Tomba Brion

Normally I dont' care for cemeteries but this is such an exception. Tomba Brion was designed by Carlo Scarpa as a falmily tomb for the wealthy Brion family. It is a wacked out surrelist landscape of abstract geometries and just bizzare all over. Plus it's designed to look better as it gets older, in fact it's designed like a future ruin. I got the pics all from all over the place, in Flickr, from my friends N&E over at Myspace and more that I cant remember. And here apparently you can download a 3D model of the place, in case u want to add it to your custom videogame environment.

Drop City

Drop City was a post hippy rural community, with a slight brokeback mountain feel in Trinidad Southern Colorado. They built their homes using the Buckie Fuller Geodome and Zdomes but with recycled materials: Car parts, scrap wood, trees, plastic and stuff. They were architects, writers, poets, painters and scientists who just had enough and wanted to drop out of contemporary society. Yes taxi driver, you can definetly drop me off here.
some more info here

I was wandering over Athens and then I saw this

It looks scary and it is scary too: I think this is part of the main garbage processing (dumping) plant. Somehow this looks like it could have been part of OMA's sushi urbanism a couple of years ago? or a couple of decades ago? or maybe its just too late at night to concentrate on anything. This is just over the hills of Nikea, I wonder what it is.
Classic polka dot wasteland.
Lightbulb Piazza? How useless to cut a freeway through a park. Somebody obviously got carried away at the drawing board and forgot what they were drawing.

Lost Post

Naturally I'm obsessed with Lost, and today we watched the last episode of the 3rd season: It just gets better all the time. If you havent seen it, its a metaphysical Robinson Crusoe situation with a fantastic cast of characters surrounded by a super spooky tropical island and threatened by The Others, Polar bears , whispers in the jungle and my favourite enemy, the Smoke Monster, a obvious referance to the bad guys in Playstations' ICO.

Random Objects in Amsterdam

I always take too many pictures, and this time I was even bored with my heavy camera so the photos did not go into Gigabytes as usual. Still there was tons to see in Amsterdam, and here is some more stuff.
A curious fur covered tea pot in the fabulous Frozen Fountain store. And speaking of stores, another one not to miss is SPRMRKT on Rozengracht.
and again a better view of the tilted cube building which I like so much but have no idea what it is
A human explosion painting and a salt related polygon object-thing in Rijksmuseum
an ambiguous and amazingly colored red tree in Vondel Park
and the sunset from OA flight bla bla bla, a picture I always take and it never looks the same again.

Random Amsterdam I

Been walking around Amsterdam for the past 3 days, and here's some things that tickled my fancy, like this stripped building somewhere close to Leitze Pleijn
Ballons on Lijnbaansgracht
random urban agglomeration close to Post CS
A candy stripe by Felix Gonzales-Torres at Stedeljik CS
Urs Fischer at Stedeljik CS
Somebody's hippy meditation flotilla

A Neen Evening

So last saturday in Amsterdam we had a Neen evening, which Rafael put together, as part of White Nights, a night in the year where all museums + art centers stay open late.

Rafael and Chihiro walking amongst the towels at Club11

The Neen Evening took place at Club11, on the 11th floor of the soon-to-be-gone Post CS building in a mini urban wasteland next to the Central Station. Angelo showed recent works, Nikola recited some of his new poems inside his MeetInANiceRestaurant, Rafael made really great Neen towels that people took home on their way out and Aux Raus gave a really sexy performance. Later on AuxRaus took us to a Pub that played only music related to weather (Purple Rain etc) and later-er over to Studio 80 which a gay night and where we bumped into the Boys of Butt. All in all a very neen evening.

Angelo Plessas' MereExposureEffect.com

I showed the ScreenTree animation and some others Andy Simionato from ThisIsaMagazine.com with Isabelle Arvers
Karen ann Donnachie from this is a magzine inside my wineglass
Gert Jonkers and Rob Meerman at Studio80
afterhours

Anonymous is Famous

The most famous blogger is of course Anonymous. S/HE manages to be everywhere all the time in every language all over the place disco non stop. And finally an exhibition dedicated to this most contemporary of concepts: "ANONYMOUS In the Future No One Will Be Famous" runs at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt until 14 January 2007 with works by 11 international artists who – like the curator – will remain unnamed. In their Notes toward a Manifesto, the initiators of the exhibition proclaim: “Anonymous artists wish to wriggle the status quo into a status incognitus. Their aim is to remove the increasing barbarization of thought via short circuits and fast lanes created by the marketing of artists as brands whose works have become masterpieces in ignorance of philosophy.” How absolutely cool.

Golden Brown

Dont really know what to post today and not up to too much. I thought about writing something on WIRED's extensive Second Life Article (Wired 10-06 Lets Go: Second Life) but then they havent put it online yet so who am I to start photographing magazines etc, its all very first life. Typically Second Life was doing maintenance at EXACTLY the time I was giving my "second life" lecture last week in Milan, so I couldnt take the audience for a walk, but anyway the title was more symbolic than anything

So anyway I was shopping for land and found myself on some beach as usual and there was a raft and you could lie down on it in different ways, and it was early morning because the servers are in San Francisco I think, and I just decided to relax and just spend time there, looking at the waves and listening to The Stranglers' "Golden Brown".

3 cute houses from a while back

I took these photos ages ago Thessaloniki. At the time I was using a video camera to off of which I copied still because digital cameras didnt really exist (yes this far back) 1/2 building 1/2 tree

little black garage maybe?

oh and this doesnt fit in here but the Philosophy Hut was just dismantled from Thissio, I guess that could have been a "goodbye summer vol III" or whatever

A Book-Shaped building and a Hand monument

Rafael sent me this article on a Book-Shaped building. It's the House of Free Creativity in Turkmenistan, inaugurated by their totally crazy dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, who says that if you read his book of poetry you will definetly go to heaven. And propably that heaven will be shaped like him or maybe like this hand monument that Jonathan sent me a while ago. I guess there's an argument about figurative architecture and I've definetly been on this track for some time now though I have no idea where it leads.

And Voltnoi sent me this graffiti about schools in neverland

Casa Vogue: Milano to Athens

Here's a little piece I wrote in this months' Casa Vogue, about the architecture scene in Athens. I featured some of the heroic modernist buildings of the 60's, when it seemed that architecture mattered in Greece, and some of the very few public buildings of note today. The most interesting work happening in Greece though is private houses but Vogue had asked strictly for public buildings, so houses maybe next time. Casa Vogue is a quarterly supplement to Vogue Italia.

If you're in Milan tonight

come see me
NABA
Nuoava Accademia di Belle Arti Milano
Via Darwin 20
20143 Milano, Italy
tel. + 39 02 973721
www.naba.it