Venice Super Post

If you've already visited the Venice Superblog, you probably know too much. No intention to describe the Venice Biennial here, just to post some nice things I saw along the way, like this photo as a representation of Los Angeles, in the Arsenale. As has been written all over the place, this was not the most fascinating exhibition, as the main part consisted of facts prettily illustrated to look a bit like contemporary art, a bit like science, a bit like wacky corporate info and a whole lot like Koolhaas' WIRED issue of a couple years ago. I'm more interested in proposals than facts so I'll concentrate more on the pavilions that didn't take the main theme too seriously.

First off the ultra fabulous and supremely weird Japanese pavilion which featured the work and inspirations of architect Terunobu Fujimori. Not only is his work , umm, particular, but what can I say about carving an architectural model AND it's base out of a single tree trunk? The only place I'd seen his work in the past was of course Casa Vogue...
The Austrian Pavilion featured an exhibitit called Rock over Barock (!) and featured 2 Hans Hollein and one Frederic Kiesler project from the 60's and some contemporary works inspired by these. Holleins' Superbuilding is propably the single most inspiring image in the biennale... The Korean Pavilion featured a show on Housing: how it gets chosen, built, placed in the city etc. Apparently housing gets built by catalogues; you draw the building, a pamphlet gets published, people choose and buy from the catalogue and from 1-1 mock ups, and the thing gets built if it sells well enough. Also apparently they are running out of "last homes" or graves, and they have to invent new techniques to properly bury their own. The French pavilion featured Daniel Buren's fantastic striped cylinders on the facade, something I seem to have subconciously reffered to in the Cloud House, though I'd never actually seen them. Inside the pavilion had been turned into a squat with 20 young architects DJs artists bla bla living and rotating for the duration of the biennale. The idea is great and fresh etc but I found the scaffolding thing kind of ugly and borng and even passe, if I may say so. Other things to check out are the Cypriot participation which featured projects about the "green line", and I particularly liked this inhabitable frame that could be transfered and transformed into many differered buildings. The idea is not new but the result was super interesting. The Dutch pavilion featured a historical exhibition of utopian projects for cities, like Constants' bridges etc. Not a challenging or attention grabbing show but definetly full of great encyclopedic content, and the set-up was hip as usual. Finally the Americal pavilion focused on the destruction from Hurricane Katrina, and projects that propose solutions for the flood striken area.

VeniceSuperBlog

Havent been posting because I'm in Venice for the Architecture Biennale. In the meantime check out the VeniceSuperBlog by the lovely people at MOMA.

Texture Map Drama

This past weekend I bought a little piece of land in Solbim, on the mainland of Second Life (if you want to visit, the coordinates are 128, 128, 0) . The plot is between two houses, so just enough room to try out the building tools and make a little demo house for Angelo and me. So naturally I went for inverted leopard rhomboids with arrow graffiti interiors, just as a base for building on. The next door neighbors came over, and I thought I was happy to meet them, instead I got : "whats this - this is ugly- can u please delete it? - now, yuk yuk" etc etc. Apparently they both hated the Leopard, thought it vomitrocious, and one of them even wanted to get into a fight. The neightbor to the east put up a wall of forest so as to not see my house, and the one on the side demolished his house and put the plot up for sale. So much for feeling at home on the internet. All this was semi fun of course, but it brings us to the real Carrie Bradshaw: Is a Leopard wall less fitting for a building than a exposed concrete wall, and arent they all just texture maps? Can we consider one material to be authentic and correct and another one kitch or just wrong? When are they going to invent photoprint concrete so everything can be texturemapped everywhere and nothing be tha same again?

Leopard Friday

Been thinking about Leopard Buildings recently, ever since the Polygon Housing project, and today I was browsing the Diane Pernet blog, and I saw these super cute photos of The Leopard Cube. The Leopard Cube by Konst2 is a an exhibition space at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. Who would have thought it was so simple to find and alternative to the white cube.
Also available the Leopard Cube wallpaper by Konst2

Post Holiday Vacation Work

Supposedly I returned from "vacation" last week, and supposely now I'm "working". It just takes so much time just existing, and updating blogs and myspace profiles and other profiles that I shouldnt be updating and checking up my favourite blogs. Then there is work and deadlines and just tons of administrivia. No time left to even get started on Half Life Episode 1 which has been sitting on my hard drive for a month now, and I havent even clicked it. Still, I was browsing the news section of the MARK magazine website and happened upon a link of a recostruction of FLW's Falingwater using the Half Life engine, which had been re-posted in City of Sound, a really cool architecture blog. The from there I went to Cities in Games in the Digitally Distributed Environments blog and a mention of City 17 (HL2). So much great information and no time to see it, I keep wondering where is my other half life.

Sound Mirrors

The Athanasius Kircher Society revisits England's sound mirrors: wartime acoustic reflectors used to amplify the sounds of distant Nazi aircraft. For a bit more on the sadly derelict structures, see earlier on BLDGBLOG – or visit The Sound Mirrors Project
via the always cool BLDGBLOG

Curious Water-Related Structure

Sunday morning going slow, and I'm listening to the radio, or rather riding my bike around. As I'm already nostalgic about the island vacation thing (so last week), I rode all over the coast around here, and happened upon this curious little building that looks like it could have been a water processing place;

A room with upsidedown columns and water tanks?

A wall of concrete fragments stuck in a web of metal?

with a roof for strange rock ceremonies?

Still the view is fabulous and people swim around there even though this is quite close to Athens.

Anafi Rocks

Anafi has the second largest rock of the mediterranean, after Gibraltar. On it are two Christian Orthodox monasteries, one accesible by road and the other by hours of walking on the super scary rock. Needless to say we skipped the scary one and had a look at the first, which rests where the rock meets the mountain. The view from the eastern edge of the island is awesome, and my friend Nikko told me that it's possible to access these beaches and even spend the night. He also did the scary route years ago, before Anafi was popular with tourists such as myself. Anyway, the Monastery is built on top of an ancient greek temple of sorts, as a lot of the Byzantine era churches were. In fact the christians were responsible for the major destruction of the ancinet greek heritage.

The Byzantine and the Greek together make for a real interesting archaological landscape, further mixed up by island shacks for animals and people: Total 18th century beauty, I felt part of the Grand Tour indeed.

Island Metabolism

Cant' seem to be able to stop posting these days, probable because I'm finally at an internet connection and also seeing tons of beauty around. Everything seems to be about island architecture, and funny enough the Greek Pavilion at this years' Venice Biennale will be about the Aegean, and even though I'm not at all involved with that, it will be interesting to see what its all about. Right now we're in Paros staying with Eleni and Joanna, and on the way to the so-called gay beach Laggeri (more on this later) we passed by this amazing hotel. Another cosmic coincidence: The Hotel was designed by their dad Makis Kostikas in 1967. It is a rare deviation from the vernacular modernism as established by Aris Konstandinidis, who designed most of the hotels of the period and reigned the island tourist landscape as head architect of the Ministry of Tourism. The Hippocampus Hotel is a kind of Metabolist Greek Island thing, which hints at a possible direction the islands could have gone into: Treated as the supernatural lunar landscape that they really are, and given a heavy dose of Science Fiction Architecture.

Greek Island Surrealism

The fast and furious construction of the Greek islands sometimes leads to funny happy accidents, buildings that could be intersting, and in an ideal world, intentional.

A Jules Verne monster on a hot white roof; A stair that leads to nowhere; A wannabe-muslim christian church poured right out of the ice-cream machine; a post-modern roofie gone a bit weird, and weirder, and a little white nightmare suffering from the recent trend of buildings spotted with stones (?)

The Inexplicable Interior of Boats

I'm wondering Who designs these boats and what the idea is? In the Greek summer you end up spending tons of times in these things, especially if you island hop.
The look is casino interiors combined with a strange machine aesthetic, they try to look like they're not on the water. Sometimes they're interesting, sometimes boring and sometimes they look better upside-down.

Abstract Lesbian Dynamic and the Post-Past

Sitting on the beach, reading and listening to the waves. Just finished reading Banana Yoshimoto's amazing Asleep, three stories of women who lose themselves inside Bananas' abstract lesbian dynamic with the usual suspects: sleep, ghosts, dead people and lovers going from apartments to offices to deserted coffee shops and playgrounds at dawn. Now onto Paul Austers' Brooklyn Follies where one of the characters says ominously that after the Past there is the Post Past, the Later, the Now.