Some more pics from Napoli

Banana Yoshimoto and the Queer Issue

I'm always lost in bookstores, looking for interesting fiction for the plane, but since I never really read book review I never know what to buy. This time I was browsing in Malpensa airport and I saw this book by Banana Yoshimoto. I thought if somebody is called Banana she MUST be interesting. The book was Hardboiled / Hard Luck, and simply amazing. Of course Banana turned out to be super famous with books translated all over the place. Her blend of metaphysical post xanax romantic bleakness was just perfect for the plane, and I suspect even better for the beach. What i would love to read too is this crop of new gay fiction that according to this article by my all-time favorite writer Edmund White is part of a big gay fiction renaissance.

The Seven Celestial Palaces

Yesterday I had a chance to see the Hangar Bicocca space in Milan, where Anselm Kiefer's "The Seven Celestial Palaces" are permanently installed. I had see drawings of the poject when it laucnched last year, but nothing could really describe this amazing space. The "palaces" are casts of container parts stacked precariously one on top of the other. So precariously in fact that the area is off-limits to people as the towering structures could really fall any minute.

Polygon Window

Recently I took part in a housing competition in Athens. My proposal was for a complex density that sits somewhere between a cluster of single family homes and an apartment building.

Post Padula

Padula was really great, especially the spooky forest where Fresco Bosco took place. Walking around at night you could see clouds of fireflies, and weird shadows from the installations on progress. Angelo's piece rocked: the Neen Emblems were installed along a huge wall facing the forest and they were imposing and funny at the same time.and we had tons of fun with Franko B and Alessandro and John of Lovett/Codagnone who did a great performance called Obliquities. Their soundtrack kept repeating "I recongnize that I'm not you, I made myself, I made myself what I am, I changed myself, I became someone else" over and over again, a totaly hypnotizing mantra that I can still hear...At the end of the night a gang of kids from the local town had gathered outside the monastery and brought an amazing over accesorized disco-car complete with huge sound system, light show and a homo-disco soundtrack that was just a perfect ending.

Some plants I liked in Naples

Naples is a pretty amazing town, and thanks to the wirlwind motorbike ride around town with our gracious hosts Vito and Katia last night, we got to see a pretty good part of it. During the day I just couldnt stop photographing the plants (?!). Here's some I liked.

Today we're off to Padula where Angelo is part of the Fresco Bosco exhibition curated by the super prestigious Achille Bonito Oliva

Schaulager

This is one of my totally favourite buildings and too bad I couldnt find any decent photos of it. Its Schaulager (2003) by Herzog & de Meuron, a kind of storage space / exhibition space. The concept is simple: art works stay in storage for so long and nobody can see them or see if they are ok so why not have a storage space where they can be easily exhibited while in storage? The solution by H&dM is not so simple, yet utterly fabulous: A kind of box with faux-cave exterior, with a prismatic space carved out of it, leaving a rockmade little house on the prairie in the middle. The windows are of course cracks in the rock.

Three Tree Buildings

Cute Marble Detail

I finished my Kamikaze deadline yesterday, so here's a cute building with a nice marble detail: the screws holding tha marble to the facade are kin of jighlighted and also they rusted a bit and there's some airconditioners too so its a nice example of how a modernist and maybe lightly brutalist building can look good today. Its in Thessaloniki, when I saw it I thought it looked like a building by Krandonellis, yet it's by Thomaidis.

A House made from stacked pieces of Land

This was my contribution for the Star Wars issue of the Hong Kong based concept book CREAM, which we got to know via our good friend Panos Tsagaris. Star Wars always makes me think of the desert, a kind of african landscape + Herzog's Fata Morgana and I was already having the idea to make somthing from the pieces of land leftover from the Invisible Home project. (I just re-read what I wrote, my syntax is way off today, I better stop bloggin and get back to work cos there is tons of stuff to do before tuesday)

Wrapping and Building

A slight fascination with wrapped buildings. I'm not really sure whats' interesting about them but I keep photographing them, but then again I photograph everything.

Virgin Suicides

While in Patras we visited the now defunct all-girls school Arsakeion. Even though the place has been out of use for only a few years, it seems ancient and the apparent recent renovation for "culture purposes" somehow makes the whole thing super beautiful and super spooky.

This coming September, a large contemporary art (and Architecture!) exhibition curated by Nadia Argyropoulou will take place in the school. More on this soon...

Some pics from the New Trends Exhibition

The students of U-Patras together with Yannis Aesopos did a fantastic job of setting up the exhibition. Here's some highlights during his presentation Minsuk Cho of MASS Studies showed this video of Towers in the Park ,
the amazing model of Taira Nishizawas' gymansium
JDS Architects Mermaid project
Enric Ruiz-Geli / Cloud 9 Villa Nurbs
Polaris Architects The Threatened City
R Sie(n) 's Hypnosis Chamber
and
the super active Veronica Valk form ZiZi-YoYo, Esthonia