Recent press

Its been ages since I updated the press section, and this was blog was originally supposed to be the "news" page on my site, and then of course it turned into something entirely different, or maybe not, it really depends what you consider news. Anyway, here's some press that I havent posted.

FRAME, which is the interior version of MARKThe School Project in Yli & Ktirio

Salon Magazine from Ukraine, interview by Katerina Oshemkova


interview in Arte & Mercato, MilanoCollateral again, in Les Temps, Geneva
Rodeo Magazine, interview by Luca Martinazzoli, who also runs the Gelati Motel blog
Experimenta (Madrid)

and some from the Loop festival, Barcelona

Diseñart (Portugal, I think)

Greek Culture Yearbook 06-07

The last night on Aglaia

I had heard from my landlord Rudolph Ormsby, that he was selling Aglaia Island for personal reasons, and he said that we would have to renegotiate with the new owners etc. The last time that I was there, the suburban streets were gone and somebody had terraformed the whole place into a beach-dune-suburbia.
Most of my neighbors where gone, and Lisa nextdoor had left her teddybear sculpture,
and the whole place looked very abandoned
Then when I opened Second Life the next time, it took me to a generic ugly teleport island. When I insisted and tried to get to Aglaia via the map, I got the message from Rudolph that "Aglaia does not exist anymore".

Surrealism on the beach

Just back from Patras where we're running the Athens Update Workshop with students from the architecture school (more on this later). This time I didn't stay in my usual hotel but the sort of infamous Rio Beach, a decadent 70's designed hotel (though describing this hotel as a product of design is rather ambitious). Anyway it's there and somehow it all makes crazy sense

the crazy upside-down snow or maybe stalagmite ceiling

the rattan ceiling plus Marcel Duchamp looking lamp

the road-sign, the traffic cone and the sunset

the bridge and the lamp

They got great plants in Tokyo

No idea what to blog and the next days are going to be so hectic, so I'm just searching in my "maybe bloggable" folder to see whats there, and it's full of stuff from Tokyo, and they're mostly plants. They got great plants in Tokyo...imperial palace holy wall something
we are family in a back street (boys) temple in Harajuku
ivy facade somewhere in Omote$anto
somewhere somewhere
a ripped concrete facade? how could we resist?

Heat Stroke

Here's some funky japanese houses that apparently went nuts from the heat

The Anger and the Bunker

So I was a bit pissed off that the lovely landscape of Merope turned ugly suburbia so fast, and I just wanted to block off everything.
Literally I turned the small plot of land into a big bad bunker, and it looked something like this.

But then I thought, that living secluded in a concrete box might be a second life,
but it is not a happy life.

New Visitors Forever

Scene for a New Heritage is a film trilogy by David Maljkovich. I know I saw parts of the film somewhere, in some exhibition, but I have no idea where.

"The film presents a futuristic world set in the year 2045. Shot over three years spanning 2004 – 2006, the first film focuses on a group of travellers visiting a memorial park, erected in Petrova Gora, Croatia, for victims of the Second World War under the Communist government of Yugoslavia. As they visit the monument, debate is sparked as to its long-forgotten meaning – it means nothing to them, just as their strange dialect is alien to us. "
I'm slightly obsessed with the aluminum foil collages and the retro looking maquettes and film stills.
Have a look:

Most of the film revolves around this monument. Parked next to it is a futuristically aluminim-foil wrapped car. Is it a Trabant?

In the show of course.

Bubble me crazy

This is what Centre Pompidou could have looked like if Chaneac and Pascal + Claude Hausermann had won the competition instead of Piano+ Rogers. Chaneac's surrealist pumkin-like agglomeration has spooky notes of Guggenheim on the interior courtyard. Unfortunately the future was not so wacky, though the Pompidou that was actually built was plenty crazy in it's time, and forever defined the industrial space-art center relationship, which by the way is so boring and expired. Why do Art centers have to always be in converted industrial spaces? Why couldnt they be in converted hair salons?and here's some further Chaneac, otherwise know as Jean-Louis Rey. For further reading check out Jean-Louis Chaneac: Architecture Interdite, and also, of course, Future City, Experiment and Utopia in Architecture by by Marie-Ange Brayer, Jane Alison, Frederic Migayrou, and Neil Spiller