AGENDA: New Trends this Friday

The New Trends in European and Asian Architecture opens this Friday in Patras. The theme is AGENDA. On Saturday there is an all-day conferance.

Polygon Concrete

As usual I've been browsing past photos, and this time I went all the way back to 1995. I photographed these breakwave modules for Purple Prose and wrote a piece called Alt-PREFAB which I think was all about how concrete prefabrication can become a little psychedelic. Seems like I'm alwasy interested in the same things over and over, but these are still kind of cute anyway.

The Show without a Name

I was lazy and quite hazy during last nights' super packed opening at Rebecca's temporary space, and was carrying my too-heavy-canon-camera in my back pocket, and still I totally skipped on taking any pictures. Angelo took tons and he blogged them too, I'm just posting some pics of the works so you get an idea. I was pretty happy with the way everything turned out. Angelo's amazing TheTasteOfTears.com a blurry view of Angelo's room My ScreenTrees with Miltos' 444theory.com in the background
go ahead and post your 444's on Miltos 444theory.com
Angelo's Neen Emblem Curtain

A still from MirrorCloud

Really I have to say that I was quite egocentric and mostly took photos of my pieces, so I'll be going back for a more thorough documentation

The Crack of Dawn

I left the BlueBoy club really late, and it was totally dark outside and I could not see much, and I had forgoten that there is a time of day in Second Life, and that sometimes it's night and sometimes day. The good thing with time on the internet is that you can set it to fit your mood, and in second life you can choose how the sun looks like, so I decided to have a rising sun moment, and when the light came I found myself next to this really funny gay monument.

This Thursday Night

This coming Thursday night, is the opening of "our" show. Miltos, Angelo and me are showing with Rebecca Camhi gallery at the space of wannajob/locomotiva in the Gazi area of Athens. Konstandinoupoleos 44, come 9ish, stay late.

Water Mania

Once upon a time, in a Water World far far away, there was a plastic elephant who was mad at The Plastic Chairs. Some others were petrified in apool, stuck forever in mid winter waiting for the screaming crowds of overexcited kids raging on their sugar highs, crashing on the fake rock, slipping down the super menacing Hydra-Lernea-looking water slide, and more and more.

Fire Island Loving

Summer is coming and this time of year I always think of
Fire Island,one of the most poetic places ever:
Passing by a weird triangle house, getting lost in the dunes,ending up at the Meatrack where you can almost see the ghosts of orgies past, listening to a distact disco party mixed in with seagulls, gayboy-talk and the surf.

Tree Buildings

Parajanovia

Speaking of Monumental, Surreal, Ominous and Dramatic in the last post, I cant help but think of the fantabulous film director Sergei Parajanov, who lived in Armenia, and spent a large part of his life in Soviet jails. His list of amazing films includes Sayat Nova and Achik Kerib, and watching them is no less than a religous experience. The films consist of endless sequences of tableaux vivant and very hallucinant. Each time you see one of these still lifes, you think that "this one is the aesthetic apotheosis of the film, the pinnacle of stylized imagery" and then along comes the next to blast you even further away into the depths of Parajanov's weird and wonderful and hyper religous super gay world.

Round and Round

Two more round buildings from Yerevan. The first is a building we used to pass by every day, looks like it could have been a community cafeteria or maybe a police headquarters or even a nightclub? You have to cross a little bridge to get to it so it could be all of the above.
The other is the Contemporary Art Museum (I think) though it looks like a concrete silo or maybe an abandoned 60's fantasy. Inside the spaces are total videogame drama, monumental, surreal, ominous in a lo-tech way.

Would be nice if these two buildings were one, if the second one was inside the first: The Bridge, the Glass Lobby, the Staircase to the Basement, the Green Neon and the Natural Light coming form Above, could be a perfect sequence out of Half Life 2 or maybe even Second Life too.

International Style

Been mentioning The Plastic Chairs as a kind of omnipresent international style. Many years ago I wrote this text about how Pizza Hut was a new international style. Pizza Hut is basically a red sloped roof slapped on a generic container-type thing and the you have a truly internatonal building, immediately recongnizable blah blah blah. Same as Le Corbusier's Domino frame. Put the two together and you have Pizza Hut Domino.

Melnikov House

My artist friend Varsenik Khatlamajyan was another reason I got into this Armenia reminiscence trip that is turning into a fully fledged post-soviet-plastic-chair-internationalism. Anyway, Varsenik has been reading this blog from time to time and she urged me to look at the Konstantin Melnikov house, which seems like it would have been an obvious thing for me to look at since its kind of Neen, but it had totally escaped my radar. (and my gaydar too!) So here are some pics of the crazy genius Melnikov House that he built for himself in 1929, and to which he retreated when he fell out of political flavor. This house is made of two cylindrical towers punctured by hexagonal windows, and it is omnipresent in most architecture history books, but I remember that as a student I never knew how to place it, because its somehow ancient and futuristic at the same time, all the time, and somehow it still looks fresh, almost neen and almost like the Herzog and De Meuron Prada store. Full circle indeed.