stunt). And one of these guys, Steve-O - who has already stuck his head in a vat of jellyfish and then poured his own urine over his face to ease the exquisite pain - won't do it because his parents would be "disappointed". And the car-guy makes such a girlie fuss -"Ooh, this is so uncomfortable. Oh, I hate this"; this from a man who's jettisoned himself down a busy road on a shopping trolley - when he goes for an x-ray. 

And you cannot help conclude that, unlike any other stunt, the pain here is not physical. And the shock that they're confronting, unlike in any other stunt, is not physical. The format is to unleash shock and awe on their audience for the extravagant, imaginative pain and the untold risks they're prepared to take - and the most painful it gets is the humiliation of having something up your arse; and the greatest untold risk is that you might look as if you're enjoying it. 

Like any change in social mores, one assumes the arse thing is a move forward. One assumes that the deification of the lady arse is a blow for feminism, for womanliness. One assumes that the chorus over J-Lo's butt is a blissful union of black and white body ideals. One imagines that the rise and rise of anal sex is striking out in the direction of sexual liberation, of understanding, of the breaking down of barriers. One hopes that the day everyone has his and her brown wings will be the day humanity realises, and rejoices in, its proper urges. And all this adds up to a nice theory - but there's a crack in it.

we'll fly away

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

If you can use some exotic booze

There's a bar in far Bombay

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

Come fly with me, let's float down to Peru

In llama land there's a one-man band

And he'll toot his flute for you

Come fly with me, let's take off in the blue

Once I get you up there where the air is rarified

We'll just glide, starry-eyed

Once I get you up there I'll be holding you so near

You may hear angels cheer 'cause we're together

Weather-wise it's such a lovely day

You just say the words and we'll beat the birds

Down to Acapulco Bay

It's perfect for a flying honeymoon, they say

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

Once I get you up there where the air is rarified

We'll just glide, starry-eyed

Once I get you up there I'll be holding you so near

You may hear angels cheer 'cause we're together

Weather-wise it's such a lovely day

You just say the words and we'll beat the birds

Down to Acapulco Bay

It's perfect for a flying honeymoon, they say

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly

Pack up, let's fly away!!

rain no more

Love ain't gonna let you down no more. Waiting here surrounded by white linen and the deafening traffic of thoughts, I feel secure. Each crease on my face is a product of happy moments. No one will ever do. The hope and plans I've made that once I thought were shattered and lay barren have now burst with activity. The choppy waters and the overcast weather I'm navigating has a definite direction now, since I have found my compass. Speak to me silently, surrender. It's ok. You have to give up the life you planned and find the life that is waiting for you. We all should...

sneek peek

Come on, we all know what a bikini is...if there is anyone out there who needs an introduction, well...a bikini is a women's swimsuit with two parts, one covering the magnificent breast and the other, the groin (aka the perfume garden - more about this on another post) and, optionally, part or all of the buttocks, leaving an uncovered area between the two. Damn! How did I manage to write it in such a technical format?! It is often worn in hot weather, while pretending to swim or sunning. 

Predecessors of the bikini date back to antiquity in Çatalhöyük and the Greco-Roman world. There have been a few artwork dating back to the Diocletian period in Villa Romana del Casale that depicts women in garments resembling bikinis in mosaics on the floor (pic above). The images of ten women, exercising in clothing that would pass as bikinis today, are the most replicated mosaic among the 37 million colored tiles at the site. Archeological finds in Pompeii shows the Roman goddess Venus wearing a bikini. A statue of Venus in a bikini was found in a cupboard in the southwest corner in Casa della Venere, others were found in the front hall. 

The groundwork for the modern bikini began to be laid in 1907, when Australian swimmer and performer Annette Kellerman was arrested on a Boston beach for wearing a form-fitting one-piece swimsuit, which became an accepted beach attire for women by 1910. In 1913, inspired by the introduction of women into Olympic swimming, designer Carl Jantzen made the first functional two-piece, a close-fitting one-piece with shorts on the bottom and short sleeves on top. By the 1930s, necklines plunged at the back, sleeves disappeared and sides were cut away. Then, the fun began with new materials latex and nylon and by 1934 the swimsuit started hugging the body and had shoulder straps to lower for tanning. 

It wasn't until a French (of course it is!) engineer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946 that made it modern. Réard, a car engineer was running his mother's lingerie boutique near Les Folies Bergeres in Paris and Heim was working on a new kind of beach costume. It comprised two pieces, the bottom large enough to cover its wearer's navel. In May 1946, he advertised it as the world's 'smallest bathing suit'. Réard named his swimsuit the 'bikini', taking the name from the Bikini Atoll. Réard sliced the top off the bottoms and advertised it as 'smaller than the smallest swimsuit'. All this is good and well but Réard could not find a model to wear his design and ended up hiring a nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, to wear his piece That bikini, a string bikini with a g-string back of 30sq/in of cloth with newspaper type printed across, was introduced on July 5 at a public pool in Paris. After that, its all history...

docking dunes

Mayslits Kassif Architects won the open competition for the regeneration of Tel Aviv Port public space. The port management's new vision for the regeneration includes public space renewal and the restoration of the port’s old hangars. The Architects viewed the project as a unique opportunity to construct a public space which challenges the common contrast between private and public development, and suggests a new agenda of hospitality for collective open spaces. The design introduces an extensive undulating, non-hierarchical surface, that acts both as a reflection of the mythological dunes on which the port was built, and as an open invitation to free interpretations and unstructured activities.

under the skin - four

Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Daniel Libeskind

under the skin - three

Stata Center, MIT, Frank O. Gehry by Stanley Greenberg.

under the skin - two

Hearst Tower, New York, Norman Foster by Stanley Greenberg.

sensual feline continues...

Andromeda Chained to the Rocks was painted by Rembrant to represent his first full length mythological female nude history painting and is taken from a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the story, an Ethiopian princess was chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster as a punishment for her mother's boasting that tormented the Ethiopian people. Unlike many other artists that depicted this story by showing Andromeda, her rescuer Perseus, and the sea monster all in the same composition; Rembrandt's shies away from classical conventions by showing her not as a glamorous beauty but as a frightened naturalistic looking girl. He didn't include any other figures except for her alarmed look out of the picture space to the right creates narrative tension. The painting is an example of Rembrandt's rejection of idealized beauty. Since he did not believe true beauty existed naturally, he painted women as he saw them; naturally imperfect and flawed.

corten chilies

Cristian Fernandez Arquitectos, Lateral Arquitectura + Diseño won the Chilean governments International Architecture Competition for their new cultural centre. The Architects approach to the building was to immediately address the surrounding environment, providing a new relationship to the previously unacknowledged surroundings.  The Architects decided to focus on four main concepts: openness to the city and its urban relationships across a large deck with loose volumes under it, the creation of new public space, the opening of the building to the community by incorporating community programs, and the legitimacy of the project through the incorporation of as many social agents in shaping a new benchmark for the city.

The Architects believe that a arts/culture building should always have varying degrees of transparency, share and engage the visitors not only directly but also to the whole community.  Therefore, the Architects opted for a design that provided openness with in the public spaces and transparency into the interior spaces.  The halls for the performing arts of music, dance, and theater, are on display to the public as 'boxes or containers'. Horizontally the building is organised around three volumes that contain and represent the three major program areas; Documentation Center for the Performing Arts and Music, a Training Room of the Performing Arts and the Great Hall Theater seating 2,000 people. The three buildings are separate at street level providing multiple covered pedestrian spaces. Meanwhile, at the lower levels all three buildings are connected.

The main materials that make up the building are all possible to find in the original building with five design elements that are worth noting; weathering steel, reinforced concrete in sight, glass, steel, and wood. The Architects have chosen the weathering steel (with holes) to link between past, present and future visually.

under the skin - one

These picture above of Steven Holl's Simmons Hall, MIT is by New-York photographer Stanley Greenberg. He ventures into the parts of modern cities that others do not or cannot go, capturing the bowels and structural backwaters of the working urban environment. His two previous books: Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and Waterworks: A Photographic Journey Through New York’s Hidden Water System, (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003) confirmed his mastery in this field.

In this new project for which he received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Greenberg studies modern architecture under construction:

"With the advent of powerful computers as design tools and to control fabrication processes, buildings have taken on new shapes and structures. This has also led to new construction techniques. When a new “blob” building is built, few can imagine what holds it together. When the skin goes on almost any new building, the structure often disappears. With the intentional (World Trade Center) and accidental (Charles DeGaulle Airport Terminal) destruction of modern buildings, the public has become much more interested in what makes buildings stand up, and what makes them fall down. As the designs for new buildings are revealed, the public watches closely as architects and engineers suggest new forms and ideas. These pictures are x-rays of the process.”

 

A book of the work will be published in 2009 by the University of Chicago Press, with an introduction by Joseph Rosa, Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Greenberg’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. He received a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2005, and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Stanley Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1956 where he still lives.

kaa-boom!!

My true feeling throughout my years of school, college, university and training before a life-long future as an Alcoholic Architect...

light stilts

Steven Holl Architects new gallery floats over the natural landscape. It has 9 steel columns and 9 elevations, all integrated via proportions of 1:1.618. A rain skin of natural 2x2 cedar is suspended on stainless steel screws. There is no plumbing, or sheetrock. The interiors are painted plywood and the floor is sanded marine plywood with all the stains of the 4 month construction process exposed. The Architects have created bespoke wooden windows, doors and skylights for this space. The gallery is reached from the east by a gently sloping wooden ramp, and exited on a wooden ramp through the south elevation which is a large pivoting wall. Light play comes from skylights thus eliminating the need for electricity.

work work work

This is Fearon Hay Architects latest fit out for a private office in a newly built shell in Auckland's Victoria Precinct. The Architects had the opportunity to create a relaxed environment that removed the formality and conventional nature inherent to most office interiors. They have rejected the idea of closed cells and clear divisions between front of house and private offices thus the notions of rhythm and transition could be explored without sacrificing the functionality and order of these spaces. The Architects have chosen natural materials such as concrete steel and timber, complimented by custom crafted furniture to create an artisanal and warm environment, deconstructing traditional perceptions of office space.

geisha transplant

Alvaro Siza, Carlos Castanheira and Kim Jong Kyu's museum for the client, Amore Pacific in Korea. The client's grandmother initiated the collection  when the cosmetics company first began. Today, the collection is immense with national value and interest. The dark brick building are all the staff training facilities and the improvised museum, displaying only a small part of the collection. The rest of the ever-expanding collection is in storage, in the basement. There is also another small building, which is isolated, as if pushed into a corner, to the northeast, serves as accommodation for anyone who comes here from a distance to do training or research. The exterior area is characterised by a huge collection of trees and shrubs that the client buys or transplants here from elsewhere.

play nice

Someone to hold me tight; That would be very nice; Someone to love me right; That would be very nice; Someone to understand; Each little dream in me; Someone to take my hand; To be a team with me

So nice, life would be so nice; If one day I'd find; Someone who would take my hand; And samba through life with me

Someone to cling to me; Stay with me right or wrong; Someone to sing to me; Some little samba song; Someone to take my heart; And give his heart to me; Someone who's ready to; Give love a start with me

Oh yes, that would be so nice; Should it be you and me, that would be nice

Someone to cling to me; Stay with me right or wrong; Someone to sing to me; Some little samba song;  Someone to take my heart; And give his heart to me; Someone who's ready to; Give love a start with me

Oh yes, that would be so nice; Should it be , you and me?; I could see it would be nice...

4 bridges

bureau SLA were commissioned to turn the two buildings into a home for the National Glass Museum. It was suggested to turn Cochius’ former residence into an exhibition area and to use the second villa as offices, storage facilities and a cafeteria.Although the spaces were enough, the Architects thought that creating both buildings fully accessible to the public would be a better solution. Their idea was that the museum’s employees could eat in the restaurant, the visitors could have full access to the collection of glass, including that in storage, and the administrative staff could work in the library. Furthermore, the exhibition rooms could be far more spacious and instead of the small rooms of the existing villas, in which visitors need to climb up and down stairs all the time, circulation and exhibition spaces could to be much more generous.

In the end, bureau SLA designed 4 bridges that draws everything together in an elegant manner. Visitors can idle through extensive rooms with only one lift is needed and an enormous amount of space is gained. The bridges serve as storage space in which all the museum’s objects are on display, in cases specifically designed for the museum by Piet Hein Eek. The bridges were constructed from several layers of polycarbonate panels and covered by a translucent skin of grey, powder-coated, aluminium mesh. During the day they contrast sharply with the refined old villas, whereas at night they glow in reflection of the 9000 glass objects inside them.

long bar

Ogrydziak Prillinger Architects have designed this 2,400 sq. ft. house for a young family moving from the city to the country. The design strategy attempts to maximize the exposure of the interior of the house to the lightly forested surroundings. The site has a steepl slope, covered with mature oak trees that provides an ample privacy screen for an essentially transparent house. The Architects decision was to elongate the primary space into a long bar. The bar is embedded along the slope, its roof tilted to match the site gradient in an effort to merge the primary mass of the house into the landscape. This space is also mirrored on its long axis to create an outside room bounded by a high retaining wall. The entry to the house also operates as a cut through the house, demarcating the public and private spaces. Here, exterior space penetrates the interior, and the procession from outside-in-and-outside-again is is fully appreciated, merging the house into the landscape. The walls and roof are considered as a continuous skin that wraps the interior with varying degrees of transparency.