Postcards from the edge

Browsing through the Graham Foundations' press section yet again, I found this really nice set of photos from Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

of course it is the studio which led 

to the book Learning from Las Vegas, 

which we all know

  I had not seen the entire set of photos, so I decided to study them a bit more.

 (of course this famous image is not from Vegas but from New Jersey) somehow I always understood this book to be talking about a contemporary moment in architecture, instead of Las Vegas in the 60's

Thats because I always confuse car dashboards with computer screens

surfing through a landscape of logos

 surrounded by lit surfaces and animated information

 

 finding corners of peculiarity hidden behind software facades

 google-earthing places I have been to only to notice patterns anew

where reality becomes as abstract as desktop background

 confusing real people for avatars and vice versa

 chatting behing facades of un-updated websites, 

 looking back at the landscape of the screen 

from the desert of the real

Walking in a Parkland of Ecstasy, Delirium and Disjuncture

R. Buckminster Fuller, United States Pavilion, 

World Trade Fair, Kabul, Afganistan, 1956.

Peter Cook, Layer City

Ant Farm, International Design Conference at Aspen, 1970

Robert Smithson, Museum of the Void, 1967

Schöner Wohner oder die Zerstörung des Wohnsarges

(Better Living or the Desctuction of the Living Coffin)

Eugene Peytie and the mapping of a Liberated Nation

Eugene Peytie was a topographer, head of a French Cartographic Mission in 19th century Greece

a newly independent country

full of conflicts

Peytie, instead of just producing topographic data

mapped the people and places too

the Ottomans

and the Greeks

blocked-off Churches

and the ruined neighborhood of Thission, on the outskirts of Athens

Serafin og Plym

 A couple of days ago I rediscovered my favourite book as a kid, which I thought was long thrown away. It's the story of Serafin and Plym, 

two friends who were good at making things 

I guess the things they made were not so popular so they had to go from job to job

 

one day they decide to make a fantastic machine, that makes the most amazing fences ever
 

They celebrated the making of the machine, but when they tested it in the city, officials freak out, and Serafin and Plym got kicked out

So they decided to fence everybody in, then fence themselves in around hole in the ground

opening the sewer cover, they set off in an underground maze of caves, 

and they lived happily ever after,

 together.