Concrete Beach

This is Foreign Office Architects' Coastal Park that is part of the Forum 2004 area in Barcelona. A landscape of pixelated dunes, it is made of a single module, a concrete petal that makes the place look as if it could have been underwater too. The park features fantastic restrooms with petal-sliding doors, something the gay boys in Barcelona seem to greatly appreciate, since the whole park is super cruisy.

Morning Beach

This morning I woke up in Patras around 6:15 and I decided to take a walk along the beach before breakfast, since my class doesnt even start before 10. Two cute dogs came along. The beach is kind of abandoned left-over space and really not more than 2 m wide at places. The light was amazing.

The Road to Nowhere

Of course I love Gawker for all its bitchy-gossipy-fascinatingly-idiotic-trivia-but-in-a-new-york-kind-of-way, but Gawker Stalker really takes the bisquit, assuming there is one to take. Gawker Stalker is the celebrity mapquest, the yahoo maps a la perez hilton, the mappy.com via !hello but even worse. You can post all the celebrity sightings you want and nobody will even think of fact checking because nobody really cares.

More Green Buildings : Emilio Ambasz

I remembered all about Emilio Ambasz when I saw his hugely influential CASA DE RETIRO ESPIRITUAL at the new MOMA in New York. I love this office building too, for all its' 80's Mirror+ Grass over-the-topness, and its' description as a Symbolically Decisive Building
Fukuoka, Japan, was in need of a new government office building and the only available site was a large two-block park that also happened to be the last remaining green space in the city center. Ambasz was awarded the commission for successfully achieving reconciliation between these two opposing aims: maintaining the green space of the existing park while providing the city of Fukuoka with a multi-use, symbolically decisive building. Under the building's fourteen one-story terraces lie more than one million square feet of space, containing an exhibition hall, museum, 2000-seat proscenium theater, conference facilities, 600,000 square feet of government and private offices, as well as large underground parking and retail spaces.
location: Fukuoka, Japan
client: Dai-ichi Seimei Insurance
cost: $380.0M
area: 1,000,000 sq ft

POPB by ANPAR

Ok so this is almost a backwards smooth segway here: I've always meant to post something on the Palais Omnisport Paris Bercy since its one of my favourite 80's buildings. POPB as it is know is by ANPAR (Michel Andrault, Pierre Parat) and was finished in 1983. Looks like a set of pyramids sinking into a sea of gazon, with frothing fabulous space-frames over them. Perfect for a video game shoot-out or a Tobias Bernstrup performance.

More R&Sie(n) : Bangok Dust Buster

This is a design for a contemporary art museum by Francois Roche and co. Its a building that acquires its' shape by acquiring dust. Apparently Bangkok is full of silvery grey exhaust fume dust, and with an aluminum wire envelop and a electrostatics system the dust collects around the programmatic volumes creating this fantastic fuzzy ghost.

AA Tonight: Mr Francois Roche R&Sie(n) Architects

I was going to post Francois Roche's Hulk Bump so I emailed him to ask for pics, then I find out he's lecturing at the Architectural Association as I type. Here's an extract from Hulk Bump, the project he did during Stockholm At Large at Fargfabriken.
Blogger is acting up so I'll post the pics later

HULK BUMP
Green Land is like a green carpet.
Bumping the carpet in a random shape is the way to introduce new facilities, without style.
Using the Waste Land inside motorway flower is a strategy of a dense and compact entertainment center.
This volume with black box could be wear by everything.
The vegetable clothe in growing nature and micro alga is the way to absorb carbonic gas.
One big Leisure Center fragmented in several situations.
The motorway is becoming a building corridor between each entity.

Strange Geodesic Dome briefly appears in Mediocre Gay Porn

What were they thinking? This weird geodesic dome covered in faux wood shingles (!) somehow made it into the plot (!) of this very mediocre gay porn movie. I watched it fast forward and with the sound off so I have no clue what anything is about but Bucky Fuller would have loved it for sure.

Oh Devendra...

Golden Brown

This is Juergen Mayer H's Stadhaus. I met Juergen when he was teaching at Columbia a while ago and he happened to use Beige, this really old text of mine in his class bibliography. Looking at his site later on I realised he's practically obsessed with the color. The Stadthaus shines in full beige/brown/gold/ecru iodized aluminum glory. Inside it looks like something rendered rather than built, a total video game space.

SUPERNEEN II

I'm still sorting through photos from Superneen, but here is another selection with fewer people.
Some people chatting in the Cloud couch...
Philosophy table + chairs with Miltos Manetas' JesusSwimming.com in the background
Rafael on a Splat Chair, in front of Angelo Plessas' MeLookingAtYou wallpainting
Angelo, Rafael, Bruno and Blue in the Philosophy room
A visitor reading Miltos' Neen Manifesto which was designed by the great Experimental Jetset. They are working on the major Manetas Monograph coming soon from hyper cool Revolver Books. Better superneen installation shots coming soon.

WhereverYouLookThereIAm

Its snowing pills on gaping face landscape! This is whereveryoulookthereiam.com by Marc Kremers. I saw a preview of this piece during NeenDay at Sketch in London last year, and now its finally on., and I can see it everyday, all day long.

Super Neen Opening

A super cute crowd showed up at our SuperNeen opening in Milan last night. Tons of people arrived an hour early and stayed really late. The first 300 to arrive got the limited superneen edition of Boiler magazine, while only a few got to watch the special Mai Ueda performance. I was in the gallery and still managed to miss it because of the huge crowd, but from what I could heard it was screamingly good. Mai was wearing a fantastic bird dress by Paolo di Landro made especially for the performance, while Angelo was wearing a t-shirt/object made especially sexy. Priscilla who discovered Di Landro before everyone else was wearing one of his early pieces. After the opening we had a fabulous dinner and a cool afterparty at Nike Studio, their secret underground lab. I'll post some good pics of the show once I sort through the 1.7 GB of compulsively photographed everythings.

Milano by night

Walking around in Milan, it was too late to get anything to eat, ended up in Roman McDonalds,

passed by the day-glo Sawaya & Moroni store,

and a fabulous flower station for gas.

Where on Earth...

Once again, I have no idea where I found this rainbow landscape. Looks like a geothermal map of some sort. It was in my Misc folder from Dec 05 and I'm suspecting I got this from BLDGBLOG or pruned or some other cool architecture blog.

Coming soon

Swiss Bunker

Some more bunkers by Leo Fabrizio, suggested by my good friend Marc Kremers. A concrete flower anyone? These buildings are just amazing, and more flamboyant than the bunkers in Normandy.