Christmas in the Sandbox

Our property is totally blocked in because the area has really shitty zonng laws, and there no room to work on the tiny 512sqft lot, so I took the Tube House out for repairs to a Sandbox, to have alook at the section and group it as a single object. A Sandbox is an area where you get lots of space for 12 hours, so people go to there to build and test tons of stuff, like snowmen and scary monsters that wrap themselves around your head, to a little chrsitmas kiosk selling trees and guns, and french fries and burgers, and there was even a weirdo goth guy looking over my back lest I snatch the fries, so I scrammed and continued looking for a larger piece of land somewhere along the coast...

Pugno al Architettura

OK I have definetly overdone it with the Gaetano Pesce posts, so here's one more. I just couldnt resist blogging his RAG CHAIR (how fabulous?) or this MOLOCH LAMP (???) and the cute drawing whose title once again says it all.

My Anchorage

Here's "My Anchorage" a work from early 2001 that I just put on You Tube. It was part of the Massless Medium exhibition in the Brooklyn Anchorage, an amazing enormous and very cavernous space underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. This was the last time the space was used for exhibitions, for obvious bomb related reasons. The show was organized by the nice people at Creative Time. For this YouTube version I put "If I were a carp" by Final Fantasy as an impromptu soundtrack.
My Anchorage is my version of the space where the show took place.

Pin-Up Magazine for Architectural Entertainment

I'd been looking for this all over Amsterdam when my friend Jop told me about it, and finally I found it in Milans' Corso Como boutique. Super expensive fashion stores are good for something after all: Check out Issue 1 of the hot new architecture magazine, PIN-UP: the self procaimed magazine for architectural entertainment It doesnt say anywhere that it's a GAY ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE but the first issue is very homo friendly indeed, featuring the sexy and talented Mr Juergen Mayer H talking about his upcoming buildings as well as the New Bears of Berlin, the cute and very interesting artist Daniel Arsham and the utterly camp Anca Petrescu talking about her most famous achievement, the Palace of Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu. Oh and there's famous tall buildings made into dildos, the fabulous Rick Owens showing us around his house,texts by Beatriz Colomina and so much more. Run to the newstands.

Project for an underground city in the age of great contaminations

While on the subject of the great Gaetano Pesce, lets have a look at his "Project for an underground city in the age of great contaminations -A Comunal habitat for twelve persons" a project that needs no explaining because the title says it all. Pesce showed this at the legendary exhibition that I've blogged about in the past, "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape; Achievements and problems of Italian Design" at MOMA in April 1972.

Sleepless in Milan

I'm so behind on my blogging it's not even funny, or maybe it is. Milan was rather stressfull, I didnt even get a chance to wish my friend Ferda happy 40th birthday. And one night I couldnt sleep so natually I was browsing the closest bookshelf, and in the design books (it's Milan after all) I found these curiously fantastic items:
What do you do when you cant' sleep? You hoover of course, or at least you would if you had this prototype hoover by Studio Alchymia. Why cant I find a book on Alchymia, anywhere?
After a little hoovering, you take a rest on the city that never sleeps ( New York Sunset, Gaetano Pesce)
or you really just go to sleep on the Sit Down (get it?), also by Pesce. As Banana Yoshimoto would say, "Very Sleepable" and finally you could have breakfast in the plexi dome that I have no info about, apart that it was on the cover of Interni, the magazine that published a lot of the really great work of the 70's - 80's, which is what all this is about really.

Animal Leader

Recently I read an extensive profile on Will Wright , designer of Sim City and Sims and the much talked about and upcoming Spore. Spore is a game where you evolve your creature/avatar so that it survives and conquers, which sounds exactly like Animal Leader, the japanese only game that my friend Mai was obsessed with in the early 2000s'. In Animal Leader you start life as a blank cube and had to evolve in to a more complex creature and take elements from your enemies in order to beat them. Just like architecture.

Fiascorama

Angelo was in London, and amongst other thing he brought back the Fiascorama issue of USELESS Magazine , featuring the lovely Kai Kuhne, the even lovelier Annika Larsson and much much more. (because life is longer than you think)

If you're in Athens tonight

I'm part of the "Apolis" exhibition, that opens tonight at the Hellenic American Union, curated by artist Kostis Velonis. Come by check it out. I'm showing a model and a video of Cloud House.

The exhibition also includes works by: Alexis Akrithakis, Nikos Alexiou, Tzimmi Efthimiou, Dimitris Foutris, Alexandros Georgiou, Eleni Kamma, Tassos Langis, Panayiotis Loukas, Leda Lycourioti & Thanos Pagonis, Network Nomadic Architecture (Anna Tsouloufi-Lagiou, Eleni Tzirtsilaki, Pegu Zali), Simos the Existentialist, Vassiliea Stylianidou, Stefanos Tsivopoulos.

The Portrait Room

Brian Bress and Jacques Vidal
more at: http://www.brianbress.com

Trepponti di Comacchio

Found this on Flickr one day
is it a famous bridge? It makes a full circle when the arch is reflected in the water. And its a three way bridge. And it's a very sunday morning kind of post.

Cero9 becomes AMID

Recently I got a comment on this post that the Office Cero9 had been renamed AMID. I'm still a big fan of their powerstation (and especially the model made of flower petals) and even though there's no projects on their website, it seems that Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efren Garcia Grinda are keeping up the good work. Here's a few images from Water House

Double Wonderland

A second Second Life post in row? I must be running out of stuff to post here... Truth is I'm swamped with approaching deadlines and these images have been hanging around for a while. One day I was bored walking around looking for cool 3D stuff and happend on a game yard with casinos and slot machinesand shoot them games and Miltos came online and he's always obsessed with video games so I showed him that you can actualy play a game even when you are inside another game. Which is exactly the scenario from one of my totally favorite films, David Kronenbergs' "eXistnZ". So anyway we walked right up to the Duck Hunt and realised that not only we could shoot ducks but that the space was enterable! We could enter the space of the screen! Like two video game Alices in a double wonderland, we were inside the space of a game which was inside the space of a place that is not really a game which was inside the screens of our multitasking laptops that a lot of people use for work but not for play.

I Tube for YouTube

Just re-did the house for Angelo and me on our ridiculously small piece of land on Second Life. The upside-down leopard pyramids are gone (though I kept a copy on my account just in case), and I tried out the Tube House. This was an idea I've been playing around for a while, in a way similar to Blue Wave, with texture maps instead of concrete and standard tubes instead of the floppy blue wave form. If you watch the video you'll notice I'm bumping my head a round, though I tried to edit those parts out to appear cool and in control (always). Anyway, it's not so easy to walk around this tube maze when you're an avatar.

New AngeloPlessas.com

Angelo is in London, I just got home after teaching for 6 hours then driving 6 hours back in the rain etc and I know that apart from being tired, I'm also super biased about this, but I cannot help blogging Angelos' new website, simply because it ROCKS.

Tickets for 2

If you're in Athens, RUN dont walk to get tickets for Dimitris Papaioannou's "2", the amazing dance performance that Angelo wrote about here when we the saw the rehearsal for the first time last April. Last night I saw it again in a more official rehearsal with a fantastic musical score by Konstadinos B, beautiful video work by Athina Rachel Tsangari and much much more. Part of the cast is Foivos Papadopoulos whose work was in the Anathena exhibition @ Deste Foundation. Get your tickets here, though I heard it's sold out until after the holidays. Opens Friday.

My Magritte Obsession

Les compagnons de la peur 1942

I was lost, looking for something unrelated to this blog, and then I bumped into these paintings by Magritte and I remembered just how fantabulous they really are.

Les tables de la loi 1966

Le plagiat 1940

Les fanatiques 1955

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