This dude's been like everywhere lately... Really blowing up... I really like his Latent City proposal and his City of Factory proposal, and I find his graphics intriguing, it seems the latest stuff he's been doing is almost a bit overdone (though he does it incredibly well)... Hyper rationalized machines for housing are cool and all, but I don't see the amount of intellectual rigor in them that I see in the urban schemes... They seem "cooler" and have a great deal more technical skills embedded in them but not smarter... Still... This guy is going places and I can see this stuff really starting to influence what I do in the future.
I just can't say no... I've been put in charge of getting a team together to design the Singapore pavilion for the World Cities Summit. Its a very high profile, very high budget project with a great deal of curatorial intent... The political dynamic of this project is going to be extremely interesting as it represents the government. This is last year's proposal, from an interior design/ graphic design firm from Singapore, Asylum.
So its been a while since I did one of these... This one is dead but damn if I was alive during this time.... Delia Derbyshire Def. not the most objective attractive of my plethora of hipster crushes, but she writes scifi electronic music about fifty years before it became popular... Pretty impressive.
Congratulations, you have officially alienated 75% of the population. Now if you can make Less cost more? You’ll knock out another 23%. The remaining 2% are married to an Architect. Clearly, your practice is off to a good start.
Reducing everything down to the purest, most elegant form is difficult, and only a truely gifted Architect can achieve that level of perfection, and that gifted Architect probably designed a glass house for a crazy lady in a robe, but she died, and now the house is a museum, and, yes, I just called Philip Johnson a crazy lady in a robe, and I think the facts will back me up on that.
Removing all the clutter, and the contradictions, and the character, and the color, and the messiness, and the struggle, and the inconsistency, and the uncertainty, and the imbalance, just to reveal an underlying structure, and an order, and a harmony, and a calm, centered peace…, is a disservice to our humanity.
Like replacing a beating heart with a thick block of glass.
But, Architects continue to strive for that perfection, and we continue to enlarge the divide between what we want and what is wanted, and I think we may have missed the point of what we were trying to do in the first place.
Yes, simplicity is a difficult goal, and clean lines are next to godliness, and purity photographs well. And, nobody cares. Because:
Life is complicated and Life is messy and Life is hard and Life is endlessly fascinating…
"....until like a dullen wine we pour into a grief know before but never quite like this. All i know now is regret, it follows like a silhouette along the cobblestones behind me, but has nothing to say except to innocently ask, its voice delicate as glass, "Do you see me when we pass?" but i continue on my way."
10.11.11
Here's some images from midterm. Thanks so much to Jordan for helping with the renderings. Saved my freaking life.... Now i gots to start over.....