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.

Lake Sevan Continued

Yes I realize that I cannot turn this blog into Armeniapedia but I just have a surplus of images and those were pre-blog days, so I never really wrote any stuff about Armenia and its a fascinating place. If you're bored by these Armenian posts, umm, well, nothing can be done. So Lake Sevan (or CEBAH as the Russian sign says) has also diminished in size, along with the mountains that are left without trees. Because of this shrinking, you end up with abandoned resorts far away from the beach, and huge Soviet-style diving boards in the middle of the empty fields. The Sun was really strong because Sevan is up in the mountains, we just lied on the grey pebble beach and covered our faces with clothes. Varsenik became a living sleeping sculpture. The water was not salty.

Mi Dacha es su Dacha (Armenia Days)

After the opening of Playgrounds and Toys we went up on Lake Sevan, just to see what it this huge lake looks like. The mountans are bare, not a tree in sight, and apparently this happened in the early 90's when the Soviet Union collapse and Armenia was left without any type of energy in winters where the temperature went way below freezing. Anyway, Lake Sevan looks amazing, like an abandoned resort landscape, very rough. On a small peninsula where the Sevanavank monastery is, we saw an amazing little soviet-modernist house, must have been a dascha from, well, the soviet times. I was fully expecting to see an interior full of similar furniture, wacky 60's soviet shtick, but of course I got the new international style: The Plastic Chairs. The house was amazing though, and it was no longer a house but a kind of haphazard restaurant where you could order some toasted wonderbread and if it was a good day they could also have butter and jam to go with it, oh and maybe coffee.

Yerevan Days

Recently I read about the Armenian Plane that crashed in Russia, and it was scary and I remembered the tons of amazing stuff I saw in Armenia a couple of years ago when I was there with Adelina, working on a project. Here's just a few pics, I'll post more as I browse through them... This is one of the things you see when you enter Yerevan

I was totally jetlagged so I'd wake up every day at around 5:30 and I see the sun rising behind the "revolution" hills or whatever, quite amazing...

this is a kind of market in downtown Yerevan, never went inside.

Some random post-soviet administrivia building. Maybe its' a pool?

It looks a bit hazy right now

Clouds of Worry are passing by, I'm not sure these pieces will actually fit together. It will be ok if they dont, just another Neen Ruin...

Ancient History

Just found out that the oldest webpage to contain information about my work still exists online, here. It was the thesis page from exactly 10 years ago when I finished my MSAAD at Columbia with Keller Easterling at her first paperless studio. Its' funny how the pictures take so long to download since back then we didnt know how to "save for the web".

Towards a Figurative Architecture

Saw these on the way to the east coast of Attica, nearly crashed, had to take deep breaths, this was a definite architecture high, or an architecture that is high or whatev.
So, are we ready for The Elephant House people? and this Diogenes things is just too confusing. And sometimes I feel like I'm talking to myself, which is ok too.

Buildings and Graphics

These are some images left over in my 2BLOG folder, from the trip to Lugano a couple of weeks ago. They are buildings with metal graphics on them, two butterflies and a fabulous logo that Angelo pointed out to me. It says "riri".

Printing a building

Printing a Building is definetly up there with Being able to Fly or Reading Peoples' Minds, but 3D printing technology is still inproportionally expensive so I decided to make a lo-fi 3D print using my 3D programs' unfold options, a very heavy coated paper and a very cheap printer.

Jules for Ever

I've forever been obsessed with Jules Vernes' "Journey to the Center of the Earth" and "20000 leagues under the Sea". Both seem to be about escaping from where you're at. Some of these images via the great Cylon Alliance a site dedicated to preserving the future's past.

If you read Japanese...

...tell what this review of my show at Inmo says. Only thing I know is that the lovely Rika Hiro wrote it, and that this magazine apparently rocks in Asia. Together with the review I got the invites for Inmos' booth at the 2006 China International Gallery Exposition, otherwise know as the Beijing Art Fair. Where you there? Did you see it?

If you read Greek

Check out the super-nice interview that Evgenia Migdou did for Soul magazine.