Electric Labyrinth

Re-Ruined Hiroshima was one of the drawings that Arata Isozaki
presented as part of his Electric Labyrinth installation
at the 14th Triennale di Milano in 1968.

"Haunted by the remaining destruction of Hiroshima twenty-two years after the atomic bomb was exploded there, Arata Isozaki has projected images of his megastructures onto a photomural of the razed city. In this image his constructions are also in ruins. It is as if he had rebuilt Hiroshima, and it had once again undergone destruction. Ruins provide an important metaphor for Isozaki: "They are dead architecture. Their total image has been lost. The remaining fragments require the operation of the imagination if they are to be restored."

Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo
Terence Riley, ed., The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 101

Incubation Process, part of the 4 core joint system, showing Isozaki's City in the Air growing amidst ancient Greek columns. (thanks to Dimitris Zisimopoulos for the great scan)


Matilda McQuaid, ed., Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 120

Arata Isozaki began his career in 1954, in the office of Kenzo Tange, his former professor and the most influential figure in postwar Japanese architecture. While Tange's architecture was in itself radical in its conception, it was his urban projects that most influenced the younger generation of architects, including Isozaki. Tange's Plan for Tokyo (1960) is critical in this regard. Trying to reconcile the incredible density of Tokyo's urban fabric with the rapid expansion and reformulation of modern social structures, Tange's plan proposed multilevel urban construction layered over the existing city and its waterways.

Radical new visions of the city were not limited to Tange's plans for Tokyo. The New Babylon project that Constant Nieuwenhuis began in the 1950s, Yona Friedman's Spatial Plan for Paris of 1958, and the work of the collective Archigram in the 1960s embraced urban transformation as a means toward achieving social change. In Isozaki's City in the Air (Joint Core System) project of 1962, the multilayered city hovers over the traditional city, the scale of which can be seen at the far right. Highways and parking structures thread their way between massive pylons that support blocks of offices and apartments above. The ground plane is reconstituted as tiers of gardens above and within the blocks.

Isozaki's City in the Air (Joint Core System) project was undertaken in 1960, the same year a number of younger architects, almost all of them affiliated with Tange, issued the Metabolist Manifesto. While Isozaki was never formally a member of the group, his project and the work produced by the Metabolists over the course of the decade largely reflected Tange's description of his own urban work: "By incorporating elements of space, speed, and drastic change in the physical environment, we created a method of structuring having elasticity and changeability."

Terence Riley
Terence Riley, ed., The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 49

In Arata Isozaki's unrealized design for the Joint Core System spatial construction, massive pylons support elevated transportation, housing, and office systems as well as parks and walkways, suspended above the existing city. This scheme was undertaken at a time when Kenzo Tange and a group of five young architects working in his office, known as the Metabolists, were creating radical solutions for restructuring Tokyo's rapid and uncontrolled postwar growth. As a member of Tange's office, Isozaki was inspired by Tange's proposal for a multilevel urban construction above the city. But, unlike Tange's plan, in which a square support system limits expansion to four directions, Isozaki's round columns permit growth in any direction.

Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo
Texts from MOMA.ORG where both collages are in the collection

Golden Boys

El Perro Del Mar "Change Of Heart" from The Control Group on Vimeo.

Mistake no3

B.K.S. Iyengar 1938

Day Without Gay

Today we're supposed to "Call in Gay", not show up at work, and donate our time to work against the hateful H8.. But what do you do when you're the boss? How to call in Gay? And anyway Athens today is facing more elemental problems than this, so maybe we just keep working... Here a nice shout out though (and I heart the merch too)

Subterranean Holiday I : Antiparos

We had been to Antiparos a few times, and had passed by a sign indicating the way to the"cave", though we always passed it by. This time we decided to visit

when you enter the stalagmites and stalactites look great,
and everything is lit with a quasi yellow light..
then the cave looks like it continues forever
(the stainless steel railing is unfortunately very Dubai airport)
and suddenly opens up to huge vertigenous underground halls

and you pass these great caves and the path continues further down

and you realize that you are in an incredible underground masterpiece


Sylvia posedthen everybody posed
(Sylvia, Mari, Angelo, me, Ilias)
ancient graffiti

the scale of the place is hard to describe
the rooms are endless
Angelo thought he was seeing ghosts everywhere

when we went back up,
I though I heard screams and went back to check

Parco dei Mostri

I was randomly looking for Herbert List pictures

and I came across this really great one

taken at Parco dei Mostri in Bomarzo, Italy.

searching for more monsters

Then somehow randomly a friend mentioned the hall of giants

at the Palazzo del Teand from there somehow to Dutch painter Carel Willink
who painted the monsters of Bomarzo

and more

Teenage Fanclub

For some reason I started googling all my favorite records from high school. I've thrown away the vinyl long ago, because I always throw everything away

This was the most exotic record ever:
Dead or Alive's "Sophisticated Boom Boom"
Homo, punk, goth and horny angry dance music,
just everything a gay boy needed while growing up
Hand in Glove was my favorite track off this,
but I was always disappointed at how "not gay enough" it was
total fabulous underground,
I learned about Nomi when he was the first artist
to die of Aids
this was a leftover from pre-teen years,
when people spoke about Classical Music
I always thought they meant Summer-Moroder
another classic obviously, and this was a great hit too,
so it was strange to listen to such a gloomy record in summer discos

New Order "Blue Monday"

and I still get chills when I listen to this

Rescue Dawn

Last night we watched Werner Hertzog's "Rescue Dawn",

starts off with great explosions



Christian Bale
is great

Random Post #xxx

The blog's been sleeping for a few days because I havent, but here's some random images I found under "blogged" though they never were. I guess at the time I thought I didnt need them, they were not good enough, not interesting, and now that I've nothing to blog (etc etc)

I think this was an ad for something, somewhere

cute building in Tokyo, somewhere close to boring Ginza
a plan of the Paolo Soleri Acrosanti complex, I might have even blogged this before
a nightclub sign from Cherry Grove in Fire Island. If you've read classic gay fiction like Andrew Hollerans' "Dancer from the Dance", then you've probably read about the Ice Palace
mirror building with eco-wig

A walk in the park

Finally a day off in Geneva,
glad to be walking around the super lovely Parc des Bastions
where they have wi-fi and the best trees everlike Sequoiadendron Giganteum F. Pendulum

otherwise known as Wellingtonia Pleureur, from California then I was off to Plain Palais, to the Saturday Flea Market

where I obviously found treasures I didn't needand the famous KNIE circus. I don't really know why it's famous but the tent was greatand further down there is a skate park where I witnessed some accidental acrobatics.

Right next to Plain Palais is the MAMCO, where everything seemed to be about interior space, starting from the super funny "apartment" where minimalist works were used to "furnish" an "apartment".

On the other hand the whole thing looked a little bit like Ikea, and I'm not sure if the relationship of Donald Judd, James Turell and Daniel Buren to Ikea was totally within the curators' intentions, but there you have it.on the desk, the best calender by On Kawara

in the permanent collection of Mamco, more interiors like the great piece by Sarkis,
his studio since 19830 (it's art, not reality)

with a piano that melts cassette tape?

In another room, the seminal project by Martin Kippenberger, the MOMAS (Museum of Modern Art Syros) which exists as an unfinish monument to museums on the barren Greek island.and a container-labyrinth by Gordon Matta-Clack which the museum is in the process of buying. Meanwhile somebody scrawled " Nobody is Perfect, My name is Nobody".

I heard a parade and some Swiss Romande hip hop (god have mercy)
so I had to get out of there

on the way back I passed the super cute brutalist UniDufour building, which has been decorated with art on the outside (a piece by Tatsuo Miyajima I think, which I find a little unnecessary , though this blog is really only about things I like, so its ok. At night it's red and you see numbers.