A short video from the Blue Wave exhibition, a few years back in Holland

More from the archives: Blue Wave was an exhibition I did in 2005 at MU in Eindhoven. The exhibition was actually a 1-1 prototype for the public space next door to MU, which we were trying to get built together with Ton Van Gool from MU. The project fell through, and I think some of the pieces are still hanging out in the Eindhoven city hall, or ended up in some culture dumpster.

Holidays in Hell

As Greece is burning and I'm looking out to a nuclear sunset, I stumbled upon this book promoting tourism in Greece in 1974. The dream was of metabolist light resorts, modernist sea-scapes and fun nights spent at the hotel disco. Everybody was ugly in the 70's but that didn't seem to stop them from having too much fun. Now that metabolism is no longer an architectural movement but the reason your diet doesn't work, we spend our vacations next to concrete supermarket Parthenons (why not?) and we keep searching for the ideal abandoned beach that nobody else knows about (they do, they're all there). The promise of architecture on the islands did become a traditionalistic (sic) compromise lost somewhere between a huge misunderstanding and the greedy vernacular.On the plane today I saw the 60's Mon Parnass resort, surrounded by the burnt forest of Parnitha, which should probably go in to the Tourist book of hell from this summer of non-stop forest fires

World of Darkness

Been browsing my archive a lot recently, and under 2003/Projects I found these photos from the Bronx Zoo. We'd gone there a day after the big Northeast Blackout, around this time of year in 03, which was really scary especially up in Harlem. There were helicopters flying around with flood lights, police cars, people going wild in the total darkness. In the zoo they keep all the night animals in a black building called, of course, World of Darkness. The bats were all sleepy and quiet, probably they were all jet lagged from having to pretend it's night time during the day just to please us jaded humans. But everything was super pretty in the various colored infrared lighting and desert-Gothic mini landscapes.

the Knife - Heartbeats

OK so I dont put music or video here too often, because I'm too lazy to upload to sendspace whatever. But how can I resist The Knife? Directed by Johannes Nyholm of course.

Goodbye Bunker Hill

Seems like I've been keeping up with blogging quite well, but I haven't been Second Lifeing (ouch) too much. In fact I should drop both because I'm supposed to be working on something else entirely, but more on this later. Anyway so I was totally bored with the whole Merope turns trashy thing, and I was also bored with the bunker I made to avoid everybody around. So I started playing with the bunker a little, with some pattern walls etc

and it started looking kind of interesting
but I kept falling asleep
and getting logged off for inactivityand it wasn't even nighttimeso I decided to sell and get the hell out of here, and start being a guest rather than a home-owner.. more on this guesting soon

Shalom Formalism

So thanks to Felix from Pin-up we have the synagogue that I was talking about just before,and as noted it is not by P.J. but by William N. Berger. There is a kind of striking similarity between the Roofless church and the Belly Synagogue (melting synagogue? fat synagogue?) so maybe the ghost of P.J. had something to do with this? or maybe the other way around? Or maybe there where no ghosts but it was all a happy coincidence? In any case , the scaffolding at the bottom kind of ruins the effect of the building, but I guess those tiles are falling onto poor shopper passerby.Google doesn't seem to know too much about Berger and I'm just wondering if he did any more wacky buildings like the synagogue on 47-9 White St. (In fact I'm not wondering, I'm just closet-crowdsourcing again)

Harmony is the New Crazy

This is the crazy church Phillip Johnson did in New Harmony, Indiana, and of course it's called New Harmony too. Looks to me like a handkerchief filled up with hot air and dressed up as a building, but of course it couldn't be filled with air because it doesn't have a roof silly me. I was able to find images of the church itself, which is mostly know as "The Roofless Church" and I can imagine Mr PJ presenting the project going all "Roofs are SO last year" or "Roofless is the post-new- modernism". Nobody though seems to post pics of the fabulous gold and black heraldic overdecorated entrance gate. On the subject of the bitterly missed Phillip Johnson, if any of you has pics of the amazing synagogue he has done in downtown New York please please send me some (yes I'm finally CrowdSourcing yoo-hoo) . Its one of my favorite buildings ever and each time I photograph it the camera goes bust or I loose the memory card or my laptop dies or something. The Synagogue (I think) in on Franklin street, or maybe White or somewhere in the Tribeca area, and I think it is of the same period as the church, like 1960 or something. (actually the synagogue was done by William N. Berger as per my successful crowdsourcing)

Notes on Kriti

Seems I'm calling all my travel posts "notes from where I was" but it's just too much work to find sub-themes or concepts and try to group things together etc. Maybe just a big old post will cover everything, so here's my week in Krete, in total randomness:

This house was cut by a road, but it insisted on staying the house where we stayedthe view

sun setting over Messaraa weird abandoned basement, on the beach

the mostly organised landscape

strangest balcony on a thin building
one of the rooms
almost from the right angle this could be elegant
a rock and a churchan illegaly extended church?
a pretend cafe
a pile of sand and pebblesbeach for a day
a hexagonal club called hexagon
snails on a tree
a tree in our "garden", (and an eagle if you look closely)
a funny garden in the village close by
for some reason I had to drive back and take a picture of this
a miniature replica of a house in the museum. Apparently in the house there is a female deity, and peepig from the roof is a dog and two guys, and it looks to me like the guys are kissing, definetly very juicy. By the way the Archaeological museum of Heraclion is one of the the most amazing museums ever, full of totally amazing stuff. Right now it is undergoing renovations so we saw only a small fabulous selection.
another miniature house, this time on a beachsmall rocks can look biga modern monastery with just one byzantine column
the abandoned Xenia Motel on the north coastgreat palm trees in the parking lot
funny tourist miniatures saying goodbye